IRS Presides over Marriage of Church & State

What church is being threatened by the IRS for making political statements? Did you guess the Catholic Church, for notoriously telling its parishioners not to vote for John Kerry last year? Or perhaps you're thinking of the many fundamentalist Protestant churches that blatantly told their members how to vote in the same election, even going so far as to issue voters guides in praise of George Bush.

Well, you'd be wrong. No, the IRS is threatening to revoke the tax free status of a small Episcopal Church in California whose rector gave a fiery sermon before the last election against poverty and the War in Iraq. Now let's get this straight. The IRS is saying that war and poverty are political, not spiritual matters? This is most fascinating. A number of years ago it was the IRS that "sanctified" the Church of Scientology by granting it tax free status.

One has to ask if our elected leaders in Congress are aware that the Internal Revenue Service has become the self-appointed arbiter of religion in this nation, which foolishly prides itself on having separated matters of church and state. If they weren't, then let them know. Perhaps they don't have time to read papers, poor things, since they're so busy being "educated" by lobbyists for the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Sounds to me like the IRS is a hotbed of politicized bureaucrats. It was an out-of-control bureaucrat by the name of Henry Anslinger (read my former post on Anslinger), that unleashed the disastrous Trillion Dollar Drug War on America, after America righteously demanded an end to prohibition. Bureaucrats demand work. Especially nonsensical make-work.

So there are two issues involved in the IRS's thuggery toward liberal leaning churches: 1) Since they are not going after the Catholic Bishops who tried to bully their parishioners into voting Republican, the purportedly non-partisan IRS now stands naked as a Republican lapdog. 2) Partisan or not, the IRS should have no mandate whatsoever in stamping "approved" or "not approved" on churches. If Congress has given them that authority, then Congress should take it back--especially now that are abusing it so flagrantly.