How Can They Do This?

Down in Texas the Salvation Army did it again! They turned away a trans-person from their homeless shelter in Dallas.

Salvation Army Refuses Housing Shelter To Transgender Woman
ThinkProgess
By Zack Ford
May 4, 2014

Back in March, Jodielynn Wiley fled her life in Paris, Texas. Because she is transgender, she had received death threats and had found dead animals left on her front porch. When she asked the police for help, they told her, “Being the way you are, you should expect that.” Wiley landed in Dallas, where she found emergency shelter at the Carr P. Collins Social Service Center, run by the Salvation Army.

As she reached the end of her 30-day stay at the emergency shelter, Wiley sought other long-term shelter options. One such option was the a two-year housing program run by the Salvation Army, which several other women from the Collins Center had recently entered. According to the Dallas Voice, when she interviewed for the program with her case worker, Wiley was told she was disqualified because she had not had gender reassignment surgery: “After I said no, she said, ‘Well, that’s why we can’t give you a room. It was putting me in an uncomfortable situation and very rude.” Her counselor then changed the story and claimed that there was a waiting list, but Wiley says that two women who arrived at the emergency shelter after she did had already entered the longer program.

When you agree to take federal funding you agree to not discriminate, the Salvation Army; it seems to me that they agreed to take federal funding under false pretenses.

Up in New York City the Salvation Army saw the light.

The Salvation Army's White-Flag Surrender to Secularism
Huffington Post Politics
By Dan Arel
Posted: 03/21/2014

In 2004 a group of 19 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the Salvation Army. The group claimed that the organization, which is a registered evangelical church and charity organization in the United States, was using public taxpayer money to proselytize their evangelical religious beliefs, discriminate, and terminate employees based on religious beliefs.
[…]
For more than a decade, while receiving federal funds, the Salvation Army allegedly has been forcing the hungry to sit through sermons in order to receive the food they desperately need, and forcing their employees to be held to fundamentalist religious standards, standards that have come into question in the past when an Australian media relations director for the Salvation Army implied that gays and lesbians deserve death because that punishment is supposedly in line with scripture. The organization quickly apologized for the official's statement and asserted that it did not fit their Christian beliefs.

It is time that the government step up and enforce the laws and not give the Salvation Army a free ticket to discriminate.