by stephen mark dobbs
Political correctness is running amok in the California state legislature, where passage of Assembly Bill 624 would require large charitable foundations to collect and publish data on the race, gender and ethnicity of their boards, staffs, donors, grantees, vendors and virtually everyone else with whom they come in contact during the course of doing their business. An earlier version of the bill would have included sexual orientation or preference as a data element.
And just what is it that has earned these targeted philanthropies the possibility of engaging in costly and time-consuming record-keeping and data publication, all of which are in violation of every constitutional safeguard against intrusive government? What great social ailment demands costly multiple layers of wasteful and bureaucratic paperwork, intended to reveal the private information of their managers, directors, clients and others?
Such foundations pour millions of private philanthropic dollars into our struggling state economy, and along the way often provide indispensable initiative and imagination in the process, especially when compared to government programs and spending.
But this legislative mischief isn’t restricted to the grant-makers. AB 624 would also require disclosure of personal data of the boards, staffs and people served by thousands of nonprofit and community agencies, already laboring under expensive and excessive reporting requirements. If the hard-liners on AB 624 were to have their way, foundations under an even more reckless version of the bill would add to the travail by going around asking their staffs and directors whether they prefer girls or boys.
Are our lawmakers crazy? Can’t they see the transparent effort to force the revelation of such sensitive private information as fraught with constitutional, practical and moral minefields? And exactly how is such information to be used? What could such intrusive data tell us that anyone else needs to know?
Professional funding organizations already assemble statistics on diversity and inclusiveness. They are values to which the foundation community is broadly and deeply committed, putting those values in practice in the way it allocates grants. But does that mean we need to compel the boards and staffs of foundations and nonprofits to open their doors to Big Brother? Is there some essential social priority here we’re missing?
The ill-conceived AB 624 has passed the California Assembly and awaits consideration by the California Senate. As goes California, so goes the nation. Thus passage locally would have national ramifications. How does such disclosure do anything more than satisfy the obsession of those who wish to subject everyone to their agendas? Make no mistake, the supporters of this backward and preposterous legislation do have a political and social agenda: They seek to alter the funding priorities and practices of charitable foundations by imposing their rules for selecting grant recipients.
All this is part of an effort to control where the philanthropic dollars are allocated. AB 624 supporters want
foundations to give more money to “diverse” agencies that meet their statistical criteria. This runs roughshod over
both the Constitution and common sense. Have the bill’s sponsors not heard about a little thing called privacy?
The targeted foundations are allocating private, not public, funds and are entitled to some latitude, as long as the choices they make are for charitable purposes. The legislation subordinates to government fiat the donors’ rights to select the beneficiaries of their generosity. This will not encourage new wealth to establish foundations in California.
In fact, AB 624 is little more than racial, gender and ethnic gerrymandering. It is based on the flawed premise that charitable funding must reflect the sponsors’ choice of demographic realities. But if a foundation is deciding, for example, whether to award a grant to a particular school, should the decision be based on the race, gender and ethnicity of the superintendent, principal and teachers, or on the performance of the students?
Assemblyman Don Laird (D-Santa Cruz) points out that when a hospital provides care to indigent children, what matters most is whether the child was helped, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the doctor or nurse providing the care.
AB 624 must be defeated in the California Senate or, in the alternative, suffer veto by the governor. This type of political orthodoxy has been previously rejected by the voters statewide in 1996 with passage of Proposition 209, which rejected racial, gender and sexual criteria for state employment, education and contracting. The current bill demands a similarly vocal electorate.
Stephen Mark Dobbs is vice president of Taube Philanthropies.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California