A Bold Suggestion

That didn’t take long. No sooner was the ink dry on the new national right to gay marriage, than certain folks then began demanding that churches have their tax-exempt status removed if they don’t fall in line and start performing gay marriage services (and with a smile too!). Religion-schmeligion, they crow.

That the destruction of some portion of religious life in the United States was one target of the pro-gay marriage movement was always suspected by some. It seems pretty clear that was true, though one suspects that proponents will deny it until they are blue in the face. The sudden and eagerness to put churches out of business if they don’t toe the line would seem to reveal that is a falsehood.

With that in mind I propose to go even further. How about eliminating the whole 501(c)(3) and other nonprofit, tax-exempt designation?

It makes sense in the wake of the Supreme Court’s extra-expansive reading of the 14th Amendment (Hey, look what we found buried here that no one had ever seen before — a national right to gay marriage!). Some people have countered that since we are using an expansionary view of the “equal protection clause” these days, why not go all the way and take down the progressive tax system? After all, it’s discriminatory against high-earners and gives non-taxpayers an “unfair” advantage vis a vis taxes. So let’s take it to its logical conclusion – everybody pay taxes at the same rate (maybe even same amount?).

Admittedly, relieving them of their tax advantages would doom a lot of religious institutions, especially historically black churches and small rural congregations. They’d need to develop a new business model. Also, the whole private school/college/university complex would take a huge hit. Art and other education foundations would be annihilated, with only the fittest surviving. And a lot of good conservative social and political groups would take it on the chin, never to rise again.

I know this sounds rough but this is only “fair” to the rest of us in the tax-paying private sector. It now gives us “equal protection.” Yes, tax-exempt was meant for certain good societal purposes but what the hey, so was traditional man-woman marriage and we see where that went.

Besides all that loot that will flow into government coffers there will also be secondary benefits. Most of the schools to be hammered are liberal, run by liberals for the indoctrination of youth along with promotion of liberal values. How many of them will survive? And this move will hamper all those arrogant, self-appointed  liberal political, women’s, racial, health, consumer and environmental groups. Labor unions too! The left has long used these as shelters and marshaling yards, all the while clucking that such groups were too good to pay taxes. They’ve used them like the communist North Vietnamese used the shelter of Cambodia to launch attacks into South Vietnam.

Seriously. The 501(c)(3) world has become dominated by the left. Massive foundations founded by conservative industrialists have been co-opted by liberals slowly over the years and decades. Other pleasant-sounding groups such as the Campfire Girls or any number of women’s groups are taken over by left-leaning activists who push conservatives out. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like takeovers are the purest distillation of O’Sullivan’s Law – any group not specifically conservative will become liberal over time.

The tax-exempt foundation/group world has become the left’s playground, its training ground. It uses these groups as soldiers to attack conservatives, traditionalists, businesses, pretty much anyone it doesn’t like. It uses it to indoctrinate through “education” and destroy through “lawfare” and agitation. You can be treated to the ultimate folly of tax-exempt lefty groups demanding that everyone else’s taxes be raised. The sooner the swamp is drained, the better for America.

These people want everyone one to be treated the same in every microscopic detail. Then let’s get to it. Get a job in the real world. Pay real taxes. Suffer under the same regulations that the rest of us do. No 501(c)(3) tax-exempt waivers.