Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
tax resistance for same-sex marriage →
Melissa Etheridge
Well, this is interesting.
None other than Melissa Etheridge has jumped on the gay marriage tax resistance bandwagon:
Okay.
So Prop 8 passed.
Alright, I get it.
51% of you think that I am a second class citizen.
Alright then.
So my wife, uh I mean, roommate?
Girlfriend?
Special lady friend?
You are gonna have to help me here because I am not sure what to call her now.
Anyways, she and I are not allowed the same right under the state constitution as any other citizen.
Okay, so I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am not a full citizen.
I mean that would just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same rights, sounds sort of like that taxation without representation thing from the history books.
Okay, cool I don’t mean to get too personal here but there is a lot I can do with the extra half a million dollars that I will be keeping instead of handing it over to the state of California.
Oh, and I am sure Ellen will be a little excited to keep her bazillion bucks that she pays in taxes too.
Wow, come to think of it, there are quite a few of us fortunate gay folks that will be having some extra cash this year.
What recession?
We’re gay!
I am sure there will be a little box on the tax forms now single, married, divorced, gay, check here if you are gay, yeah, that’s not so bad.
Of course all of the waiters and hairdressers and UPS workers and gym teachers and such, they won’t have to pay their taxes either.
Oh and too bad California, I know you were looking forward to the revenue from all of those extra marriages.
I guess you will have to find some other way to get out of the budget trouble you are in.
Gay marriage rights tax resisting pioneers Charles Merrill and John Bisceglia were quick to praise the action and urge others to join in.
Melissa Etheridge’s pledge to stop paying California state taxes in the wake of California voters’ decision to outlaw same-sex marriages like hers struck me as a sort of heat-of-anger decision — not necessarily well thought through as far as its ramifications, but with the sort of appealing righteous logic that makes you think “damn the torpedoes” and just forge ahead.
In that way it reminded me a lot of my own decision to become a tax resister, in which refusing to pay taxes seemed to have become a moral imperative for me well before I’d figured out how I was going to do it.
Now Etheridge is on to stage two: figuring out the messy details.
Etheridge and her wife were on ’s Oprah Winfrey Show, talking about their reaction to the California election results.
I didn’t see the show, but here’s an excerpt from the show’s summary on oprah.com:
In a recent blog posting about the passage of Proposition 8, Melissa vented her frustration by saying she would stop paying taxes.
“I tell people I have until to make true on that blog,” she says.
“That was [me] letting off a lot of steam.
What I wanted to do was show the absurdity of a populace thinking they can take a right away or deny someone a right … and yet feel completely fine taking 100 percent of our taxes.
It doesn’t make sense.”
Meanwhile, same-sex marriage tax resistance pioneer Charles Merrill was on The Ron Reagan Show .
There’s some discussion of the Etheridge tax resistance pledge and general pro-same-sex-marriage talk throughout the show, but the Merrill segment itself starts about 19½ minutes in and lasts about 10 minutes.
Merrill has been resisting , and expects to finally be able to make his case in court .
And it hasn’t escaped my notice that John Bisceglia has refashioned his “Gay Tax Protest” site into one that is promoting a National Equality Tax Prote$t for .
Today, I’m tracking these three tax resisters for legal recognition of same-sex marriage, but it feels like it won’t be long now before I’ll be able to write about the “movement.”
