American churches pull in about $100 billion every year, and pay
no taxes on the money.
How does the IRS decide whether an organization is a church, and
therefore exempt from taxation? You can pretty much get a free pass from the
IRS if you at least pretend to be part of one of the established churches. They
look for a church with a history, a “recognized” creed, an “established” place
to worship. Essentially if you can make it look like you’re Baptists or
Methodists or whatever, you get to keep the money. The outliers – Wiccans,
Druids, Pastafarians etc – get a lot more scrutiny, and of course people like
agnostics and atheists get no tax break at all, which to me smacks of
discrimination.
Which brings me to the Westboro Baptist “Church”. The “God Hates
Fags” bunch. What is it, that makes this sack of loons a church, other than
sticking the word “Baptist” in their name?
This maniac Fred Phelps, boss of the WBC, is, only by the broadest
interpretation, any kind of minister. His religious credentials are dubious –
he was “ordained” at the age of 17 by a preacher who ordains “ministers” by the
hundreds after brief and perfunctory “examinations”, but even that preacher who
ordained Phelps later admitted that Phelps was delusional. Phelps’ religious
training is minimal – he wandered around from one bible school after another
for a couple of years, but appears to have absorbed little. So he is scarcely a
real preacher.
The Westboro bunch do not belong to the major Baptist
denominations – the big American Baptist groups have specifically and publicly
rejected them. Those groups run the Baptist community, and they say flat-out
that the Westboro bunch are not Baptists. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist King, agreed
with the guy who ordained Phelps, and called Phelps a “first-class nut”. And
the Westboro clan has replied in kind, condemning all the other Baptists. So
they are scarcely “Baptists”.
Phelps worked briefly as a low-ranking pastor in the East Side
Baptist Church in Topeka; about a year later that church built a second branch
and handed it over to Phelps. Phelps showed his gratitude by cutting off ties
with the original East Side church – it was more like a real-estate seizure
than a ministry. And since then the “church” has essentially consisted of
Phelps and the rest of his loony family and their followers. Their “ministry”
consists of picketing, around six protests a day, more on Sundays. Huge amounts
of the “church” budget goes into these protests. Doesn’t sound like a church to
me.
Do they offer church services? On Sunday they don’t ramp up for
services, prayer, any of that: they ramp up to increase the amount of protests
– much of that involves picketing other churches. Do they do missionary work, convert
people, offer services to the poor, the sick, the old? Do they do charity work?
Do they have any message about the ministry of Jesus? Do they partake of the
global dialogue on the meaning of faith, other than to condemn most other
churches as devil worship because they don’t hate gays enough?
No. They spend a lot of time condemning other churches and they
actually oppose religious education. So this is scarcely a church – it sounds
almost like an anti-church, only a few scary steps away from the Manson family.
(In addition to lacking the credentials of a true minister, Phelps
has also been disbarred as a lawyer – he went on a psychotic vendetta against a
court reporter, dragging the girl into court for a week, cross-examining her,
calling her a slut and speculating about her sexual practices, until finally
the authorities tossed him out, banning him from practicing both in Kansas
court and federal court.)
So how is it that the IRS gets out their proctoscope whenever a
little band of harmless Druids wants to pray to the sun or a sheep or whatever,
but they totally ignore this Phelps loon and his merry band of terrorists?
Couldn’t the IRS start enforcing their own rules, and if so, who better to
start with, than Phelps? His connection to the Baptist faith is so tenuous,
that by his logic, a whole lot of organizations – anyone from Greenpeace to
McDonald’s – could claim to be a Baptist church and avoid taxation.
And
how many other rightwing political groups – because that’s what they are – are
not paying their fair share of taxes, by pretending to be churches when they’re
really political organizations? If those guys aren’t political organizations,
then how is it that they are working through our legislatures to dominate
policy-making on abortion, school vouchers, school prayer, intelligent design,
putting the Commandments in courtrooms, stem cell research, euthanasia,
cloning, civil unions, HPV shots, contraception, sex education, faith-based
initiatives, banning books, and assisted suicide? I think people who insist on
running our government should at least pay their share of the upkeep.
