No Voting at Church

Just remove polling sites from religious buildings.

I am quite sure that the cowardly anonymous fuckers who objected to voting in a eeeeeekkkk! mosque are anti-muslim haters, but they did the right thing for the wrong reason.

Churches serve as polling sites everywhere in Kentucky, and it is deeply, profoundly offensive to non-christians to have to pass through hallways covered with freakazoid propaganda posters and displays in order to perform their patriotic duty as citizens to vote.

Unless you're willing to set up 10 or 20 times the number of polling places so that everyone can vote in a religious building in which she feels comfortable, the only solution is to remove ALL polling sites from religious buildings.

There are plenty of secular public locations to host polling sites a grand total of twice a year: schools, fire departments, courthouses, libraries, recreation centers.

 

Of all public activities, the one constitutionally furthest from religion is voting.  Keep them separate.

Freakazoids Demand to Get Paid for Endorsing Candidates

That's what's really going on here. Churches get huge tax exemptions for reasons that pass understanding, and all they have to do is refrain from using their tax-free riches to endorse political candidates.

But the whiny-ass titty babies have been crying for 50 years that they have no free speech.  Bullshit.  They can say and write anything they want as long as they don't endorse.  And they can endorse their fat asses off if they stop taking tax exemptions. But that would mean they have to work for a living rather than scamming their parishioners. 

So of course they're lying their asses off about it.










Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

That restriction was passed in 1954 in order to prevent donors from being able to deduct political contributions from their federal tax liability. It has applied to every nonprofit I have ever worked for – including the Washington Monthly. If you’ll notice, we write very openly about issues and politics. What we don’t do is ever explicitly endorse a particular candidate. To do so would threaten the organization’s nonprofit status.

I say all of that by way of explanation of something you might have heard Donald Trump say during his speech last night.

At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical and religious community in general who have been so good to me and so supportive. You have much to contribute to our politics, yet our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits.

An amendment, pushed by Lyndon Johnson, many years ago, threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views. I am going to work very hard to repeal that language and protect free speech for all Americans.

Republicans have also called for the repeal of this amendment to the tax code in their party platform. They often call it the “Johnson amendment” because LBJ was in Congress when it passed. So let’s take a minute to look at how Trump’s description of this is all wrong.

First of all, as I’ve explained, this restriction doesn’t only apply to “religious institutions.” Even the media is bad at pointing that out. For example, here is the headline from an article on the topic in TIME: “Republican Platform Calls for Repeal of Ban on Political Organizing by Churches.” Nonprofits as large as private universities and as small as the community-based organizations I worked for have to comply with this restriction in order to maintain their tax exempt status. This is important to keep in mind when Republicans try to suggest that religious organizations and churches are being targeted. That is simply not true.
Secondly, this part of the tax code does not keep organizations from speaking their minds nor does it restrict their free speech rights. As you can observe right here at the Washington Monthly, we talk openly about politics every day. Beyond that, nonprofits like this one are always free to give up their tax exempt status if they want to advocate on behalf of a specific political candidate. Nothing in the law stops them from doing that. It is just that the benefits of tax exempt status far outweigh the narrow gains that would be made in giving it up.

What this all comes down to is that certain religious leaders (like Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham) want all of the benefits of their tax exempt status with none of the rules about what that means. Were they to be successful, their churches and religious organizations would be turned into funnels through which donors could contribute to a political candidate and write it off as a charitable contribution. People who advocate for that are obviously attracted to the power that would give them. But it would become a terribly corrupting influence on their own organizations.

"Once again, somebody who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting a gun."

If the goal of the gun nuts is to draw Angry Ni**er out of him at last, they're almost there.



Martin Luther King Jr. didn't say it, but I will:  Stop Praying and Start Fighting. Get. The. Fuck. Off. Your. Knees.

And this, from Wonkette commenter cousinitt:

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

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Atheist Church is an Oxymoron, and Counter-Productive

We're already fighting a rear-guard action against the freakazoids who insist on calling secularism a religion; this shit just feeds their stupidity.

If you need something to do on Sunday mornings other than sleep in or fuck like minks, volunteer at a homeless shelter or join a yoga class or lead an anti-war rally.  Stop aping the freakazoids.

PZ Myers:

Molly Worthen attended Sunday Assembly, the church for atheists, and came away with the wrong idea, and a few right ones.

Is this what secular humanism — the naturalist worldview that many nonbelievers embrace and religious conservatives fear — looks like in practice? In one sense, secular humanism is a style of fellowship intended to fill the church-shaped void, but it is also a strand of the liberal intellectual tradition that attempts to answer the canard that godlessness means immorality.

There is no “church-shaped void”. I also don’t have a Jesus-shaped hole in my heart. I don’t even believe that most Christians feel that way — people aren’t sitting around pining for an opportunity to sit on a bench and go through a boring ritual for an hour or three on Sunday morning. People like connecting with other people more generally, and church has been the opportunity and obligation for that. It’s a mistake to confuse the substance of human interaction for the trappings of a particular and peculiar institution.

I am not at all a fan of Sunday Assembly, but if some people enjoy it, I’m not going to say you shouldn’t go. We need to get to the heart of that need, though, and recognize that atheists also must satisfy the desire for community…and it doesn’t have to be the stultifyingly narrow pattern of the weekly church service.

But there are some significant parts of Worthen’s article I agree with. We need to realize that we don’t have an absence of ideas, we actually have a significant intellectual and ethical tradition — and ideas have effects.

The average nonbeliever may know even less about his tradition’s intellectual debates than the average Christian does — because its institutions, like Sunday Assembly, tend to be tiny, relatively new and allergic to anything that resembles dogma. But nonbelievers should pay attention. Atheism, like any ideological position, has political and moral consequences. As nonbelievers become a more self-conscious subculture, as they seek to elect their own to high office and refute the fear that a post-Christian America will slide into moral anarchy, they will need every idea their tradition offers them.

It’s positively painful to see how many atheists reject that sentence I emphasized. They want to simultaneously believe that atheism is a trivial idea that favors both or neither conservatives and liberals, yet also that theism is a terrible awful idea that is destroying our country. It’s utterly incoherent. Worthen, at least, takes it for granted that “modern secular humanism is also a species of 21st-century liberalism”, and that we all have a set of foundational beliefs independent and often opposed to those of most religions. I don’t have a Jesus-shaped hole in my heart, but I do think a lot of people, atheists included, have a philosophy-shaped hole in their heads.

The task in front of us is not to deny godless values, but to enunciate them clearly.

Yet the liberal notions of tolerance and freedom of conscience are not anodyne slogans; they are contentious issues. As nonbelievers tangle with traditional Christians over same-sex marriage and navigate conflicts between conservative Muslims and liberal democracy, they will need a confident humanist moral philosophy. The secular humanist liberation movement, in its zeal to win over religious America, should not encourage nonbelievers to turn away from their own intellectual heritage at the time when they will want it most.

Just Tax "em All

Somebody tell these morons that far older, more popular and long-lasting religions than the sex-terrified Abrahamic ones made temple-based sex their primary focus.

If sex-celebrating churches have to pay taxes, so should all the motherfuckers.

PZ Myers:

A church, Panama City Beach’s Life Center is no longer tax exempt, because authorities decided that they didn’t like its sacraments…which involved nude body-painting events (but the human body is one of god’s greatest creations, how can you object to celebrating it?) and selling sexually explicit t-shirts (again, sex is holy, isn’t it?). They were specifically appealing to college youth who were in town for spring break.


The city appraiser passed judgement in a clear act of discrimination.

"A bottle club, charging $20 at the door and selling obscene T-shirts is not being used as a church," Sowell said. "A God-fearing, God-honoring church in January does not sponsor this type of debauchery in March."

He does have a point. Here in Minnesota, the churches don’t encourage debauchery until late May, when the weather is a bit more forgiving. But Florida has been blessed by the Lord with warm sunny weather, and debauchery season reasonably starts a little earlier.

But otherwise, why is selling sex grounds for removing a church’s tax exemption, but selling threats of damnation and false promises of paradise not?

Wonkette has the sexy deets.

When Freakazoids Are In Charge of Welfare

We've tried this for millenia. It never works, except to add fuel to the "all poors are worthless and deserve their suffering" fire.

That's why we gave the job to government, which saved millions of lives during the Great Depression, and lifted millions more out of poverty for the next four decades.

The twist now is that instead of letting churches use their own donations to keep the poor poor, repugs want to give churches tax dollars to keep the poor poor.

Zandar:

Alternet's Adam Lee has a theory about why Republicans want to destroy the safety net for America's poor and let church charities deal with them instead: putting millions of Americans under a new theocratic state is exactly what they want.

Cutting government charity on the scale that Republican Congresses propose would be Armageddon," according to local charities and food banks. But I think there's an explanation that runs deeper than indifference. I suspect many religious conservatives are well aware that what they propose would mean throwing millions of people into destitution. In fact, they may be counting on it. 

Under the law, churches have wide latitude to discriminate and to put conditions on whom they'll hire and whom they'll serve, far more than any private business. In exchange for ladling out soup, they can make people sit through a sermon; they can impose an ideological loyalty test; they can refuse to serve people they think might be gay; they can discriminate for any reason or for no reason at all. (The one thing that churches can't legally do is tell their members how to vote - at least, they can't do this if they want to retain their tax exemption - but they're fighting hard to repeal even that trivial restriction, with right-wing pastors all around the country repeatedly flouting the law and daring the IRS to punish them.) 

While most evangelical churches proclaim that they want people to convert voluntarily, their actions show otherwise. When given the chance to coerce their audience, they'll do so gleefully, as we've seen in prison ministries all over the country where inmates are given special rewards and privileges in exchange for their cooperation with religious indoctrination. 

What they want, in short, is a captive audience. If government charity were to be cut off, the churches wouldn't be able to come close to supplying the wants of everyone, and so they'd have strong incentive to impose stringent conditions on the people they did help. Only the most faithful, the most compliant, the most submissive would be able to get through the door. 

And that's precisely the state of affairs that the religious right yearns for. What they want is to build a theocracy from the ground up, where the poor and the needy are abjectly dependent on a church that can yank away the necessities of life if it judges them insufficiently compliant, and so the masses will have no choice but to be corralled and steered. Even today, we can see this conservative vision put into practice, and witness the terrible consequences that result when it blocks the government from helping the needy. Consider Mississippi, which is both the most religious and has the most churches per capita of any U.S. state. If rosy visions like Ernst's were true, Mississippi would be the best place in the country to live. But in reality, it's the poorest and (by life expectancy) sickest state.

If you thought right wing Christians were furious with poor people getting tax money and having to jump through hoops to show they're really needy, wait until they have to go through the church to get basic needs met.  Millions of ready souls to be cared for, and the church can set whatever rules they want in exchange for help, including listening to whom they should vote for.

Which is exactly what the GOP wants.

My Church

ummagumma.co:

Tax the Churches

Yeah, yeah, free speech is your fucking right.  So is being as stupidly freakazoid and conservatard as you want.  But tax exemption is a privilege, and one that you have to earn by keeping politics out of your fucking churches.

Ed Kilgore, Political Animal's liberal christian:

We all know from watching Fox News and reading Peggy Noonan that the Internal Revenue Service has been engaged in a vicious partisan war under the leadership of Obama-puppet Lois Lerner, who shocked the conscience by dragging her feet in granting conservative electioneering groups the right to hide their donors and avoid taxes by pretending to be “social welfare” entities. I suppose the tax collectors’ insane partisanship exposed them to so much righteous anger that they couldn’t dare to crush religious liberty, too (per this report from Politico’s Rachel Bade):

A record number of rogue Christian pastors are endorsing candidates from the pulpit this election cycle, using Sunday sermons to defiantly flout tax rules.

Their message to the IRS: Sue me.

But the tax agency is doing anything but. Although the IRS was sued itself for not enforcing the law and admitted about 100 churches may be breaking the rules, the pastors and their critics alike say the agency is looking the other way….

At the same time, the number of pastors endorsing candidates in what they call Pulpit Freedom Sunday jumped from 33 people in 2008 to more than 1,600 this year, according to organizers, Alliance Defending Freedom. And this year, they’ve stepped up their drive, telling pastors to back candidates any Sunday up until the election, not just one Sunday as in past years.

One guess about which party is benefiting from this civil disobedience.

The church leaders are jumping in high-profile races that will help decide the Senate and tight governor races across the country, endorsing candidates from Thom Tillis (R) over Sen. Kay Hagan (D) in North Carolina to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) over Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) in Kentucky.

Rev. Mark Cowart, pastor at Colorado Springs-based Church For All Nations, suggested good Christians should vote Democratic Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper out of office in an Oct. 19 sermon, where he endorsed his GOP rival, Bob Beauprez.

“Beauprez is against more gun control, does not support abortion and he does protect the man-woman marriage — that’s the one I’m voting for. … I’m endorsing biblical principles,” the preacher said in a video of the service, pacing a church stage and chopping his hand through the air for emphasis.

Yeah, the Bible’s real clear about the need to stockpile military weapons, isn’t it?
In any event, these folks see nothing wrong with accepting massive tax subsidies (since contributions to their coffers are tax-deductible) and then taking official political positions. And they’re spoiling for a fight in the courts. Makes you wonder if they are really the quailing, shivering victims of Police State Persecution they always claim to be.

Tax Exempt

ummagumma.co: