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View Full Version : Group challenges tax exempt status of Catholic church



Captain Obvious
04-23-2012, 01:01 AM
Will this go anywhere, absolutely not. The Catholic church is too powerful and our representatives have been bought-and-paid-for well enough to keep them untouchable. The Catholic church is safe to continue it's mission of corruption that's existed from day one for now.

But I've been railing about this for some time now, it's nice to see that my ramblings aren't wholly without merit.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/22/group-challenges-tax-exempt-status-of-bishop-who-compared-obama-to-hitler-stalin/

As a side note, it's ironic to me at least that BO is the victim in this matter. There's more substantive matters involving the Catholic church's tax exempt status that can be challenged, but this is a start.

RollingWave
04-23-2012, 01:10 AM
Pope will call a Crusade and crush these infidel's..... ok sorry too much Medieval : Total War lately :grin:

CoLibertarian
04-23-2012, 01:41 AM
Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code prohibits charities and churches from intervening in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate.

Funny that the right wing now oppose this when they were all for it under the Bush war years. Let's review...

It's these tax laws, among others, that have caught the attention of Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative group that monitors the activities of non-profits.

"You can have debates, you can do policy papers. It doesn't consist of a bunch of people running down the street shouting obscenities and all these other things," said Boehm. "That's not [non-profit] activity and it never has been."

Boehm told the Cybercast News Service that the tax code restrictions apply, even when groups like the People's Rights Fund provide financing and otherwise stay behind the scenes.

"Whenever you have a relationship between a (c)(3) and a (c)(4)," as in the case with the People's Rights Fund and the International Action Center, Boehm said, "the rule is, (c)(3)'s can give to (c)(4)'s, but they have to be for the types of activities that are (c)(3) activities."

"An examination of their web pages, materials publicly available, a Nexis search, etc., shows that they are to a large degree an activist group that conducts street demonstrations, puts together political coalitions, uses enflamed rhetoric, and does not make any attempt to do any balance whatsoever," Boehm said of the People's Rights Fund.

Alan Dye, a Washington, D.C., lawyer providing services to non-profit organizations, also saw problems with the People's Rights Fund claiming an "educational" tax-exemption while funding a political protest. "It would seem to me that a protest is not charitable ... or educational," Dye said.

Dye said IAC's anti-Bush inaugural protests in 2000 and 2004 should also have alerted the IRS. "It's hard for me to see how the IRS would find a counter-inaugural protest to be educational or charitable. I don't see how you justify that."

Boehm said the IAC, "without question," presents its viewpoint in an emotional, rather than reasonable manner, in violation of the 501(c)(3) provisions. The IAC activity is "political, it's ideological, it's advocacy," Boehm said.

Dye agreed that IAC's style could be as problematic as its substance. "If the language is inflammatory enough, if the appeals are strongly enough based on emotion rather than reason [the IRS] certainly could, if they wanted, find the content not to be educational," Dye told the Cybercast News Service.