Churches' Tax Exempt Status: Not a Constitutional Right
San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, in his first extensive explanation about his role in the passage of Proposition 8, on Wednesday defended the church's actions in the successful ballot initiative.
"Religious leaders in America have the constitutional right to speak out on issues of public policy," Niederauer wrote in a statement posted on the archdiocese's Web site.
[Matthai Kuruvilam, "S.F. archbishop defends role in Prop. 8 passage", San Francisco Chronicle, 4 December 2008.]
This is a curiously specious argument, a strawman that has been getting more and more straw stuffed into it ever since right-thinking people started objecting to the idea that gay and lesbian people should be excluded from their constitutional right to petition the government for redress. This disenfranchisement is the fundamental problem with California's proposition 8, just as it was with Colorado's Amendment 2 some 15 years ago, and for which the US Supreme Court struck it down.
The Mormon Church, and now the Catholic Church, would like us to think that they are back in the Roman Arena being persecuted by fierce gay lions that want to rend their constitutional rights asunder with their big, gay teeth. This, they believe, is persecution when, in fact, it's what they usually recognize as "the marketplace of ideas".
Nobody is censoring the churches, especially since "censoring" is something that can only be done by the government, not some people, not The People. It's odd how economic boycotts are so popular with the religious right, but lose popularity when the boycott is against them. I suspect the main difference is that boycotts from the right-thinking people actually work.
But, of course, this is not persecution, this is known as "actions have consequences", and those consequences come in the form of intense disapprobation by the society the churches would rather control. It's part of the free exchange of ideas about the vilification of same-sex relationships, condemnation that comes much closer to persecution than anything either of those religious sects face.
There has been no argument about whether churches, or church leaders, may comment on public policy. None whatsoever. That's the strawman.
On the other hand, there has been intense discussion of whether churches, which are corporations, should be allowed to retain their tax-exempt status when they meddle in politics.
As corporations, it's questionable whether churches really do have a constitutional right to political speech, but it's an argument that's irrelevant to this discussion.
What is relevant is that the US Supreme Court has, several times (I'll trip over the references again someday), found that churches do not have a constitutional right to avoid paying taxes. Tax-exempt status is a privilege graciously extended by the US government to churches and other organizations in recognition of their benefits to society; in exchange, tax-exempt organizations agree not to meddling in politics.
Perhaps tax-exempt status should be taken away from churches, at least those in violation of the rule against partisan politicking. It's all part of the "actions have consequences" discussion, and it's the reason that the Mormon Church, and now the Catholic Church, would really, really like you to believe that this is about their perceived constitutional right to political speech.