How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
disrupt government auctions →
Corner and Kehler home, 1989
When the IRS seized the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner for fourteen years of back taxes, their community rallied around them, and the civil disobedience was only beginning.
Then “When a young couple buys the contested home at auction from the U.S. government for $5,400, they become involved in a political and moral battle much larger than what they originally bargained for.”
Rick Gee published a very thorough review of the movie a few years back that, depending on your tastes, will either give away too much of the “plot” or whet your appetite to see it.
Colrain Journal; Peace Advocates Turn Tax Resistance Into a Ritual
Colrain, Mass., —
Every Thursday morning , a small group of out-of-towners has trudged down a dirt road in this quiet Berkshire community carrying colorful hand-sewn banners to the doorstep of a small white farmhouse.
Stopping in the front yard, they are greeted by others, who form a circle and join hands to sing songs of defiance and world peace in a ceremony evocative of the 60’s.
They have come to protest the size of the nation’s military budget in a house that has become a symbol of tax resistance.
The participants have two things in common: they do not believe in paying Federal taxes to finance the United States military, and, pointing to the end of the cold war and evidence of social unrest in the nation, they believe the time is ripe for a revival of their cause.
“Everybody’s become more restless and disgusted with the major parties in government,” said David Dellinger, who was a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial and who came to Colrain with a group from Vermont.
The Chicago Seven were anti-war protesters charged with various offenses related to disruptions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“Everywhere people go now, there’s crime in the cities, homelessness, drugs, poverty, unemployment,” said Mr. Dellinger, now 76 years old.
“I think people are going to decide we didn’t win the cold war.
The Soviet people lost and we lost.”
Mr. Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain house, which was seized by the Internal Revenue Service in because its owners had not paid $27,000 in Federal taxes and interest.
The tax-resister owners, Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, did pay their local and state taxes.
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals .
Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony.
Because the house was sold in a Government auction , all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing.
Seven protesters were arrested on the day the house was auctioned but were released after the auction.
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience.
At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Others, like Purusha Obluda, come to resurrect values of their past.
Mr. Obluda met Mr. Kehler in California after being jailed for blocking the Oakland induction center.
During his week’s stay at Colrain house, Mr. Obluda, 64, typed a letter to the Government saying he would not pay his income tax .
“I don’t expect to file for the rest of my life,” he told others before he left to go home to Palo Alto, Calif.
The I.R.S. says it stopped counting tax refusers in the mid-80’s because the numbers were so small.
The sale of the house to Danny Franklin, a 22-year-old part-time police officer from the nearby town of Greenfield, has added a twist to the protest, which seeks among other things more attention for housing needs.
The house sits on land owned by the Valley Community Land Trust, a private trust formed to preserve open space and affordable housing in the area, said John J. Stobierski, Mr. Franklin’s lawyer.
Mr. Franklin is waiting for the trust to confirm that he can assume the 99-year lease before moving into the house with his fiancee and 5-month-old child.
From his office in the Traprock Peace Center in nearby Deerfield, Mr. Kehler said that he felt sorry for the young couple who bid on his house but believed that they had made a “mistake.”
“In our view, they have wittingly or unwittingly assisted the Government in collecting taxes from us,” he said.
Mr. Kehler, 47, a self-employed public policy researcher, spent 10 weeks in jail after his arrest and was released on the day the house was sold.
He and his wife, Ms. Corner, and their 12-year-old daughter are staying at a friend’s home near their former house.
Ms. Corner, a self-employed landscape architect, still returns to tidy up the house she lived in for 13 years.
She bristles at those who have written letters in the local paper saying she is setting a bad example for her daughter, Lillian.
“We aren’t paying for bombs and she understands that,” Ms. Corner said.
“People can’t get away from the fact that we’re breaking the law.
But this country was founded by breaking the law.”
The house siege was the subject of the movies An Act of Conscience and Path of Greatest Resistance, and you can also read more about how it played out in the following Picket Line entries:
We were talking last week about tax resistance, and an interesting article came to our attention about a group of tax resisters in western Massachusetts
It seems that one family has refused to pay federal income tax for the past 13 years, and the IRS finally tried to auction off the family’s house to pay the tax bill.
The IRS set a minimum “floor bid” of $5,100 for the home — and no one bid it.
One bidder offered 42 blocks of ice, to symbolize the end of the 42-year Cold War.
Another bid free psychotherapy for stressed-out IRS employees.
Others offered food and other barter items.
It seems that the free spirit of Thoreau’s Walden and Shay’s Rebellion has not faded from the western Massachusetts hills, and the IRS now has title to the family’s home — but has yet to take possession.
It will be interesting to see what the taxman does with the house after throwing the family onto the street.
We’ll keep you posted.
And by the way — it appears that there are thousands of quiet tax protestors all over the nation, all refusing to pay some or all of their federal taxes.
Most of them are protesting the fact that 87% of the tax money raised goes to the Pentagon.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a great deal about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , in part because of the occupation of the Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner home which the IRS was trying to auction off, and in part because of the IRS suit against the Journal to try to force it to pay its editor’s resisted taxes, and in part because of the Peace Tax Fund bill’s first congressional hearing.
A note in the issue pointed out that politicians were playing a name game that had apparently fooled some Quakers into thinking that the telephone excise tax had been transformed into something benign:
The telephone tax continues as a source of money for military expenditure, contrary to recent confusion about its status.
The tax, which was due to expire in , was extended under the Act for Better Child Care.
Those who proposed the act were searching for a way to finance their new program and seized upon the telephone tax as their “new” source of money.
However, the phone tax revenues continue to go into the General Fund, as always, and are not earmarked for the child care programs. More than 50 percent of the General Fund is used for military expenditure.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee recommends that conscientious resistance to the telephone tax continue, as it can have a powerful impact if enough people are involved.
an ad for NWTRCC in the issue of Friends Journal
That issue also had a follow-up on the “Alternative Revenue Service” protest:
In , the Alternative Revenue Service reports that individuals redirected $104,740 of their federal income taxes away from the military to areas of human need.
The total includes $12,898 redirected through the ARS, $38,416 redirected by Alternative Funds, and $53,426 that individuals redirected to social action and relief programs. The Alternative Revenue Service campaign is designed to educate taxpayers about how their federal income tax dollars are used.
The service provides the EZ Peace Form, which participants can use in registering their opposition to military spending at the time they file their taxes.
The service reports that 70,000 EZ Peace Forms were distributed nationwide last year.
This year’s form is simplified, with clearer instructions.
The issue brought the news that the Peace Tax Fund promoters had finally managed to get a Congressional Committee hearing for their bill, which was scheduled for .
“The hearing will be informational to determine the need for such legislation, not a preparation for floor action.
The need is assessed from the testimony of both individuals and religious bodies.
The hearing will support the bill by providing a permanent public record, by lending it legitimacy, by possibly attracting more serious consideration from prospective cosponsors, and by providing a record of congressional scrutiny.
The hearing will be brief, not lending itself to extended exchanges.
However, written testimony can be added and will become part of the official record.”
A follow-up in described the latest Peace Tax Fund bill as one that “would amend the Internal Revenue Code to permit qualified conscientious objectors to have part of their federal taxes — that part equal to the military portion of the federal budget — to be paid into a fund for peace-related projects.”
It encouraged readers to submit “written testimony for the official hearing record,” to publicize and perhaps attend the hearing, to contact Congressional representatives and encourage them to attend and to support the bill, and to donate money to the cause.
The issue described how the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures went — “the first actual hearing held since a Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in Congress .”
Excerpts:
“If we give the right to a person to withhold their body from a war as a conscientious objector, that person should be able to withhold his money as well.”
So spoke Sen. Mark Hatfield in his lead-off testimony…
…Several hundred spectators from across the country packed the hearing room.
Many attended as concerned individual taxpayers.
Others came as members of religious denominations and peace groups long associated with the Peace Tax Campaign.
Three chartered buses, one from Lancaster, Pa., two others from Philadelphia, swelled the numbers by some 150 supporters.
When the last of them filed in from a late-arriving bus to find all spectator seats occupied, Chairman Charles Rangel stopped the hearings momentarily, inviting standing-room only observers to move forward and to occupy empty seats normally reserved for officials and the press.
Many did so.
Veterans of peace demonstrations, several parents holding small children, young bearded men in simple dress, older couples from the peace churches created a colorful patchwork as they mixed with congressional aides, heads of foundations, and Capitol bureaucrats in business suits.
…Over 2,300 letters in support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill were bound in large volumes and set on a front table to be presented to the committee.
From 50–100 such letters a day continued to arrive as of the time of the hearing.
Following the introductory testimony of Mark Hatfield, lead sponsor of the bill (S.689) in the Senate, there were also presentations by four members of Congress: Andy Jacobs (lead sponsor of the bill in the House), Nancy Pelosi, and John Conyers.…
…[A] panel of religious leaders testified.
One, Thomas Gumbleton, Roman Catholic bishop from Detroit, and past president of Pax Christi, pointed out that two of the first leaders of the church, John and Peter, said that sometimes it is necessary to obey God before obeying the law.
How much better it would be, Gumbleton said, for COs to be able to pay all their taxes, knowing their money would be used for life-affirming purposes.
William Davidson, retired Episcopal bishop of western Kansas, a CO in World War Ⅱ, has actively opposed war .
“Having lived past draft age, I have been saddened and conflicted each year having to pay taxes to support war,” he said.
The Episcopal Peace Fellowship has consistently supported war tax resistance as a religious witness.
John A. Lapp, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pa., spoke on behalf of the three historic peace churches (Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren).
The issue of war-related taxes is one of religious freedom, Lapp said.
“Many of us feel the pain of having our religious institutions serve as tax collectors for war.”
During committee questioning, Representative Jacobs asked Rabbi [Phil] Bentley [with the Jewish Peace Fellowship], “Is [passage of this bill] going to give rise to requests for similar legislation from people who don’t want their money going for a golf course?”
…[Friends Journal] editor-manager Vint Deming, associate editor Melissa Elliott, typesetter Susan Jordhamo, and board members Robert Sutton and Sam Legg joined several hundred other citizens in packing the hearing room…
The hearing was informational, to give legislators material to use in future considerations, rather than to schedule the bill for action.
As such, it gave supporters a chance to formally present the case, get testimony in the written record, and show the depth and breadth of people’s interest in the bill.
The pace of this legislative process is frustratingly slow, but, for many of us, the hearing was a heartening experience.
There, we heard people testify in a formal legislative setting to our most deeply held beliefs.
One activist-participant said, “All my life I’ve been on the side that opposes government decisions.
It was a weird experience to see all those peace movement people in the same room with legislators.
I’ve never seen anything like that before, nor ever imagined it.
It gave me a different vision of what might be possible.”
The Peace Tax Fund Bill has come a long way , with many technical refinements, and it has a long way to go in gathering widespread support.
On we witnessed one small step in validation, acknowledgment of our beliefs, and moving the dream closer to reality.
Perhaps one day we will look back, as do those who watched the process of legalizing conscientious objection, and be glad we were involved in making it legal to follow our beliefs with our money-as well as with our bodies.
“This is not a political issue, but a moral issue of conscience,” responded Bentley…
Jacobs, in response, thanked the Rabbi and others of religious conscience who had testified.
“I am a sponsor of this bill,” he said, “but I am not a pacifist.”
He called to mind one of his favorite movies, Friendly Persuasion, and the lines spoken toward the end of the film: “It’s good to know that somebody is holding out for a better way of settling things!”
Terrill Hyde, tax legislative counsel for the Department of the Treasury, presented the Bush Administration position opposing the PTF.
She mentioned “problems of complexity, confusion, and increased administrative burden,” sure to arise if the bill were passed.
There would be no deterrent either, she said, to restrain taxpayers from inappropriately claiming CO status.
If taxpayers were allowed to designate the uses for which their tax dollars were spent, “our entire budgetary process would be undermined.”
There would likely be loss of revenue to needed federal programs.
Others, however, presented differing views.
Several speakers argued that there would likely be substantial increases in revenue as a direct result of the bill.
Many who currently refuse to pay a portion or all of their taxes would gladly pay.
Also, large costs resulting from IRS efforts to collect from tax resisters would be avoided.
Answering the criticism of how the act might increase paperwork and administrative costs, several people testified to the simple nature of the bill and of the tax filing process.
As to IRS claims that the bill raises possible legal questions, a panel of two law specialists responded.
Mark Tushnet, professor of law at Georgetown University, said, “A nation that wants to protect the religious freedom of its citizens can reasonably be expected to enact legislation to enable the freedom to be expressed.”
It seems perfectly appropriate, he concluded, that such legislation be enacted.
“It is needed in addition to the Religious Freedom Act.”
Philadelphia, Pa., attorney and war tax specialist Peter Goldberger agreed.
“Legislation of this kind has a noble history in our country,” and he quoted from a letter from then-President George Washington to Philadelphia Quakers.
The nation’s laws, Washington wrote, must always be “extensively accommodated” in cases of individual conscience.
Alan Eccleston, a Quaker and an organizational development consultant from Hadley, Massachusetts, told about how, in his own tax witness, he has endured penalties, punishments, and the threat of losing his home.
The IRS has a lien on his house right now.
“Conscience must be taken into account.
Spiritual values are real.
They are not to be treated as incidental or expendable to fit the needs of the state.
This is what the First Amendment is all about.”
Ruth Flower, legislative secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation, emphasized that the Peace Tax Fund Act would not offer an escape to those who do not wish to pay their taxes, because they would have to pay the same amount either way.
It would, however, provide a legal way out of violating one’s religious beliefs in order to comply with the laws of the land.
Her point was born out by Patricia Washburn, who gave perhaps the most moving testimony of the hearing.
She talked about the challenge presented to each of us, and to her personally, in Micah 6:8: “…what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love constantly, and to walk humbly with your God?” Walking humbly requires us to acknowledge the seeds of violence in our own hearts, rather than projecting them onto someone else.
“Loving constantly” can be a discouraging and difficult task, especially in today’s climate of distrust and alienation.
“I am not opposed to paying taxes, but I find no alternative form of tax payment… Thus, I see no current alternative to withholding the military portion of my taxes… I pray that my witness is done in love and that it will help to build a bridge across the chasm of violence and fear.”
After the hearing and following the press conference, [Marian] Franz [executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund] gave a brief workshop on lobbying for the bill.
She pointed out that the testimony would now be entered in written record and could be referred to in the future.
She added, “the fact that we got a hearing is absolutely amazing.”
Many other pieces of legislation have not yet been so lucky, and the demand is great.
“If all members of the committee had been present, they all would have been deeply moved, and we would be a lot further down the road.”
Franz encouraged people, when lobbying, to talk in terms of conscience, as defined by Pope John ⅩⅩⅢ, who said, “Deep inside, each one of us finds a law that we did not put there.
It tells us to do this and shun that.”
That is what puts the issue of paying taxes for war in the arena of religious decisions and touches on every individual’s right to follow their faith — whether they are housewives, bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, or politicians.
That is why it is important to keep trying to open doors and ears and minds.
Marian Franz has a suggestion for how to approach people: “Talk to aides and legislators as though you’re sharing something personally.
You will often find that when you are talking about conscience, people are moved deeply.”
The issue also plugged “Good Use: Songs of Peace, Tax & Conscience” — “a tape of War Tax Resister Songs, featuring Charlie King, Luci Murphy, Geof Morgan, Lifeline, and others.
It was produced by Don Walsh, who donates the royalties.”
The lead editorial (by Vinton Deming) in the issue concerned the ongoing Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner case:
Finding Affinity
Randy Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have been tax resisters .
They have given the tax money instead to a variety of groups doing constructive community work.
the IRS has been trying to sell their house in Colrain, Mass., in an effort to collect $25,896 in back taxes — but it hasn’t been easy.
First of all, there’s been a growing tax resistance movement there in Franklin County.
Bob Bady and Pat Morse, for instance, had their house seized and auctioned in .
(They still live in the house, however, and the buyer hasn’t taken possession.)
Shelburn Falls dentist Tom Wilson had his dental license revoked when he refused to cooperate with IRS.
(He continues his practice, however; even the local sheriff remains one of his regular patients).
So when the word got out that IRS planned to auction Betsy and Randy’s house, supporters in large numbers turned up on the announced day to oppose the sale.
There were lots of signed bids (such as an offer to clean the teeth of an IRS agent, others pledging to do community work or to be peace activists for life) — but no cash buyers came forward.
Not a one.
So, in , IRS upped the ante.
Betsy, Randy, and daughter Lillian, 12, were given an eviction notice.
When Randy decided to stay, he was held in contempt and tossed in the county jail for 6 months.
This didn’t go unnoticed by friends and neighbors, however.
A sign-up sheet got circulated, and volunteers committed themselves to stay in the house around the clock.
There’s been a continuous presence there .
Groups from as far away as Washington, D.C., have signed up to come and help out.
In , members of Mount Toby (Mass.) Meeting formed such an affinity group for a week.
Meanwhile, Randy stays in jail and makes the most of his time there.
He has made friends with many of the prisoners, has organized a chess tournament, and does what he can to interpret his tax witness.
Allan Eccleston, member of Mount Toby Meeting, has been approved as the meeting’s official minister and visits Randy twice a week.
So what’s next?
IRS has scheduled another auction, this time out of the area in Springfield, Mass. — in the hope, it seems, of attracting a buyer for the house, someone who doesn’t know about this whole chain of events.
Randy will not be there to talk about it, but lots of his friends will.
Even if the house is sold, the issue will be far from over.
The house is part of a land trust (Randy and Betsy own the house but not the land on which it stands) — and there’s the likelihood of a continuing nonviolent presence in the house to welcome any potential new buyer.
How might Friends respond?
I asked this question in of Francis Crowe, long-time head of the American Friends Service Committee office in western Massachusetts and a supporter of Randy and Betsy.
She suggests:
Form an affinity group to help sustain the presence in the house.
(To be scheduled, contact Traprock Peace Center…
Funds are also needed to support the action (checks made out to “War Tax Refusers Support Committee”…).
Letters to the editor on the subject of taxes and militarism are always helpful.
More sponsors are needed in Congress for the Peace Tax Fund bill.…
At a rally in support of Betsy and Randy, Juanita Nelson — who, with husband Wally, has been a tax refuser for decades and is known to many Friends — offered these words by Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has Genius, Power, and Magic in it.”
Good advice as another tax season is upon us, when many of us seek to find our way on this difficult question of taxes for war.
In a later issue, David Zarembka reported in a letter-to-the-editor about how the occupation / blockade of the Kehler/Corner home was proceeding:
On , federal marshalls arrested seven members of the Flowing River Affinity Group who were occupying the Kehler/Corner home and removed the furniture into storage.
At , the IRS sold the house to the highest bidder in an auction for $5,400. The seven affinity group members were released from jail later in the afternoon.
So was Randy, who had served two months of his sentence.
Do not think, however, that Betsy and Randy have lost their home in an exotic cause!
As soon as the federal marshalls left the house, an affinity group reoccupied it, and other groups, including one from Washington, D.C., of which I am a member, have continued to occupy the house on a 24-hour basis.
Affinity groups, which occupy the home for a week each, have been organizing , but new ones are still being formed…
The “buyers,” a young couple with a two-month-old son, have visited the house several times but have not as yet forced the issue.
They are consulting with their lawyers.
Betsy and Randy have become members of the Colrain Neighbors Affinity Group, which will occupy the home for the week beginning .
They and their twelve-year-old daughter, Lillian, will move back into their home when they can comfortably live there once again.
I would hope that this action would lead Friends to consider how their cooperation with the federal tax collection process — even those who are symbolic tax resisters or those who force the IRS to take their taxes from them — allows the present military system to thrive.
A report in that issue on the Canadian Yearly Meeting that had taken place noted that:
Canadian Yearly Meeting, in its role of employer, was asked to refuse to remit that portion of its employees’ taxes that will be used to support the military.
Concern was expressed by the yearly meeting’s trustees, who would bear the legal results of such actions.
Although the yearly meeting came close to supporting a minute for this action, it agreed to seek clearness with the trustees and monthly meetings and return to this issue next year.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue was largely devoted to war tax resistance.
It began with an editorial from Vinton Deming concerning his war tax resistance and the response of his employer, the Journal.
Excerpt:
From the outset, I knew it wasn’t a very practical thing to do.
The government was too powerful, and all the tax laws were against me.
I’d just end up paying much more in the end, so why not choose a better way to work for peace?
A good letter to my congressman, for instance, or a tax vigil at the federal building on Apri1 15.
But this was in .
Our war in Vietnam was just over, but the Cold War continued.
As the Reagan years unfolded, with still larger military expenditures and big cuts in domestic programs, I became even more clear: I must resist as fully as possible the payment of taxes for war.
The Journal board was always supportive of my witness.
It refused twice to honor IRS levies on my wages.
In doing so, Friends openly accepted the possibility of being taken to court one day and fined severely.
The board wrote to IRS: “Our position of noncompliance to the requests of the Internal Revenue Service is not an easy one.
We do not question the laws of the land lightly, but do so under the weight of a genuine religious and moral concern.”
Well, as they say, “What goes ’round comes ’round.”
, Friends Journal was told by the U.S. Justice Department to pay up or we’d be taken to court.…
I am grateful for the steadfastness of the Journal’s board of managers.
, it has been faithful to the Quaker peace testimony.
The road has been an uncertain and confusing one at many points, but Friends have shown courage in continuing.
In my own personal war tax journey, these words by John Stoner have served to guide: “We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.”
Sam Legg, clerk of the Friends Journal Board of Managers, gave his take on the Deming situation and on why the Journal had decided to throw in the towel and pay the IRS’s demands.
Excerpts:
… Vinton refused to pay any federal taxes.
Each tax year he sent a blank 1040 along with a letter to the president explaining his opposition to war and his unwillingness as a Friend to pay for it.
Since there was no Peace Tax Fund, Vinton reasoned, he would instead contribute the money to worthwhile projects and see that it was used for peaceful purposes.
In , the IRS served a levy on Friends Journal for $22,714.16, Vinton’s taxes for the period, plus interest and penalties.
The IRS asked Friends Journal to withhold part of Vinton’s salary each month, but the Journal Board refused, writing that “We… are in support of Vinton Deming’s conscientious witness.”
In , Friends Journal received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice reminding us of the levy on Vinton’s salary and asking us to try to “resolve this matter short of litigation.”
That is, to pay the original assessed amount plus interest and a possible 50 percent penalty on the total.
We were given until to respond.
If we were to continue refusing to honor the levy, an immediate court action would follow.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision, Smith vs. Oregon, as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the American Friends Service Committee have learned, teaches us that there is no way we could win such a case in court, nor could our assets be protected from seizure.
More troubling, this seizure could make others who are not involved in our decision, undergo unwelcome investigation.
Finally, a court case offers IRS the opportunity to set a legal precedent requiring the payment of the 50 percent penalty (which a sympathetic judge excused in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting case last year).
We fear that the inevitable negative decision could establish that precedent and thereby restrict other individuals’ or groups’ religious freedom.
And so, most reluctantly, the Friends Journal Board has agreed to negotiate with IRS and to pay the least amount IRS will accept ($31,300) as settlement of this claim.
Our painful recognition of failure is heavy upon us.
We have to accept that our witness in its present form can no longer serve a useful purpose.
We can hope Vinton’s action and our support will have brought the issue of tax refusal to the attention of others, thereby becoming a part of the tradition of citizen pressure that in the long run eliminates or diminishes social evils such as slavery and war.
Our protest is on record.
What we will do now is support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of … which aims to reestablish the first amendment religious rights lost in the Smith vs. Oregon decision.
We also urge support for the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill… which makes the same witness, but provides money to finance peace-enhancing projects.
(Needless to say, if there had been a Peace Tax Fund in , Vinton’s taxes would have been paid gladly, and there would have been no need for an IRS levy.)
We ask all those who share our concerns to join in these legal approaches to the continuing effort to convince ourselves and others of the futility of armed conflict and the necessity of finding other means to resolve human disputes.
The immediate financial challenge to the Journal is a very real one.
In a year in which we already face a substantial budget deficit, the payment of such a large lump sum adds an enormous burden.
Vinton has engaged to repay the Journal through payroll deductions over time.
We have been heartened as well, as word of our tax witness spreads, to receive gifts of support from our readers.
One contributor writes: “I hope everyone at the Friends Journal can be made aware of Friends’ approval of [your] Board action.
To help this happen, I encourage the Journal to go as public with the story as is consistent with respect for Vint’s privacy and the Journal’s limited resources.
I am convinced that other Friends will wish to help financially when so informed.”
For such words, and unexpected gifts, we are most grateful.
Readers wrote in with their feedback about the Journal’s decision, and some of their letters were printed in the issue:
Duane Magill wrote to “applaud” and “sympathize” with the Journal’s stand.
“As a war tax resister myself for the past quarter of a century, I have had some brushes with the IRS myself and know what it is like.
I also appreciate your giving publicity to the subject.
I know that not many Quakers take this position, and giving the matter this extensive coverage just might encourage more to take this stand.”
Yvonne Boeger wrote in on behalf of the Live Oak (Texas) Meeting to say that the meeting had recently “discussed the importance of war tax resistance as a means of witnessing to Friends’ long-standing opposition to all forms of war and violence” and that the Meeting was supportive of the Journal’s (and Deming’s) action.
“We send the enclosed check as a token of our support and solidarity in Friends’ resistance to war.
Thank you for the example you have set for us all.”
Lillian and George Willoughby wrote to express gratitude for the Journal’s “courage in standing in support of Vint Deming.”
They wrote: “Most important is the example of a Quaker religious employer providing support to staff who endeavor to live according to Friends’ teachings.
The Journal has run considerable risk and incurred heavy expenses.
We enclose our check as a demonstration of our support.
We think that many other Friends will want to help carry the financial burden of this witness.”
An editorial note in the letters column expressed “thanks to all those who have sent checks!” and a later editorial note (in the issue) said that they had received “$8,000 from individuals and meetings, $7,000 from a Sufferings Fund of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,” and almost $4,000 from Deming himself.
Mennonite war tax resister (and, according to his author bio, “itinerant prophet and spiritual retreat leader”) John K. Stoner wrote about the call he got from an IRS employee.
Excerpts:
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said “no” to paying the full amount of our income tax.
The man could not understand why anyone would invite the collection pressures of the IRS upon themselves by withholding some taxes.
But by the time the conversation was over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was, for us, a matter of faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9 kind of experience of being called before the authorities, “before governors and kings,” because of Jesus, as a testimony to them.
By the sound of Mark 13, Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
Mark 13 is a good text to remember when everybody around you is quoting Romans 13.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams organization is promoting symbolic war tax refusal as a way to make a clear witness in the matter of war taxes.
Taxes for Life is a plan to have taxpayers redirect to education an amount equivalent to 1 penny for every billion dollars in the military budget.
For tax year this is $3.03, which can be mailed to Christian Peacemaker Teams… Listen to your conscience when you pay your taxes.
Write a letter of witness to the IRS, with copies to Congress and your local newspaper.
Redirect some taxes to education through CPT.
If the IRS calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law and that you do not enjoy being harassed by the collectors of blood money.
Go on to say that you are far more apprehensive, however, about breaking God’s law.
Tell them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the bulldozed mass graves of Iraqi conscripts, fathers and husbands, and the nightmares of their children.
Explain that you are really afraid to harden you heart to the cry of the victims and that you have decided you will not take their blood upon your hands.
When Randy Kehler was thrown in prison on contempt of court charges for refusing to vacate the home that had been seized by the IRS, he prepared a statement that he hoped to read.
The court denied him permission to address it.
The Journal printed the statement he’d hoped to have made, which is a good thing: it would be a shame if such an articulate statement was left to sit unread in a file folder somewhere.
My refusal to give up our home is not an act of contempt or defiance of your court order.
I regard it as an act of conscience and also an act of citizenship.
The two go hand in hand.
The first obligation of responsible citizenship, I believe, is obedience to one’s conscience.
Obedience to one’s government and to its laws is very important, but it must come second.
Otherwise there is no check on immoral actions by governments, which are bound to occur in any society whenever power is abused.
I want to assure you, however, that I am not someone who treats the law lightly.
Even when a particular law seems at first to have no clear purpose or justification, I try to give it — that is, give those who created and approved it — the benefit of the doubt.
In an ideal sense, I see law as the codification of those rules and procedures by which the members or citizens of a community, be it local or global, have agreed to live.
A decent respect for one’s community requires a decent respect for its laws.
At their best, such laws express the conscience of the community, causing conscience and law to coincide.
The international treaties and agreements that my wife, Betsy, and I cited in the legal documents recently submitted to, and rejected by, this court are wonderful examples of the coincidence of law and conscience.
These agreements, each one signed by our government, include the United Nations Charter, which outlaws war and the use of military force as methods of resolving conflicts among nations; the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use or threatened use of weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians and poison the environment; and the Nuremberg Principles, which forbid individual citizens from participating in or collaborating with clearly defined “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against peace,” even when refusal to participate or collaborate means disobeying the laws of one’s government.
These international accords — which, as you know, our Constitution requires us to regard as “the Supreme Law of the Land” — are at least as much affirmation of conscience, rooted in universal moral standards, as they are statements of law.
Betsy and I regret that you chose to deny our request for a trial, which would have allowed us to argue the relevance of these international laws before a jury of our peers.
Even in the absence of such laws, however, I believe that citizens would still have an affirmative obligation to follow their conscience and refuse to engage in or support immoral acts by governments.
It is not true, as is commonly thought, that if large numbers of people put conscience ahead of the law and decided for themselves which acts of government were immoral, civilized society would break down into violence and chaos — that is, greater violence and chaos than there is now.
In fact, the opposite would likely occur.
There would likely be greater compliance with those laws that are fundamentally just and reasonable — in other words, most laws — and there would be greater public pressure to abolish or reform those laws (and policies) that are unjust or unreasonable.
There would be exceptions for the worse, of course.
In the name of conscience, certain individuals would, no doubt, do some terrible things and cause much injury and death, which happens now.
On balance, however, the historical record is clear: from the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade, to Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s Holocaust, the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and our own devastation of Vietnam and Iraq, far more killing and suffering, has resulted from people following “legal” orders and obeying the law than from people refusing to do so in obedience to conscience.
My own refusal to kill (which led me to spend nearly two years in federal prison rather than cooperate with the Vietnam draft), Betsy’s and my refusal to pay federal taxes used for killing (which caused the IRS to seize our home), and now our refusal to turn over our home in lieu of taxes, are all acts of conscience.
It has not been easy for us to deliberately violate the law in these instances, and in so doing incur the anxiety and disapproval of some of our friends and family, as well as the scorn and censure of many members of the community.
We are painfully aware that even though we do pay our town and state taxes, and even though we have given away to the poor and to the victims of our war-making in other countries every cent that we have withheld from the federal government, nevertheless we are still regarded by some as irresponsible and not contributing our fair share.
These are times, however, when all of us are confronted with difficult choices.
Betsy and I, and many others like us, feel we must choose between knowingly and willingly paying for war and killing, and openly and nonviolently breaking the law with respect to federal taxes.
Our consciences compel us to choose the latter.
For me, the issue is larger than simply the taking of another human life, or even the instance of a particular war in which many lives are lost.
I have increasingly come to see the larger issue as war itself.
Whereas there has always been a moral imperative to end war and refrain from killing, today the imperative is much greater.
Today the logic of peace, the logic of nonviolence, is also the logic of survival.
It is impossible to dis-invent today’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and so-called conventional weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, we have no alternative but to effectively abolish war.
This is the one essential adaptation the human species must make — and, I firmly believe, can make — if life as we know it is to continue.
War today is the scourge of the planet.
It is tragic enough that war is daily claiming the lives of people, maiming more, leaving orphans and widows, and destroying homes, schools, and hospitals — to say nothing of the irreplaceable treasures of human civilization destroyed in Baghdad last year and in Dubrovnik over the past several months.
What makes war today even more tragic, more horrible, are the incalculable economic, social, and environmental costs that go along with it.
Instead of using our human and material resources to produce food, medicine, housing, schools, and other desperately needed commodities, the world’s nations, led by our own, are annually spending trillions of dollars to purchase more and more weapons of even greater destructive capability.
The hundreds of millions of children, women, and men whose lives are ravaged by poverty, hunger, and homelessness — around the world and here in the States — are as much victims of our addiction to war and militarism as are those who are hit directly by the bullets and bombs.
While the awful gap between the rich minority and the poor majority of the world’s people grows wider and wider, war’s assault on the earth — the earth that sustains us all — becomes more savage and less reversible with each new armed conflict.
The severe and longterm ecological damage to the Persian Gulf region that resulted from only a few weeks of war last year is just the tip of the iceberg.
The cumulative impact of the many smaller, less publicized wars elsewhere around the globe is no less severe and, ultimately, no less threatening to the well-being of people everywhere, including the United States.
Furthermore, here at home, where ecological damage to our own environment is proceeding at a frightening pace, the single largest polluter by far, producing more toxic and radioactive waste than any other single entity, is the U.S. military.
I am not at all suggesting that our country bears sole responsibility for the global state of affairs.
But we bear a good deal of it, and therefore any steps we take to move away from war will have great influence upon other countries around the world.
Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had the most powerful armed forces in the world, the most sophisticated weaponry, and by far the largest number of military bases outside our own borders.
Since World War Ⅱ, we have used our military might to bomb, invade, or otherwise intervene in more countries around the world than any other nation.
We were the first to develop the atomic bomb, and we are the only nation ever to use it.
For years we have led the Soviets in atomic test explosions, and we ani continuing these tests even though Soviet testing has stopped.
In addition, we have long been the world’s largest arms merchant, today supplying 40 percent of the entire overseas arms market.
We have been told that all of this is necessary for our security, but the opposite is true.
This military colossus we have created has greatly undermined our security — by creating more enemies than it destroys, by wasting our precious resources and poisoning our environment, by degrading our democracy with “national security” secrecy, covert actions, and official lying, and by undercutting our highest Judeo-Christian values with the insidious doctrine of “might makes right.”
Betsy’s and my actions that have brought us to court are testament to our belief that there is another way for us to live in the world, and another way for us to resolve our conflicts with our fellow human beings.
It is a way that is rooted in the best of our values: the values of generosity and justice, of human dignity and equality, of compassion and mutual respect.
The seeds of this alternative way — the way of nonviolence that Dr. Martin Luther King tried to teach us — already exist within our society, and within each person.
We have only to honor and nurture those seeds, individually and collectively.
This is a prescription based not on wishful idealism, but on practical necessity.
It is our only real hope for survival.
The transformation required cannot be accomplished without our accepting some measure of personal responsibility for the mess we are in.
It would be futile to expect our government, or any other, to initiate it.
In any event, we cannot afford to wait.
The transformation must begin with us.
Because we profess to be a self-governing people, it is all the more our responsibility.
We can exercise this responsibility by means of the choices each of us is called upon to make.
For example, we can choose to speak out publicly against governmental practices and priorities that we know to be wrong.
Many of us can also choose not to hand over to the federal government some part of our tax money — instead redistribute it to those in need, until such time as those in need become our government’s first priority.
And each of us can choose to continue leading lives based on materialism, consumerism, and environmental exploitation, or we can find ways of living based on simplicity, sharing, and respect for the Earth.
The choices we make as individuals will determine the choices we make as a nation.
This is, no doubt, a dangerous and ominous time to be alive in the world.
Yet it is also a very exciting time to be alive.
People all over the world, despite the opposition of their governments, are taking initiative to bring about momentous and long overdue changes.
These winds of change are sweeping the planet, and they are not likely to stop at our borders.
If the people of Prague and Moscow can overthrow Soviet communism and bring about democracy and human rights; if the people of Soweto and Johannesburg can abolish South African apartheid and establish an egalitarian, multi-racial society; then, I feel sure, it is equally possible for us to dismantle U.S. militarism and replace it with attitudes and institutions of nonviolence.
It is my great hope, my silent prayer, that Betsy’s and my struggle to see that the fruits of our labor are used for nurturing and healing, rather than for killing and war, will somehow contribute to that process.
Following this, Christopher L. King had a piece promoting the Peace Tax Fund.
He described it as the brainchild of David Bassett, who some twenty years before had come up with the idea of allowing taxpayers to perform “alternative service” money the way conscientiously objecting draftees could with their labor.
King wrote that he was surprised to find little awareness of the bill in Quaker circles and described some of the work that he and his comrades were doing for the bill.
Those of us who meet each month and a quiet group of supporters in the surrounding communities believe in our consciences that war and militarism are wrong.
We don’t believe they should be the major tools of our foreign policy.
We sympathize with citizens like Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner of Colrain, Massachusetts, who have chosen to pay no taxes because they are pacifists.
We empathize with those brave souls who choose alternative lifestyles so they can keep their income below taxable levels.
It often means their children must learn to sacrifice at an early age.
It means stepping out of the mainstream culture.
Most of us don’t want to change our lifestyles radically or go to jail for our beliefs.
Some might argue that if we are true to our faith, we have no other choice.
On the other hand, there is a need to resist the fundamental tyranny that requires that we must become rebels if we wish to stand firmly for peace.
King’s article was pretty vague on the mechanics of what the Peace Tax Fund bill would actually accomplish, and it was written as if there were no reason why a conscientious objector to paying to war might not find it a satisfactory solution.
The issue included a brief review of the video Paying for Peace: War Tax Resistance in the United States, which was produced by Carol Coney.
Excerpt:
Among those interviewed are Brian Willson, a war tax resister and Vietnam veteran who in was run over by a train while blocking munitions shipments at the Concord naval weapons plant in California.
Also interviewed is Maurice McCrackin, a minister who was sentenced to jail for war tax resistance in ; Ernest and Marion Bromley, who have lived under the taxable income level to avoid paying taxes for military purposes; and Juanita Nelson, an early civil rights organizer who was the first woman to spend a night in jail for war tax resistance.
The issue included an op-ed from Allan Kohrman suggesting Quakers ought to be more patriotic, perhaps singing “God Bless America” during their Sunday meetings, and in particular should rethink their permissive attitude toward civil disobedience and war tax resistance.
“Many Friends seem to define civil disobedience as breaking any law they feel is morally wrong.
Some will not pay war taxes, testifying that God has called them to resist.
I would argue that paying taxes is a basic responsibility of citizenship, a function of my almost mystical relationship to my country.
God calls me to pay my taxes much as God calls others to resist them.”
That’s what “an almost mystical relationship to my country” will get you, I guess.
Another note in that issue concerned two Quakers in Germany — Christa & Klausmart Voigt — who had been prosecuted for war tax resistance.
“About 40 Friends from all over Germany attended the hearing, which was overseen by five judges.”
Klausmart had “placed his money in an account for a peace tax initiative,” and at press time they were still awaiting the court’s decision.
There was another note about the Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund in the issue, which described it this way: “When a request for assistance comes in, the committee that oversees the fund takes it under consideration, then notifies people who have agreed to participate of the amount each would need to contribute to cover the tax resister’s penalty and interest debt.
Contributions are not used to cover the tax liability itself.
The fund is administered in cooperation with the North Manchester (Ind.) Fellowship of Reconciliation.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
American Quaker war tax resistance reemerged in the Friends Journal in , with some real live resisters telling their stories and sharing the processes by which they had developed their methods of resistance.
The issue had several mentions of war tax resistance.
Editor Vinton Deming’s lead editorial concerned his annual confrontation of the “agonizing question” of what to do at tax-filing time.
Excerpt:
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
For many years I sought ways to protest.
I started by submitting a letter with my 1040 objecting to the large sums going to the Pentagon and the neglect of other needed programs. No one responded.
At other times I requested a refund so I might send a sum to a human service program not being adequately funded.
Nice idea, I thought, but IRS didn’t think so.
One year they told me the request was “frivolous,” and they tried to penalize me for asking.
My lawyer got them to drop the matter.
Then about 15 years ago I stopped filing a tax return altogether, choosing instead to write a letter to the president explaining why I was not willing as a Friend to pay for things like B-1 bombers, cruise missiles, or Star Wars.
The latter approach clearly got the attention of IRS officials.
Suddenly I was “playing in the big leagues.”
The government took me to court on two occasions and threatened to do the same to my present employer unless my back taxes, interest, and penalties were paid at once [see ♇ ].
Reluctantly, and after much soul searching, the Journal agreed to pay.
I released them to do so, being convinced we had resisted as long as we could and had explored all legal means.
Friends rallied to support us with financial gifts to help pay the large debt.
In I made my last monthly payment to the Journal.
I continue to struggle with IRS on this matter, which dates back to my tax resistance of .
The government disagreed with our math for what we believed was actually owed in back taxes.
My lawyer is maneuvering to try to prevent IRS from seizing my Individual Retirement Account, an argument to be decided by a judge later this year.
In more recent tax years I have filed and paid, trying to claim as many exemptions as possible and to limit the government’s take.
I have lobbied for the Peace Tax Fund Bill and supported others who are resisting.
David Shen also wrote of his war tax resistance in that issue.
Excerpts:
For 12 years, I have withheld a portion of my income tax from IRS.
I refuse to give money to the military to kill people.
There is too much need around us.
For the last three years, I have given this portion to My Brothers’ House, a homeless shelter my Quaker meeting supports in the inner city of Philadelphia.
Each year at tax time, I sigh deeply.
I know IRS may punish me.
And I know I stand on the side of life.
For these 12 years, IRS and I have been corresponding politely.
They send me notices; I write back.
Since I received notices of intent to levy and since they have not levied, I assume I have been lost in their millions of files.
I was surprised, then, when my college employer received the levy on my salary.
My first talks with IRS, lawyers, and F/friends left me feeling depressed and helpless.
IRS would get what they thought was theirs.
Then God intervened.
Inadvertently, my lawyer angered me.
In my anger, I took a position of reducing my wages to a level IRS could not levy.
(By law IRS must leave me a wage to live on.)
I had not considered it before, since doing so would cost me $2,200 — more than the levy’s $1,200.
I think Shen is being too modest here in giving God the credit for a bold decision that came direct from Shen.
I approached the college dean, my superior.
“Reduce my wages,” I said, “so IRS cannot satisfy its levy.”
But the dean shocked me.
Her superior, the vice president, would not allow me to reduce my wages.
I had to quit or pay the levy.
That sounds very familiar.
When I first started resisting, I went in to the human resources department of my employer to ask if reducing my salary below the tax line was an option.
They told me it was out of the question.
My response was to resign and become an independent contractor.
Shen took a different tack:
After a conversation with one of my students, I decided to continue teaching and pay the levy.
I would, however, also continue learning about love and Truth.
Could I reach administrators, I wondered, if I used Gandhi’s principle of selfsuffering?
I would direct suffering to me, and not to the college, by teaching at reduced income rather than quitting and leaving the college with 80 angry students.
I met with the administrator who wrote my paycheck, the department chair, the dean again, and then the vice-president.
Three respected my position (the vicepresident didn’t reveal his stand).
The payroll administrator blurted out, “Isn’t there a legal way you can do this (pay income tax without paying the military)?”
When I met with the president of the college, six weeks had passed and the levy was almost fully paid.
He was busy.
He startled me by agreeing with my right to take my position, and he would seek how I could do so at the college.
Two weeks later, he informed me he could not find a legal way to accommodate me.
I, though, was thrilled.
In our two conversations, the president and I connected.
We talked about my tax situation for 20 minutes and unexpectedly talked about his and my family for 90 minutes.
He was late for one of his appointments.
As I waved goodbye, he asked, “Stop in for coffee again, will you?”
What did I learn?
I am poorer by $1,200, but I am richer in intangible ways.
I feel in the flow of God’s will for me and feel connected to people — F/friends who support me and opponents who respect me.
I am invigorated and happy
It must be comforting to feel that “God’s will” is responsible for all the difficult and fuzzy decisions you make.
Whether you zig or you zag, whether things turn out well or ill, God’s in charge and if you’re willing to give Him all the credit, He’ll be glad to take all the blame.
The same issue published part of an interview that Susan Van Haitsma conducted with Paula Rogge .
Excerpts:
What were the motivating factors in your decision to become a tax
resister?
Deciding to refuse to pay taxes for war was a slow, gradual process for
me… As I grew older and attended Illinois Yearly Meeting, I heard more about tax resistance.
I met two men who had served time in prison for refusing to pay war taxes or resisting cooperation with the Internal Revenue Service.
I saw them as very committed people with a lot of integrity, and I could see that the yearly meeting supported them.
So, at some level I felt that tax resistance was the logical extension of my pacifist views, and I knew there was a community of support for tax resistance among the Friends and the wider peace community as well.…
How did you go about your tax resistance?
That first year, I think I owed one dollar.
I refused to pay the dollar
and sent a letter to the IRS explaining my position.
The next year, I increased the number of withholding allowances on my W-4 form so that I owed the IRS at the end of the year instead of vice-versa.
I began by refusing to pay 40–50 percent of my federal tax money because at the time, that was the approximate percentage being used to fund current and past wars.
Then, over time, I realized that of the 50–60 percent I was paying, 40–50 percent was still being used for military purposes, so I stopped paying the whole kit and caboodle.
I stopped paying all taxes because I had no control whatsoever over how the money was being spent.
In the last several years I’ve also stopped paying social security taxes because the government borrows from those funds to help cover the deficit, indirectly financing the defense system.
So, it’s been a gradual process of taking my tax resistance further and further.
I’ve always filed, and the IRS and I have always agreed about how much I’ve owed (now over $60,000 including penalties and interest).
At this point, I don’t feel led to stop filing.
For myself, I feel better being open about it, but I realize many tax resisters don’t file, and I respect their reasons for going that route.
Have you redirected your tax money?
The first couple of years that I did tax resistance, I put the money
aside in a bank account, assuming it would be seized.
It wasn’t seized right away, however, and I’m afraid the money was spent without having been donated as it should have.
But I learned, and since then I’ve made sure the amount of money owed in taxes and social security is donated every year to charitable groups.
I’ve had a lot of fun giving this money away.
Sometimes when I have sent the contribution, I have included a note explaining that the donation represents refused war taxes, and I have received supportive notes in return.
It’s a very empowering feeling to know that my money is doing some good.
Have there been special ways in which you would say your life has been
affected positively by your practice of tax resistance?
When I finished my residency, I worked in a migrant clinic for two years
in the Rio Grande Valley in Harlingen, Texas: a very conservative community.
The second year I was there, I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper explaining that I was a war tax resister and why.
The newspaper editor phoned me to make sure I really wanted the letter printed!
I said yes, and they did print it.
I was afraid of the response I might get from the community, but I felt it was important to be public about my stance.
After the letter was printed, the other doctors in Harlingen actually became much friendlier and began to take a certain interest in me.
I don’t think any of them agreed with the tax resistance, but they seemed to respect my position.
Several nurses and a nuclear medicine technician I hadn’t known before introduced themselves and expressed their support of my war tax resistance.
I didn’t get any negative reactions.
In , I began a medical family practice in Austin, Texas, along with another doctor.
The first year into the practice, the IRS sent notice that my wages would be garnisheed.
I asked that my salary be lowered to $100 per week, as that is the amount exempt from levy.
In order to supplement this reduced income, I began to work moonlighting jobs in various agencies: the city Health Department, Planned Parenthood, and the State Commission for the Blind, for example.
I had to find new moonlighting jobs every two years or so because that was about the length of time it usually took the IRS to catch up and begin attaching wages again.
Something good happened as a result of this.
I’ve had to explain to all potential employers that at some point the IRS would begin to levy my wages and when that happened, I would no longer be able to work for them.
When I explained this to the Texas Commission for the Blind during my interview, for example, they were quite taken aback, and I thought I probably wouldn’t get the job.
But, a few weeks later, they did hire me!
The woman who hired me said she understood why I was doing tax resistance and that she agreed with my convictions.
I came to feel a real sense of support and community there.
In , the
IRS
seized your automobile.
Could you describe what happened?
Well, some time before the car was seized, an
IRS
agent, accompanied by a law officer, came to our clinic to pay me a visit.
I could tell they were nervous and even a bit hostile.
But as we sat and talked, and I explained why I simply could not pay for war, I could see them both soften a little.
Toward the end of the interview, the officer began asking questions about our practice and commented that it was unusual for us to be located in such a poor neighborhood.
As they were leaving, I complemented the officer on his cowboy boots — he had on some kind of exotic boots — and I think he was tickled pink that I had noticed them.
He told me where he had gotten them.
It was kind of a humorous exchange and I felt very good about that.
We had related as people.
I figured that since my wages had become uncollectible and I had no bank account, eventually my car would be seized.
But even so, the morning it happened, it came as a bit of a shock.
My IRS agent came to the bouse and, poor woman, she was just shivering in her shoes, she looked so nervous.
She placed a sticker on the car and then asked if she could use my phone to call the tow truck!
I decided that they were going to tow it one way or another, so I invited her in to use the phone.
I had a sick patient in the emergency room at the time, so I took a taxi to the hospital right away.
Having a patient to worry about took my mind off the car long enough to ease my worry about the situation.
Then friends came forward and loaned me their cars without my having to ask.
A month following the seizure, the car was auctioned.
About 20–30 Quakers and other friends came and protested the auction, asking potential buyers not to bid on the car.
At least one potential buyer was convinced to refrain from bidding, but a used car dealer did, in the end, buy the car.
A week following the auction, a doctor I had once worked with phoned and said that he wanted to buy the car back from the car dealer and donate it anonymously to our practice.
That was such a wonderful surprise.
I was very moved because I respected him very much as a doctor.
I talked the offer over with friends.
Though I didn’t want the money going, even indirectly, to the IRS, I did want this doctor to have an opportunity to support the whole cause of war tax resistance, and this was his way of contributing.
I decided to accept the car.
It came back with new tires, looking much cleaner than it had before it was seized!
A friend of the doctor had also done a tune-up on it — and it was great.
I think the best part of this story is that when I tell it, people chuckle.
You see, it’s such a good example of how limited the power of the IRS is in the face of creative resistance.
It’s also an example of how our needs are often met in unexpected ways when we take a stand for peace.
I think these three experiences in particular — the return of my car, receiving the job at the Commission for the Blind, and the reaction to the letter in Harlingen paper — were all occasions when I felt that speaking out for truth actually opened doors and tore down barriers between other people and me.
When I was willing to take a stand for what I felt was right, I discovered a community of support I hadn’t realized existed.
Perry Treadwell also wrote about his war tax resistance in that issue.
Excerpts:
Today I received another one of those white envelopes from the Internal Revenue Service — the ones that tell me I failed to pay $35 in or $106 in and now I owe a lot more in penalties and interest.
I file them away with the other ones from .
But this time their arrival reminded me of an anniversary of sorts.
It has been .
I refused to pay for people to kill other people.
I resigned my tenured university position [see ♇ ] and drastically simplified my lifestyle so the fruits of my labors would not be used for war.
I still get that little twist in the stomach when those IRS letters come.
Sometimes the IRS actually raids a bank account or Individual Retirement Account.
However, I know that Friends are there should I ever need their support in not cooperating with a government whose only answer to conflict is violence.
I have been able to simplify my life to a point where I am below the taxable level.
Friends’ support has helped.
The richness of my life is proportional to my friendships.
That is what I have learned in , and that is what I pass on to others.
The issue had an obituary notice for Jane Palmer which noted that she “chose to live in accordance with the Quaker peace testimony and purposefully limited her income to avoid paying taxes that supported war efforts,” and one for Mildred Teusler Ringwalt which mentioned “her refusal to pay the portion of her income taxes she believed supported such [war] efforts.”
One of the events at the Friends General Conference Gathering in — the “Henry J. Cadbury Event, sponsored by Friends Journal” — was “an original production in story and song about the war tax witness of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner from Colrain, Massachusetts.
The stage performance won a favorable review from those who crowded the auditorium (despite the heat and lack of air conditioning!).
A video of the show was made and will be available at a later date.”
At the Illinois Yearly Meeting in (according to a Journal article ), “Sebrina Tingley explained not just the nuts and bolts of war tax resistance but also the spiritual call to do so” and “Bill Ramsey (American Friends Service Committee) told of his personal experiences involving war tax resistance.”
The lead editorial of the issue was all about the Peace Tax Fund Bill and an effort to get 10,000 people to write letters to Congress supporting it.
“The Peace Tax Fund Bill,” according to one supporter’s letter, “when it becomes law, will give us our religious liberty.
We’ll be able to pay our taxes in good conscience since we’ll be allowed to pay for peaceful projects rather than for war.”
Two letters-to-the-editor in the issue reacted to that project: one, by Marge Schier, thanking the Journal for aiding the cause — “We’re even more sure now that we can do it!”
— and the other, by Elizabeth Campuzano, giving the gist of the letter she had sent: “I told them that I voluntarily live below the federal poverty limit in order to avoid paying income taxes for war.
I told them that if this bill passes, I will raise my income in order to pay for education, road and bridge repairs, anti-monopoly enforcement, etc.” She added: “I think this is one of the greatest things FJ has ever done!”
International news
“a Spanish war resistance sticker: peace (paz) and bread (pan), not bombs”
A report about the previous year’s Canadian Yearly Meeting in the issue mentioned that “[t]he ad hoc committee on war tax concerns has found a method which potentially will allow Canadian Yearly Meeting to redirect the military portion of employees’ income tax remittances to the federal government’s Debt Service and Reduction Fund.
This is not an entirely satisfactory solution, but perhaps a first step.”
’s Canadian Yearly Meeting (according to a story in the issue) “reached joyful unity in a decision as an employer to stop remitting to Revenue Canada the military portion of taxes for those employees who request it.”
This decision follows several years of study, prayerful consideration, and the attempt during for use of legal means of expressing our conscientious objection to paying for the military.
The remittance will instead be paid into Conscience Canada, with consideration given to establishing in the future a specific trust fund.
The Fifth International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns was held in Spain in and was covered in the Journal in a report by Steve Gulick.
Excerpt:
About 70 activists from all over Europe and a number of other parts of the world gathered in Hondarribia, Spain, , to charge our batteries, to compare conditions in our various countries, to get to know each other, and to carry on business.
It was inspiring to meet, get to know, and work with war tax resisters and peace campaigners from all over Europe and from the United States, Canada, Peru, Iraq, and Palestine.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee raised money to make it possible for the Palestinian, Elias Rishmawi from Beit Sahour, West Bank, to attend.
The Iraqi and the Peruvian attenders are currently living in Europe.
One problem with the gathering — similar to the War Resisters International gathering that I attended in — was the difficulty of getting a diverse attendance.
Folks from India were unable to attend, for example, in part because of the distance.
I attended as a delegate from the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Other attenders from the United States were David Bassett and Marian Franz (National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund), Susan Quinlan and Larry Rosenwald (National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee), Cynthia Johnson (Women Strike for Peace), and Gerri Michalska (Pax Christi) — which gave some of us from the U.S. movement the opportunity to get to know each other.
The conference issued a number of public documents — the most important being the bylaw of a new non-governmental organization which will have consultative powers with both the UN and the European parliament: Conscience and Peace Tax International.
The role/goal of the organization will be to espouse the cause of those who take stands of conscience in relation to military expenditures — and also military service and issues of conscience and civil and human rights more generally.
A report back from the Germany Yearly Meeting mentioned war tax resistance matter-of-factly:
In our commitments to projects such as “alternatives to violence,” civilian peace service, war tax refusal, and in our decision to give financial support to the setting up of a Quaker Center in Moscow, Russia, we express that we not only ask ourselves “how do we see God?” but also “how do we do God?”…
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a resurgence of war tax resistance news in the
Friends Journal in ,
including an interesting series of articles on the voluntary simplicity / low
income lifestyle as a tax resistance tactic, and the beginning chapters of
the tale of Quaker war tax resister Priscilla Adams.
A note in the issue plugged the
“Conscience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account”:
Established in by the Nonviolent Action
Community of Cascadia, the account allows war tax resisters to set aside
refused military taxes in a secure fund. Deposits may be retrieved at any
time (to replace assets seized by the
IRS,
for example), and interest from the account is used to promote war tax
resistance and support peace and social justice activism. Depositors’ funds
are reinvested in socially responsible institutions assisting low-income
communities and minorities. The CMTC Escrow Account is the largest and most
geographically diverse war tax redirection fund in the United States.
War tax resistance is an act of civil disobedience, and resisters potentially
face fines, levies, and seizure of assets. However, the escrow account itself
is a trust fund, and as such is confidential and entirely legal. Depositor
records are not available to the
IRS,
and individual deposits are considered to be anonymous portions of a larger
fund invested in fully insured institutions. Participants receive records of
their transactions, annual statements, and a free subscription to
NACC’s quarterly war tax resistance magazine.
(I wouldn’t rely on any of that as solid legal advice. My understanding is
that the
IRS
sometimes treats “warehouse banks” like these as illegal operations that they
can seize wholesale under the theory that they’re being operated for money
laundering or tax evasion purposes.)
In a letter in the issue, William Kriebel
called out Quakers on their careless or politically-correct use of of language;
in particular he claimed: “There are no ‘war taxes.’ All income tax money goes
into the treasury without earmarking for the military. Taxation is a legitimate
power of any government. Our points of protest really are the decisions
(budget-making, appropriation) to use money out of the common fund for military
purposes.”
An article on the Quaker Council for European Affairs in the same issue noted
in passing that “conscientious objection to war taxes” was one of the “studies
for publication” that the organization had produced. Another article in that
issue noted that the National Association of Evangelicals had endorsed the
Peace Tax Fund bill:
“At first this was just a lonely struggle for the peace churches,” said
Marian Franz, director of the campaign, “then we got the support of the
mainline churches, which represent over 12 million people. Now we have
support from more conservative religious organizations, who, until recently,
had seemed to be unlikely allies.” Marian attributes the recently attained,
broad base of support to a change in tactics from an issue of conscientious
objection to an issue of religious liberties. Marian explained that “having
this broad base of support means that members of Congress, even conservative
members, take the issue more seriously.”
On , there was a benefit premiere
showing of An Act of Conscience, a documentary on
the Kehler/Corner house seizure and subsequent occupation. There was some
tangential Quaker involvement in the benefit (it was sponsored by several
organizations, including a regional AFSC office, and some Massachusetts
Quakers took part in the occupation), and the benefit screening was covered
in a note in the issue.
In the lead editorial in the issue,
editor Vinton Deming paid tribute to Eleanor Webb:
Eleanor Webb, who died , was clerk
of the Journal board when I was appointed
editor-manager in .… It was Eleanor… who
stood firmly in support of staff who resisted paying the military portion of
their federal taxes.
One of the feature articles in the issue
was written by David R. Bassett and told his story as “The Founder of the
Peace Tax Fund Movement.” Excerpts:
marks the 25th year since the
introduction of the Peace Tax Fund Bill in the
U.S. Congress. I
have been involved in the initiation of this legislation, a laborer in the
centuries-long effort to establish on earth the type of peaceful world
envisioned by Jesus and George Fox. I firmly believe that, on some
significant day in the future, some nation will for the first time pass a
Peace Tax Fund Bill, thereby establishing legal recognition of the right of
conscientious objection to the payment of military taxes. Once this is
accomplished, other nations will follow suit. I consider this goal as one of
the crucial and route-determining “trail-signs” on the path to that time and
place where the world will realize that ahimsa (soulforce)
is the preferred way to resolve conflict and to govern communities, and where
conscientious objection to war and other forms of violence will be considered
the norm.
[My] orientation as a conscientious objector to war and of preventing
preventable suffering impelled Miyoko and me, beginning in
, to wrestle with the fact
that each year we were paying (through our federal taxes) to support the
Viemam War and the military system generally. In fact, some 50 percent of
those tax moneys went to support
U.S. military
systems! One of my most graphic memories of that time was, while working many
nights at Queens Hospital in Honolulu, hearing
U.S. Air Force jet
tankers, fully laden with jet fuel, flying over the heavily populated part of
Honolulu on their way to Indochina.
Conscientious objection to payment of military taxes
In , with the Vietnam War continuing, we
moved to Ann Arbor to work at the University of Michigan. We became members
of the Ann Arbor Meeting and found there a number of people who were actively
grappling with the issue of whether to continue to pay the military portion
of federal taxes for a war that we opposed. I came to realize that any
nation’s military programs are made possible the, monetary resources that, in
the analysis, are extracted from the nation’s citizens by taxation. It also
became clear to me that one who was conscientiously opposed to military
systems must not allow his or her funds to be used for this purpose.
Surveying the pervasive role of our military system not only in our foreign
policies, but in its effects on our economy, our environment, and on the
nation’s culture and spirit, I carne to feel that this issue was central to
our times. Conscientious objection to payment of military taxes is as
important to be established as was the ending of slavery and of apartheid and
the establishment of women’s right to vote. At the same time, I held then,
and still hold, the view that the federal government is capable of carrying
out many beneficial and constructive programs and that I am willing, indeed
obligated, to pay my full share of taxes to support those programs.
I came to know that it would not be enough simply to focus on reductions in
military spending by influencing legislators and electing new ones (though
this was obviously necessary). The challenge was to extend the right of
conscientious objection to war to include not only one’s physical body, but
also one’s economic resources. I knew further that there had been repeated
resistance in the
U.S. courts to
such change and concluded that, while civil disobedience in this area
(i.e., war tax resistance) would continue to be essential, the
principal focus of attention should be to change the tax laws.
During the year , there was for me
a struggle with my conscience, not in regard to what I believe on this issue
but whether to take some action and what that action should be. Should I live
below a taxable income level? move to Canada? engage in war tax resistance?
take our civil disobedience actions into the judicial system? or attempt to
change the federal tax laws? Miyoko and I knew that to embark on any of these
actions would require great amounts of time and energy; that each course
would require some changes and risks, not all of which we could anticipate at
the outset; and that none were assured of “success.” I knew that to commit
the time necessary to move this issue forward might conflict with my hopes of
making progress in academic medicine and in research into the causes of
atherosclerosis. We gradually came to the view that it seemed wisest to try
to resist paying the military portion of our taxes and to begin to
take steps to bring about legislative change.
It was the quiet voice of conscience that kept nagging me almost every day, as
I found one or another reason not to take some action. Finally, in the
, I phoned Professor
Joseph Sax at the University of Michigan Law School and outlined to him the
basic idea: the need to change the federal tax laws so as to have Congress
grant legal recognition to the right of conscientious objection to
the payment of military taxes, while enabling the taxpayer to pay the full
amount of his or her tax with assurance that those tax monies would
not be used for military expenditures. Professor Sax sketched out how this
might be accomplished. Over a period of eight to nine months, with the
assistance of Michael Hall, we began the process of drafting what became the
World Peace Tax Fund Bill.
Other Ann Arbor Friends, Joe and Fran Eliot and Bob and Margaret Blood, had
been considering drafting a bill. A brief written for them by Thomas Towe (a
Quaker law student) proved a helpful resource. It was not hard to draw
together a working committee of seven or eight people during
to work on
this legislation and to take the initial steps in deciding how to bring the
bill to Congress, how to publicize it, and how to raise funds. We were
encouraged when Ann Arbor’s Interfaith Council for Peace decided to support
the legislative effort and appointed two very effective members to meet with
us on a regular basis.
The World Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in the
U.S. Congress on
, with Representative Ronald
V. Dellums as the lead sponsor, with nine other cosponsors. The Peace Tax
Fund office moved from Ann Arbor to the Florida Avenue Meetinghouse in
Washington,
D.C., in
. The bill was first introduced in
the Senate in , with Senator Mark Hatfield
as its sponsor. In the bill was renamed the
U.S. Peace Tax
Fund Bill. A dedicated staff, led for the past 14 years by Marian Franz, has
coordinated the lobbying effort. The orientation and the gifts that she
brings to her work are evident in her book, Questions That Refuse To Go Away.
A sidebar noted resources available from the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and also made note of the international conferences at which similar plans proposed in other countries are discussed.
The same issue also contains Clare Hanrahan’s article “Wholesome Poverty: A Revolutionary Adventure.”
Unfortunately, in the archived PDF, some of the opening paragraph is obscured by an insert card.
The article appears to begin with Hanrahan saying that she initially adopted a lower-income simple-living lifestyle in order to resist war taxes, but then came to believe that frugality and thrift and anti-consumerism and simplicity had a larger role to play in the pursuit of “a just and sustainable global community.”
It continues:
When I must work for wages, I do so as an independent contractor so that I can maintain control over tax withholdings.
I redirect a fair percentage of cash wages and many hours of volunteer time to support life-affirming projects at home and abroad.
Self-employment suits my temperament and has enabled me to develop skills and to pursue interests I may never have had the time for in a conventional career.
I’ve tried to be resilient and open to any honest labor.
If I’m asked what I do for a living, each day I can provide a different answer.
One day I might be gathering and saving seeds for next year’s garden or harvesting wild herbs for a winter tea; another day might be spent in household repair, community organizing, or researching and writing a grant for a nonprofit organization.
I’ve learned the wisdom in giving due time each day to labor of the mind and of the body and to quiet reflection that feeds the spirit.
I value my free time and open schedule far more than any accumulation of cash or property, security, or prestige.
The freedom to choose how I will be with each moment is a gift and a challenge that I count as my greatest wealth.
Living on the edge, more or less, over the years I have honed the skills and nurtured an attitude of wholesome poverty.
Meeting basic needs without a substantial cash flow has been least stressful when I’ve lived within a stable community where interdependence and cooperative values are practiced.
But during my nomadic years I learned to trust in the kindness of strangers and the serendipity of life.
I came to value the gifts of the pilgrim spirit and to recognize the importance of the itinerant wayfarer in the lives of the comfortably settled.
I’ve lived and traveled aboard small sail boats, in a tipi, in rural cabins, and in derelict inner-city housing, trading cleanup and repair for rent.
I’ve made do in the back of an old school bus and afloat on a homemade houseboat on a Mississippi backwater.
I’ve worked in a cooperative shelter for displaced women and children, with room and board as compensation, and I’ve battered for home and garden space by exchanging pet and plant care.
My primary transportation is the slow way.
As a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a bus rider, I keep a less frantic pace, and the more personal contact with those I encounter enriches the journey.
I can borrow a car or catch a lift from a friend if necessary, and by paying my fair share of the cost, the cooperative way serves each of us.
Nutritious food is available in surprising abundance if one is willing to look to unconventional channels:
I’ve participated in grassroots distribution networks of urban gleanings, intercepting the produce, grains, and other surplus foods otherwise lost.
Best of all, I’ve learned to grow my own food in community gardens and backyard plots whenever I had the opportunity.
As a worker-member at the local coop I claimed a significant reduction on food purchases, and by eliminating meat from my diet, the cost of my sustenance is affordable and sustainable.
Insurance against old age, disability, accident, or disease has never been an affordable option, nor one in which I place my faith.
Catastrophic illness or accident or the incapacities of age could happen to anyone.
Yet time and again, I’ve been sustained through economic precarity with help that comes at just the right moment.
This has happened so often that I live with a trust that keeps fear at bay.
I have learned to lean into the present moment, focused on the work before me, while keeping a well-honed sense of the adventure of it all and a very real faith in the unfolding process.
The inherent goodness of the universe has been made visible through the most unlikely of allies, and the travelers I’ve met along the way have been the wisest of teachers.
Peace Pilgrim, writing in her pamphlet, Steps Toward Inner Peace, recalled a visit to a city that had been her home:
In the poorer sections I am tolerated.
In the wealthier sections some glances seem a bit startled, and some are disdainful.
On both sides of us as we walk are displayed the things that we can buy if we are willing to stay in the orderly lines, day after day, year after year…
Thousands of things are displayed — and yet the most valuable things are missing.
Freedom is not displayed, nor health, nor happiness, nor peace of mind.
To obtain these, my friends, you too may need to escape from the orderly lines and risk being looked upon disdainfully.
Stepping outside the tyranny of “orderly lines” and daring to risk the uncertainties of disaffiliation can make of our very lives a revolution.
The way to the just and sustainable global community that we seek will open before us as we walk.
Another article in the same issue took the “voluntary simplicity” idea and ran with it.
Starting with Jesus’s one-sentence summary of his teachings — love your neighbor as much as you love yourself — the authors took this to mean “taking our fair share of global resources and no more.”
This starts with refusing war taxes because militarism is directly destructive of “our global neighbors.”
But that’s just step one of a six-step process.
Step two would be to imagine the world’s resources shared equally, which, the authors assert, means “an annual ‘fair share’ of just over $3,000 per person.”
But because the world is not using its resources in an environmentally sustainable way, step #3 is to reduce this fair share some more, to a more sustainable level: $1,800 per person per year.
But since that much money would go further in a place like the United States, where it’s relatively easier to live off the cast-offs of the wealthy, level #4 “challenges us to live on even less than level three, since we have an easier time doing so in a society with a relatively affluent public infrastructure.”
We’re not done yet.
Level #5 considers the non-monetary wealth most Americans enjoy because of the relatively high levels of medical care and education they have had access to.
“With such advantages (and others), we ought to be able to live on less resources than folks who lack education and have chronic medical problems.”
Finally, level #6 is for those who are not hampered by disabilities, encouraging them to sacrifice yet more so as to leave more for those who have to struggle harder.
Challenging? Certainly.
Even the authors only seem to have made it half way to step #2, limiting their income as a couple to $12,000 a year.
Some other choices they made were to “keep the majority of our savings in the form of non-interest-bearing loans” so as to avoid the sin of usury, and to “give away each year an amount equal to what we spend on ourselves.”
(A letter-to-the-editor in the issue criticized this radical simplicity, saying it smacked of “intelligent, able-bodied adults who consciously decide to let others subsidize” the benefits of society.
In particular: “In reducing their income to avoid paying taxes to support the military, this couple also avoids paying taxes that support the other half of the federal budget.
So, there goes their support for many of the roads they use, for medical research they might avail themselves of through that subsidized doctor, for other federally supported scientific and social research, for national parks, and so forth.
The authors are obviously well educated.
Their education was probably supported by local, state, and federal subsidies.
One wonders if they are repaying society for the educational benefit they’ve received.”)
Another brief note in the issue reported on the results of a “penny poll” that had been “conducted by Christian Peacemaker Teams in Elkhart, Ind.” and had indicated that those polled implicitly supported huge reductions in military spending.
A letter-to-the-editor from Marjorie Schier and Suzanne Day of the “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting War Tax Concerns Support Committee” published in the issue summarized the war tax issue as they saw it:
Resisting taxes
When a draft call finds some conscientious objectors unable to participate in war, the government not only has provided them alternatives, but also has proceeded to draft others who will participate.
It is individual conscience that makes the difference, not how the government allocates the recruits.
Some Friends have been unable to enlist, and some cannot voluntarily send dollars in federal tax for military uses.
Interacting with the federal government through tax resistance as witness for peace is more than symbolic; it can be earnest, meaningful religious conscience in action.
However, it does not change how the government allocates its resources, and efforts to witness for changed priorities are also significant.
Many Friends and others work for passage of the Peace Tax Fund Bill by the U.S. Congress because it would not only provide a legal opportunity for pacifists to pay their full federal tax without supporting war, but also give the government an indication of the numbers of citizens exercising this option.
Yes, the federal tax on telephone service is refused by many pacifists (with
a note of explanation accompanying the refusal and redirection of the money
for constructive purposes) because that tax was specifically reinstated to
support the war in Vietnam. Federal bookkeeping does not distinguish certain
tax streams for specific purposes, and has not since John Woolman wrestled
with this same issue. Nevertheless, many Friends are prompted to take a stand
for peace via taxes and thereby find a forum for disclosing that witness with
meetings, governmental representatives, families, and neighbors.
An obituary notice for Abram Bresel Goldstein in that same issue noted that
“[t]hough he worked briefly for the Internal Revenue Service, Abram left that
position during the Korean War to avoid aiding the collection of taxes for
war.”
On , NWTRCC and
the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sponsored
a seminar on “Corporate Conscience and War Taxes” at the Moorestown, New
Jersey, Meeting (according to a calendar listing in the
issue).
Priscilla Adams
The war tax resistance of Quaker Priscilla Adams became a cause célèbre that
played out over in the
Friends Journal starting in
. I’ll break with my chronological examination of the Journal for a while to follow this thread.
The issue introduces Adams and her
legal case:
Priscilla Adams, a war tax resister and member of Haddonfield
(N.J.) Meeting, is
challenging the
IRS
in court under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Her case is the
first of its kind to test conscientious war tax resistance since the passage
of the RFRA in . Priscilla and her lawyer,
Peter Goldberger, will challenge two points covered by the act: the
government’s use of penalties against war tax resisters for their stands of
conscience; and the lack of a government accommodation for conscientious
objectors to paying for war (like a Peace Tax Fund). The RFRA states that in
conflicts between the government and religious freedom, the government must
show compelling state interest and then use the least restrictive means
necessary. In this case, Priscilla is challenging the government’s lack of
recognition of conscience in response to the
IRS
assessing her taxes and penalties. She and Peter are arguing that under RFRA,
the IRS
should waive penalties for religious war tax resisters as long as they
recognize other forms of reasonable cause for noncompliance with the tax law.
They also are stating that the RFRA requires the enactment of something like a
peace tax fund for religious war tax resisters who are willing to accept a
reasonable accommodation, such as earmarking tax monies for non-warlike
purposes in the federal government. The case has completed its earliest
procedural stages and will be heard in United States Tax Court. Though no
date has been set, lawyers expect a trial date
. Priscilla has participated in
several clearness committees and is receiving guidance and support from
Haddonfield Meeting, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee,
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s War Tax Concerns Support Committee, the
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and family and friends.
The issue gave an update:
Priscilla Adams… will appeal the court’s decision rejecting her right to
refuse to pay taxes. The case went before the Philadelphia Tax Court, where
Adams presented an extensive outline of Quaker history and beliefs related to
war tax objections. The court’s decision states, “Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of does not exempt Quaker
from federal income taxes, despite taxpayer’s religious opposition to
military expenditures.” , Rosa Packard of Purchase
(N.Y.) Meeting and
Gordon and Edith Browne of Plainfield
(Vt.) Meeting also have filed
complaints in federal district courts seeking to protect their conscientious
acts of war tax refusal.
The issue mentioned her appeal:
Tax resister Priscilla Lippincott Adams… faced the Federal Court of Appeals
on . Her case against the
IRS for
penalizing her for her religious objections to paying the military through
taxes was dismissed in … The court
had the choice of hearing oral arguments or making a decision based on the
written briefs. In a positive turn, the judges heard oral arguments. Adams
said her lawyer, Peter Goldberger, passionately presented her case, “just
like a lawyer on T.V.”
The three judges will now make a decision, a process that could take anywhere
from six weeks to six months.
From there, to the Supreme Court, according to a
press release that formed the
basis for a
Journal news brief:
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the
U.S. Supreme Court
in support of its member, Priscilla Adams… who petitioned the high court in
, following unsuccessful efforts
in lower courts to obtain government accommodation for her conscientious
objection to paying war taxes by allowing her to pay federal taxes without
paying for military expenditures. Her employer, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,
supports religious witness by not forwarding the military portion of a
conscientious objector’s taxes to the
IRS. A
Peace Tax Fund, where tax dollars of conscientious objectors would be directed
exclusively to nonmilitary programs, is one possible solution to the dilemma
for adherents to nonviolence; a bill to establish a Peace Tax Fund has been
introduced in every Congress .
…Lower courts addressed the issue of accommodating war tax resistance only by
declaring that the government has a compelling interest in collecting taxes;
the courts have not dealt with the arguments that accommodation of
conscientious objection would be possible within the context of mandatory
participation in taxation. The Supreme Court has not heard any case that
raises these religious liberty questions under the
law.
By then it was too late, though. The issue noted that Adams’s Supreme Court appeal had been turned down:
On , the
U.S. Supreme Court
declined to hear appeals by Gordon and Edith Browne and Priscilla Lippincott
Adams to lower-court rulings that allowed the Internal Revenue Service to
impose late fees and interest for their conscientious refusal to pay the
military portion of their federal tax. The issue in this case was not paying
the tax when forced to do so by the
IRS,
but whether a “religious hardship” existed that should enable them to pay
without any penalties and interest. The lower-court rulings reaffirmed a
statement of the Supreme Court in that “The
tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge [it]
because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious
belief.” The Justice Department lawyers said that “Voluntary compliance with
the tax laws is the least restrictive means of furthering the government’s
compelling interest in collecting taxes.”… “We’re very disappointed that the
Supreme Court will not be taking the opportunity to reinforce religious
freedom and freedom of conscience,” said Marian Franz, executive director of
the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. “Congress seems like the most
appropriate place where this human right can be protected.”
Adams wasn’t going to give up though. Whether or not the government was going
to deign to make her war tax resistance legal, she was going to resist, and
the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was willing to help her. From the
issue:
The United States Department of Justice, Tax Division, is suing Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting for refusing to forward wages of an employee to the Internal
Revenue Service. The employee, Priscilla Adams, resists paying taxes for war
and the military on the basis of religious conscience. The lawsuit, filed in
, is a move to attain funds from
PYM
as recompense for taxes owed by Priscilla Adams, plus a 50-percent penalty
for not garnishing her wages as instructed by the
IRS in
. If the
IRS
succeeds,
PYM
would owe approximately $60,000.
On ,
PYM’s
Interim Meeting decided to respond to the lawsuit and defend its position in
court.
PYM
stated that to garnish Priscilla Adams’s wages would infringe upon her
religious beliefs, and
PYM
should not “be required to act as a collection agent for the government when
doing so will require it to violate key tenets of the Quaker faith.”
Thomas Jeavons,
PYM
general secretary, commented in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “About 50 percent
of our taxes pay for weapons and warfare… We have long sought the creation of
a Peace Tax Fund, a government fund for nonmilitary use, where taxes of
[those who regard paying for war as a violation of religious conscience]
could go. Legislation for this has been in Congress for many years. It should
be passed now.”
The issue spelled out the
Meeting’s legal argument:
On , Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting filed its answer to a Justice Department lawsuit that asks a $20,000
penalty to be imposed on them and seeks to make them the collection agent for
the government. The yearly meeting’s response makes dear its intention to
stand by its essential religious principles, and publicly defend the free
exercise of religion on all possible grounds, including constitutional and
statutory religious freedom defenses. The
IRS
contends that
PYM
must garnish the salary of one of its employees and members who refuses — in
keeping with longstanding Quaker convictions — to pay taxes that support war
and preparations for war. While the
IRS
could easily take other courses to collect the back taxes it claims are due,
instead the federal government is trying to force a church to collect these
funds for it, an action that would require this Quaker organization to
violate its own essential religious convictions regarding freedom of
conscience.
PYM
has refused to do so. The answer to the suit says that the government “asks
the court to assist it in violating the most fundamental religious principles
of an established church… Although those principles and the yearly meeting’s
reasons for its actions have been painstakingly explained to the [government]…
the complaint purports to set forth the history of this matter without even
mentioning
PYM’s
efforts at communication and conciliation. Further, the complaint labels the
Yearly Meeting’s religiously mandated actions as a ‘failure’ to submit to
government coercion, and brands the [Quaker] theological scruples as
‘unreasonable’ and deserving of harsh penalties.” The news release from
PYM
adds, “Quakers have long been known for their religious pacifism, opposition
to war, and support of religious freedom and freedom of conscience.
PYM
regrets that being true to its faith has now brought us into conflict with
the government. The Quaker organization sees itself as defending freedom of
religion and freedom of conscience — and not just for itself, but for all
those who desire to be both good citizens and people of faith. While
PYM
regrets the need to resort to legal action, it looks forward to a full airing
of the issues involved in a public forum where both the sound reasons and
religious principles that guide this Quaker organization’s actions may be
upheld.
PYM’s
defense will rest on the constitutional right to freedom of religion
generally, and particularly as upheld and restated in the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of .”
The issue reported on how far
they’d gotten with that argument:
On , A federal judge ruled that
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting must comply with a levy on the wages of war tax
refuser Priscilla Adams, but rejected a 50 percent penalty desired by the
Internal Revenue Service.
U.S. District
Judge Stewart Dalzell agreed with the Quaker argument that complying with the
levy “substantially burdens its exercise of religion,” because, as
PYM
General Secretary Thomas Jeavons earlier testified, the organization
“considers it a sacred duty to support the conscientious actions of its
individual members, especially in such historic witnesses as the Peace
Testimony.” Judge Stewan Dalzell also agreed that the
PYM
defense “raised novel and important questions,” thus demonstrating in this
instance that the previous refusal of
PYM
to comply was not a frivolous activity. But he disagreed that the
IRS had
practical alternative means to collect taxes from Priscilla Adams. The
government should not be required “to engage in a time-consuming, and
possibly fruitless, scavenger hunt for other assets.” In
, the Third
U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals had already rejected Priscilla Adams’s claim that the government
could devise a means for earmarking taxes for nonmilitary expenditures,
stating that there were “particularly difficult problems with administration
should exceptions on religious grounds be carved out by the courts.”
That issue also noted:
Film students from Brooklyn Friends School are directing and producing a
video documentary about Quaker peace activist Priscilla Adams. The students
came to Friends Center in Philadelphia to interview her about how her
religious beliefs led her to refuse payment of taxes in order to avoid
contributing to military funding. The students also interviewed George Lakey,
head of Training for Change, and Gene Hillman, adult religious education
coordinator for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. This documentary film may be an
entry for Bridge Film Festival, which is open to middle and upper school
students at Quaker schools worldwide.
The issue noted that the film had
been made — a 16-minute short titled A Need to Witness. And hey, look — it’s on-line:
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
At Riversong HouseWright, war tax resister Robert Riversong recalls
the Randy Kehler / Betsy Corner house seizure of
in the context of Gandhi’s “constructive programme” theory. He also shares
many photos from the protests that accompanied the seizure, and from the
cooperative home-building project that grew out of it.
The surge in the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship
seems to have slowed
after having accelerated for several years.
The recent Republican tax rate cuts were offset by a growing economy such
that while corporate taxes have fallen so far , individual income taxes have risen enough to
more than make up for it.
Rebel neighbors in McKillop, Sasketchewan, have organized to refuse to pay property taxes after they were nearly doubled by their Rural Municipality council.
“None of us really cared before,” one of the resisters said.
“We just shut up and paid our taxes. But something like this is bringing us together.”
The Wendell Post, a cute, typewriter-layout-style zine that covered the scene in Wendell, Massachusetts for several years, not infrequently featured articles on war tax resisters.
The following example, an article by Floyd Borakove, comes from its issue:
Wendell may be unique in the high concentration of war tax resisters.
War tax resisters’ techniques vary from intentionally keeping their income below the taxable level to openly refusing all Federal tax.
Many of us have experienced the collection of penalties and interest.
At times these penalties and interest amount to a great burden and makes it more difficult for our witness.
In the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund was started by members and friends of the North Manchester Fellowship of Reconciliation.
The founders invited sympathetic people to form a broad base that would help sustain and support war tax resisters.
Resisters needing assistance with interest and penalties which have already been collected by IRS submit requests to a committee for review.
Documentation must include a copy of the IRS collection form, [and] a copy of their original letter of conscience to IRS or Congress.
Approximately three times per year the committee combines requests for reimbursement and sends out an appeal to all names on their mailing list.
The fund does not reimburse any taxes collected, just the penalties and interest.
For example, if the requests totaled $2000 and the fund has 500 names they ask participants to send $4.00 ea[ch].
To date the fund has reimbursed over $50,000 to more than 100 war tax resisters in 24 states.
Stephen Broll is behind bars, the latest of a goodly number of Wendell citizens who have been jailed in recent months for vigiling in Colrain.
The Wendell father, teacher, Post staffer, and war tax refuser violated parole on a conviction of “wanton destruction of property.”
(He had helped repair — not destroy — the roof of the Colrain house seized by the IRS from Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, but the roofing work was without authorization from its new inhabitants.)
His parole violation was in keeping with the theme of nonviolent tax refusal that has been a large part of his life for the past dozen years or more: vigiling last summer against a court injunction, “too near” the Colrain house with other protesters, then refusing to leave when warned to by police.
Also convicted with him for that episode of nonviolent expression of belief were Bob Bady, Michael Klein, and Vince O’Connor.
A domino-arrangement of court and administrative decisions now keeps Randy and Betsy out of their house.
There’s a chance this latest injunction will be struck down by the same legal processes that issued it, once the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly are weighed more carefully against the new occupants’ disputed claims to the land — owned by the land trust — which Steve and his companions were vigiling on.
Meanwhile, for their dubious crime and the parole violation it represented, Steve and Bob started serving 15-day sentences on .
A patient and procedurally liberal judge, brought in from another jurisdiction, heard the trial.
This removed the tension of a heavy court schedule.
As the arresting officers testified, and as Steve and his codefendants spoke, the elements of the growing knot of issues — war tax refusal itself, the IRS’s seizure of property, and the ongoing civil disobedience in Colrain — shone clear.
In an atmosphere of the best the law has to offer, the IRS’s reliance on threat and obedience stood in a kind of contrast.
There is no provision for conscience in the realm of federal income taxation.
My mind wandered as I wondered: does it injure all people to define pacifists as outlaws?
Does this represent the sort of aggression against the spirit that precipitates physically violent crimes — child abuse and drive-by shootings, to name the current showcased symptoms?
The Selective Service has provisions for conscience; why not the Internal Revenue Service?
Money has the curious effect of “laundering” conscience; maybe that’s why the American people haven’t insisted on a Peace Tax Fund.
In that courtroom, the hidden essence of our governmental/legal system showed itself to be distrust and delegation of authority — kind of a Cold War against the conscience — and while some of us felt it, and even saw the hint of an alternative right in that courtroom, I think others had to fight not to.
The IRS, by failing to recognize that land trust property is not the usual kind of property that can be simply bought and sold with a direct exchange of money and pieces of paper, made a big mistake in seizing this particular property in its showcase action.
Defendant Vince O’Connor made it clear that the question of who has the right to control the land around the house is, at the very least, an unsettled question, injunction or no injunction.
The presiding judge had to rather lamely pass the buck by saying the copy of the injunction he held was a “certified copy” — therefore legal.
He couldn’t question the merits of the injunction, he said.
Even if a court someday upholds that injunction — or confirms the IRS seizure and auction of the house as well as the leasehold — the question will remain, in a space beyond legalism: if a land trust is created specifically to introduce stability into property use and ownership, by requiring transactions to take more than just a willing buyer and a willing seller, can even a branch of the federal government override it?
Many land trusts are created to modify the excesses of the free market; by what authority may the government smash them?
Finally, Steve’s court case spotlighted the ratcheting-up of the drama between our authoritarian tax system and people who simply ask to be allowed to live free with their consciences intact.
The law enforcement apparatus finds itself having to choose between disobeying its own strictures and locking up for ever-increasing periods of time people expecting/demanding to be permitted to live less violent lives.
State police and courts are apparently learning to accept the sincerity of this dogged new kind of tax “criminal” in Colrain; there are no fire hoses or Mace attacks.
It’s impossible to predict, but maybe some real gains are being made here in Western Massachusetts to bring authority back home, shifting toward personal and away from delegated risk, toward the inner and away from the institutional… toward a more complete society of more completely functioning (and deeply non-violent) people like my friend Steve Broll.
Jonathan von Ranson
The edition of the Wendell Post included a letter to the editor from Zenya Wild, who was participating in the Colrain occupation of the home of war tax resisters Betsy Corner and Randy Kehler, which had been seized by the IRS:
I sit in the little house on Shelburne Line Road in Colrain, thinking of the changes the past few months have brought about in my life.
When Betsy’s and Randy’s house was seized by the IRS, I faced the decision of whether to volunteer to take my turn house-sitting until they returned.
I had not paid federal taxes myself for several years but I had been very quiet about it.
It was a protest, and certainly one of value, since at least no part of the tiny amount of money I make was circulated through the military.
But I think all along I knew that it was incomplete for me.
Something held me back from more active protest.
The first decision to occupy was an enormous one.
For weeks I thought about the risks to myself and my family.
I played out worst-case scenarios in my head.
I thought about what effect my political work would have on the work I do for Wendell.
And I thought about all the people who died in the Gulf War, who are still not counted as casualties by our government.
Especially I thought about all the children who are continuing to die in Iraq.
In the end, frightened or not, I decided I needed to take the step of occupying the house, and I needed to accept whatever degree of publicity that that action brought with it.
So when the time came around again for the Wendell group to occupy the house, I thought I would once again agonize over the right thing to do.
I was in for some surprises.
One was that this time the decision was easy.
Once one decides that it is wrong to travel to foreign countries and hurt people, many things fall into place.
Life becomes very simple.
And that is the second and most delightful surprise.
Against the clarity of conscience, many other complexities of this modern life become simple.
It becomes an exhilarating exercise in personal authenticity to weigh everything against the standard of whether it is or it is not in line with what I know to be right, and whether it furthers or hinders my ability to live and speak according to my conscience.
How about ownership of land?
Ownership of animals?
Cars?
Parenting?
Use of electricity?
Gardening?
My computer?
Many things are in question, and changing, and I have never felt so alive.
The simple act of tax refusal is teaching me in midlife so much about how to live.
[“We have no need to stockpile nuclear weapons and threaten our planet Earth under the guise of ‘security.’ We cannot find a reason to help finance the death squads of right-wing governments in Central America.” This is part of a statement by Bob Bady and Patricia Morse, war tax resisters from Western Massachusetts.
The house which they built with their own hands over a ten-years period was put on the auction block by the IRS, for taxes owed the federal government.
A bid was made by two unknown persons and the property sold to them.
Bob and Pat have been given a 180 day period in which to “redeem” their place and then apply the repurchase price against the still due taxes.
The couple say they will not do this, and will also resist any attempt to remove them from their house by means of a nonviolent occupation.
By the time this issue is put in the mail, the fate of another house, that belonging to Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, may have been decided.
They and their nine-year-old daughter, Lillian, are neighbors of Bob, Pat, and her seventeen-year-old son.
Randy and Betsy’s house was auctioned on , but in that case the IRS ended up as the owner of the house, after “bids” in the form of Nicaraguan currency, canned goods for the poor, and offers of community service, were turned down by the IRS.
They, too, will prepare for a Gandhian nonviolent occupation if the IRS attempts to remove them.
Acts of civil disobedience against war taxations take many forms.
Karl Meyer sees the value of tactical efforts to avoid a date with the IRS; Randy, Betsy, Bob, Pat and many in the Catholic Worker movement find it imperative to inform the IRS directly of any such actions, and welcome others to write for more information on the possible Satyagraha campaign, American style, which may occur if the IRS attempts to evict them from their homes.
Please contact: War Tax Refusers Support Committee, c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
Karl Meyer is always happy to discuss questions and problems concerning war tax resistance.
He may be reached at: 1460 W. Carmen, Chicago, IL 60640, (312) 784‒8065.
―Eds. Note]
By Karl Meyer
In , when Mohandas Gandhi searched for a tactic of civil disobedience that would galvanize India in the struggle for self-rule, he recognized that the use of salt was a necessity at the heart of Indian village life, yet salt production was a monopoly controlled by the British rulers.
Every time Indians bought salt they paid a burdensome tax to the British.
He began a campaign for self-rule with a march to the sea, to take untaxed salt from it, in violation of British rule.
His campaign was rooted in resistance to taxes on an elemental commodity of everyday life, just as our own American Revolution began around resistance to a British tax on tea.
Striking at these basic taxes struck at the heart of British rule.
In , in Gandhi’s India, jail was the ordinary ultimate sanction for enforcing government control.
Death was the extraordinary ultimate sanction.
During the salt campaign, hundreds of satyagrahis were beaten with clubs when they tried to enter a saltworks.
In two months of , more than 32,000 Indians were convicted of political offenses and jailed.
Gandhi once said, “Rivers of blood may have to flow before India gains her freedom, but it must be our own blood.”
In North America [today], the system of control seems far more benign than this.
The front line agencies of government coercion, which are Selective Service and the IRS, believe that they can control U.S. dissenters adequately by compiling computerized data about them, their whereabouts, their means of education, their livelihood and their financial assets.
With this information the enforcement agencies can apply adequate pressure with civil penalties, by withholding benefits or by seizing a punitive share of income or assets.
They think they can pin us down while they extract our teeth, and then allow us to gum our verbal protests as much as we please.
In , at the height of the Vietnam War, we started a tax refusal campaign to beat the withholding system by claiming extra allowances on W-4 Withholding Exemption certificates.
It worked. Hundreds of refusers began to do it.
At first in , the IRS tried to squash that movement by putting a handful of resisters in jail.
But that didn’t work well.
Putting conscientious war tax refusers in jail created martyrs, martyrs created publicity and publicity created more resisters.
So the IRS stopped putting us in jail and began to search around for better control tactics.
I think they understood the potential of classic jail-going civil disobedience better than we do.
Today, the U.S. government basically declines to imprison war refusers for their ordinary crimes.
Hundreds of thousands refuse to register for the draft — none is in jail today.
Thousands openly refuse taxes for war — none is in jail today.
The Warfare State
In America today, the internal systems of control by the warfare state have evolved to more benign forms.
For many people this apparent benignity masks the horror of reality.
The U.S. administration and Congress have repeatedly said: “Rivers of blood may have to flow before we suppress the struggle for self-rule in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, but that will be all right because it will be their blood.
North Americans will not care because we will see to it that none of their own blood will flow.
We will control them with media manipulation and with electronic information gathering and processing systems.” They believe that they will control adequately the society of the future by gathering information efficiently and processing it instantaneously.
They will have information about the flow of every dollar that represents our personal belongings and our personal productivity.
These streams of dollars will be the blood of the future.
Once the IRS has identified and located every vessel of human interchange through which they flow, the tax gatherers will tap those vessels where they please and gather the blood of our productivity and our belongings, without a word of acquiescence or protest on our part.
The machine grinds on, impervious to picketing and ordinary letters of protest.
It ignores them because they have no numbers and produce no dollars.
Perhaps electronic information is not bad in itself; but if we allow these systems to divest us of our human work, and to use it to harm people in other countries, the end of this stream of dollars will flow red with human blood, as it does today in Salvador.
(Excerpted from a longer article, “Satyagraha in 1984: Gandhian Resistance to War Taxes in the Age of the Computer.”)
By Betsy Corner and Randy Kehler
The federal government’s policies regarding nuclear weaponry and military interventions contradict our deepest moral and spiritual values — values which, we believe, should apply as much to public as to private life.
We are not religious in a formal way, but we do struggle to accept and live by the proposition that we are all children of God.
We take this to mean, in a very real sense, that all people everywhere are our sisters and brothers whom we must try to love and, in any case, refrain from deliberately injuring.
For us, this applies especially to the poor, including our sisters and brothers in Central America who are suffering and dying as a result of U.S. policies and U.S. arms, and our sisters and brothers here in our own country who are hungry and homeless while our government pours billions of dollars into an insane nuclear arms race that threatens to kill us all.
How can we willingly give money to the federal government when we know that it will be used to cause, or threaten, so much harm to other members of our human family?
Our answer is that we can’t.
We are convinced that our government’s policies are not just immoral, but also illegal.
The United States is a signatory to international treaties that prohibit the manufacture of genocidal weapons of destruction and forbid the use of force to overthrow foreign governments.
According to the U.S. Constitution, these treaties have the same binding force as domestic law.
Yet we continue to produce more and more nuclear bombs capable of destroying all life on earth, and we persist in sending arms and material to groups attempting to topple governments deemed “unfriendly” to U.S. interests.
Who is the real lawbreaker — we who refuse to pay for these criminal activities, or the U.S. government, and their tax collectors, who carry them out?
The Nuremberg Principles that resulted from the trials of Nazi war criminals, and which were subsequently ratified by the U.S. government, hold that individual citizens who commit or collaborate with “crimes against humanity” must be held responsible for their actions even though they were “only following orders” or “only obeying the law.”
We believe that preparing for nuclear war, and waging actual war against people in countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador, are both crimes against humanity — and that helping to pay for them is a form of collaboration.
We view our war-tax resistance not only as serving our country’s best interests, but also as highly consistent with the rich American tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience — a tradition that includes the Boston Tea Party, the early colonists’ refusal to pay British stamp taxes, Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes during the Mexican-American War, and the refusal by black Americans to obey racially discriminatory laws during the Civil Rights Movement of .
Nonviolent acts of protest and noncooperation have always been crucial to the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
Are we nervous about the possibility of losing our house? Sure we are to some degree.
We don’t want to lose our house any more than anyone else does.
It has been our home for ten years and it represents the only material security we have.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by U.S.-sponsored bombing in El Salvador or by U.S.-sponsored terrorism in Nicaragua?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash if the nuclear arms race is not halted and reversed?
If, by risking the loss of our home, we can raise one more voice in protest against all this needless destruction, then it will be worth it.
When we grow anxious about the consequences of our war-tax resistance, it also helps to remember the good that comes from redistributing our federal tax money.
Last year Don Mosley, who coordinates a project called “Walk In Peace,” which raises money for people who have lost arms and legs in Nicaragua, wrote to us:
“Your contribution all by itself is nearly enough to finance the complete rehabilitation (including the making of artificial limbs) of five people.
I hope you can grasp that in human terms…”
For us, that’s what it all comes down to: human terms.
And that’s what keeps us going. At this point in our lives, we can’t not resist the federal government’s taxes.
The issue of The Catholic Worker reported on the inspiring tax resistance campaign of the mostly-Christian Palestinian village of Beit Sahour against the taxes collected by the Israeli occupation:
Peaceful Tax Resistance in Beit Sahour
By Terry Rogers
The Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, founded in East Jerusalem in by Mubarak Awad and others, offers a wide range of educational programs and research in the history, theory, and methodology of nonviolence for Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general.
In , the PCSNV published an analysis of the 22 most recent leaflets of the Unified Command of the Intifada.
These leaflets, printed anonymously every two weeks, give specific instructions to the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Center’s study, which counted the frequency with which various actions were urged, found that only 9.6% of the leaflets’ instructions proposed violent acts.
The rest included such nonviolent actions as strikes; boycotts of Israeli jobs, goods, and services; tax resistance; participation in popular committees; cancellation of celebrations; surrounding and protecting children who are beaten by soldiers; and others.
The authors of the study conclude: “It has not been proven that the Intifada is a nonviolent struggle, only that violence is not necessary for the intifada to continue.”
The tax resistance of the village of Beit Sahour in the West Bank is a recent example of one of these nonviolent tactics and has attracted widespread international attention.
A small middle-class village of 12,000 near Bethlehem, Beit Sahour is a close-knit community of extended families, most of whom have lived there for generations.
The population is eighty percent Christian, and its economic base consists of several hundred small family enterprises.
Residents of Beit Sahour have the highest percentage of university graduates of any village in the occupied territories.
Since the occupation, they have a history of strong political organization, and many cooperatives and neighborhood committees have been established there.
Recently, the village has been known for welcoming Israeli peace activists into its homes and churches, organizing dialogues and joint peace demonstrations.
The commitment to tax resistance in Beit Sahour began in and intensified in .
The rationale for tax resistance in the occupied territories has several bases.
The sales tax, or VAT, was imposed by Israel after the occupation; its legality is disputed by Palestinians because, according to international law, an occupying power has no right to impose new taxes.
Also, Palestinians under occupation maintain that only a small portion of their taxes pays for the limited public services in the occupied territories, and Israel cannot prove otherwise as it does not publish a budget of its income and expenses there.
Finally, since Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip cannot vote, they have no control over taxes or public expenditures.
A statement from Beit Sahour on stated, in part:
“We will not finance the bullets that kill our children, the growing number of prisons, the expenses of the occupying army.
We want no more than what you have: freedom and our own representatives to pay taxes to.”
Tax resistance is risky, for without a certificate that all taxes have been paid one cannot, for example, register a car, renew a drivers’ license, travel out of the country, register the birth of a child, or receive permission to bury a family member.
Nevertheless, significant numbers of Palestinians under occupation have refused to pay taxes or file tax returns.
Beit Sahour was recently singled out for harsh collective punishment as an example to others in the territories.
, the village was declared a closed military zone.
For the first five days a 24-hour curfew was imposed, and the subsequent curfew was 5 pm to 5 am.
Many telephone lines were cut, soldiers were posted on rooftops throughout the town, and press, solidarity, and religious groups were denied entrance, including the consuls-general of six Western European countries.
Under military protection, tax authorities visited ten residents daily, confiscating and sometimes destroying business and personal property that was sometimes worth much more than the taxes owed.
At times property was taken from the members of the extended families of tax resisters.
Three hundred families had property confiscated and five hundred other families had their bank accounts frozen.
Much property was receipted, but not all receipts were signed and some were receipted only as boxes.
Forty Sahouries were jailed for nonpayment of taxes and forty-two placed in administrative detention.
To protect tax authorities during these raids, the soldiers forced drivers of passing cars to park their cars in a ring around the house being raided, and commanded passersby to stand in a ring outside the cars.
Residents of Beit Sahour described the tax raids as harsh and arbitrary.
Some who had paid taxes were mistakenly raided and some of the soldiers taunted and threatened family members and children during the raids.
On , the United Nations General Assembly, in a nearly unanimous resolution, condemned the Israeli government for the tax raids in the occupied territories.
By the end of the siege, much of the productive base of the village had been destroyed, yet the mood there was one of celebration.
On , with the soldiers gone, observers heard whistles, chants, and cheers echoing through the streets.
In their all but empty homes, residents who had been raided spoke proudly of the village’s steadfastness and the villagers’ mutual support.
In recognition of the devastating effect of the siege and confiscations, the Palestine Central Council, meeting in Baghdad, voted to ask contributions from PLO members and employees to help compensate the villagers.
Israeli peace activists, many of whom have made friends in Beit Sahour through the previous months of dialogue, have also shown solidarity.
After the siege, they were invited to a service for peace in the Beit Sahour Roman Catholic Church, and though sixty were turned back by soldiers at roadblocks outside the town, a dozen who had spent the night there were able to take part in the service.
Their spokesman, Hillel Bardin, told the two thousand Palestinians in the congregation,
“There is a group of Israelis here with me today who’ve known you for a long time; who’ve had the honor of meeting you, talking with you, learning about you in a way few Israelis have…
I admire the courageous people of Beit Sahour for coming together today to call for peace between our peoples.”
The Mufti of Jerusalem also attended the service, and the presence of a Muslim holy man in a Christian church was a sign of increased unity among Palestinians themselves.
Another expression of support for Beit Sahour was an Israeli gift of a truckload of tree and vegetable seedlings, delivered .
Some Israelis have held protest demonstrations during the selling of the confiscated goods at the Ben Gurion airport.
Israeli and Palestinian women are protesting the harsh exposure to cold at the Anata Detention Center where 35 tax resisters from Beit Sahour are being held.
Members of Yesh Gvul, Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories, were stopped by an army roadblock when they tried to make a solidarity visit on , but hundreds of Sahouris arrived by side paths to greet them outside the town.
The increasing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis who are organizing against the occupation, both jointly and in their own communities, are drawing from, and making a significant contribution to, the theory and practice of nonviolent struggle.
Military authorities have told the villagers of Beit Sahour to expect another tax siege within six months, but there is no sign that the Sahouris will change their stand.
International pressure and expressions of concern are an essential part of the protection and encouragement desperately needed by Palestinians and Israelis working for a just and peaceful solution to this conflict.
Although acts of civil disobedience and conscientious objection take varied forms in our country, few in recent memory have resulted not only in loss of freedom but of hearth and home as well.
It is perhaps the latter event which placed North Americans closest to those who lose homes through eviction, war and other forms of violence.
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner were arrested in , after the Colrain, Massachusetts home, where they lived with their daughter Lillian, was forcibly seized by the federal government for non-payment of taxes.
Betsy was later released, while Randy remains in jail as we go to press, to serve a six-month sentence for contempt of court.
Their home was put on the auction block in , with the federal government ending up as the only bidder and subsequent “owner” of Randy and Betsy’s place, but it has taken two-and-a-half years of other legal maneuvers before they have finally been removed and charged with contempt, despite strong local support and publicity.
Betsy and Randy lease the land on which their home is situated through the Valley Community Land Trust, a non-profit corporation using land for conservation, garden and agricultural purposes, and for affordable housing.
Like many resisters who pay local and state taxes, Randy and Betsy are in disagreement with federal levies used for nuclear weapons production, military intervention and other acts deemed criminal by international law.
Despite all talk of arms reduction carried out in saw Congress giving its approval to $270 billion dollars for the military budget.
The court ruling in favor of ownership by the United States further stated that the government had the right to padlock the house since it “had proper title to, and was entitled to possession of” the home in which Randy, Betsy and Lillian have lived for the last twelve years.
When asked in their court appearance if they planned to reenter their home, Betsy agreed not to when released, and Randy added, “It is my intention neither to occupy or not occupy my house.
It is my intention to oppose the use of my tax dollars for killing and preparations for war.”
But friends, neighbors and other sympathetic supporters have, since the time of the seizure, occupied the house.
On the following morning, for instance, a group of fourteen resisters, including the indefatigable 84-year-old Wally Nelson, who has been “just saying no” to federal war taxes , removed the government’s padlocks and remained in the house for several days, risking arrest in doing so.
As of this date, these occupations continue.
The eloquent response of Betsy Corner to those who have asked if they were “nervous” about the loss of their home, illumines one method of solidarity for these hard times:
“Sure we are. We’ve lived here for over twenty years, and our twelve-year-old daughter Lillian was born here.
We love this place, and the land, and our neighbors too.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by our brutal bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Panama and Iraq or by the US-sponsored bombing that’s going on at this very moment in El Salvador?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash or irradiated forever, if we don’t stop building nuclear weapons and generating more and more nuclear waste?”
For further information on Betsy and Randy’s current status and ways of assisting their efforts, please contact:
War Tax Refusers Support Committee (WTR), c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Rd., Deerfield, MA 01342, (413) 774‒2710 or (413) 773‒7427.
―Jane Sammon
The same issue had an additional article about war tax resistance:
War And Taxes
The CW listed some boycotts suggested as one route to follow “the little Way" of peace.
Now, as the income-tax-returns season is in full swing, is the time to urge a further boycott — of the Internal Revenue Service.
Once we know about the military pursuits in the Persian Gulf over the past year…, surely we must say “No!" to the government as clearly and as concretely as possible.
Nor can the Persian Gulf War be seen as an isolated incident, a regrettable aberration from national policy.
The very existence, for instance, of a “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, shows how deep-seated is the pursuit of violence in the practices of the US government.
The fact of the matter is that more than half the money collected by the IRS goes to pay for war or to prepare for war.
According to the old adage, “Death and taxes are inevitable” but, according to our faith, murder is not allowed.
True, our Lord did say, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed” (Matthew 24:6 and Mark 13:7);
He did not add though, that we should take an active part to promote them.
And, on the mundane level of financial considerations, modern warfare would be rendered well nigh impossible if nobody would foot the bill.
During the war in Vietnam, someone who promoted tax resistance was once asked what to do about the money to be withheld.
He answered, “Better to flush it down the toilet as waste-paper than to pay for the war.”
In reality, though, practicalities about the dollars and cents demanded for taxes cannot be quite so simply swept aside, nor considered only at the moment of the due date.
Peter Maurin taught a full life of voluntary poverty when he interpreted Jesus’ enigmatic reply about taxes with “The less you have of Caesar’s, the less you have to render unto him.”
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner are now paying the price, in prison, and through the loss of their home to the IRS.
The War Resisters League has proposed the Alternative Revenue Service as a means to hold and channel monies not handed over to the government.
These are all “hard" suggestions which reveal the iron grip of taxes.
Even if success for the tax resistance movement is not imminent, any withholding of federal income taxes marks a break in the deadly power of the economic system in which we are all complicit.
It is a system whose principal “product” is war, whose motive is profit, whose organizing principle is usury.
Usury (charging interest on a loan to make money from money) is the word Peter Maurin emphasized in his discussions on economics, one we seldom hear anymore.
It is the basis for all our financial institutions, from the International Monetary Fund and the world debt to the Savings and Loan frauds (which have been described as “pure capitalism,” that is, effectively unfettered from constraints of either human labor or natural resources) to the stock market to insurance plans, right down to your local bank account.
But the guarantor of usury is the Federal Reserve System, through our taxes.
Barry Peters’ study on the ban on usury in the Hebrew Scriptures, makes it clear how this practice is violent robbery and oppression.
January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
, his memorial was eclipsed by the formal outbreak of hostilities against Iraq.
This year, let us rekindle the light of his life and martyrdom by a dedication to his ways of active nonviolence, by a refusal to render unto Caesar the ways of violence.
Instead, let us find alternative ways to render the fruits of our labor unto God, and to His children, to whom they belong.
―Katharine Temple
An Alternative Revenue Service
The Alternative Revenue Service (ARS) is a project of the War Resisters League (cosponsored by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee and the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign) designed to educate public opinion about the realities of military spending in the federal budget, and to give people a chance to redirect $1 or more of their money “owed” in federal taxes to an established alternative fund.
Last year, people who wished to practice tax resistance, to put that money towards peaceful purposes, put $12,000 into the ARS.
For further information or advice, please write to Lisa Harper, Alternative Revenue Service, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, or telephone their “hot-line” 1‒800‒955‒7322.
Attention New York City CW Readers!
Are you interested in finding ways to channel the grief and anger felt in the aftermath of the Gulf War, while discovering alternatives to war in general?
New York City War Tax Resistance (WTR) offers support and information meetings the first Monday of each month — , , etc. — at 6:30 pm.
The meetings are held at 339 Lafayette St. (IRT Number 6, Bleeker St. station).
For more information, please contact Sallie Marx at: (212) 929‒4833.
The issue of The Catholic Worker included an article by Karl Meyer about a road-trip taken by him and Kathy Kelly.
Here are some excerpts that touch on tax resistance:
After we went on to Salina, Kansas and Newton, Kansas, where we visited with Mennonite friends in the war tax refusal movement.
Everywhere we stopped we found the peace movement vibrant, active and numerous, contradicting the falsehoods that President Bush and much of the press tell about the demise of our efforts.
In New Mexico
The same energy was evident in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we visited friends in the war-tax refusal movement.
Don Schrader in Albuquerque had arranged two television news interviews, two newspaper interviews, eight radio talk show appearances, and a lively public meeting.
We renewed acquaintances that showed us how the web of peace action stretches its stands all over North America and Central America.
Perhaps these were the very fields and ditches where Ammon Hennacy worked when he came to Phoenix in , with only a penny in his pocket.
He worked as a farm laborer in order to avoid the withholding of taxes for war.
, he picketed the IRS to let them know why he refused to pay any taxes for war.
In , he began to fast and picket one day for each year that had elapsed since Hiroshima.
(A few copies of his autobiography, The Book of Ammon, are still available from his widow, Joan Thomas, P.O. Box 25, Phoenix, AZ 85001, for $20.)
I am eager to picket with the Peace House this spring at the IRS office in Phoenix, to remind them of Ammon Hennacy, who made a radical and a tax resister out of me thirty-five years ago:
We have come back to bother you again.
This society, and each one of us personally, must put our income into servicing human needs, not into the works of war.
Only then can we rise from the economic ashes of the arms race, the Vietnam War, and our brutal indifference to the needs of the poor in the years since then.
The issue of The Catholic Worker gave an update on the Randy Kehler / Besty Corner house seizure:
War Tax Refusers Update
Although Randy Kehler, Colrain, Massachusetts war tax resister (CW ), was released from jail after a little more than two months, the occupation of his family’s home by friends and supporters continues.
The federal government seized the house for non-payment, and later arrested Randy and his wife, Betsy Corner (briefly held) for contempt after their refusal to surrender it.
Their home has been auctioned off, and is now owned by someone from a nearby town.
At press time, the new “owner” has yet to move in, while groups sympathetic to the cause of tax resistance are taking turns at occupying the home, despite threats of arrest.
For more information, please call the War Tax Refusers Support Committee at: (413) 774‒2710, or write: c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
There were also a handful of brief passing references to tax resistance in other issues of The Catholic Worker in .
The issue of The Catholic Worker brought an update about the Randy Kehler / Betsy Corner home seizure, sale, and occupation:
Now That April’s Here
By Brian Hynes
Randy Kehler, Betsy Corner and their 13 year-old daughter, Lillian, had not been in their Colrain, Massachusetts home for sixty weeks when I was last up for the vigil in their yard.
They were evicted in , when the IRS finally seized their home as compensation for unpaid taxes.
The house is currently occupied by a couple who “bought” it from the IRS.
The hope is that these folks will come to see the seizure, and subsequent sale and purchase, as illegitimate.
The argument of the War Tax Refusers Support Committee (WTR) is that “It is wrong to take people’s homes to force them to pay for war.”
Betsy and Randy have refused to pay their federal taxes since the ’70s.
Although they file with the IRS every year, they don’t pay what they are said to owe.
Instead they pay that amount to charities — some local, and some for other worthwhile endeavors.
In , the IRS started to take steps to confiscate the Kehler-Corner property, culminating in the auction of their home in .
At this time, the IRS received many non-monetary bids from Randy and Betsy’s supporters but no outside bids, and ended up buying the place themselves.
In a subsequent auction one monetary bid was received, just above the $5400 minimum.
This was the famous bid by the current occupants, who were then given title to the house.
By then, Randy had already been arrested for contempt of court and the whole family had been evicted. ( CW)
The occupation of Randy and Betsy’s home in support of their stand to resist this seizure, began immediately after the eviction.
Despite its around-the-clock presence in the house, the new owners managed to move in when several people were at a war tax resistance demonstration.
Since that time the support vigil has moved to the yard.
Most recently a beautiful trailer, one room and a porch, built especially for the purpose, has been moved on to the property.
There is one additional complexity to the situation.
The house in question is on land owned by the Valley Community Land Trust.
This means that the land itself was never confiscated, and therefore was never “sold” to the family now occupying the house.
Furthermore, the members of the Land Trust, while certainly sympathetic to WTR, also have legitimate claims and concerns about what is happening, as the IRS transferred title to the house while disregarding the stipulations of the land lease.
Pursuant to these concerns, the Land Trust has filed suit against the family who bought the house from the IRS.
At the time of my last visit, lawyers were preparing for a future hearing on this problem.
The vigil has been a time to think about many issues in discussion with people of diverse backgrounds.
The concern and commitment that I have seen there are noteworthy.
It is daunting, in an environment of such diversity, to reach common ground for moral commitment.
In Colrain, however, there is a strong consensus.
The consensus is for active nonviolence in the context of the refusal to pay for war.
It has been argued that taxation is a societal responsibility but the history of carnage is too great for us to avoid the moral issues of militarism and its support through taxation, by claiming that societal responsibility gives it legitimacy.
In fact, societal responsibility is exactly the point, and nonviolence is exactly the confrontation of moral issues by moral methods. (Militarism, instead, confronts moral issues by immoral methods.) The continuing use of military force by our nation is a moral issue that requires confrontation.
This confrontation is the consensus in Colrain.
The consensus proceeds from a long and loving tradition of nonviolent transformation of society.
The question that is worked and reworked there is now to give this living tradition rebirth in the changing situation up at Colrain.
I suggest a visit to lend your strength to theirs.
Please contact War Tax Refusers, c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 03142.
(413) 774‒2710, or, (413) 773‒7427.
The issue of The Catholic Worker included a book review that again told the story of Saint Hugh of Lincoln and promoted his claim to be the (unofficial) patron saint of war tax resisters. (See ♇ for a previous Catholic Worker article on that topic.)
The issue of that paper carried a statement from jailed war tax resister Bill Ramsey:
No Limits On The Promise Of God
By Bill Ramsey
As I reflect back on the path that brought me to this cell, along with the many points of decision and sharp turns of the legal process, there was one reliable trail mark — the interplay between conscience and community, between risk-taking and relationship building.
Any way I measure it, the trail to this cell is a long one, but never a lonely one.
Most immediately, it began on with an action in the public waiting room of the IRS Taxpayer Information Service in St. Louis.
With other members of the St. Louis Covenant Community of War Tax Resisters, I planned to pass out a federal spending piechart to the steady stream of hundreds of people with taxes on their minds and time on their hands as they waited for service.
No disruption was planned, only an orderly attempt to communicate.
Within an hour, two of us were arrested after refusing an order to leave the waiting room.
In , a federal judge convicted me of unlawful leafleting.
I was acquitted of charges that we disrupted taxpayers and IRS employees.
At the US Attorney’s insistence, a pre-sentencing investigation was conducted.
It displayed my 20 years of public war tax resistance to the judge.
In , he sentenced me to three years of federal probation, with a special condition that required that I file and pay all taxes due.
From this point forward, this court-ordered condition and my conscience were on a collision course.
War tax resisters around the country urged me to consider the potential chilling effect that the probation condition would have if applied to other war tax resisters.
They introduced me to Peter Goldberger, an attorney who specializes in First Amendment appeals, who would take my appeal to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The national war tax resistance network was alerted and offers of support came from around the country.
Meanwhile in St. Louis, a local support committee was formed.
War tax resisters, homeless shelter workers, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, sanctuary providers, domestic violence counselors, educators, a priest, and a community development planner all came together to provide assistance.
They raised legal fees, set up an emergency response phone tree, served as a clearness committee, and planned a public challenge to my probation.
Two members wrote an op-ed piece published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch proposing that the US government, rather than myself, should be placed on probation for violating international law, refusing to pay dues to the United Nations, and trafficking in arms.
It served as our indictment.
This community of support convened a People’s Tribunal on .
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law at Princeton, presented the case against the government.
Former Secretaries of Defense and Treasury were invited to represent the government but sent letters of regret.
Domestic victims of the arms race testified.
One hundred thirty “jurors” placed the government on probation, listing the conditions which were presented to the St. Louis US Attorney on by a delegation from the Tribunal.
Collective Challenge
As I approached the collision of my conscience with the court-ordered condition, preparing to refuse to pay my taxes on , I was upheld by this community of support I was also inspired and grateful that they had been able to turn the questions around my probation into a collective challenge of the fundamental contradictions underlying US policy.
After a public refusal to pay my taxes on , I was summoned to a probation revocation hearing on .
The national war tax resistance network was alerted and letters from around the country arrived on the judge’s desk.
Locally, the support community planned an overnight vigil at my church for the night before the hearing.
I invited the judge to the opening service. He did not respond.
One hundred thirty people participated in the vigil which concluded an hour before the hearing with a Catholic Mass.
Fifty supporters attended the hearing.
But that night, I had a decision to make.
I felt that the government was using the probation revocation hearing as a way to circumvent the need for a trial in front of a jury of my peers.
I would not get my day in court to publicly explain my reasons for refusing to pay war taxes.
Do I remain in the church, refusing to recognize the constitutionality of the hearing?
The appeal on the constitutional grounds of freedom of speech and religion had failed.
Or do I answer the summons, appearing in court, but remain silent in my own defense — only making a brief statement of my motives which the court had refused to take into consideration?
I was without an answer.
After deliberation with members of the support community, my wife, and war tax refusers in Colrain, Massachusetts, we came to a resolution.
Respond to the summons, make the statement, and direct the public eye to my refusal to pay for death, and not to a refusal to show up in court.
My statement in court cited my responsibilities to Nuremberg principles, knowing that my government used tax money to commit war-crimes in Panama, Nicaragua, and Iraq, and fearing the US military operations in Somalia and Bosnia would soon result in indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
The statement also focused on my religious convictions.
The resources we hold are a divine trust not to be surrendered to war-making.
Looking back on US interventions during my lifetime and on testimony offered in the Bible, it is clear that when nations resort to violent force, it is usually to protect privilege, not people.
No situation or person stands outside God’s transforming work in history.
To kill is to assume that we have the right to place limits on the promises of God.
These are the beliefs I placed before the court.
In return, I received a 30-day sentence, to be followed by another year of supervised release with the same special condition that I pay taxes.
On , the order came for me to surrender to the Williamson County Jail in Marion, Illinois.
My refusal to surrender brought a summons to appear in court.
Again the larger community of support gathered for Mass at my church and then filled the spectators gallery in the court room.
After I refused to sign a bond guaranteeing that I would surrender, I was taken into custody.
Jailed for two days in the overcrowded and violence-laden conditions of the St. Clair County Jail, I discovered another community among the young men from East St. Louis who shared my cell block.
We slept toe to toe, many of us on the floor. We ate inadequate meals shoulder to shoulder.
They were without resources. Many seemed to have no one on the outside who cared about them.
Others were hardened by their life experiences.
Bantering and talk of drugs, guns, and sex resounded through the cell block until the middle of the night.
And yet, as we offered each other a little more space, plotted to get more food into the cell block, and shared our stories and one Bible among us, I began to sense camaraderie and a community forming.
In the blessed silence of the second morning, the faces of my support community on the outside merged with the faces of the young men sleeping all around me.
I knew then that I could do the entire 30 days in that cell block.
Several hours later, federal marshals arrived to take me to a new cell block in Williamson County.
It amazes me that anyone could believe that placing me in these county jails would somehow change my mind about paying war taxes.
Somehow, confined to these jails that expose the obscured violence of the status quo in our society, I am supposed to see the light and admit that the spending priorities are “right enough,” that the system is “just enough,” and that perhaps, after all, force and violence are appropriate ways to correct human behavior and resolve conflict.
The authorities wager that fear of those around me in these cell blocks and my physical separation from my primary communities will drive my conscience underground.
What they don’t realize is that these jails and the people in them are just another opportunity for community and that these walls cannot separate me from the communities of support.
They just don’t get it. Acts of conscience thrive on community!
A longer view of my path to this cell would include the community in Durham, North Carolina, that first challenged me to resist war taxes in .
Down the path would be my colleagues over the last 17 years in the American Friends Service Committee, an organization that not only tolerates civil disobedience, but affirms employees’ acts of conscience.
Add to all these the St. Louis Catholic Worker Community where I lived and worked in and the extended Worker community that remains at my side through everything.
As the path continues, there are members of my inner-city parish, struggling together to understand and act on our faith.
All along the path is the St. Louis Covenant Community of War Tax Resisters, linked to communities and humanitarian efforts throughout the world through alternative gifts from our resisted taxes.
And then there is the beloved community of my family, Cathy and my five children.
As we traveled this summer visiting friends and relatives with the prospect of my imprisonment before us, a more refined closeness grew among us.
We hold each other a little tighter these days, even over the distance that separates us for these 30 days.
As I write from this cell, Cathy and our children are surrounded by acts of kindness as the broader support community assists her with the day to day chores of running our household and caring for our children.
My absence seems to have become the occasion for further experiments in community.
As I look back on all of this, I am convinced that the convergence of heart and will that we call acts of conscience is a gradual slope, with many small steps.
Each risk taken clears the way for the next.
Everytime I raised my foot to take that next step, a community of people was there, prepared to steady my stride and to catch me if I fell.
I am now certain that this journey is impossible, unless one is accompanied.
In the end, it is the collective courage and transforming gifts of community that empower our individual acts of conscience.
“Step by step the longest march, can be won, can be won,
Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none.”
The issue of The Catholic Worker announced the publication of a newish (first published in ) NWTRCC pamphlet:
Keep in mind the deadline for the payment of income taxes.
Looking for good alternatives to paying the deadly dues?
Contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, PO Box 774, Monroe, ME 04951 for the pamphlets they put out.
In “Practical War Tax Resistance #5, Fow Income/Simple Living as War Tax Resistance,” there’s a one-page entry by two heroes of the nonviolent revolution, Wally and Juanita Nelson, now 86 and 72 respectively.
Also, there’s a small section on voluntary poverty, which the CW advocates, as opposed to involuntary poverty, which the writers tell us Gandhi called “the worst form of violence.” Truly, this little brochure is an uplifting guide for the perplexed when it comes to the nonpayment of war taxes and how to get started or to live below the taxable income.
The issue of that paper reprinted parts of an Ernest Bromley essay about war tax resistance that it had originally published in (see ♇ ).
A note by Ric Rhetor in the issue read:
One way of practicing nonviolence at the grass-roots level is through some form of tax resistance.
Maybe you’ll receive this paper before (we hope).
Perhaps tax resistance, withholding or some other form of saying no will be considered.
We wonder what will happen to long-time tax resister and teacher of resistance methods, Ed Hedemann, who goes to court as we go to press for his refusal to pay.
If you do pay federal taxes, you might be unaware that over 50% of these monies go to war and its preparation.
Melissa Jameson discussed her war tax resistance, and the decisions and compromises she made along the way as she adopted it, in the Catholic Worker:
One Way to Resist War
By Melissa Jameson
I became a tax resister in .
My introduction to resisting federal taxes because such a high percentage of them go to pay for war, came through the War Resisters League (WRL) organizers’ training program in .
During the 10 days of the program, I met people who lived below taxable income as a means of not contributing to the world of the federal government and its war machine, and read about not paying taxes as another tool of resistance.
One of the people I met there was Randy Kehler of Colrain, Massachusetts, who, along with his partner, Betsey Corner, was a longtime tax resister; their house had just been seized by the IRS after many years of redirecting their taxes to places that help build up the world, not destroy it.
I was struck by Randy and Betsy’s story and its impact on the community around them.
Later on, when the house was purchased from the IRS by a couple up that way, members of our War Resisters League local group became part of the campaign around “occupation” of the property.
We participated in the 24-hour-a-day vigil at the house, where I met even more more tax resisters.
First Steps
The vigil began in and ended in , when the people who bought the house finally sold it back to the land trust.
(Randy and Betsy now live in another house on the land trust property.)
The vigil was an amazing experiment in nonviolent resistance and building community.
It opened me up to whole new worlds of thought.
Somewhere along the line, I started reading up on the subject in the WRL’s “Guide to War Tax Resistance,” and I determined that, as much as I could, I would resist.
I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with my level of participation in the system.
To the extent possible, my partner and I tried to avoid federal taxes, concentrating on the things people can avoid by not purchasing them, like cigarettes and liquor.
(I am still searching for someone who can teach me how to make wine!)
Obviously, the taxes on tires and gasoline and such are much more difficult.
One does what one can, when one can.
We then started withholding payment of the federal excise tax on our phone bill, dutifully — mostly — sending in notes saying why we were not paying the small percentage that is this tax.
What is supposed to happen is that the phone company takes the amount you don’t pay off the bill, then informs the IRS you are doing this.
However, the amounts are often so small that nothing happens.
This practice led to some interesting, even entertaining, conversations with Bell Atlantic.
Eventually, it also led to them dropping the money from the “Past Due” section of the bill.
Whether they ever actually told the IRS, I don’t know.
Given where we were living (suburban, northern NJ) and how much our rent and other expenses were, living below taxable income did not seem viable.
We — mostly me — were not ready for community living at that point, where perhaps a group of us could have shared expenses, enabling us to live below the taxable income line.
We were busy with other peace activism, too, and for this and other reasons, being self-employed also did not seem to be an option.
Living the way we did gave us certain choices we could not have had otherwise.
My partner earned below the income guidelines at two of his jobs, and, at first, did not earn enough in both combined to pay taxes.
We decided that it was great at least one of us could do this.
As for myself, the job I have full-time now was then only part-time, and they were withholding.
I eventually got a second job, for one day a week, where my employer agreed to pay me as an independent contractor and did not withhold any taxes.
I was thrilled!
Then, in my reading, I found out that I could change my W-4 form and increase the amount of deductions claimed, which would mean that I would have less money taken out of my paycheck each week.
This is, of course, illegal, and can have serious consequences.
However, I felt that I needed to take this step.
My happiness was dimmed a bit when I realized that I had not claimed enough deductions and so some federal taxes were still being taken out.
Feeling foolish, I changed my withholding form again, trying to ignore the quizzical look on the face of our personnel director, the all-powerful dispenser of forms.
(Legally, the people in the accounting department are not supposed to stop you from filling out these forms however you wish, but that does not mean that the various and sundry individuals you meet along the way of the process — witness our personnel director — will not wonder what you are doing.)
And now, believe it or not, it still isn’t enough — I got a raise, and need to change my withholding once more!
Continuing the Walk
After a few years, maybe in or so, I received a form letter from the IRS saying they did not have a record of my taxes for .
I wrote back, explaining why, as a pacifist, I did not believe in paying for war, and also told them I was redirecting my tax dollars to peaceful causes.
I enclosed a copy of the War Resisters League pie chart that breaks down the federal tax dollar into how it is spent.
After some time, I received another request, this time for me to fill out a return and send it in.
I wrote back again.
There were more letters and, finally, a bill for an amount due: as they had no record of taxes being taken out of my one-day-a-week job, they assessed me accordingly.
They tacked on some penalties and interest, and asked me to send them the six or seven hundred dollars right away.
I wrote them another letter.
I have heard from them a couple of times since, asking me to send them a check as soon as possible.
The last time was near last summer, when the letter I received told me that if I didn’t pay them by a certain date, they could take steps to get their money.
I knew this could happen, and so am more or less waiting for the other shoe to drop.
To the IRS, my several hundred dollars is not even a drop in the bucket, so they may not do anything.
But, they could garnish my wages or seize my bank account.
(However small, I do have one, having succumbed, for other reasons, at my job to get direct deposit — this also makes it easier for the IRS to find my money.)
I then would have to decide whether or not to leave my job, something I have contemplated doing, or continue and keep resisting here, in this way.
When co-workers talk about getting refunds from the IRS or about filing their taxes, I confess that I have not always been that forthcoming about my own practices.
However, I have also found that each successive step along this path becomes a little surer, a little easier, and I talk more about this now.
I have also found, as with many things, that once you introduce a topic, others welcome the chance to share their own stories.
One of my co-workers told me she has a friend who claims a lot of deductions so that she can have more money to take home during the year, and then in the spring, just pays the IRS what she owes.
Most people I speak to never think of questioning the IRS about anything, let alone challenging them.
Resistance can be hard, but it is always so worthwhile.
Compared to many people, I have hardly faced the IRS at all — my “tiny" bill is nothing compared to others, over the years, who have been assessed tens of thousands of dollars in penalties and taxes, who have been taken to court, who have even gone to jail.
At this point, I am feeling more and more as if I need to continue the walk and explore ways in which I can further my life of resistance to weapons and war.
I realize that the particular form of resistance I have been doing is not for everyone, but for me it is a step in the right direction.
There were also occasional announcements of national, international, and regional gatherings of war tax resistance groups, and a few other mentions in passing of tax resistance during these years.
