Q: When is a charity not a charity?

(A: when it's Family First)

One of the ways that I monitor unskeptical groups is by signing up for their newsletters - at the moment I receive regular emails from Voices for Freedom, Scientology, Eckankar, Freedom Village, Transformation Into The New Paradigm and more. The titles of some of the recent emails I've received include such gems as:

• Is magic real & could it just be a science that we have not figured out yet?
• Harness the Power of Energy & Realign Your Channels with PEMF for Your Greatest Thriving
• Your health rests on… a single missing nutrient?
• {Life Amongst The Stars} 🌐 Discover powerful opportunities and ways of Making Contact with life
• Awaken Your Superpowers & Embody Master Healer | Quantum Activations with Darren Starwynn
• Unlock Superhuman Energy | Reverse Alzheimer's | Discover Radical Healing | Abolish Chemical Toxicity

One of the more serious groups I keep an eye on through their newsletter is Family First. For anyone not aware of this group, it's a Christian organisation run by Bob McCroskie - and they work to try to ensure our laws in New Zealand reflect a particularly conservative reading of the bible.

A bit of background

I've been to see Bob McCroskie, head of Family First, at a talk in Wellington a couple of years ago - just before the last election. Their focus wasn't on telling people who to vote for, but how they should be voting in the two referenda - on legalising marijuana and assisted dying. They talked on both topics, told us why we should vote no for each, and used some shonky statistics and bad arguments to back up their claims. This is all to be expected, but what they also do, which I think is both a clever and sneaky tactic, is to separate their activism on each of these issues from the main organisation, and from each other.

Presumably they do this at least partially to make it look like there is a grassroots movement for each of the issues they focus on. They create a separate website for each issue, and feature someone other than Bob in their material - you can find these sites listed on their main website as “partner” sites, which is a bit of a misnomer given that Family First appears to be behind them all. These sites include “Love them Both”, “Abortion Regrets”, “Abortion Procedures” and “Choose Life” for abortion, “Protect Marriage” and “NZ Marriage” for gay marriage, “Free to Live” for conversion therapy, “Ask me First” for gender identity, “Say Nope to Dope” for marijuana, “Porn Inquiry” for pornography, “Reject Assisted Suicide” for assisted dying and “Vote No” for smacking children.

Family First do a really good (bad?) job of generating content for each of these sites - they seem to have honed their skills to the point that they are able to make an argument that's not totally stupid, and they are able to generate professional looking articles, images and videos.

As if that's not enough, Family First also makes a regular video series called McBlog, where Bob opines on a topic in each episode. And they write a regular newsletter, which I'm signed up to. And it's this newsletter that piqued my interest last week when I received an email titled “DEREGISTERED - but definitely not defeated...”. This sounded promising!

The email went on to say:

The Supreme Court in Wellington has just handed down their judgement in Attorney-General v Family First New Zealand, and the Government and the Charities Board have won the right to deregister Family First as a registered charity.

This is a case that has been going on for a while now, with Charities Services first deregistering Family First back in 2013. They said at the time that they considered the group was not fulfilling the educational portion of its registration, and that the majority of its efforts were political rather than charitable.

Since then the group has challenged the decision in court, managing to have it reversed twice - with the High Court rejecting an appeal, the Court of Appeal accepting an appeal, and now the Supreme Court reversing the Court of Appeal's decision and once again allowing Charities Services to deregister Family First.

In a second email that Family First sent out about the decision, titled “What does the decision mean?”, Bob attempted to spin the decision as a positive thing for them (it liberates them from restrictions on how they can act, and also gives them free publicity) and then he tried to dob in a list of other charities he considers to be similar to Family First in their political work. Although the NZ Skeptics were not featured on the list, another organisation I'm a member of - the NZ Humanists - was mentioned (and, honestly, I'm kind of treating it as a badge of honour that Bob name dropped us!).

The list seems to be a selection of organisations that are politically on the other side of the divide to Family First, and many of them appear to have publicly argued the opposite side of one or more issues that Family First has been involved with. The list includes, as well as the Humanist Society, the NZ Drug Foundation, the National Council of Women, Forest and Bird, Amnesty International, Save the (not our) Children and the Child Poverty Action Group.

It's obvious that these groups do a lot more than just having a voice when it comes to political issues. Many of them are well known for their extensive work trying to fix some of our country's issues, such as child poverty, gender inequality, drug addiction and the environment. Bob even mentions Caritas, a catholic charity that presumably believes the same that Bob does about many of the social issues he cares about. It seems that Family First's main argument has been that the god-fearing “nuclear family” is the bedrock of society, and that their work on trying to restrict the rights of people who are transgender, gay, female or juvenile has all been in support of their very narrow view of the type of family a society should allow.

What about us?

So, what does this mean for the NZ Skeptics? After all, we're a registered charity - should we be worried? We can't be sure, but I don't think we're at any risk of losing our charitable purpose - we don't involve ourselves in much in the way of politics (we might make one or two submissions a year to parliamentary select committees on issues relevant to skepticism), and much of our work involves trying to educate the public about critical thinking (which is a topic that is peppered throughout the New Zealand school curriculum).