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04/28/2005: "What’s Wrong With This Picture?"

Picture this – a lobbying organization called FBC – Federal Bench to Conservatives - is formed to push installation of right-wing operatives onto the Federal Judiciary. It attracts millions of dollars in contributions. It hires a full-time professional staff and gives them hefty perks like homes and cars. It builds a modern facility expansive enough to hold thousands at a time. It employs advanced multi-media technology to enable national simulcasts. With this infrastructure in place, it launches a massive campaign to influence lawmakers, who are only too happy to get the publicity. They know it will translate directly to campaign contributions. Then let’s say that this lobbying organization applies for federal subsidies, and succeeds in getting them! Every dollar donated by right wing zealots is a dollar the zealots can use to reduce their taxable income. With the budget in deficit, this means that every American taxpayer will be paying interest on the lost revenues from these deductions as long as their portion of the extra debt is outstanding (in other words, for the rest of their lives). If you are like me, you see something wrong with this picture! Isn’t it the law that contributions to lobbies aren’t tax deductible? (That’s a rhetorical question. They aren’t). Yet most readers of this journal likely saw this very picture within the last week. It was the picture put out over the newswires of the event in Louisville that attacked the filibuster as being deployed against “people of faith.” The picture I saw showed Dr. Senator Frist on big video monitors addressing the rapt throng. The only difference (a difference subtle enough not to be readily apparent from the picture) was that the sponsoring organization, FBC, isn’t really named “Federal Bench to Conservatives.” Its real name is “First Baptist Church.” Here’s my take on this issue. Allowing churches to act like lobbies forces all Americans to subsidize their efforts to criminalize non-conformance to their particular interpretations of scripture. Being tax exempt and indeed tax subsidized gives them a tremendous competitive advantage over legitimately registered political advocacy organizations. If a church feels strongly enough about an issue to feel compelled to act like a lobby, they’re free to do so. They should just expect to give up their tax deductible status. That’s not “war on religion,” its enforcing the law, something they claim to support. I wonder if the “absolute moral imperative” they purport to feel on these issues would survive the loss of a huge percentage of their members to churches that chose to remain deductible? That’s another rhetorical question, BTW.