UK: Ten-year-old boy launches men-only charity cycle in Worcester

Submitted by Mastodon on Wed, 2014-05-07 15:22

Story here. Excerpt:

'A BOY was so disappointed he was not allowed to run the women's only Race for Life [link added] last year that he has started his own charity event for men.

Ten-year-old Ethan Muller will launch the first Ethan's 10k Male Only Charity Cycle Challenge event on Saturday, May 10, to raise cash for Help for Heroes [link added].

The Martley Primary School child was not allowed to enter the Cancer Research UK yearly event at Worcester Racecourse with his mum and sister but felt he wanted to help in a way.

He said: "The challenge is only for boys because girls can only do Race for Life and I really wanted to do it.
...
His mum, Tina Muller, said her son was desperate to do an event after being refused onto Race for Life.

She said: "I am proud of the fact that he decided that it was unfair to do Race for Life for only girls. He was desperate to do it and kept asking me if we can do something for only boys, and he came up with the idea himself and the charity.
...
For more information, or to register for Ethan's 10k Male Only Charity Cycle Challenge event, visit ethanscharitychallenge.org, or to sponsor Ethan, visit justgiving.com/Ethans-Charity-Challenge.'

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Comments

... two wrongs don't make a right. First, big kudos to him for having that kind of chutzpah, and at age 10 no less! (I definitely didn't have that much get-up-and-do-it at that age -- it was all my folks could do to get me out of bed some time before lunch...). But as I've said before, it is a fundamentally bad economic decision to restrict your market based on anything except moral grounds. For example, say you manufacture and sell anesthetic drugs. It's moral and ethical to sell them responsibly to medical professionals and distribution chains that are auditable and accountable, but not so to sell them to anyone else. That's an example of something that you ought not seek just any old customers for. However when you have a charitable event, except for knowingly taking "blood money" or some other kind of contributions that come from proceeds from morally or ethically questionable activities, you ought to be happily ready to take money from Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny if they showed up on your door with a bagful of cash. Restricting participants in any charitable work based solely on their indelible characteristics like sex, ethnicity, etc., is just plain bad for business as well as bigoted.

Indeed, what claim of moral superiority or of setting a counter-example can one make if he or she does exactly the sort of thing they object to in the first place?

Do the Walmarts and Targets and Home Depots of the world insist their customers be a certain height or weight, or have a certain amount of credit, or be a certain "kind" of person (pick your poison: sex, class, ethnicity, religion, city of birth, etc...)? No. That's because money is money is money. Ask any accountant. It's the most fungible asset on Earth, aside maybe from clean air and water. And whether it comes from the hand of a man or a woman makes no difference. So while it may be tempting to create one's own men-only event as a constructive objection to a female-only event of some kind, if it involves things like raising money for charity, it seems like a much better thing to do to really stick it to the bigots who reject you merely because you have a penis by showing them what a much-larger event that raises so much more money than theirs looks like. Bet that gets them re-thinking their "femmes-only" policy real fast as they watch the cash zip past their hands and into yours.

Money doesn't talk. It screams.

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2014-05-09 02:10