YEARS AGO, I WENT on a seminar for glossy-magazine executives. Discussing the ethics of advertising pages, one radical young woman editor announced that whatever the revenue loss, she refused ads from feminine hygiene products that she considered insulting to what were then known as wimmin. There was a respectful silence, then a glum man from Motorcycle Monthly said “Can I have their number? We’d be glad of the money”.

This memory was revived by the latest story of a charity refusing a donation under pressure from other people’s ethics. The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) has turned down £30,000 raised by Barry Atkinson, a shooting enthusiast who carried out a record 148 days “beating”. The ICR speaks of its concern for “minimising pain and suffering in animals” but apparently told Mr Atkinson that it was worried about animal rights “activists”.

It has suffered from them in the past. Mr Atkinson agreed to give the money discreetly, but it was still rejected.

Roll back a few weeks to the affair of Maggie’s Centres, a charity for cancer sufferers. It was offered £3,000 from a special performance of the hit show Jerry Springer — The Opera which contains rude words and a dream-sequence using images of God, Christ, Mary and Satan. A small group called Christian Voice warned the charity off: its activists threatened to protest outside the offices and centres. That would not have been much fun for the patients; more distressing, you would think, than knowing that they had benefited from a musical enjoyed by thousands and broadcast on BBC Two. The chief executive justified the capitulation because for the sick “this had the potential to be an extra battle”.

Think what you like about the show: I think it is not actually blasphemous, since the religious figures are not themselves but figments of nightmare. You may differ. But, as one doctor sighed, “What sort of Christian blackmails a cancer charity?”.

I do not think we should complacently assume that this is a one-off. This loss of £30,000 to the ICR proves that. There are plenty of other single-issue fanatics who will be encouraged to target charities: trustees have got to decide how to meet this threat. It may be for us, the public, robustly to inform charities that if they cave in to blackmail, the rest of us will turn our backs. Two years ago was another troubling case: Oxfam’s refusal of £5,000 from Professor Ted Honderich of University College London, whose book examined the morality of Islamist attacks and included a paragraph asserting the “terrible truth” that there may be justification in some Palestinian violence. Oxfam defended its refusal of the money with strong words about the value of all life; Professor Honderich believes that it was scared by a threat from a Canadian newspaper to run a piece saying it took money from terrorist sympathisers. Muslim organisations have attacked the charity over this; it is complex, and worth looking up in more detail than I can offer here.

But the history of charities refusing donations is interesting. I spent a curious hour trying to find out whether the blackmail tactic so openly used by Christian Voice really is a new phenomenon. It is. I found abundant, and unsurprising, examples of principled charities turning down “dirty money”. One can see why the World Wide Fund for Nature flinched from accepting £2,000 raised by a novelty alligator race. It is understandable when anti-gambling churches refuse Lottery grants. Sometimes the sacrifice is great: in Florida in 2003 the Salvation Army turned down $100,000 from a Lotto winner. Fair enough: there is at least a direct line from the charity’s beliefs to its self-denial. Some refusals are a bit petulant: in Boston, the ailing Catholic Archdiocese turned down $35,000 from a lay group, Voice of the Faithful, which has criticised the Church’s feeble response to child abuse scandals. In Albuquerque a homeless shelter refused $1,200 raised by a drag show. Here in the 1990’s Shelter — whose business surely is campaigning for the homeless — turned down £50,000 from a tobacco company. Still, at least the Bostonian bishops, Shelter, the Salvationists and the Albuquerque drag-haters were not being bullied.

You could say the same about the African archbishops who have vowed to reject donations from any Western church that ordains gay clergy. “We will not”, says Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria, “on the altar of money, mortgage our conscience and salvation.” Fine. It’s their choice to let their parishioners suffer. But note, going back to the original stories, that Maggie’s Centres is not a Christian organisation. It did not itself hold a view on the Jerry Springer musical. It was strong-armed. And so, in a way, was the ICR, cowed by animal-rights terrorists against whom our police seem so powerless. And so, perhaps, was Oxfam: Professor Honderich’s view on Palestinian violence is controversial, but it was expressed with care and thought and he is a lifelong donor. Principle alone is unlikely to have swayed the decision; the professor claims that he was told there was “pressure brought to bear”.

This is not the same issue as when charities refuse donations with publicity strings attached: that is mere prudence. A good example is Breakthrough Breast Cancer and its refusal to take a million’s worth of sponsorship from Nestlé because it believes (though the company denies it) that Nestlé promotes baby milk powder unethically in developing countries. Here the proposal was for cross-promotion, and the charity was protecting its image. But in the three main cases cited above, any of the charities could have taken the money and simultaneously announced their disapproval of its source. But that would not have been enough for their attackers, would it?

In a lot of moral dilemmas I happily say “money isn’t everything”. But when solid good causes start to suffer from the hyperactive, self-righteous consciences of every passing bully, we should notice.

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