Religion is playing a central role in the 2004 elections and regular church-goers concerned about life issues and protecting traditional marriage are a critical voting bloc. Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU), “Catholics” for Free Choice (CFFC) and other groups that share their extreme views understand this.
The cavalry has arrived, fortunately. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has just launched an effort called the “Free Preach Project,” which seeks to protect the “free expression of all religious traditions,” according to their website (www.freepreach.org). Picarello says that the group has just mailed letters to about 295,000 houses of worship warning them of the threatening letter they will likely receive from groups like AU as well as explaining what is permissible under the IRS code, and to assure them of their rights to preach “sincerely held religious beliefs from the pulpit.” Best of all, Picarello’s organization promises to defend free of charge any IRS threat to the tax-exempt status of a religious institution as a result of “any good faith religious message — left, right, or center, wisdom or nonsense — preached from the pulpit.”
In 1798, Thomas Jefferson said, “One of the amendments to the Constitution… expressly declares that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,' thereby guarding in the same sentence and under the same words, the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the press; insomuch that whatever violates either throws down the sanctuary which covers the others.” This should be a warning to those who seek to win the upcoming election by trying to deny freedom of speech and freedom of religion to countless American preachers and their millions of faithful followers.
St. Thomas More, pray for us.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Craig Richardson is the founder of the recently launched Catholic Action Network, an organization committed to calling Catholics to authentic and faithful citizenship particularly on issues of life and family.
They have taken to using threats of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaints to intimidate religious leaders in order to prevent them from talking to their faithful about the election. Sound un-American? It is.
Anthony Picarello, president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, explains that there are two relevant provisions in the IRS 501 (c) (3) Code that impact churches and other non-profit organizations when it comes to politics. The first stipulates that lobbying the government on particular issues must not be a “substantial” portion of a non-profit’s focus, which the IRS says is roughly 5-15%.
The second relevant provision, and the most threatening to our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, bars any church or other non-profit organizations from getting involved in elections. The problem with this provision, according to Picarello, is that the definition of “intervention in a political campaign” is vague, and the consequence for violations (revocation of tax status) is draconian: “It’s like applying the death penalty for shoplifters.” Even more difficult, he adds, is that the IRS “not only gives churches no latitude to step over the line, but also avoids telling them exactly where the line is.”
While the IRS has not been clear on where the line is, Picarello says there are both cases of clear violations and incidents that should be protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. For example, if a preacher says from the pulpit specifically that the congregation must vote for President George W. Bush, the IRS would treat that as a clear violation of its Code. Preaching about moral issues of grave concern to a particular faith, however, is not a violation. The rule applies equally to the Catholic Church, which clearly articulates that protecting human life should be a priority to the faithful when it comes to voting, as well as to faiths like the pacifist Quakers, who may well preach that the Iraq war is immoral and that their faithful should consider this when they vote.
The threat of revoking an organization’s tax status is devastating and thus, notes Picarello, it has been used as a political tool, most commonly by the Left, to prevent churches from legally participating in the electoral process. However, he adds that conservatives have begun getting in the game, especially this election, by targeting left-wing churches and using similar IRS threats.
The very origins of the IRS’s authority over churches’ and other non-profits’ activities were politically motivated. This was made clear in a June article written by Paul Weyrich, Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. He explained that after rumors surfaced that Lyndon B. Johnson stole a 1948 election for the U.S. Senate — claims that were substantiated years later by a campaign worker on his deathbed — Johnson worried that churches might “rise up in indignation” and call for his defeat. As a result, Senator Johnson “got a provision inserted in the IRS code indicating that churches that intervened in politics endangered their tax-exempt status.”
Apparently the IRS did not pay much attention to this provision for years until Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the late 1970s. According to Weyrich, the IRS began discouraging “churches from rising up against the Carter Administration’s effort to claim that if church schools did not have minorities that were reflective of the community, they were guilty, de facto, of segregation.” Since then, IRS enforcement has not been uniform and recently the IRS began harassing churches for “using ‘code words’ such as pro-life.” Not only are churches in trouble if they intervene in elections, they may now lose “their tax-exempt status for intervening in policy politics. In other words, even if churches and synagogues preach the word of God, about life, about marriage, or about sin, this can be interpreted as practicing politics,” he concludes.
Enter AU and other like-minded groups, who have used IRS threats to silence their opponents. In 2000, weeks before the presidential election, AU sent out 280,000 letters to houses of worship that were nothing more than an attempt to frighten these churches into saying as little as possible about the election, according to Picarello. He adds that AU, headed by former American Civil Liberties Union operative Barry Lynn, will probably do another mailing shortly.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, a favorite target of AU, said in a June article that AU’s “fright letter” targets conservative churches and incorrectly tells them that “any use of voter guides, political discourse or other such activity could result in a loss of tax-exempt status for their churches.” Falwell adds that no church has ever lost its tax status as AU claims. Picarello makes the point however, that AU wins even when no IRS action is taken because their strategy is to create a “chilling effect” on preachers, so they stop talking to their flock about issues of importance as they relate to the election.
Because the U.S. bishops and other Catholic officials have spoken out so clearly this election cycle about the scandal that pro-abortion elected officials cause, AU and others have turned their sights on the Catholic Church. On their website, AU notes that when John F. Kennedy ran for president 50 years ago, he “assured a skeptical America that the Catholic Church would not influence his decisions as president.” They continue that an “increasingly aggressive Catholic hierarchy is undermining this historic principle by attempting to control the votes of Catholic politicians on important social issues.” Finally, they single out Colorado Springs Bishop Michael J. Sheridan, who they claim is “so extreme that Americans United called on the IRS to investigate. Bishop Sheridan insisted that Catholics not vote for candidates who support legal abortion, stem-cell research or euthanasia.”
Never missing an opportunity to persecute faithful Catholics, CFFC has also gotten into the IRS threat game. On Monday, the anti-Catholic organization “filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service against Catholic Answers, Inc. for blatant violation of its charitable status,” according to a rambling statement by CFFC president Frances Kissling. She claims that electioneering “by anti-choice groups, and even the Catholic bishops, is especially high this presidential campaign with bishops actively opposing Sen. John Kerry.”
CFFC pulled the same stunt back in July against the pro-life group Operation Rescue West for what they called a “blatant violation of its charitable status.” Kissling’s letter to an IRS director began, “I write to provide you with clear evidence of a flagrant political expenditure by Operation Rescue West, an organization purporting to operate as a public charity under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 501(c)(3).”
One of more disturbing developments of this campaign is an effort underway by the MAINstream Coalition, a group that is anything but mainstream and is actually just another left-wing, pro-abortion, pro-cloning organization advocating “the separation of church and state.” According to the Family Research Council, the MAINstream Coalition is sending “an estimated 100 volunteers to ‘monitor’ sermons in evangelical churches in Missouri and Kansas to ‘ensure’ they are in compliance with IRS regulations forbidding the endorsement of candidates by tax-exempt nonprofit organizations.”
