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As they open their arms, they slam a door
© St. Petersburg Times This past Christmas was one for the books. Everybody else in my family was sick. The Christmas roast was going to go to waste. So I did what you do in Tampa. I drove to Metropolitan Ministries in Tampa Heights, pulled up to the back door of the kitchen and gave the roast to a young man who promised to pass it on to the cooks. Metropolitan Ministries is a busy place on Christmas Day. They feed a lot of homeless people, with no regard to where they come from, what they believe, what color they are. So the idea that they only discriminate at the top of the heap, on their board of trustees, comes as a shock. Nah. When they keep Jews off the board, it stinks. The Ministries has a provision in its bylaws that only a "professed Christian" can be on the board. As a result, the wife of a TECO Energy executive, Linda Karson, was barred from the board last year. She's Jewish. They say at the Ministries they have done business as Jesus would have done it. I know that they probably are talking abut the Biblical mission to tend to the poor, but in this context, claiming Jesus as your protection is a cheap dodge for old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Since Karson was barred from the board, TECO has started talking about no longer giving to Metropolitan Ministries. Money talks loudly, even louder than being held up to public embarrassment. This week, the Ministries board will vote on whether to remove the professed Christian provision. You can predict the outcome. For years, Metropolitan Ministries has had gold-plated status among Tampa charities. Its corporate donors, like TECO, were numerous and generous. Add to that just plain people who went to the Ministries' doors at Christmas to give food and toys for poor families. The line of cars would go around the block. This past holiday season, people were so generous the Ministries collected 636,000 pounds of food, including 10,000 turkeys and 74,000 toys. The corporate money, the private contributions, were all declarations of how much Tampa believed in the open arms of Metropolitan Ministries. When you gave to the Ministries, you felt a little better about yourself. You felt that you lived in a place where we believed in doing good. What is going on at Metropolitan Ministries is not a shock. Like most cities, Tampa has its own history of anti-Semitism. We just don't seem to be able to get over it. In 1986, Sandy Freedman became mayor. She is Jewish. One of the first things she tried to do was to make prayers at the start of public meetings more ecumenical. She didn't want to bar prayers, mind you. She only wanted to replace the word Jesus with God. That may not sound like much, but Freedman encountered tremendous opposition. The reaction wasn't much different when she changed the mayor's prayer breakfast from a chest-thumping declaration for fundamentalist Christianity to a more ecumenical event. Fifteen years have passed since Freedman's first efforts. So much time. So little change. It's not that Metropolitan Ministries doesn't do wonderful work. It does no less than save lives. But Metropolitan Ministries can't go about doing good while acting hypocritically, even cruelly, to people who don't believe what they do. What if they applied that thinking to the homeless who come knocking at the door? -- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or 226-3402.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Howard Troxler Jan Glidewell Gary Shelton Elijah Gosier From the Times Metro desk |
