First Amendment Assault Begins, Govt Aims to
Strip Churches of Non-Profit Status, 7/2/15
(Breitbart) – In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision
mandating that states reward same-sex marriages throughout the nation, churches
across the country prepare for the inevitable assault on their
tax-exempt statuses.
“Beliefs” columnist for The New York Times, Mark
Oppenheimer, wrote at Time.com that churches should have their tax-exempt
statuses ripped away for opposing same-sex marriage. Felix Salmon at
Fusion wrote the same thing:
The
US government subsidizes churches to the tune of many billions of dollars per
year by giving them tax-exempt status. … The First Amendment guarantees freedom
of religion, but that’s free as in love, not free as in beer. Taxation is a
purely secular affair, and by default it applies to everyone equally, whether
they’re a religious institution or not.
The left wishes for a nation where same-sex couples are
given tax benefits for participation in a homosexual lifestyle, but where
churches are punished for rejecting that lifestyle.
And it won’t stop with churches. The Christian
Science Monitor asks whether conservative religious colleges will lose
their tax-exempt statuses. Professor Michael Olivas of the Institute for Higher
Education Law & Governance at the University of Houston said, “I don’t
think that a number of these religious schools can reasonably hope to adhere to
principles that are clearly in violation of public policy, a la Bob
Jones.” As I wrote years ago, the Bob Jones University case, in which the IRS
removed non-profit status from the university over its rules on interracial
dating, will now be used as precedent by the IRS to go after non-profit
institutions over same-sex marriage.
The crusade against religious churches and schools amounts
to bigotry against religious believers – a bigotry clearly expressed by
University of Virginia law Professor Douglas Laycock, who told The
Washington Post, “The gay rights side keeps escalating its demands and
public opinion keeps shifting in their favor. … Conservative believers are
their own worst enemies and lead people to think they are hateful morons, so
they’re not getting much sympathy.”
And this is the point: when public consternation governs the
regulations on churches, we have violated the purpose of the First Amendment.
There is no First Amendment right to tax exempt status, but as the Supreme
Court wrote in Walz v. Tax Commission of City of New York (1970),
the leading case on tax exemptions for religious institutions:
Grants
of exemption historically reflect the concern of authors of constitutions and
statutes as to the latent dangers inherent in the imposition of property taxes;
exemption constitutes a reasonable and balanced attempt to guard against those
dangers. … Elimination of exemption would tend to expand the involvement of
government by giving rise to tax valuation of church property, tax liens, tax
foreclosures, and the direct confrontations and conflicts that follow in the
train of those legal processes. … The grant of a tax exemption is not
sponsorship, since the government does not transfer part of its revenue to
churches, but simply abstains from demanding that the church support the state.
The Court summed up that tax exemption for religious
institutions “covers our entire national existence and indeed predates it.”
This, historically speaking, is true. As religious
regulation expert Richard Couser wrote, “The notion of exempting churches
from taxation did not begin in the United States. Medieval Europe, the Roman
Empire under Constantine, and even Egypt in Joseph’s time exempted church
property from taxation.” Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel of the Alliance
Defense Fund, explained, “The unassailable fact remains that, for as long
as anyone can remember, churches have always been tax-exempt or enjoyed
favorable tax treatment.”
In the United States, tax exemption served the purpose of
not excessively entangling the government with religious institutions, given
that most civilized countries of Europe had established state churches
sponsored by the government itself. The Founders – and most legislators and
regulators throughout the history of the United States – understood that using
the government to discriminate against particular churches would act as an
abridgement of religious freedom. And the Founders would have been appalled by
the federal regulations currently in place that crack down on pastors’ ability
to speak politically from the pulpit.
Such regulations began in 1934 with a congressional
amendment to the tax code, as Stanley points out. That amendment attempted to
reject tax exemption for a church if a “substantial part of … its activities …
is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation.”
That amendment came after one legislator got upset with a church for
campaigning against him based on veteran benefits. In 1954, then-Senator Lyndon
Johnson sponsored the Johnson Amendment, which labeled tax-exempt organizations
those that did not “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing
or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in
opposition to) any candidate for public office.” He sponsored the legislation
because a rival secular non-profit opposed his candidacy. Now the IRS has
expanded the regulations to include a bevy of possible violations in order to
quash religious speech.
In short, politicians, given power over churches, would move
to destroy those who oppose them. That is why tax exemption is an important
aspect of protection for churches: the government’s attempts to smack down
particular churches smacks of First Amendment-violating viewpoint
discrimination. Either all churches should receive tax exempt status
– which they should to prevent government specifically targeting religion,
since the “power to tax involves the power to destroy,” as Chief Justice John
Marshall put it in 1819 – or they should not. But the idea that government
will selectively benefit those churches it approves makes religion an arm of
the state, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/02/government-crusade-against-churches-begins-with-removal-of-non-profit-status/
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See more at: http://www.teaparty.org/first-amendment-assault-begins-govt-aims-strip-churches-non-profit-status-105846/#sthash.hh77FDoB.dpuf
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