Terry is right: If the IRS refuses to disallow SCIENTOLOGY as a tax exempt religion, they sure aren't going to touch the Watchtower.
The U.S. Govt. doesn't want to touch church policies with a 1914 foot pole. Only true felonies and crimes.
What Would Happen if the Watchtower Loses Their TAX EXEMPT STATUS?
by John Aquila 35 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Listener
It would be devastating for them. From reading their Charter for the WTBTS Pennsylvania and New York (and most likely many of their other corporations) I understand that they can only operate if they are tax exempt otherwise all their assets must pass on to a different entity that is tax exempt. -
Vidiot
Dogpatch - "Terry is right: If the IRS refuses to disallow SCIENTOLOGY as a tax exempt religion, they sure aren't going to touch the Watchtower."
Does the WTS have key players by the short and curlies?
What if, say, the public got to the point where some kind of example needed to be made?
Dogpatch - "The U.S. Govt. doesn't want to touch church policies with a 1914 foot pole. Only true felonies and crimes."
I think a strong argument could be made that the WTS has broken laws.
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OrphanCrow
At the very least, churches should be taxed a portion of their money to go to cult recovery support. The social costs to deal with cult survivors is not one that the rest of society should have to pay for.
The same as governments give a portion of liquor sales and casino profit to addictions recovery, the WTS (and other churches) should be made to give a portion of their total donations to cult recovery. They should be held socially responsible for the harm they cause.
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Vidiot
OrphanCrow - "At the very least, churches should be taxed a portion of their money to go to cult recovery support."
Damn, that's clever.
I suspect mainstream religions would happily comply (it would be in their best interests to, after all, both short- and long-term), and it would be a great way of sticking it to groups that sufferers have come out of.
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JWdaughter
I think anyone with a charitable/non profit status that has tax exemptions should be MORE carefully monitored and that ONLY actual charity should be exempt. If they get 1,000,000 yearly and provide $100,000 worth of food to a food bank or to buy clothing for poor people, let them take that off their taxable income. If they have a building that is exclusively used as a food bank, let that bit not be taxed. But seriously, the WTS had a billion dollars worth of property that they never had to pay taxes on-in Brooklyn alone. And what did they do? house people to publish their magazines. That serve no actual charitable purpose WHATSOEVER. All churches, mosques, temples should pay the same property taxes as everyone. If God can't afford it, they don't need to be there, IMO.
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apostatethunder
Charity: Provision of help or relieve to the poor. Without the WT the poor wouldn't be helped to meekly accept their poverty with the hope of a paradise earth on the horizon, and that would probably create angry crowds of poor window cleaners accross the continents which wouldn't benefit anyone.
Foreseeing the consequences it is very unlikely the Government will take that road, so the WT will have to be considered a charity wether we like it or not.
Also that could expose its financers and that could only add further confussion to an already complicated situation.
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TerryWalstrom
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y BEN SHAPIRO2 Jul 2015
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision mandating that states reward same-sex marriages throughout the nation, churches across the country prepare for the inevitable assault on their tax-exempt statuses.“Beliefs” columnist for The New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer, wrote at Time.com that churches should have their tax-exempt statuses ripped away for opposing same-sex marriage. Felix Salmon at Fusion wrote the same thing:
[T]he US government subsidizes churches to the tune of many billions of dollars per year by giving them tax-exempt status. … The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, but that’s free as in love, not free as in beer. Taxation is a purely secular affair, and by default it applies to everyone equally, whether they’re a religious institution or not.
The left wishes for a nation where same-sex couples are given tax benefits for participation in a homosexual lifestyle, but where churches are punished for rejecting that lifestyle.
And it won’t stop with churches. The Christian Science Monitor asks whether conservative religious colleges will lose their tax-exempt statuses. Professor Michael Olivas of the Institute for Higher Education Law & Governance at the University of Houston said, “I don’t think that a number of these religious schools can reasonably hope to adhere to principles that are clearly in violation of public policy, a la Bob Jones.” As I wrote years ago, the Bob Jones University case, in which the IRS removed non-profit status from the university over its rules on interracial dating, will now be used as precedent by the IRS to go after non-profit institutions over same-sex marriage.
The crusade against religious churches and schools amounts to bigotry against religious believers – a bigotry clearly expressed by University of Virginia law Professor Douglas Laycock, who told The Washington Post, “The gay rights side keeps escalating its demands and public opinion keeps shifting in their favor. … Conservative believers are their own worst enemies and lead people to think they are hateful morons, so they’re not getting much sympathy.”
And this is the point: when public consternation governs the regulations on churches, we have violated the purpose of the First Amendment. There is no First Amendment right to tax exempt status, but as the Supreme Court wrote in Walz v. Tax Commission of City of New York (1970), the leading case on tax exemptions for religious institutions:
Grants of exemption historically reflect the concern of authors of constitutions and statutes as to the latent dangers inherent in the imposition of property taxes; exemption constitutes a reasonable and balanced attempt to guard against those dangers. … Elimination of exemption would tend to expand the involvement of government by giving rise to tax valuation of church property, tax liens, tax foreclosures, and the direct confrontations and conflicts that follow in the train of those legal processes. … The grant of a tax exemption is not sponsorship, since the government does not transfer part of its revenue to churches, but simply abstains from demanding that the church support the state.
The Court summed up that tax exemption for religious institutions “covers our entire national existence and indeed predates it.”
This, historically speaking, is true. As religious regulation expert Richard Couser wrote, “The notion of exempting churches from taxation did not begin in the United States. Medieval Europe, the Roman Empire under Constantine, and even Egypt in Joseph’s time exempted church property from taxation.” Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, explained, “The unassailable fact remains that, for as long as anyone can remember, churches have always been tax-exempt or enjoyed favorable tax treatment.”
In the United States, tax exemption served the purpose of not excessively entangling the government with religious institutions, given that most civilized countries of Europe had established state churches sponsored by the government itself. The Founders – and most legislators and regulators throughout the history of the United States – understood that using the government to discriminate against particular churches would act as an abridgement of religious freedom. And the Founders would have been appalled by the federal regulations currently in place that crack down on pastors’ ability to speak politically from the pulpit.
Such regulations began in 1934 with a congressional amendment to the tax code, as Stanley points out. That amendment attempted to reject tax exemption for a church if a “substantial part of … [its] activities … is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation.” That amendment came after one legislator got upset with a church for campaigning against him based on veteran benefits. In 1954, then-Senator Lyndon Johnson sponsored the Johnson Amendment, which labeled tax-exempt organizations those that did not “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” He sponsored the legislation because a rival secular non-profit opposed his candidacy. Now the IRS has expanded the regulations to include a bevy of possible violations in order to quash religious speech.
In short, politicians, given power over churches, would move to destroy those who oppose them. That is why tax exemption is an important aspect of protection for churches: the government’s attempts to smack down particular churches smacks of First Amendment-violating viewpoint discrimination. Either all churches should receive tax exempt status – which they should to prevent government specifically targeting religion, since the “power to tax involves the power to destroy,” as Chief Justice John Marshall put it in 1819 – or they should not. But the idea that government will selectively benefit those churches it approves makes religion an arm of the state, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
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azor
It is time for humanity to grow up. All religious institutions must at some point, hopefully in the near future lose their tax exempt status.