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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / LGBTQ Rights / Gay Rights are Human Rights / Make Amends, Make a Bow

Reader Interactions

109Comments

  2. 2.

    Violet

    Oh, wow. I guess this affects the Boy Scouts. Can’t wait to hear the screaming from the poor, poor persecuted wingnuts.

  4. 4.

    Poopyman

    @DZ: And leveraging off that response, I’d amend MM’s post to

    taking away tax-exempt status from any youth group that discriminates against gays kids,

    Because I think there’s too many bigots hiding behind religion.

  7. 7.

    Yutsano

    @Violet: Oh teh Mormons will get into their Suburbans and drive from Utah and Nevada to protest this. I also predict a few choice word salad dishes from Bible Spice when all is said and done too.

  8. 8.

    Zifnab

    Cheers to this. Half these orgs are just tax shelters for assholes who want to run their own private subsidized country clubs anyway. I’m getting a little tired of the “Tax Free” status of pretty much everything.

    If we’re going to start axing through the bullshit, this is a damn fine place to start.

  9. 9.

    scav

    Wish it would it be fair to wrestle up some lions too, but that would be a lot of fat and antibiotics / drugs to introduce into the carnivore food chain. So, herd them into the arena and unleash the Taxes it is!

  10. 10.

    MikeJ

    if the Christian Right is going to masturbate to persecution fantasies, let them have a taste of the real thing.

    Except that this is in no way persecuting them.

    LA’s already got a Colosseum, can’t we round up a few lions from somewhere?

    ETA: Damn you scav.

  13. 13.

    mistermix

    @Cassidy: I have been in a bad habit of writing long sentences with many clauses, which is something I generally would like to avoid, though in some cases I do it anyway, because, as with every other “rule” about writing, including the one about run-on sentences, breaking the rules occasionally makes things more interesting.

  14. 14.

    Scotius

    @Yutsano:

    Oh teh Mormons will get into their Suburbans and drive from Utah and Nevada to protest this

    Good. Let’s take away their tax exempt status while we’re at it. If they have enough money to spend on passing Proposition 8, they don’t need me as a California taxpayer to subsidize them any further.

  17. 17.

    kindness

    Eh, won’t happen. While we in California are blessed right now with a super majority of Democrats in both state houses, many of them are blue dogs afraid of, well everything. I figure most of ’em wear Depends all the time. So no, they won’t take away the cherished non-tax status of bigots. They won’t.

    However it doesn’t mean everything is bad out here. We still got Jerry Brown as Governor. I’m happy with that.

  18. 18.

    jeffreyw

    @mistermix: Too many commas for that to be a proper run on sentence and you can trust me when I tell you this because I have it on good authority that misuse of commas is a real thing that someone from Oxford the big famous school over there in England where the English live with some other people wrote about. And a puppeh.

  21. 21.

    Chris

    @MikeJ:

    Except that this is in no way persecuting them.

    This.

    A tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, especially when the organizations in question totally have the means to pay taxes. Constitutionally, there’s absolutely no reason why religious organizations should even have that status in the first place, other than “this is America and our culture demands that we spoil our churches almost as much as our big businessmen.” If the government occasionally chooses to remove the privilege it’s granted them, I ain’t gonna complain.

  22. 22.

    Todd

    …if the Christian Right is going to masturbate to persecution fantasies, let them have a taste of the real thing.

    Obama failed me by lazily neglecting to set up the FEMA re-education and extermination camps for conservative Christians that we were implicitly promised through the radicalism of his campaign rhetoric.

  23. 23.

    ...now I try to be amused

    @scav:

    So, herd them into the arena and unleash the Taxes it is!

    I’m amusing myself imagining them dodging taxes in the arena. Now there’s something that deserves to be a spectator sport.

  24. 24.

    Yutsano

    @Chris: It was an old European practice from when the Catholic Church was much more powerful than it is today. They own billions of dollars of untaxed property in the US alone and would squak like plucked chickens if they lost that precious status.

  25. 25.

    Chris

    @Yutsano:

    Even better reason not to do it, then. We were explicitly set up not to be like “old Europe,” and that status strikes me as just as much of an old world privilege as the titles of nobility the Constitution outlaws.

  27. 27.

    Todd

    @mistermix:

    I have been in a bad habit of writing long sentences with many clauses, which is something I generally would like to avoid, though in some cases I do it anyway, because, as with every other “rule” about writing, including the one about run-on sentences, breaking the rules occasionally makes things more interesting.

    Amateur. This is a real run on sentence and from the American Thinker, to boot.

    The Middle Ages, by which people mean the Christian Middle Ages, the European Middle Ages, had their faults, like any other epoch, but to call Islamofascism medieval is to equate medieval Christendom and the medieval Islamic world, a religion that gained adherents through persuasion and a religion spread almost entirely by the sword, a civilization that abolished slavery and a civilization that propagates it, a society that began poor and ended rich and a society that began rich and ended poor, a culture that was backward in the beginning and enlightened in the end and a culture that was enlightened in the beginning and backward in the end, a polity that was weak and divided and became strong and, well, divided, and a polity that was strong and relatively united and became weak and divided.

    http://agitprop.typepad.com/agitprop/2006/07/and_the_winner_.html

    Game. Set. Match.

  29. 29.

    JPL

    @Todd: Try to imagine what a conversation with that author would sound like. I’d need a glass of wine, just to sit nearby.

  30. 30.

    Seanly

    The use of the word “persecution” implies that it is undeserved or unfair treatment.

  32. 32.

    aimai

    @Yutsano:

    Man, they should take away all but criminal status for the Mormon Boy Scouts troops given that they covered up massive pedophilia and child abuse for years–and probably do to this day. Rico their asses.

  35. 35.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @Todd:

    I’ll stay with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which ends James Joyce’s Ulysses. It has two sentences with a combined total of more than twenty thousand words.

  38. 38.

    ericblair

    @Chris:

    Constitutionally, there’s absolutely no reason why religious organizations should even have that status in the first place, other than “this is America and our culture demands that we spoil our churches almost as much as our big businessmen.”

    To me, the whole thing is Constitutionally problematic, since it involves the government deciding what is and isn’t a real religion. If I decide I’m a bishop of the IDontWannaPayTaxes Assembly of GodOrWhatever, Congregation of 2013, and my house is a parsonage, where the hell do the Feds get the power to tell me that this is not a real religion and the show with a guy in a cheap suit on community cable TV is? What if I pinky-swear that I really, really believe in a GodOrWhatever and this is totally not a tax dodge?

  41. 41.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Chris:

    I don’t agree. The tax-free, or limited taxability of the churches in Europe contributed to the development of the seperation of church and state as a viable concept, for which legacy I should think most everyone here is grateful. I don’t think we should bring back ecclesiastical courts, which also were part of this process, but taking away the tax free status of churches in this country will only encourage them to meddle in secular politics even more than they do now. It is bad now, but it could be worse.

  42. 42.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    So, how will Ben Franklin make this Obama’s fault, or what will he find related to this that will be Obama’s fault? It’s a game, it’s a floor wax.

  43. 43.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    The threat of losing tax exempt status, for his racially segregated school, is what got Jerry Falwell to form his bigoted Moral Majority, precursor to the Christian right wing of the GOP. If the Democrats aren’t so afraid, that they need look into their pants to insure they have a dick and balls every five minutes, and pass this thing, I think everything will turn out fine for them in the future.

  45. 45.

    Sacrablue

    @Yutsano: The Mormons are already here and they seem to be the largest sponsors of the Boy Scouts, at least in this part of California. Ninety-five percent of the time I see something about an Eagle Scout in the local paper, he is a member of the LDS church. It seems that at least 10% of the population is LDS and I believe that the Boy Scouts are an official part of their youth programs.

  46. 46.

    Mandalay

    @Chris:

    A tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, especially when the organizations in question totally have the means to pay taxes

    Maybe so, but any attempt to remove the tax privileges of mainstream religions would be a deadly vote loser, and won’t happen. So as a practical matter for them, it is irrelevant whether tax-exempt status is a privilege or a right. They are off the hook.

    But the Boy Scouts are not in the big leagues, and richly deserve an ass kicking, and hammering them is not a vote loser.

    I long for the removal of tax-exempt status from ANY organization that discriminates against gays (i.e. pretty much all religions except the Quakers), but it ain’t gonna happen.

  48. 48.

    Violet

    I’m enjoying watching California make changes now that they’ve squashed down the Republican party in the state. How is that supermojitomajority going to hold up in the midterms? Hopefully it’ll make it though that election.

  49. 49.

    DavidTC

    Okay, part of this is confusing, mostly because the media doesn’t ever explain what ‘tax exempt’ means. There are actually two separate things that are called ‘tax exempt’.

    Non-profits are structured under the 501(c) section of the tax code, which means they don’t pay income tax…because they have no actual income. Money is not supposed to flow from the corporation to the ‘owners’.

    501(c) includes all sorts of non-profits, including many that serve no public purpose at all. For example, a 501(c)(18) is an employee pension fund, and 501(c)(13) is where cemetery management trusts are.

    The thing people are talking about when they talk about non-profits, however, is 501(c)(3), aka, a ‘charity’. Those not only are don’t pay income tax, but also donations made _to_ them are tax deductible. (Donations, not ‘purchases’. A lot of charities get tripped up by that.)

    Now, all this is national law. Meanwhile, state law usually does all sorts of special things like exempt 501(c)(3)s from charging sales tax and paying property tax and whatnot, and _that_ is what California is talking about altering, where some 501(c)(3) organizations will no longer not be exempt. (1)

    Please note that whatever California does, they would still be ‘exempted’ from income tax, even state income tax, because, as non-profits, _they have nothing that qualifies as income_. (Income is actually a misnomer. Corporations really pay outgo tax, not income tax.)

    1) Incidentally, this is not some unique thing. Often states will restrict what sort of 501(c)(3)s are exempt from what taxes. For example, a educational charity might be waived from having to pay sales tax on books, but a sports league might have to, but get property taxes waived on sports fields.

  50. 50.

    Chris

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    I don’t agree back at you :D

    Separation of church and state does not mean they’re not still part of the same society. If “separation of church and state” means that churches aren’t required to pay for the upkeep of that society, then you might just as easily say that governments aren’t required to provide churches with the services those taxes pay for (e.g. police and fire departments), which would be absurd.

    Just because churches shouldn’t dictate law or policy to the state, nor the state dictate theology to the churches, doesn’t mean they don’t still have to live together.

  51. 51.

    Mandalay

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    taking away the tax free status of churches in this country will only encourage them to meddle in secular politics even more than they do now.

    I would happily allow religions to openly meddle in politics in exchange for getting the fuckers to pay taxes.

  52. 52.

    MikeJ

    @Sacrablue:

    It seems that at least 10% of the population is LDS and I believe that the Boy Scouts are an official part of their youth programs.

    Brigham Jugend.

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):

    So, how will Ben Franklin make this Obama’s fault, or what will he find related to this that will be Obama’s fault?

    What makes you think it will need to be anything related? Rand Paul’s embarrassing appearance at Howard University was Obama’s fault because of Monsanto.

    My new favorite concept: the Jesus Juke. We need to figure out a way to make it more secular to explain our friendly neighborhood firebaggers’ favorite technique.

  55. 55.

    Comrade Dread

    Speaking as a Christian, albeit one that has long since dropped any opposition to letting gays attain married status under the law, I’d have to say that paying taxes is annoying, but not what I would call persecution.

  56. 56.

    Mandalay

    @DavidTC:

    Please note that whatever California does, they would still be ‘exempted’ from income tax, even state income tax, because, as non-profits, _they have nothing that qualifies as income_. (Income is actually a misnomer. Corporations really pay outgo tax, not income tax.)

    But if the bill passes the Boy Scouts would be required to pay corporation tax which would hit them hard, right?

  58. 58.

    shortstop

    @DavidTC: Thanks for that handy analysis. Around here, we’re not using to having tax legalities unexplained without unearned condescension and inappropriate raging.

  59. 59.

    artem1s

    @DavidTC:

    they would still be ‘exempted’ from income tax,

    the issue gets even more complicated when you start to talk about unrelated business income and lobbying expense reporting. Not all income by 501 (c) orgs is considered exempt. For instance, museum store income is usually considered unrelated business income where rental income of a hall in a building is often not subject to UBI tax.

    any non profit can lobby (although endorsing candidates in strictly prohibited) on issues that affect its industry (saving funding for PBS for instance). But the expenses for this have to be reported and there is a limit to what is considered substantial by the IRS.

    the LDS biggest offense in the Prop 8 fight wasn’t that they lobbied, but that it is believed they grossly under-reported the amounts they spent thereby saving themselves from excise taxes and scrutiny by the IRS (and the public).

  60. 60.

    shortstop

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Would you at least agree to making it a federal crime for American Christians to whine about being a persecuted and oppressed minority? Maybe punishable by a few sucker punches rather than tying up the courts?

  61. 61.

    Mandalay

    @Chris:

    If “separation of church and state” means that churches aren’t required to pay for the upkeep of that society, then you might just as easily say that governments aren’t required to provide churches with the services those taxes pay for (e.g. police and fire departments), which would be absurd.

    Not so absurd. Folks who live out in the boonies pay lower taxes, but they don’t get street lighting or garbage collection. So why should wealthy religious organizations pay no property taxes, but still receive garbage collection, fire and police protection, etc?

    The current arrangement means that you and I are paying higher taxes because religious organizations are not paying their fair share. Put another way, we are (reluctantly) subsidizing religion.

  66. 66.

    scav

    @shortstop: Mo Mammon Mo Morman?

    No idea if it’s exactly apt, but what a mouthfeel. Mo Mammeries Mo Morman. But not Mo Mojitos, at least not in public consumption.

  69. 69.

    shortstop

    @scav: That’s some snappy work right there.

    Also too, I thought Jonathan Winters had been dead for many a year.

  70. 70.

    aimai

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    I don’t get the arrow of causality here? If you took away their tax exempt status they’d be too damned busy accounting for all the properties they have been holding as “church” properties and trying to fundraise to pay the taxes to do much of anything but cry. A whole lot of things are “churches” which shouldn’t be and in any event I don’t see why I am not tax exempt and they are. Paying their taxes will drain all but the largest and return them to the original (christian) focus on worshipping rather than renting and benefitting.

  71. 71.

    raven

    @shortstop:

    Jonathan Winters, the rubber-faced comedian whose unscripted flights of fancy inspired a generation of improvisational comics, and who kept television audiences in stitches with Main Street characters like Maude Frickert, a sweet-seeming grandmother with a barbed tongue and a roving eye, died on Thursday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 87.

  72. 72.

    minutemaid

    yea but are they for or against CHAINED CPI…boooga booga booga.

    Dkos needs to know!

  74. 74.

    burnspbesq

    @…now I try to be amused:

    I’m amusing myself imagining them dodging taxes in the arena. Now there’s something that deserves to be a spectator sport.

    I deal with both the IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board on a regular basis. The FTB are the second-biggest assholes in the world of tax administration (they used to be number one, but they’ve been passed by India). “Release the lions?” You have. No idea.

  77. 77.

    Mandalay

    @aimai:

    A whole lot of things are “churches” which shouldn’t be

    Exactly. If they had to pay taxes they would be forced to put everything in writing for the IRS, and all their scams would be revealed. Not a path that they would want to go down at all.

  78. 78.

    burnspbesq

    @shortstop:

    Thanks for that handy analysis. Around here, we’re not using to having tax legalities unexplained without unearned condescension and inappropriate raging.

    Suck my 1040, sweetie.

  79. 79.

    shortstop

    @burnspbesq: And yet, when I uttered a mild complaint about the California FTB, you went inexplicably ballistic and hotly defended them. Well, no one here expects anything consistent from you…other than emotional instability.

  82. 82.

    shortstop

    @raven: Who could possibly confuse those two? Not I!

    I wonder who else is walking around alive unbeknownst to me. All shall be revealed in good time, I guess.

    @LanceThruster: Nice!

  84. 84.

    Amir Khalid

    @shortstop:
    From my kidhood, I remember the Hundred Dollar Movie segment on Jonathan Winter’s TV show, where he’d do one-scene parodies of Hollywood hits. (“They’re called The Filthy Dozen, ’cause they never take a bath!”) And the saucy old lady Maude Frickert. And, of course, his stint as Mirth, son of Mork & Mindy.

    Sigh.

  85. 85.

    GregB

    The conservative persecution complex is in high dudgeon these days. I was so disgusted with that jagoff Representative that was comparing gun background checks to the Rwandan genocide.

    Yesterday a now former FaceBook friend was posting Martin Niemoller’s anti-Nazi poem because gun owners are the new Jews of liberal fascism. After I noted that the Nazi’s in the poem were targeting socialists, communists, and union members, the same people modern day conservative Republicans target, he finally unfriended me, at long last.

    If the old axiom about whom the God’s will destroy they first drive mad then I look forward to these assholes losing their power.

  86. 86.

    Roger Moore

    @MikeJ:

    LA’s already got a Colosseum, can’t we round up a few lions from somewhere?

    Well, we have some mountain lions visiting the neighborhood near where I live; is that good enough? Also, too, there are plenty of black bears that come down to visit people’s swimming pools and hot tubs and to raid their trash cans. I’d suggest we put some of them to use, but I suspect they’re laid back California bears that wouldn’t want to eat anyone.

  87. 87.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @piratedan:

    Winters’ appeared often on late night TV (Jack Paar?) when I was a youngster. He had an amazing ability to take some random object; a coffee cup, a mic stand, anything, and the object would suddenly become something else and Winters would go into character using that something else to create hilarious shtick.

  89. 89.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    @GregB: I had one who compared Melissa Harris-Perry statement on children and communities to what supposedly Hitler stated. Godwin is on steroids on the right( a funny aside he rails against soshalized medicine but is right now working in Abu Dhabi, and I guess when he is finished with his job there, move with his new wife to New Zealand, his is from there)

  91. 91.

    Anoniminous

    I keep hoping Congress will take away the Right to Vote from people who cannot identify and explain post hoc ergo proptor hoc and the Informal Logical Fallacies of ad hominem, ad populum, Petitio principii, and ad ignorantiam.

    Hope is shattered due to passage would immediately eliminate 60% of the GOP vote.

  92. 92.

    Another Halocene Human

    OT, but I plonked (pie-filtered) an idiot before breakfast (I work the night shift, shut up!) and I feel good.

    Btw, h8rz, not getting your hate subsidized is not oppression. Anyway, I thought religion rackets were swimming in dosh, after all that IS subsidized through multiple tax exemptions and little oversight.

  93. 93.

    Comrade Mary

    Off topic but great news: 8-year-old follows Tenn. lawmaker around Capitol until he drops welfare bill

    A Tennessee lawmaker has relented and agreed to drop his bill linking academic performance to the family’s welfare benefits after an 8-year-old girl shamed him by following him around the state Capitol.

    On his way to vote on Thursday, state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) was confronted by 8-year-old homeschooler Aamira Fetuga, who presented him with a petition signed by people opposing his welfare bill, according to the Tennessean. Nearby, a choir of about 60 activists sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” …

    Under Campfield’s bill, families could have lost up to 30 percent of welfare benefits from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program if a child did not attend school regularly and make “satisfactory academic progress.”

    Although assholes will be assholes:

    Campfield, however, said he was not giving up on the idea. He asked the state Senate to further study the bill, giving him the opportunity to bring it back up next year.

    “To me, it’s not a dead issue at all,” he told reporters. “This may be a slight detour, but honestly I think this could hopefully make it even better.”

    As for the protests, Campfield remarked, “It is what it is.”

    “There’s always going to be detractors.”

  95. 95.

    dollared

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate: Schnauzerfreude, n., the sensation of pleasure at knowing that someone will shortly learn all the joys of schnauzer ownership, such as learning that That Dog will not obey the simplest command without actually being shown the treat.

  96. 96.

    artem1s

    @shortstop:

    most of charitable giving law was written to try and keep individuals from using non profits as a tax shelter even when the money wasn’t really going to charitable uses.

    Lots of current problems stem from NPs getting very very good at making and raising money and now private businesses are trying to horn in on the act (think charter and online education and health care). The lines between non profit and not-for-profit have gotten pretty blurred. Then faith based initiative got thrown into the mix and now we have a whole raft of NPs getting government funding to run programs that were once the purview of secular institutions. And of course now those are claiming they should only have to use that funding to serve people they like and approve of. It was pretty predictable.

    Yanking 501 status will cause a firestorm of craziness but it is certainly time to review who should be allowed to get government funding as a NP. And I would be satisfied if so called ‘churches’ had to use the same tax reporting form that every other class of NP has to use. There is significantly more oversight of NP boards and their financial relationship to the organization. Churches get to hide a lot more because they don’t have to report the same way.

  98. 98.

    dollared

    o@artem1s: Agreed on the shitstorm, but this is how you move the overton window. You raise, this and push it, and then you get the random article on fake religion tax dodges, and then you get the Slate article on how Henry VIII was right to steal the Church’s property, and then you’ve stirred the pot.

    Get the wingers to play defense for a bit. It’s all good.

    And no, the banksters’ won’t lift a finger to defend the fundies, and so it’s also another great opportunity for the fundies to see that the banksters own the Republicans, not them. All good. All good.

  100. 100.

    catclub

    @Comrade Mary: I am not as sanguine. ” homeschooler Aamira Fetuga”

    Why do I suspect it is just homeschoolers with too much time on their hands, protesting the ‘school attendance’ part.

    Wasn’t there just a thread on weird names?

  101. 101.

    Roger Moore

    @GregB:

    he finally unfriended me, at long last.

    As a non-Facebook person, I have to ask why you didn’t unfriend him first. If these people really piss you off so badly, why don’t you just shitcan them instead of letting them drive you bonkers?

  103. 103.

    patroclus

    The Scouts need to change their bigoted policies yesterday. Thanks to the California legislators for keeping the pressure on.

  104. 104.

    Roger Moore

    @lojasmo:

    I think it has to do with the income of the church consisting of mostly already taxed tithing and dues, etc.

    Except that donations to churches are tax deductible, so money donated as tithes and other donations isn’t already taxed, at least if it comes from people who can itemize their deductions.

  105. 105.

    Trollhattan

    @raven: Pure comic genius; hard to think of somebody who can/could quite do what Jonathan did routinely. It took its toll on his sanity, but it could also be argued one could not have existed without the other.

    Take a final curtain call, Mr. Winters. You earned it.

  106. 106.

    DavidTC

    @artem1s:
    the issue gets even more complicated when you start to talk about unrelated business income and lobbying expense reporting. Not all income by 501 (c) orgs is considered exempt. For instance, museum store income is usually considered unrelated business income where rental income of a hall in a building is often not subject to UBI tax.

    No no, this is where ‘exempt’ gets confusing. All ‘income’ by a 501(c) corporation, of any sort, is ‘exempt’ from taxes, because of the fact such income does not exist. ‘Income’, in the corporate sense, actually means ‘profits’…and non-profits legally have no profits. (And the IRS will crack down on that if the people in control siphon money out.)

    However, there are _other_ taxes they may be subject too, such as charging sales tax, or collecting sales tax. Those, being state taxes, are not really subject the Federal income tax classifications, but a lot of states just piggy-back on the Federal classifications, in various ways. (Although it’s worth pointing out that Federal definitions just lumps everything together, so if the state wants to have something specific for a ‘church’ vs. a ‘museum’ vs. a ‘literacy program’, the state has to explain how to tell those apart.)

    any non profit can lobby (although endorsing candidates in strictly prohibited) on issues that affect its industry (saving funding for PBS for instance). But the expenses for this have to be reported and there is a limit to what is considered substantial by the IRS.

    That rule is actually only relevant for a 503(c)(3)’s (aka, ‘charities’) tax exempt status, which is about tax deductions that _others_ can make when donating.

    You can go set up a 501(c)(4) instead, and have that promote candidates all you want, and as that is a non-profit, it doesn’t pay income tax either. In fact, that is how lobbying groups are set up, including PACs. However, donations _to_ them cannot be deduced from your taxes…that ability is restricted to 501(c)(3)s.

    You can even set up non-profits that do nothing but _provide things to the members_, and you choose who to let in. Fraternal orders do this. Yacht club do this. The Freemasons do this. Unions exist under this.

    Basically, the rule is if the corporation you are setting up doesn’t exist to give you (and other owners) money, but to do _anything_ else, you set it up as a non-profit under some part of 501(c), so it doesn’t pay income tax.

    Then, if it follows even _more_ specific rules, basically rules ensuring it operates as a ‘charity’, you can make it a 501(c)(3), which lets people donate money to it and get a tax break, and often has special state rules. These explicitly can’t lobby for politicians, and can’t be set up for the _purpose_ of political lobbying, and they have to help the public _at large_ instead of just their members (Or allow anyone to be a member), and all sorts of rules to make them ‘charity-ish’.

    the LDS biggest offense in the Prop 8 fight wasn’t that they lobbied, but that it is believed they grossly under-reported the amounts they spent thereby saving themselves from excise taxes and scrutiny by the IRS (and the public).

    Yeah, just because you’re a 501(c)(3) does not mean you get a blanket waiver to spend money on anything you want without paying taxes. I’m not entirely sure what the LDS is accused of, but the LDS itself actually exposes one of the major problems with non-profits…that states often exempt property charities own from property tax, _even if they rent that property to other people who should be subject to property tax_.

  107. 107.

    weaselone

    that states often exempt property charities own from property tax, _even if they rent that property to other people who should be subject to property tax_.

    The LDS is unlikely to be passing on the property tax savings to the bulk of the individuals, groups and companies to whom it rents. It’s probably charging the market rate to all but a few chosen entities and pocketing the rest. The renters are effectively paying property taxes, the money just isn’t going to the government.

  108. 108.

    scav

    @weaselone: The Church may not pass along the tax benefit to the occupiers but they may hold a stranglehold on what they allow done there. Catholic Church forbids the teaching of sex ed in the buildings they lease to the NY city so the kids have to leave the building to learn it. Triumph of both the Free Market and Religious FREEDUM! Such tender tender beings they are — sin communicated through legal contract and the medium of fungible monies. No wonder why simply walking by an overt happy gay person is so dangerous to them.

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