Okay, I believe I understand the underlying theory somewhat now, magisterial though it may be. Thanks to both Left Hand of Dorkness and Dio for your patience in explaining it. Perhaps the tax could be eliminated entirely were it not necessary to finance the behemouth bureaucracy that must interpret and enforce such theories as these.
If wishes was horses, we’d all be eating steak.
-Jayne
Kind of. The problem arises, IMHO, because 501©(3) lists religion as a category to receive tax exempt status. I have no issues with a church hospital or school getting a tax exemption under the exemption for health care and educational establishments. I think where the establishment problem occurs is when religious groups are granted tax exemptions as religions. That gets the government into the mucky business of having to determine what a religion is (which of course they have blundered royally into with the Religious Land Use and Instittionalized Persons Act).
Seperating out the religious from non-religious aspects of a church - tax exemption for the school, no tax exemption for the preaching - also makes your later problem easier to deal with. General laws such as discrimination ones should certainly apply to the non-religious functions undertaken by churches. You want a tax exemption for your hospital, then you have to hire gay people/people of different religions/women (depending on the law in your jurisdiction). There is a greater argument to allow the ‘religious’ aspects to go unregulated if they aren’t being directly subsidized by the same taxpayers who (in theory) were responsible for the anti-discrimination legislation in the first place.
The problem at the moment is that while you are right in saying they receive tax exemptions to help them do good deads, religion is defined in and of itself as a good deed. Having re-read what you wrote, I think we are in pretty close agreement, at least on the tax exemption side if not fully on the discrimination side.
In a related vein, apparently a North Carolina Republican has introduced a bill that would allow clergy to endorse candidates from the pulpit and still retain a tax exemption of their house of worship.
Bill summary here. It’s got a wonderfully innocious :rolleyes: name, too – the “Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act.”
Yeah, uh, we prefer you not pay attention to our state government, people. You know, the place where someone advised teenagers who had sex to spray their genitals with Lysol afterwards to prevent STDs? Let’s just pretend they don’t exist, mkay?
That’s right, nothing to see, move along.
Daniel
Bwahahaha!
I think that the grammar is a little screwed up there.
Am I reading that right – is that amendment intended to make it so that a sermon that consists of a half-hour of “Vote for Bob!” can’t be held to be participating in a political campaign, when it comes to tax law?
I propose a new bill: The USC should be amendended so that jamming an umbrella up the ass of Walter Jones and then opening it shall not be treated as a criminal assault.
Whee!
$5 says that there’s a site on Yahoo Groups that…likes…this.
North Carolina is also the state in which it’s impossible to rape a woman. As I recall, the former Senior Senator Jesse Helms declared that if a woman wasn’t interested in sex, then her “juices won’t flow” or some such.
We’d be eating horse steaks???
Only in France.
I think I’m getting whooshed here. If this isn’t the case may I just say that I grew up in the “triangle” part of North Carolina. Then I went to college in the “triad” part of North Carolina. I now have a job right over the Smoky mountains (see “Location:”) from North Carolina. This is in my back yard and it scares the hell out of me. There are seemingly educated and well spoken folks from this part of the country that genuinely believe if you don’t support GW then you are a traitor. The logic they use and point of view they have is infallible in their own eyes…God is with THEM and no one else.
I’d say there is no more important line of battle in the war against ignorance than this one.
YMMV. I’ve written some congressmen.
So have I and now I have 10 dates in the next two weeks.
Looks like I’m getting some serious Santorum. And probably anal sex from the other nine too.
That was Rep. Henry Aldrich, and he didn’t claim it was impossible to rape a woman, but that it was impossible for a rape victim to get pregnant, because if the woman isn’t consenting, “the juices don’t flow”.
Helms is alleged to have made a similar comment off the record. The Washington Post Magazine ran an article on him in the early 1990’s (I believe the writer was Juan Williams). A pro-choice activist or lobbyist claimed Helms said to her that if a victim is truly raped, she won’t get pregnant.
Correction: Henry Aldridge
Local coverage ain’t exactly treating this minister well. Local folks may be conservative, but most of them aren’t awful.
Daniel
I daresay it isn’t helping Rev. Chandler any that he’s been the pastor of that church for only three years and a lot of the people he kicked out or who left in protest have been involved in it for decades.
Remove .45 from holster.
Pull hammer back.
Aim at big toe.
Squeeze trigger.
As I was packing to leave Florida Monday a similar situation was on the news. A pastor told the congregation from the pulpit that if they had voted for Kerry they needed to “repent or resign.” Two members of the church were kicked out. One of them had been a member of the church for 42 years.
I definitely think they should lose tax-exempt status.
See! There is a God!