If you want a charity to give to instead of the Salvation Army

[dsc]

try this one:

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/11/guest-post-carl-siciliano.html

Yesterday I met with a group of kids at our drop-in center in Chelsea. They were all out in the cold at night, waiting for beds to open up in our shelters. One boy, who is 16 years old, told me how everything went bad for him when he was eleven. His father demanded to know if he was gay and when the boy was honest, his father refused to speak to him for three years. His mother tells him that he is a mistake and that she wishes she never had him. He has been running away repeatedly since then. There is nothing to celebrate at his home. I had a hard time sleeping last night, wondering what he had suffered.

What a sick, toxic force homophobia is in our society, destroying homes, making parents turn on their own children. Tens of thousands of teens in our country have been forced out of their homes. An LGBT teen is eight times more likely to suffer homelessness than a straight teen. The religious and political leaders who promote homophobia are causing terrible human suffering. They lie when they say they are promoting family values.

The waiting list for our shelter beds skyrocketed in the last year. More than half the kids coming to us for help are from out of state. Most are from the red states. Even though we recently opened a new 20-bed shelter, we now have a waiting list of over 200 kids. In New York City there are only 250 youth shelter beds for a population of 3,800 kids, 40% of whom are LGBT.

[shraby]

1. Meanwhile people like Sandusky are afforded the best of

everything. Values are turned all upside down.

[RKP5637]

2. We have quite a few sick, twisted psychopathic politicians in this country. Which

comes first, I don't know, but the end result is the same. So many people in this country are mistreated and more and more I think a fair number of people in this society enjoy the mistreatment against others.

[pinboy3niner]

3. That's a great idea!

Local food banks are also an important resource that needs support now. A couple of weeks ago, the director of my community's food bank told me he already had more than 1,500 needy families listed for Thanksgiving food baskets. (And he also runs a shelter. I don't know if that's common elsewhere, but here we have the food bank, one of the local shelters, and homeless veterans outreach pretty well integrated.)

[SidDithers]

4. K&R...nt

Sid