Target vs. Salvation Army? It's about more than just bell-ringers.

As the holiday season drew to a close, the Target Corporation apparently drew the wrath of the public for denying Salvation Army bell-ringers the opportunity to solicit charitable contributions in front of Target stores. The crescendo of criticisms aiming at Target seems to have been more than a bit choreographed by people with political agendas.

Why Target and why now? Target is hardly the only retail chain to conclude that winnowing through requests from charities wanting to solicit money, denying everyone but the Salvation Army, leads to increasing problems and exposure to charges of unfairness. Reportedly, stores such as Barnes & Noble, discount drug store chain CVS, Best Buy, Circuit City, Kohl's, Toys "R" Us, Home Depot, Costco, and others, plus numerous shopping malls, do not permit the Salvation Army bell-ringers.

Target's policy has been on the books since 2001, but the company had always made an exception for the Salvation Army.

Target's decision this holiday season garnered a maelstrom of hostility. It seems as though Target found itself a handy, visible victim to a campaign of fight-wing religious and political think tanks. In their view, Target was somehow the centerpiece of a secular campaign to attack Christmas or the pawn of something referred to as the "homosexual agenda."

The empirical evidence of Target's submission to the imagined anti-Christmas secularists is scant if any. The best that one of Target's critics, the president of the American Family Association, could reportedly offer was, "It wouldn't surprise me if homosexual groups are behind this." In response to Target's explanation that it was facing increasing inquiries from other nonprofits to do fundraising like the Salvation Army, a director of the Concerned Women for America could only guess, it was reported, that "some of those requests (might) be coming from homosexual activists" Others seemed to confuse the unwillingness of gays and lesbians to contribute to the Salvation Army as equivalent to a boycott of the stores that permit the bell-ringers.

Target's opponents, including groups named the Christian Defense Coalition, Concerned Women for America, and the national Clergy Coalition, can't find much to identify other than their amorphous fears of gay and lesbian critics of the Salvation Army behind Target's decision. Though they chortle at the fact that only a few years ago, right-wing protests organized by Life Decisions International got Target to eliminate charitable contributions to the women's reproductive rights programs of Planned Parenthood.

Lesbian and gay activists have been critical of the Salvation Army, which has long had an anti-gay rights policy. Federal policy observers remember the Salvation Army's special arrangement with the Bush White House arguing for exemptions from fair employment standards in the administration's proposed faith-based program. The Salvation Army and the White House tried to spin out of the evidence of their lobbying, but that evidence stuck.

Remember that the Salvation Army has always asked about the religious affiliation of potential employees and requires commitment to the organization's evangelical gospel. As the head of the organization has publicly said, "you cannot be in a position where you rely resent the Salvation Army organizationally and practice a lifestyle that conflicts with who we are."

Part of the orchestrated campaign against Target has been stories of the empty kettles causing charitable fundraising shortfalls for the Army. Even if the cost of the Target ban is $8.9 million, it is difficult to shed too many tears. Salvation Army is not short of money.

It has been one of the top revenue-raising charites in the United States, or within a place or two of the top for the past 12 years according to various published reports. Combining charitable fundraising, governmental grants, and other revenues, the Salvation Army pulled in $1.3 billion from private sources, $2.8 billion total, in 2003, making the purported loss attributable to the Target policy inconsequential in a typical fundraising year.

For 2004, it won't even be discernable, due to the organization's receipt of a charitable bequest of $1.5 billion from the estate of McDonalds heiress Joan Kroc. (She left a paltry additional $200 million to National Public Radio.) Compared with that level of fundraising, plus the largest charitable bequest ever, on top of the Salvation Army's 2003 assets of more than $8 billion, the Target loss will be unnoticeable.

The agenda might not only be political and religious, but competitive as well. In response to the Target policy, Wal-Mart announced a very public stance of encouraging the Salvation Army bell-ringers and matched their take dollar-for-dollar up to $1 million. Getting less attention was the fact that even Wal-Mart tightly controls the charity kettles, having reduced the number of days available to Salvation Army volunteers from 28 to only 14 days of solicitations and no more than 3 days in a row.

Wal-Mart's move to compete for a slice of the Target retail market might be partly motivated by Target's increasing competitiveness for the Wal-Mart bargain shoppers. With a track record of opposing unions, paying low wages, and making health care coverage expensive if not impossible for employees, Wal-Mart has been in need of positive press, making a play to the population concerned about imagined "Christianophobia" as purportedly reflected in the Target policy unsurprising.

On a political level, the philanthropic giving of the Wal-Mart Corporation and the various foundations of the Walton family emphasize conservative political and social themes through grants to right-wing think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, and the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation. It shouldn't be a surprise to find lots of commentary on the Target/Salvation Army controversy on the Web pages of these organizations, including disgraced Iran/Contra kingpin Oliver North weighing in on the pages of Heritage'sTownlaall.com project Web site, suggesting that Target is simply "following (Fidel) Castro's lead."

The political priorities of right-wing critics, heady with the morality and values underpinnings of the re-election of President Bush, fearful of what they see as the inexorable movement toward marriage rights for gays and lesbians, make Target a convenient, ah, target. But less ideologically motivated observers shouldn't be surprised by the restrictions placed by Target and dozens of others on the Salvation Army's fundraising.

With ever-increasing numbers of nonprofits looking for new venues for fundraising, Target's policy is little different than the motivations of large corporations after World War II to adopt United Way federated fundraising appeals, rather than permitting various nonprofits individually to solicit donations from employees at various times during the year.

Not mentioned in the brouhaha is the recognition that the Salvation Army's fundraising approaches themselves are changing. The labor-intensive bell-ringer model is giving way to online approaches, "virtual kettles," and other technological improvements. In fact, the Salvation Army is now a major player in online charitable fundraising, capitalizing on the Army's huge name recognition and its ability to deploy its massive tax-exempt wealth for effective marketing through the Internet.

Raking in huge amounts of private and public capital, including $1.7 billion in government grants from an increasingly compliant faith-oriented federal government, the Salvation Army is not going to suffer much from the Target decision. Press reports have been mixed, some suggesting that the Salvation Army's kettle-take has been as robust this year as any recently.

Sympathy for a mega-retailer like Target is hard to muster, but in this case, Target was simply a handy mark, a vehicle for certain political interests, religious sectarians, and commercial competitors to score some easy points. Once you get past the carefully crafted story of an allegedly uncaring mega-retailer ditching the sights and sounds of Christmas tradition, the sordid reality is, at best, the wistful efforts to prop up outmoded, old-fashioned charity, at worst a rightwing strategy to insert an intolerant, dogmatic brand of sectarianism into nonprofit fundraising.

Rick Cohen is executive director of the National Committee For Responsive Philantrhropy in Washington, D.C.