Power by Absorption

““ The Christian Horizons case continues to wend its way through the court system in Ontario, and now the province’s Conference of Catholic Bishops has joined the legal battle. The Conference has joined the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and other conservative groups in launching an appeal of a ruling from the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal last year; a ruling which ordered Christian Horizons to pay a former employee $23,000 because she was let go after admitting she was a lesbian. The organization’s code of conduct, which that employee had signed, specifically precludes homosexuals or lesbians from working there.Christian Horizons is an evangelical charity that runs group homes and other services for the developmentally disabled.The HRT ruling said, however, that Christian Horizons would only be allowed to impose a so-called “morality code” on its employees if it confined its’ clientele to the evangelical community, adding that because it serves the broader public, and does so with the help of public funding, the code of conduct was invalid.Constitutional lawyer Iain Benson is advising the Bishops in the case. He says the case is “extremely important” because it “has the capacity to restrict religion to the sidelines” of public life. Benson adds that if the HRT ruling is allowed to stand, it will “represent an extraordinary truncation of the public dimension of religious belief and conduct.” ””
This brings up one issue which I am in major disagreement with ! The concept has been around for quite some time that when the government / the “public” grants an income tax deduction for something that money still belongs to the government. It is still public funds! That is not true – even though the ‘government’ thinks it is. There is a rule, a rather strict rule, that when a donor gives money to a charity that donor has given it away – as in, it is no longer his or hers, and that therefore they have NO further influence or say in what happens with said money ! They can NOT designate what the money is to be used for, or why or any other thing about it ! ! Now here we have the government breaking its own rule. ‘We give you a tax break’, they say, ‘but the money is still ours and we Can and Will tell you what you can and can not do with it’.

May be a word to the wise.
Do not grant tax receipts for charitable donations.