13 April 2009

Along with the anti-pork “Tea Parties” and the various war tax resistance actions going on this Tax Day, this year there is a third set of activists using tax day as their rallying-point.

Equal Taxes, Equal Rights protesters are going to be meeting last-minute filers at post offices around the country to remind people that gays and lesbians are still paying for a first-class ticket but getting second-class citizenship.

Charles Merrill is among the organizers of protests in Washington, D.C.. And the Boston rally will include a Boston Tea Party Reenactment. Tax Day is getting crowded. It’s getting to the point where you won’t know who is protesting what without a program.

Some links that have caught my eye recently:

• Hellhole: The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?
• Tax Resistance: The Moral and Legal Defense
• The Dilemma of Dissent — establishment liberals mock those who, like Martin Luther King, push the envelope of dissent
• Invitation to an Open Conspiracy: The Bartleby Project — the proliferation of standardized testing in schools is all for the benefit of the bureaucrats, not the students… so what if the students started saying “I prefer not to”?
• Tax day protests against war economy planned in USA — a press release about upcoming war tax resistance actions
• Taxes Fuel U.S. War Machine — an op-ed from Vickie Aldrich in which she writes about her war tax resistance, and the importance of giving things their right names
• Cost of War — Grecia Quijije does the math and figures out the personal cost of war in a typical individual’s tax bill, and wonders if there’s any way to resist