Attorney Generals Urge Congress to Defend Religious Organizations

 

Attorney General Ken Paxton announced today he has joined with 14 other Attorneys General signing a letter sent to Congressional leaders urging them to take steps to protect the tax-exempt status of nonprofit religious organizations.

“Under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, citizens have the right to exercise their religion freely without government pressure to change their minds or penalties for unpopular beliefs,” the letter states. “We take very seriously the religious liberty of our States’ citizens and believe that Congress should take action now to preclude the IRS from targeting religious groups.”

The letter was sent to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., prompted by statements before the U.S. Supreme Court by Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. during oral arguments in the Obergefell v. Hodges case. When asked if religious-affiliated institutions could have their tax-exempt status revoked if they opposed same-sex marriage, Verrilli said “It’s certainly going to be an issue.”

Attorney General Paxton and the other AGs ask that Congress modify the Internal Revenue Code to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from revoking the tax-exempt status of nonprofit religious organizations that disagree with the decision in Obergefell.

The letter says stripping the tax-exempt status of religious organizations would be “an unprecedented assertion of governmental power over religious exercise.”

“To allow the IRS to proceed in this way would suggest that the IRS has the power to target disfavored beliefs in any religious organization, to effectively decide the truth or correctness of a religious belief, and to penalize as a matter of ‘policy’ a mainstream belief held by groups that long have received tax-exempt status,” the letter states.

A copy of the letter can be viewed here: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/files/2015/LettertoCongress-ReligiousLiberty.pd

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The Supreme Court's ruling is not going to require priests and preachers to officiate at same-sex weddings if they do not wish to do so. There was nothing in the ruling that remotely touched on that. Let's worry about things that really matter, not fantasy straw bogeymen conjured up by addle-brained paranoiacs or exploited by unscrupulous politicians trolling for money in the bilge water of robo-call-identified patsies.

live, Sun, 07/05/2015 - 12:52

Gus, your head is not on a swivel; it's probably buried in sand. Mark Steyn wrote a good piece about this terrible public policy. If you want to know where we're headed, Steyn argues, look at the Boy Scouts of America:

I was on the floor of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 2000 when they had some Eagle scouts as an honor guard - and in my section of the crowd everyone booed. And I remember thinking, "Man, these Dems are nuts. Booing boy scouts?"

But the booers won. Over the next decade, gay-friendly churches (Episcopalian, Congregational, and the other post-Christian ones) booted the scouts from church halls where they'd met for decades; Disney cut them off the list of approved charities to which their employees were permitted to donate their "Ears To You" fundraising proceeds; other corporate benefactors from the US soccer league to Lockheed Martin severed their ties ...and the number of new recruits to scouting dwindled remorselessly, and so did their finances. And in the end the boy scouts' leader caved - but too late. In the blink of an eye, the boy scouts had been, as my friend Ezra Levant likes to say, "de-normalized", and banished to the fringe, and nice soccer mommies don't want l'il Jimmy playing on the extremist fringe.

That's quite an accomplishment. After all, until Democrats figured it was safe to boo them, boy scouts were so mainstream that their very name is a synonym for someone kindly and pure and good-hearted. Take litigious lunatic and Nobel Prize appropriator Michael E Mann, who says here that the argument between the global warming crowd and us deniers has been "likened at times to a fight between a boy scout and a terrorist - and you know, we are the boy scouts". Which would make me the terrorist. When Mann calls himself a "boy scout", he doesn't mean he's a homophobic hater - although I'm certainly happy to advance that line in court if it helps. Mann is using "boy scouts" as a synonym for "the good guys".

That's how effective Big Gay is: They took "the good guys", and made 'em the bad guys, in nothing flat.

How many other groups are willing to be boy-scouted in the years ahead? How much faith is there in "faith-based institutions"?

(Source: Mark Steyn Online)

Ever since Loving v. Virginia, churches have been forced at gunpoint to perform interracial marriages. And the number of priests who have been threatened with arrest for not marrying Baptists in Catholic churches is truly impressive.

Oh, those things never happen? Gee...

No one is going to force ministers who do not wish to perform marriages of same-sex couples to perform those marriages. It is that simple. I have no idea of what Boy Scouts have to do with any of this discussion.

live, Sun, 07/05/2015 - 16:17

Your church will be forced to fall into line through a variety of torture devices, primarily money. Pastors not performing same-sex marriages will see their tax exemptions taken away. Christian schools who don't read "Heather has Two Mommies" to their pre-K classrooms will be decertified by the board of education. The plight Boys Scouts is an excellent analogy You can't see if because you're head is buried in the dirt and you're unable to reason clearly. That's understandable. In our post -Christian society, reason doesn't matter and incoherent, emotional crowd-sourced arguments will rise to the top clouding the  truth at the bottom of the glass. And the church that caves to the state will become watered-down pablum of the sex-addicted masses.

You are desperately chumming for readers with your patently ridiculous claims. A majority of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholics; do you really believe they will side with your addled assertions? Tax exemptions will not be taken away; no reasonable person believes that. Catholic schools will not be decertified by your delusionally imagined "board of education" (whatever that is). In the age of home schooling, I have no idea what you are talking about, and I feel confident you do not know what you are talking about either. We are so far from a "post-Christian" society that it is not even worth time and energy to discuss.

live, Sun, 07/05/2015 - 23:24

Since the Supreme Court is comprised of Catholics (according to Gus), how to do explain the dissent, that follows my reasoning. Presumably, written by Catholics. Are they heretics?

In Oregon, the state government there skipped shuttering churches and schools. They went directly at the people.

State Silences Bakers Who Refused to Make Cake for Lesbian Couple, Fines Them $135K

The Catholics seated on your pew no doubt are cheering.

Are you unclear on the differences here? Churches are protected by the First Amendment, and their autonomy in associations has been reaffirmed many times.

In Oregon, as in a few other states, sexual orientation is a protected class, so anti-discrimination laws apply to commercial activity (but still not to religious activity).

There are six Roman Catholics currently serving on the court (Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, and Clarence Thomas) and three Jews (Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagen).

So Gus was actually correct in that claim. #truefacts

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