Author: Brian Carnell

The National Organization for Women routinely claims that it has 250,000 to 500,000 members and a budget of $10 million, but are those figures accurate? That’s what Marie-Jose Ragab of the renegade Dulles, Virginia, NOW chapter, wanted to know. Based on NOW’s required 501(c) filings with the IRS, Ragab claims the figures don’t even come close.

As Ragab notes, almost all nonprofits exaggerate their membership figures somewhat, but NOW appears to be one of the select few who take such exaggerations to outrageous levels. Ragab notes that in its 501(c) filing for 1999, NOW reported income from memberships at $2,903,383. Since a yearly individual membership to NOW costs $35, that would yield about 89,500 paying members.

It is true that NOW has a sliding scale of memberships that allow some people to pay as little as $15 for membership, but even if we assume that everyone pays just $15 to be a member and nobody pays the $35 fee, that’s still just over 190,000 members — not even close to the recent claims it has made of 500,000 members.

There are similar distortions in the overall NOW budget. Although NOW claims to have a budget approaching $10 million, in fact its IRS filings puts its highest level of income over the past five years at just over $5.5 million, and that figure has seriously declined. Ragab reports that NOW’s IRS forms show that NOW’s annual revenues declined by almost $1 million from 1996-1999, with most of the decline in revenues coming from a decline in memberships. Ragab believes that the decline in revenues was linked to NOW’s position (or lack thereof) on the Monica Lewinsky affair, noting that NOW revenues declined by an astounding $660,000 from 1998 to 1999.

NOW’s level of exaggeration is nothing compared to the closely-associated Feminist Majority Foundation, however. That group claims to have 100,000 members, with an annual membership costing $35. But its 1998 tax returns show that its total revenues for 1998 were a mere $318,000 which would give the foundation at most one-tenth the number of paying members it claims.

A likely explanation for how the figures are inflated is that they count past members who are no longer contributing to the organization. A number of other non-profits such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claim astounding levels of membership by counting anyone who has ever contributed money to the organization over, say, the last five years.

Source:

Ten Million Dollars Budget? 250,000 Members? Think Again! Marie-Jose Ragab, Dulles Now, April 5, 2001.

You probably haven’t heard of Thomas Sipos, but the novelist has written a couple of excellent articles for the (annoyingly) conservative web site FrontpageMag.Com about independent media.

Communist Vampires is partly a description of Sipos’ self-publishing efforts with his excellent anti-Communist horror novel, Vampire Nation (which succeeds, btw, as a straight horror novel even if you’re not into the anti-Communism aspect of it).

Christians Go Hollywood is in the similar vein but focused on movies. That article would have been better if he’d focused on truly small, independent films.

Go rent The Last Broadcast to see just how good a movie with essentially no budget can look these days. It’s everything The Blair Witch Project should have been, and it cost a grand total of $900 to make (I’m not making that figure up) compared to Blair Witch’s $30,000 to $50,000.

Personally, I’ve always been impressed at the vitality of the Christian pop music scene. Somewhere in my basement I’ve got a case full of Christian pop music cassettes from the 1980s.

The weird thing is the double standard when it comes to Christian-oriented cultural products. If a bunch of Leftists get together to help fund a documentary or Warren Beatty uses his clout to get an assinine political-screed-disguised-as-a-movie like Bulworth made, the media doesn’t blink an eye. But when a movie like The Omega Code comes out, almost all of the media coverage focuses on the explicit religious nature of the film and the marketing techniques behind it.

A porn entry, PixxxelChix, won the Grand Prize at this year’s 5K web design contest.

Women’s eNews recently published a long screed by National Organization for Women counsel Isabelle Katz Pinzler dedicated to a single proposition — even when men and women receive equal opportunity, it’s unfair unless women and men also achieve equal outcomes.

This is such a strange turnaround for feminism. At one time women were the victims of this sort of double standard. In the 1950s, for example, a woman who had a given score on the SAT had far less educational opportunities, simply because she was a woman, than a man who had the same score. Elite universities such as Yale would simply turn away people they otherwise would have admitted based solely on their sex.

And, of course, this was repeated in any number of areas, especially in obtaining employment. A woman who could perform just as well as any male candidate nonetheless had a much lower chance of obtaining employment in any number of fields simply because of her sex.

You would think, then, that feminists would want to defend the principle that decisions about college admission, job hiring, etc. should be based solely on qualifications rather than sex. But in fact Katz Pinzler and other feminists argue against this principle with the same vehemence that feminists formerly argued against special barriers that kept qualified women out of positions.

For Katz Pinzler anytime a test of any sort results in different outcomes for men and women, this is prima facie evidence of discrimination. Katz Pinzler writes,

But many supposedly impartial practices have a tremendously discriminatory impact on racial and ethnic minorities, as well as women, girls and other protected groups. Examples include racial profiling by police, placing potentially toxic plants or waste treatment facilities in minority neighborhoods, height and weight requirements for employment and other selection procedures, such as written tests, and so on.

To Katz Pinzler, standardized tests for college admissions are no different than racial profiling by police. She writes,

It is a known fact, for example, that women tend to score lower than men on the SAT, despite the fact that women tend to get higher grades in college, which is what the aptitude test is supposed to predict.

Since women, on average, receive lower scores than men, on average, on the SATs, that means by definition the test is biased and requires a legal remedy.

One of the biggest problems with this is that, in fact, disparate outcomes often have very little to do with any bias or discrimination. This happens to be the case with SAT scores.

As Christina Hoff Sommers has noted, the reason that women as a group have lower scores on the SAT than men as a group is that far more “at risk” girls take the SAT test than do “at risk” boys which skews the average score results for each group. There are also a number of other factors that work to ensure that far more poorly performing girls take the test than poorly performing boys.

The disparate impact test fails both as a moral standard and as a practical standard, and should be soundly rejected by people who care about genuine equality between the sexes.

Sources:

High court ruling may hurt minorities, women. Isabelle Katz Pinzler, Women’s eNews, May 2, 2001.

The War Against Boys. Christina Hoff Sommers, The Atlantic, May 2000.