June 29, 2006

Donate Money to Charity, Get Compared to Mengele

Emphasis mine:

Warren Buffett's new philanthropic alliance with fellow billionaire Bill Gates won widespread praise this week, but anti-abortion activists did not join in, instead assailing the two donors for their longtime support of Planned Parenthood and international birth-control programs.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which Buffett has pledged the bulk of his $44-billion fortune, devotes the vast majority of its funding to combating disease and poverty in developing countries. Less than 1 percent has gone to Planned Parenthood over the years. And the Gates Foundation does not permit its gifts to Planned Parenthood to be used for abortion services.

"The merger of Gates and Buffett may spell doom for the families of the developing world," said the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, a Roman Catholic priest who is president of Human Life International.

Unlike, say, malaria, poverty, waterborne disease, AIDS, and all the other stuff their money is going to combat.

Referring to Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi death camp doctor, Euteneuer said Buffett "will be known as the Dr. Mengele of philanthropy unless he repents."

To three or four complete whack jobs, sure.

Feldt confirmed that the Gates Foundation stipulated that its gifts to Planned Parenthood not be used for abortion services. But that policy has not spared Bill Gates' Microsoft Corp. from anti-abortion protests over the years.

At the 2003 annual shareholders meeting, anti-abortion activists cited Microsoft's support for Planned Parenthood during an unsuccessful attempt to stop the company from directly contributing to charities.

Beyond the issue of abortion, some critics oppose the Buffett and Gates foundations' support for global family-planning and population control programs.

Because they love the foreigners so? Then they must be calling for the borders to be opened, so that the children of the world might come to receive the love!

"Some of the wealthiest men in the world descend like avenging angels on the populations of the developing world," wrote Population Research Institute president Steven Mosher, a frequent critic of Gates and Buffett. "They seek to decimate their numbers, to foist upon vulnerable people abortion, sterilization and contraception."

I'm getting confused here...are they Satan's handmaids or avenging angels? Or Nazis? And are Nazis angels or devils? Mixing up similes... ouch!

And the last comment in bold shows the complete ignorance of the PRI guy. Women in the developing world, like most women, want to control their fertillity, not destroy it. The availability of affordable family planning lets women do just that: plan their families. When they can't get access to contraception, then the rates of abortion go up, sterilization too. The fastest way to reduce abortion and elective sterilization would be to distribute contraception.

Which is exactly what Buffet's and Gates' money is going to do.

Posted by binky at June 29, 2006 08:48 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Extremism | International Affairs | Religion | Reproductive Autonomy


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