Charles Merrill and Kevin Boyle on Tax Strike Until They Can Marry

In February I mentioned that Charles Merrill had decided to stop paying federal and state income tax in protest against the governments’ policies of denying equal legal status to same-sex marriages. (See also the similar case of tax resister Robert Mueller.)

Merrill and his partner Kevin Boyle now have a web site at which they are collecting information about their protest and resources for what they hope to be a growing movement of tax resisters protesting for gay marriage rights.

“We’re paying first-class taxes to be treated like second-class citizens and we’re sick of it.”…

“According to the General Accounting Office, there are over 1,049 protections and incentives extended to straight married couples, none of which we get… I’m just doing the same thing that Mahatma Gandhi did in India and the colonists did during the War for Independence.”

If you’ve got some spare time and have a Don Quixote lance in the garage, you might be interested in filling out an IRS Form 13285-A — “Reducing Tax Burden on America’s Taxpayers (Referral Form for Use by the Public)” — essentially a “suggestion box” form asking you for your ideas on what is causing “taxpayer burden” and what you would suggest to solve the problem.

“Taxpayer burden is defined as the time and money taxpayers spend to comply with their federal tax obligations,” however, so any suggestions about the ethical burdens of tax-paying that taxpayers bear like links of heavy chain Ghost-of-Christmas-Past-style will probably be categorized as “out-of-scope” by the bureaucrats-that-be.