What happens, in these situations, is that a non-profit, charity or activist organization becomes so impressed with its own virtue as it chooses to define it that its leaders decide self-enrichment is not only justifiable, but a right. Why should they sacrifice and suffer, when the for-profit executives and leaders whose companies inflict scars on the earth, the culture, society or the public, live in comfort and extravagance? It is so unfair!

And thus we get repeating stories like what the New York Times published yesterday about GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. [ I like GLAAD: it nominated one of my theater’s shows for a local award!] As you might imagine, the group is riding high these days, flushed with victories in legislatures and the courts, seeing the culture supine before it in fear of being branded discriminatory. Things are going particularly well with GLAAD’s efforts to encourage children to change their genders without input or interference from their parents. Hooray.

The Times reports in part:

…[A]t the Zurich airport one Sunday morning in January 2023 as Sarah Kate Ellis made her way from a seat in Delta’s most exclusive cabin to a waiting Mercedes. It was there to chauffeur her to the Swiss Alps, where she and her colleagues would stay at the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet that cost nearly half a million dollars to rent for the week.

Ms. Ellis, who was en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, doesn’t run a Wall Street bank or a high-flying tech start-up. She is the chief executive of the nonprofit organization GLAAD, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups.

The group, which has an annual budget of roughly $30 million, paid for Ms. Ellis’s trip, as well as a day of skiing, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with current and former employees and others with knowledge of GLAAD’s operations.

The trip was part of a pattern of lavish spending at GLAAD, much of it by Ms. Ellis, that may have violated the organization’s own policies as well as Internal Revenue Service rules. The Times reviewed dozens of GLAAD expense reports and accompanying receipts from January 2022 through June 2023, as well as employment agreements, tax filings, audit reports, other financial documents and internal communications.

When Ms. Ellis traveled for work, there were first-class flights, stays at the Waldorf Astoria and other luxury hotels and expensive car services. Not to mention a Cape Cod summer rental and nearly $20,000 to remodel her home office, which was outfitted with a chandelier, among other accouterments.

All of that is on top of Ms. Ellis’s annual pay package, which has the potential to stretch into the high six or low seven figures — a sum that would far exceed what her peers at many similarly sized organizations have earned.

Such perks, luxurious business travel and large pay packages might be commonplace at a for-profit company. But legal experts said they were inappropriate for a nonprofit organization with about 60 employees that, in exchange for being exempt from federal and state taxes, must ensure that executive pay is reasonable and aligned with the charity’s mission and the intent of donors. The overall pattern of spending represents “a potentially abusive use of charitable funds that would be surprising and insulting to a lot of their donors,” said Michael West, a lawyer who advises charities at the New York Council of Nonprofits. “It appears she may have fallen into the trap of excess.”

The last statement by West is hilarious. She “may have fallen into a trap”? GLAAD is a non-profit; everyone connected with it knows, or has no excuse if they don’t know, that donors are not giving money to fund lifestyles of the rich and famous. Its CEO just innocently “fell” into this kind of unethical, and possibly illegal, misuse of funds. Sure. Tell me another. West frames it that way because he’s a coward. He’s afraid of being called “homophobic,” or motivated by hate, so he resorts to weasel words. Or he supports the group, and bias has made him stupid.

Naturally, as always happens in the first stages of scandals like this one (The United Way, ACORN, Black Lives Matter, and many, many others) the immediate reaction from GLAAD was deny, deny, deny. (They are almost all Democrats, after all.) The organization denied that Ellis traveled in too much splendor. It ludicrously defended its expenditure on her home improvements and summer home because “they enabled her to advance GLAAD’s mission.” (Wow. A lawyer got paid for coming up with that pathetic defense?)

GLAAD said it relied on lawyers and accountants to ensure that its executives were “good financial stewards.” They did this knowing that ” lawyers and accountants said it was okay,” which is both one of the oldest excuses in the book “How To Try To Get Away With Organizational Looting” and among the least successful.

As for the Davos trip, see, it was funded through a donation from the Ariadne Getty Foundation, which said it was proud to support GLAAD’s work in Davos, so everything is okay, right? (All GLAAD was doing in Davos was shmoozing and fundraising.)The Tivoli Lodge was used as a venue for receptions and other events! Yes, GLAAD paying for the day of skiing looks bad, but it was only “due to an administrative oversight.” Oopsie! Besides, Ellis later reimbursed the organization (after GLAAD realized that the Times was sniffing around.)

The board says it stands behind its funds-squandering CEO, “with respect and appreciation for how she and her team are leading the movement at a time when our community is under attack. We have full confidence that they’re doing so with integrity and that they share the board’s commitment to irrefutably strong governance and business practices.” Ellis says “I take my role as GLAAD’s financial steward incredibly seriously, and we’ll continue updating our procedures to keep pace with the organization’s rapid growth.”

Ramalama Ding Dong. She’s a crook. I will be shocked if further investigation fails to show that the whole culture at GLAAD has rotted, with management and staff feeling entitled to treat themselves as the heroes they believe they are.

Here are the full texts of the rationalizations GLAAD has “fallen into.” Surprisingly, the group doesn’t read Ethics Alarms. The relevant entries on the list are Rationalization #13. The Saint’s Excuse: “It’s for a good cause,” its corollary 13A, “The Road to Hell,” and #21. Ethics Accounting, or “I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that”…

Rationalization #13. The Saint’s Excuse: “It’s for a good cause,” This rationalization has probably caused more death and human suffering than any other. The words “it’s for a good cause” have been used to justify all sorts of lies, scams and mayhem. It is the downfall of the zealot, the true believer, and the passionate advocate that almost any action that supports “the Cause,’ whether it be liberty, religion, charity, or curing a plague, is seen as being justified by the inherent rightness of the ultimate goal. Thus Catholic Bishops protected child-molesting priests to protect the Church, and the American Red Cross used deceptive promotions to swell its blood supplies after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Saint’s Excuse  allows charities to strong-arm contributors, and advocacy groups to use lies and innuendo to savage ideological opponents. The Saint’s Excuse is that the ends justify the means, because the “saint” has decided that the ends are worth any price—especially when that price will have to be paid by someone else.

13A  The Road To Hell, or “I meant well” (“I didn’t mean any harm!”)

“This sub-rationalization to the Saint’s Excuse is related to its parent but arguably worse. Rationalization 13 is one of the really deadly rationalizations, the closest on the list to “The ends justified the means.” The Saint’s Excuse is that the ends justify the means, because the “saint” has decided that the ends are worth any price—especially when that price will have to be paid by someone else. 

But while the wielder of the Saint’s Excuse typically at least has a beneficial or valuable result to claim as justification for unethical and inexcusable acts, the desperate employers of 13A only have their alleged good intentions, which may be the product of emotion, misunderstanding, ignorance or stupidity. How a bad actor intended his unethical conduct to turn out is no mitigation at all. The underlying logic is that the wrongdoer isn’t a bad person, so the wrongful act shouldn’t be held against him or her as harshly as if he was. The logic is flawed (it is the same logic as in The King’s Pass, #11, which holds that societally valuable people should be held to lower standards of conduct than everyone else) and dangerous, encouraging the reckless not to consider the substance of a course of action, but only its motivations. The Saint’s Excuse attempts to justify unethical actions that accomplish worthy goals. The Road to Hell attempts to justify unethical conduct even when it does undeniable harm, just because it was undertaken with admirable intent.

#21. Ethics Accounting, or “I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that”

You cannot earn the right to act unethically by depositing a lot of ethical deeds in the imaginary ethics bank, nor can unethical conduct be erased by doing good for someone else. The illusion that one can balance the ethics books this way is referred to on the Ethics Alarms blog as “the Ruddigore Fallacy.”  Nobody earns the right to be unethical, not even once, no matter how exemplary their conduct. An unethical act is just as unethical whether it is performed by a saint, a hero, or a villain.

There are others that apply, but these will do.