How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → migrate or taxpatriate ahead of the tax collector → the Monteverde settlement

The first edition of the Friends Journal is dated , and billed itself as “Successor to The Friend () and Friends Intelligencer ().”

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which had been split into an Orthodox and a Hicksite meeting , had reunified . The new magazine reflected this merger: The Friend had been the organ of the Orthodox meeting, and the Intelligencer that of the Hicksite meeting.

, the magazine shared offices with the “Friends Peace Committee” of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which may have led to some cross-pollination, and increased coverage for peace testimony concerns in the magazine.

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in

There are few mentions of war tax resistance in the early issues of Friends Journal. We have reached the last years of the long decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that began around the time of the American Civil War.

In , the American Friends Service Committee put out an influential booklet, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, that mentions war tax resistance only once, in reference to its use by Quakers in (this despite the fact that war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer were part of the committee that wrote the booklet).

The first mention I found comes from the issue. It is a single-sentence sardonic comment on the tax resistance of conservative Utah governor J. Bracken Lee: “The Governor of Utah should be welcomed to the ranks of conscientious objectors, even though most Friends and other pacifists would not resist paying income tax on the ground that they were conscientiously opposed to economic aid to other countries.”

The issue mentions a lawsuit filed by Milton Mayer “to recover income tax taken from him forcibly in what he claims was a violation of his conscientious objection to war.” The three-paragraph article is conspicuous for how much effort it seems to go to to avoid referring to Mayer as a Quaker. Mayer is “a well-known writer,” a “Carmel, Calif., author, formerly a Chicagoan,” “who writes for leading magazines,” and “has been a lecturer for the American Friends Service Committee and at many colleges, universities and churches,” and “has been a member of the faculties of the University of Chicago and Frankfurt (Germany) and is consultant to the Great Books Foundation.” All that resume material in the brief article, and yet no mention that he is a Quaker convert. The article says that “his religious principles will not let him buy guns for other men to shoot” but doesn’t call these Quaker principles or refer to the Quaker peace testimony. So it makes for a curious article: a respectful nod at war tax resistance with a pained effort to distance the Society of Friends from it.

The issue included a “symposium” on “Investments and Our Peace Testimony” which highlighted the difficulty of finding investments “free of the taint of involvement in war preparation.” Only one of the participants, Samuel J. Bunting, Jr., explicitly mentions taxation as something that triggers the same concern. Excerpts:

The problem has worried me ever since World War Ⅰ. At that time, at the risk of losing a position and the chance of becoming permanently barred from my chosen profession (the investment business), I refused to sell or otherwise handle U.S. Liberty Bonds. My firm respected my conscientious convictions, however, and the ax did not fall.

Since then I have scrutinized the activities of the corporations whose securities I have considered selling to my clients and have rejected many because of their service in military production. Yet I still think there is no satisfactory solution of the problem for most of us. We live in a world geared to military activities. I see no way of escaping it except by the destruction of militarism itself and by adjudicating differences which might lead to war.

Investments are only a small fraction of the over-all problem. Payment of taxes is another important aspect of the situation.

It is true that to some extent mortgages could be considered, but, of course, income taxes would have to be paid from the interest.…

The issue included an interesting note about the Quaker outpost of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in the form of a letter from one of the inhabitants there. Excerpts:

You are so surprised that our group consists of so many North Americans. The reason that most of them have established themselves in Costa Rica is not the climate, nor the possibility of finding work here, but rather an idealistic reason, typical of Quakers. They were convinced that it was against their conscience to continue living in a country where, indirectly, they had to collaborate in arming the nation for war by means of taxation, and where it is impossible to educate their children according to principles of Quakers. A few of them spent a year in prison for being conscientious objectors before emigration to Costa Rica.

So finally, a full-throated reference to real live Quakers who have taken action in response to their conscientious objection to paying war taxes. Perhaps their geographical remove made this feel safer to mention. Or perhaps the ice that had formed over American Quaker war tax resistance was beginning to crack. The issue covered the goings-on at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting earlier that year. On , according to the article, war tax resistance was discussed:

It will always be unfinished business that Friends’ practice of our testimonies is not consistent with profession. The discussion centered on the payment of income tax, particularly that portion used for military purposes. Few present felt it right to refuse to pay, nor yet felt comfortable to pay. Varied suggestions were presented: Send an accompanying letter expressing one’s feeling about war; live so simply that income is below tax level; make no report, but once a year send a check for nonmilitary purposes; engage in peace walks and other minority demonstrations; follow Jesus’ example of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; beware of taking for granted the evils deplored, such as riding on military planes; associate more closely with the Mennonites, who share Friends’ concerns; rise above one’s own shortcomings through personal devotion; work to unite with all Friends Yearly Meetings in refusal to pay taxes. Nothing can be done unless there is a willingness to suffer unto death.

The next mention comes from the  issue, and shows the cracked ice has begun to melt. Excerpt:

Meetings [on the West Coast] in general have been reconsidering the meaning of the peace witness. Newer activities have included… street distribution of a leaflet on tax refusal because of the amount going to arms (write Franklin Zahn, 836 South Hamilton Boulevard, Pomona, California, for samples), and a poster walk in front of the federal tax office on income tax day, …

Franklin Zahn’s name will come up frequently during the years of the thaw and resurgence of war tax resistance in the American Society of Friends.

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in

In the simmering issue of war tax resistance begins to hit the boiling point in the pages of the Friends Journal.

“Taxes for Violence”

In the issue appeared a brief article by Alfred Andersen entitled “Taxes for Violence.” While Mildred Binns Young’s article on revitalizing the Quaker peace testimony back in (see ♇ 9 July 2013) had suggested war tax resistance in the course of its larger argument, Andersen’s article was the first one that was both devoted to the subject of war tax resistance and that unmistakably recommended it to Quakers:

Friends have become increasingly concerned about paying taxes which finance war. Some reasons for this are:

  1. The Federal Income Tax provides 75 per cent of the money by which the military is financed.
  2. Yet there is no provision for conscientious objection to paying taxes, as there is for conscientious objection to serving in the armed forces. It is obvious that such a provision would be the equivalent of the existing provision for alternative service for C.O.s.
  3. Many Friends took the conscientious-objector position regarding military services when younger; now, in paying taxes, they are serving the military in a more fundamental, though less obvious, way.
  4. It is inconsistent for them to encourage young people to refuse military service while they themselves continue to “serve” in this way.
  5. Those who have merely sent the Internal Revenue a note of protest along with their tax checks are coming to realize that integrity requires that they follow protest with action.
  6. Those who have withheld part of their payment in protest are becoming aware (a) that what they do send is used for military purposes in the same proportion as all the rest, and (b) that because they indicate to the government the amount that they have withheld, the Bureau simply collects it by distraint and adds interest!
  7. Therefore, some Friends are increasingly clear that the thing wrong with the tax law is its lack of provision for conscientious objection; nothing short of noncooperation with the tax law itself (i.e., refusing to file a return until the defect is remedied) will meet the moral challenge before us.
  8. True democracy requires that all Federal laws provide for conscientious objection.
  9. All Friends have observed, and many have helped encourage, the successes of civil disobedience to laws discriminating against Negroes. Therefore, they feel encouraged to challenge other injustices with nonviolent resistance. Forcing persons to finance nuclear weapons makes them perpetrators of in justice toward all living creatures on the earth, both in our generation and in generations to come.

Therefore, we should expect that more and more Friends will refuse to file income tax returns until our government gives reliable assurance that whatever money is paid will not be used for those purposes which our consciences clearly tell us are out of moral bounds for us. As these refusals increase, we may expect that others will join the movement, affirming that where conscience and law conflict, conscience shall prevail.

As you can see, this not only advocated war tax resistance, but also tried to shut the door on many perennially popular half-way measures of tax resistance such as paying under protest or withholding a symbolic amount of taxes — claiming that “nothing short of [total] noncooperation… will meet the moral challenge before us.”

Several letters-to-the-editor, found in the , , , and issues, addressed Andersen’s argument:

  • Hanna Newcombe wrote about how the Canadian Yearly Meeting had been struggling with the issue. At first, she writes, they tried to lobby the government for “a tax law… which will channel our tax money into nonmilitary uses,” but then they “came to the conclusion that it would not do… since they would then simply readjust their books to use someone else’s taxes for military purposes only, and nothing would have been achieved.” They then adjusted their goal to be one in which taxpayers could choose to divert their money from the national government and into “non-governmental peace-directed activities.” Finally, “[i]n order to show the seriousness of our purpose and the intensity of our feeling, we offered to match the diverted amount from our own pockets, so that essentially we, as conscientious tax-objectors, were petitioning the government to increase our taxes!”
  • J. Passmore Elkinton wrote in to advance the subtle argument that because tax money is legally owned by the government, and not the taxpayer, the taxpayer has no moral responsibility for deciding what to do with it, aside from the ordinary legal processes of trying to influence the government in its decision-making. The conscription of money is not analogous to the conscription of people, Elkinton argued, since the ownership of money is a function of government policy to begin with, while the ownership of one’s body is inalienable.
  • Daniel Smiley, while expressing sympathy for Andersen’s position, and while claiming to be “against paying taxes for military purposes, past or future,” says that he has not refused to pay his income taxes because there are so many other taxes that also support war and that are embedded invisibly in every economic action — even something like buying a loaf of bread. If you cannot completely avoid paying war taxes (“we would have to remove ourselves completely from the economy of our country… by becoming hermits”), he thinks, there’s no reason to bother refusing to pay some particular tax. Besides, if we were to redirect our income taxes to, say, the Peace Corps, wouldn’t our contributions just end up getting replaced by those of taxpayers who don’t share our concerns?
    • A later letter by Thurston C. Hughes makes almost the same argument, even going so far as to say that the Quakers who emigrated to Costa Rica so as not to continue paying taxes to the U.S. government (see ♇ 5 July 2013) were making a vain gesture, as they still pay taxes for the police force there, and pay taxes on any imported goods they purchase!
  • Lee Maria Kleiss wrote in about the compromise she had come to — refusing to pay 55% of whatever small amount she still owed at filing time, as a protest, and then writing to the tax collector and her political representatives to ask them to enact some alternative for conscientious objectors to military taxation. “Certainly some protest concerning the inconsistency of paying for war — and especially paying to have somebody else do a dirty job that we refuse to do — should periodically be expressed.”
  • Samuel Cooper (there’s more about him below) wrote in to say that his war tax resistance grew out of his experience as an imprisoned conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ. “My wife and I have tried several means of protest and withholding; latterly we have resolved the problem by living within the non-tax income bracket.” He suggests this approach as a tenth item for Andersen’s manifesto.
  • Finally, Andersen writes a response to some of the letters mentioned above. I particularly liked his answer to Hanna Newcombe’s letter about her Meeting’s attempt to gain a legal method for taxpayers to stop funding war this way: “I suspect that it is only as we first commit ourselves to stop supporting what we clearly see to be wrong, thus living up to the moral insight we now have, that we shall be worthy of more.”

Andersen, by the way, certainly practiced what he preached. In the issue of the Journal is a brief note about the IRS seizure and auction of his home (the IRS got $1,500 for the property; the Andersens owed $36,000). The note concludes: “The Andersens [Alfred and Connie] have refused to file an income tax return for more than twenty years.”

Samuel Cooper

I’m going to deviate from my chronological system here a bit so that I can follow the trail set down by Samuel Cooper, who wrote letters to the editor of the Journal promoting war tax resistance:

  • There’s the letter I mentioned above, from , in which he responds sympathetically to Andersen’s argument and notes that he and his wife are practicing low-income/simple-living tax resistance.
  • In , he wrote in with disappointment over “how few Friends have refrained from payment of income taxes, knowing that a large portion goes for past wars and preparation for future ones!” He noted that Quakers in John Woolman’s time “suffered ‘distraint’ of goods, rather than willing payment for war.”
  • In Samuel and Clarissa Cooper wrote to ask “what should Friends do” about “income taxes and the 51 per cent of the budget allocated to the military.”

    Should Friends now stand by in acquiescence, letting a few others take the risks of civil disobedience and possible imprisonment? One can bear testimony, even refusing to pay part or all of the tax. If the Society of Friends were to unite on this aspect of our peace testimony — to take a stand not to support war any more — what might the influence and result be?

  • In he wrote in again:

    I have been witnessing for more than twenty-five years against the payment of part or all of the tax levied against my income. I do not presume that it has hindered the war program by one iota, but it has said no to war after I said no to conscription and served a time in prison. I believe there is a real relevance, although all one’s assets are involved in our economy. Simply buying one’s food is supporting, through hidden taxes, the war effort. If one is working for money, then time is a contributing factor.

    There is no satisfactory way to be consistent for peace and against violence.

    Our Quaker peace testimony can only be resurrected — from near death by inaction — by corporate action, standing together instead of quibbling over methods, expediency, and results.

    Let the light of Christ shine in your heart to show the true way acceptable to the Prince of Peace.

  • Also in , he wrote in about socially responsible investing, noting that this isn’t just a matter of avoiding stocks “in the military-industrial complex and its subcontractors” but that because some “businesses pay nearly as much in Federal taxes as they do to their stockholders… [they contribute] indirectly toward military procurement.” He recommends investing in low-income housing.
  • In , Cooper addresses a number of points related to war tax resistance:
    • “It is not the amount of money… but the principle — whether one feels easy to support the war-minded Government…”
    • “[V]oluntarily living below the taxable income” is one way to “avoid the issue” — another is to “scrutinize very critically the source of that income.”
    • He says that a response to people who accuse tax resisters of not supporting Government is that even tax resisters pay “hidden taxes in most things we buy.”
    • He recommends some less-offensive investments: municipal bonds, and bonds for “college, hospital, rest homes and such” that “yield good income and help humanity instead of destroying.”
  • In , Cooper returned with a letter about the 1,000-person-strong peace walk and vigil that accompanied the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting . “Does this ‘witness’ satisfy our Peace Testimony for a year? What do we do now?” He recommends phone tax resistance as something Friends can do to make their testimony continue through the year.

Miscellany

In the issue, Robert Horton briefly reflected on the voyage of the Phoenix, a small ship that tried to interfere with nuclear weapons testing at sea. In the course of this, he asked this series of rhetorical questions:

“Why does one do what he doesn’t have to do?” Why did Thoreau refuse to pay taxes and why did he write Civil Disobedience? Why did Columbus sail an uncharted ocean? Why did Kagawa of Japan go to live in the slums? Why did my young neighbor, married and with three children, refuse to pay taxes for war? None of these heroic souls could see the eventual result of their actions; there was no guarantee to them that their actions would be effective in changing social patterns. They were true to the Inner Light and left the result in the hands of God.

In the edition was a brief review of Edmund Wilson’s book The Cold War and the Income Tax (see ♇ 5 September 2003). Excerpt:

But [particular] interest to Friends is his objection to at least one half of what is collected [by the Internal Revenue Service] being used to prepare for the destruction of the world as we know it. He recounts the experience of a few tax refusers whose action meets with his approval; a number of others equally dramatic are well known to Friends. Since the great debate is going on in the minds of many Friends and others as to effect on our society, our times, and on us as individuals of our promoting the peace testimony on one hand and paying for world destruction on the other, this book will at least help clarify the issue, even though it will not contribute to peace of mind.

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in

The issues of Friends Journal had a few mentions of war tax resistance and an extensive debate about the wisdom of supporting the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund act.

The issue mentioned that J.E. McNeil had been named the head of the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, and that her legal experience had included “cases involving war tax refusers and conscientious objectors to military service.”

The issue included an article about the Monteverde community in Costa Rica, which was founded by American Quakers who fled the United States in part to avoid paying military taxes there. Excerpts:

Many Friends know about Monteverde, the Quaker community established in Costa Rica in . “They came here to be free to practice religion in the way they felt was important.” They wanted no military taxes. They wanted to send their children to Quaker schools and to bring them up with a good sense of priorities, away from materialism and militarism. Some came out of a sense of adventure. Four of them had just spent time in prison for their beliefs. They wrote: “We hope to discover through Divine Guidance a way of life which would seek the good of each member of the community and live in a way that will naturally lead to peace rather than war.”

[At the trial of four Quaker conscientious objectors to draft registration], the judge said, “If you are not willing to defend this country, you should leave.” They decided to do just that but had to wait until their jail sentences were over. One couple in the meeting had visited Costa Rica, and several families had already been thinking of moving there. Besides being a fairly prosperous and democratic country, and not very crowded, Costa Rica abolished its army in . Forty-one people from the meeting eventually moved there, including the teacher of the meeting’s private school.

“We were looking for a peaceful place to raise our families without being involved in the military preparedness of the United States,” recalls Marvin Rockwell.

Marvin Rockwell ran the Flor Mar Pension, a simple hostel-like bed-and-breakfast with a pleasant restaurant serving delicious food. He says he was never disappointed in the hopes he had when he moved to Costa Rica. “Costa Ricans are a friendly, helpful people.” He smiles, “And I do not feel bad at all paying taxes in Costa Rica. The largest item in the tax budget is for education.”

In the same issue, Chuck Hosking (in the course of a larger article on ethical investing), said: “If I hadn’t had to start an IRA to lower my income below the taxable minimum (to avoid financing U.S. militarism), I would have put these retirement savings in the same place we’ve put most of our contingency savings — into no-interest loans to American Friends Service Committee and Right Sharing of World Resources.”

In there was a “Religion & Social Issues Forum” titled “Building a Culture of Peace” at the Pendle Hill Quaker conference center. Among the speakers at the conference was Gordon Browne, who “told of his experiences as a ‘military tax refuser’ for over thirty years” during “a session on how Friends can make a personal difference today.”

The issue commented on the Rosa Packard legal case:

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear a Quaker appeal of Internal Revenue Service penalties on religious practice. Rosa Packard, a Greenwich, Conn., Quaker, had challenged the authority of the IRS to penalize her for religiously based non-payment of war-related federal income raxes. For the last 18 years Packard has filed her income tax return, notifying the IRS by an attached letter that her core religious beliefs prevent her from paying a tax if any part of the money collected from her is used to fund war or preparation for war. Every year she has placed the full amount of her taxes, as her letter to the IRS states, in trust for the government in an escrow account maintained by Purchase (N.Y.) Quarterly Meeting. In Packard requested that the federal government waive the discretionary penalties imposed by the IRS for late payment and failure to pay estimated taxes. Packard appealed the lower court’s dismissal of this request to the Supreme Court.

An obituary notice for Richard R. Catlett in the same issue noted that “Richard was a founding member of Columbia Meeting and an active war rax resister, for which he was imprisoned briefly about 25 years ago. In his war tax resistance, he was supported by both Illinois Yearly Meeting and Columbia Meeting, which held an open meeting for worship at the prison where he was held.”

The “Peace Tax Fund” debate

The last issue of had included an op-ed by Spencer Coxe in which he cast a skeptical eye on the Peace Tax Fund idea (see ♇ ). Boiled down, his complaints were these:

  1. The Peace Tax Fund bill would ostensibly allow conscientious objectors to earmark their taxes for non-military government spending, but this will not in fact make any practical difference whatsoever in how Congress spends tax money.
  2. Conscientious objectors could have more practical effect on actual military spending through such mundane political activities as lobbying, demonstrating, attempting to influence elections, and the like; and attempts to get a Peace Tax Fund bill passed distract from this.
  3. The idea behind the Peace Tax Fund concept — that individual taxpayers can override the spending priorities of their elected representatives with their own conscientious imperatives — is corrosive of democracy, which requires people to compromise and accept the decisions of their representatives rather than engaging in a free-for-all.
  4. If it were enacted, the Peace Tax Fund would make conscientious objectors to military taxation legal, and therefore mundane and unworthy of attention. In contrast to the war tax resister of today, whose sacrifices evoke admiration and controversy and government inconvenience, the Peace Tax Fund payer would just be another citizen checking a box on a form — which would “[channel] a potentially effective resistance movement into a harmless backwater.”

I have less faith in the democratic process and in democracy in general than does Coxe, but his criticisms are sound, and, from my perspective, way overdue. A sentimental, blinkered, panglossian take on the Peace Tax Fund bill had become part of the Quaker canon, and, disturbingly, had crowded out other discussion of the dilemma of paying for war with your taxes.

But now that the criticisms had finally been aired, how would the scheme’s supporters respond? Voiciferously, as future letters columns showed:

Edward F. Snyder partially conceded the point. “The aim [of the Bill] is not to reduce the military budget… The main purpose of the bill is to honor and respect the conscientious objections of those citizens who are opposed to war in any form, including the financing through their tax dollars…” He compared it to draftees who do “alternative service” rather than serving in the military. “If I thought the primary purpose of the Peace Tax Fund were to reduce the military budget as Spencer Coxe does, I’d be hard pressed to give the proposal the time of day, and for many of the reasons he cites. There are many more direct and effective ways to challenge military spending and the policies on which it rests.” But he believes that since this isn’t the purpose, the bill is still worthwhile. He also thinks that the fact that war is such a clear violation of a bedrock conscientious value, and because it is such a large part of the budget, it holds a unique place, and carving out an exemption for conscientious objectors here will not necessarily open the floodgates for vast numbers of objectors to every little this and that in the budget.

Joe Volk wrote an extensive op-ed in response (which, alas, is partially obscured in the PDF I have). He said that he had shared Coxe’s letter with the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s Policy Committee (Volk was the FCNL executive secretary) as a way of provoking a discussion as to whether that group ought to change its policy of supporting the Peace Tax Fund bill (they decided to continue supporting it). Volk shares Snyder’s views that the slippery slope is not so slippery in this case, and that one can support the bill without believing that it would reduce military spending (“On the contrary, another argument for the Peace Tax Fund is that it would not alter Congress’s control of the purse strings” and “Of course, federal funds are fungible. Thus, whatever the Peace Tax Fund pays for simply frees other funds for the military.”) Volk asserted that were the Peace Tax Fund passed into law, rather than defanging conscientious objectors, it might free them from their current troubles in tax court to take up more productive struggles. Besides “the absence of the Peace Tax Fund does not seem to be generating the waves of protest and tension that Spencer Coxe fears we would lose were it enacted.” He also felt that rather than being corrosive of democracy, it was supportive of that essential element of democratic legitimacy that requires respect for minority opinions. And besides, Congress is carving out deductions and exemptions and other things all the time — it seems petty to pick out our own concern as the only one that’s corrosive of this manifestly imperfect democracy. Volk concluded:

My wife, Beth, and I have refused to pay our war taxes voluntarily . We want to pay our entire tax bill, but we won’t pay for weapons and the salaries of the people who use them. Having seen so much war and its effects, we could not voluntarily pay that portion of our tax that goes for war. So, we pay only that portion of our tax bill that does not pay for war. Every few years the IRS levies our bank account, wages, or savings. They take the principle, interest, and penalties on what we have refused to pay. We end up paying more to the government than had we paid the war tax. Once they took and auctioned our car. We no longer park it at our residence. We have never been able to own real estate; it would be confiscated. In the U.S. owning real estate has been a principal way for poor and middle-class people to accumulate wealth. Many of our friends could borrow on their land and property to put their children through school. We have not had that option. We are not complaining. We are happy following our conscience on this matter. We consider that these consequences of our war tax refusal are aspects of the voluntary self-suffering that nonviolent action uses to reveal truth to ourselves and to others. But we think the government should recognize our conscientious objection to paying war taxes so that we voluntarily can pay our entire tax bill. Today, we feel that we are being punished for our religious beliefs, a violation of the U.S. Constitution and of our human rights. Recognition of our claim to conscientious objection will not cut the military budget, will not end war, will not bring the Kingdom of Heaven. It will allow us to practice our faith without being punished for it. That’s a fairly radical idea still. It’s a dangerous thing too, but it can work without leading to anarchy.

Richard N. Reichley thought that Coxe was missing the point — that the Peace Tax Fund was not meant to put a dent in the military complex, but to permit certain taxpayers to follow their consciences. It might, he suggested, help spread the idea of conscientious objection to military spending: “Once the Peace Tax Fund Bill is passed, every taxpayer will know that it is law. IRS instructions will include the option to file as a conscientious objector. Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised to learn how many Americans do not want to pay for war.”

Silas Weeks shared his frustrating experience with war tax resistance: “Eventually, the IRS invades our bank account and recovers [the] amount, plus interest and penalties. We end up paying more tax than we would otherwise have to, plus our income is reduced by whatever we have put in the local [alternative] fund.” He says that while “[i]t is extremely unlikely that the U.S. Congress will ever establish a legal peace tax alternative” it is “an improper judgment of others” to insist, as he says Coxe did, “that effort on behalf of a Peace Tax Fund wastes time and is a balm to individual conscience.”

Bruce Hawkins thought the Peace Tax Fund was not meant as an ultimate goal but as “an organizational and educational tool” for outreach and lobbying, and one that helps keep pacifist ideas on the agendas of legislators. “Don’t think for a moment that any of us will heave a sigh of relief and cease all political activity if the Peace Tax Fund passes! We would continue in the same political activity that we are in now, including support of sensible candidates for office. And we would encourage everyone we know to consider using the fund. One of our next goals would be to get enough people to use it so that it would make a difference. It will only be ‘low-key’ if we let it be low-key.”

Ben Tousley thought that while paying into a Peace Tax Fund might indeed have no practical effect on the military budget, the same could be said for many respected acts of “witnessing” — these things aren’t meant to be immediately, directly effective, but to have an eventual “transforming effect on both individuals and the larger society.”

Rosa Covington Packard echoed the idea that the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill was never meant “to influence the military budget” but instead “to acknowledge the inalienable right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war and preparations for war and to accommodate it as a matter of religious freedom.” She also asserted that those who would take advantage of the Peace Tax Fund were not thereby engaging in a risk-free and invisible act:

When the bill passes, the option will be described in the tax forms everyone receives. Reports of numbers of conscientious objectors and amounts of taxes redirected to nonmilitary purposes will be published in the Congressional Record. The conscientious objector will affirm a statement of belief and ille it with his or her tax form. Even if conscientious objectors to paying for war are given legal status and accommodated, they will continue to suffer many forms of discrimination from the public and the military. Making slavery illegal did not end racial discrimination. Recognizing and accommodating conscientious objection to paying for war will not end religious discrimination.

Conscientious objectors were among the first to go to the gas chambers under Hitler. When we study the Holocaust, we mourn the atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies — and “others” — our memories of the victims of war rarely even name conscientious objectors. Risk free indeed! We who choose a visible legal status may be more vulnerable to hostility.

Finally: “Without visible legal status, without acknowledgment that it is indeed legal to act upon our beliefs, our ‘democracy’ will continue to confuse and seduce each generation into thinking that war is honorable or necessary and that there are no other options.”

Mary Moulton addressed only the idea that the Peace Tax Fund would “ease the conscience of pacifists and [thereby] deflect them from hard work.” She said: “This prediction certainly would not apply to any of the peace activists I have known over the years.”

Samuel R. Tyson wrote in with his own set of objections:

  1. Conscientious objection laws discriminate in favor of members of historical “peace churches” which has the effect of adding a religious bias to the law.
  2. Such laws also (because they require objectors to convincingly testify to their conscientious beliefs) discriminate against people with less verbal or reasoning capabilities (a class bias).
  3. Such laws also, for the same reason, favor people with a paper trail in the “historically dominant white paper-based culture” which leads to a racial bias.

He concluded: “A Peace Tax Fund will make it easier for the few, without a full explanation in tax forms. Do we really want another federal bureaucracy to sit in judgment on conscience?”

Coxe wrote back, and in a letter that appeared in the issue. Excerpts:

The letters convince me that I overlooked two considerations, first that passage of the bill would signal a reaffirmation of our country’s respect for religious dissent (though in symbolic fashion), and second, that legislation would relieve the personal distress of pacifists.

I am surprised that no correspondent pointed out that logically my position is an attack on the legal recognition of conscientious refusal of military service.

As a matter of fact, I have come to the conviction (in my old age) that the pacifist movement might be strengthened if the government offered no alternative to military service except prison. Then the issue raised by the resister would be the government’s claimed power to conscript. In my view, conscription is the basic evil.

The government’s recognition of religious objection to military service blunts resistance to conscription.

Those who during the Viemam War said “Hell no we won’t go” were on the right track and did more co bring the war to an end than did the COs.

Debate aside, the issue noted that the Radnor, Pennsylvania, Meeting had approved a minute endorsing the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill, and considered this a way by which the Meeting “expresses its commitment to our historic Peace Testimony.”

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in

After noting several years of dwindling coverage of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal, it was a pleasant surprise to see that the magazine devoted its issue to the topic.

“Why Pray for Peace and Pay for War?” — the cover of the March 2008 Friends Journal

Robert Dockhorn wrote the opening editorial. Excerpt:

Historically, many Friends have refused to participate in armed forces, and occasionally Friends, in an organized way, have refused to pay taxes to finance military activity. But mostly, especially in recent years, only a few individuals, acting on the basis of individual conscience, have refused to pay taxes that are “mixed” — i.e. where one cannot determine which monies are funding which functions of government. These individual Friends have sometimes received endorsement from their meetings, and on occasion, meetings (including yearly meetings) have gone so far as to encourage individual Friends generally to think seriously about tax resistance.

In this issue of Friends Journal, we offer several articles that address this subject. At the center of them is a moral dilemma: how can those of us who are clear that our government is pursuing an immoral, militarist course live with our consciences in the knowledge that we are funding this activity? What is required of us? What are our real choices? What is our most effective response? And, at another level: are we required only to be faithful to our consciences, and to leave the consequences in God’s hands?

For  — my wife, Roma, and I refused to pay the military portion of our federal income tax, as calculated by Friends Committee on National Legislation. We donated the refused amounts to various causes that we felt were appropriate. During these years I was employed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Eventually, the IRS came to my employer and sought to levy my wages for the owed amounts. Much searching resulted, and the yearly meeting, while declining to turn over the funds, placed them in a separate account and did not hide them. Eventually, they were attached. And in , Roma and I prayerfully considered our course, sensed that we were no longer led to this resistance, and settled with the IRS, paying a substantial amount of interest and penalties. We followed a leading, and the leading changed for us. In the entire process, we were supported and nurtured by my monthly and yearly meeting (I am a Friend, Roma is not) — but it was our leading, supported by meetings, not the meetings’ leading.

And that is part of the question in these articles. It is not just about what individuals can do, and should do. It is also about what all Friends can and should do — together. How are Friends led today?

The first war tax resistance article in the issue came from Nadine Hoover, who told the story of Dan Jenkins’s attempt to get the courts to recognize conscientious objection to military taxation as a right of individual conscience that American citizens had before the enactment of the U.S. Constitution and that they had deliberately not relinquished by means of that document (see ♇ ).

The courts weren’t buying it, and in fact found the argument so far-fetched that they upheld a $5,000 fine against Jenkins for using legally-frivolous arguments. Hoover thought the arguments were good enough to be worth repeating in the Journal, however.

She noted that “nearly three dozen Quakers and other supporters” joined Jenkins when he was arguing his appeal, and she argued:

To pay war taxes or to purchase from or invest in corporate structures that profit on war or use military might in order to secure wealth, in violation of our religious conviction, plants a dis-ease among us. Friends’ witness is letting our lives speak — not that we will be protected but that we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable — knowing our faith will sustain us, set us free, and give us joy. I have experienced this joy when I live in accord with my conscience and faith, regardless of the apparent, temporal consequences.

She invited “Friends who will stand before the courts and proclaim our faith… [or] write their statements of conscience and share them with others… [or] make the commitment to represent and/or support any Friend who is called to this witness” to write a war tax resistance committee of the New York Yearly meeting. She hoped that if enough Quakers began to resist, they might make a change in the country the way the women’s suffrage movement did.

The change Hoover was hoping this would bring about was that the government would legally acknowledge conscientious objection to military spending by passing the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, or something along those lines:

Quakers, Mennonites, Shakers, and others have maintained this testimony throughout U.S. history. Still many people today, of a wide variety of faiths, do not pay taxes for military purposes because this action violates their essential religious beliefs and moral convictions of conscience. Passage of this bill by Congress would facilitate the payment of all taxes owed by these principled people.

Perish the thought.

Hoover shared a minute from the New York Yearly Meeting, dated :

The Living Spirit works in the world to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people. We are united in this Power. We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction. We will seek ways to witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.

Then she listed off some possible “ways to witness”:

  • encourage your congregation to write and deliver a statement of conscientious objection to paying for war
  • write a statement of conscience to include with your tax return and to send to various other people
  • redirect some or all of your taxes “to an escrow account to be held in trust for the U.S. government”
  • file more lawsuits using Jenkins’s 9th Amendment argument
  • live on a below-the-tax-line income
  • divest from “corporations that profit from war” and invest and spend more responsibly
  • “Pursue local ordinances that deny corporations recognition as persons, and that deny recognition of corporate charters as contracts”

It was a long, rambling, repetitive, sometimes vague and random-seeming (what did corporate charters have to do with any of this?) argument. It represents one weird extreme of the Peace Tax Fund idea, which had come to be seen by some supporters as an end in itself, rather than a means to a more important end. Why do we resist paying war taxes? Because that might help us get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed!

The following article, edited by Karen A. Reixach, tried to account for how enthusiasm for conscientious objection to military taxation had taken hold in the New York Yearly Meeting in recent years. It began by identifying a “movement of conscience” in much the same way that voluntaryists describe ideal noncoercive politics, with a quote from Jim Corbett:

Nonviolent civil initiative by covenant communities is… the way human beings preserve and develop society based on consent, in which the rule of law, as distinguished from the rule of commanders, is necessarily grounded… Civil initiative must be societal rather than organizational, nonviolent rather than injurious, truthful rather than deceitful, catholic rather than sectarian, dialogical rather than dogmatic, substantive rather than symbolic, volunteer-based rather than professionalized, and based on community powers rather than government powers.

The article hoped to describe how when individuals articulate and share their conscientious yearnings, by means of a “statement of conscience,” they can find like-minded souls to form a “movement of conscience” that can work together to “act on our collective beliefs of conscience,” using the recent activity in the New York Yearly Meeting as an example.

She described some of the minutes and reports from the Meeting that had touched on peace and justice issues in recent years, and on the Meeting’s support for Dan Jenkins in his court cases. Then:

In the yearly meeting’s Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War sponsored a series of conferences in support of this growing movement of conscience. The first conference was held at Purchase Meeting the weekend following the oral argument of Jenkins in the Second Circuit in . The court hearing and the conference were attended by about 35 Friends and others from the metropolitan area and the northeast region. Out of that conference arose two strands of action: exploring the possibility of group legal action, and expanding the movement of conscience [PDF illegible] step of writing a statement of conscience.

The second conference, in at Rochester Meeting, featured a public forum on the failure of violence that included Robert Holmes, professor of Philosophy at University of Rochester; Derek Brett, of Conscience and Peace Tax International; and Frederick Dettmer, the attorney representing Daniel Jenkins. During the following day and a half, Friends continued to consider action steps individually and in concert with others.

The third conference was held at Flushing Meeting in … It focused on international venues for raising freedom of conscience issues as they apply to paying taxes for war. A fourth conference , is being planned; and as momentum builds, we envision more every few months, inviting ever-widening circles of participants.

I don’t see many details there about what, if any “action steps” the conferees decided on. Jens Braun is quoted in the article as suggesting some possible next steps:

  1. to develop a better theoretical understanding of pacifism and the failure of violence, so as to share this vision more convincingly
  2. to “explore, develop, and improve the many ways Friends can work towards not paying for war” — 
    1. get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed
    2. try new court challenges along the lines of Dan Jenkins’s
    3. develop and use workshops and other outreach material
  3. to join with counterparts in other countries, for instance at international conferences

The Yearly Meeting then issued this Minute:

To Conscientious Objectors to Paying for War Everywhere,

New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends invites you to join us in acknowledging that paying for war violates our conviction in the Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people.

We call on all conscientious objectors to paying for war to state in writing 1) your belief against paying for war and the preparations for war, 2) major influences in forming your belief, 3) how it is demonstrated by the way you live, and 4) a request that our government recognize and accommodate our convictions.

We ask anyone who prepares such a statement to send it to NYYM Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War… We ask Friends to send your statement to your monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings to record in the minutes having received your testimony.

The thing that unnerves me is that it’s possible to read the whole article without seeing a single reference to one of these newly enthused New York Yearly Meetingers actually refusing to pay their taxes (except for Jenkins himself, who put his taxes in escrow with a promise to pay them into a government “Peace Tax Fund” once one was established). There’s lots of talk about writing statements of conscience and holding gatherings and planning legal strategies and contacting legislators and all that, but where is the actual not-paying-for-war part? Of “the many ways Friends can work towards not paying for war,” you’d think some of them might involve not paying for war. Hopefully this just went without saying, but I worry.

A sidebar from David R. Bassett and Karen Reixach concerned the status of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, and where one could look on-line to find information about it. Another, by John Little Randall, described his work with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and with Conscience and Peace Tax International.

The following article, by Jens and Spee Braun, wrote about war tax resistance as part of (and contributing to) a larger project of living a life of integrity, and how not-straightforward it all is. It’s a good overview of what a typical modern American war tax resister is in for:

Are you frustrated thar the war goes on and on? Has your conscience brought up with you the subject of not paying for war? Be careful; your conscience can make you do things (albeit for a good cause) that can turn your life upside down!

You don’t really want to think of refusing to pay part of your taxes to the government, do you? For starters, no matter how you calculate the percentage to refuse, there will always be some frustrating other formula that makes just as much sense. You can use the FCNL percentage of the budget going towards war, but the War Resisters League has another calculation and number. You can refuse to pay a token amount, or you can simply not pay the estimated 50 percent or so of the tax burden that goes to war-making, past war debts, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons work, and all that spying we do. How to decide?

And then, to top it off, you have to figure what to do with the money not going to the government! Give it to charity? Put it in an escrow account? Use it for peaceful and life-affirming purposes at home or overseas? Of course this problem can be avoided by living under the taxable-income level — if you don’t mind life without all the great stuff we have nowadays.

After you make these decisions of how to go about not paying for war, have fun telling your employer that you don’t want any funds withheld from your paycheck and not to send any money directly to the government for you!

If you get really serious, you can take the government to court, try to change the laws, or try to change the lawmakers. So many options!

And that is not all. Deciding to be a conscientious objector to paying for war and setting up the mechanisms by which you put action into your intentions is the easy part. Once you do that, you know your conscience will have taken a few strides into your being. And with that foothold (not to mention the knowledge and understanding you have been given for having taken those steps), your conscience will begin to demand all manner of other deviations from a normal daily way of living!

Here is where life gets really dicey. The problem is integrity. As your conscience integrates one part of your life with your belief structure (and who says they need to be integrated — people have believed one thing and done another for as long as there have been people!), the process can turn into a domino effect with all sorts of other areas likewise wanting to be integrated. It becomes a terrible sacrifice.

And don’t believe those who say it is actually liberating! It is like putting your house in order: once you start organizing the mess, you keep finding other things to clean up that you didn’t even know were out of place. Take finances. It turns out that we could all pay less in taxes, i.e., buy fewer bombs, if we took all the deductions coming to us. What? Well, for example, if you keep track of all that travel to Quaker committee meetings and write down the mileage in a little book to document the expenditure, it may be deductible.

Businesses deduct driving and lunches (and even golf games), but Quakers seldom do. That is so because we Quakers generally are not hagglers; we want to pay our full share of taxes to support our government as it builds roads, keeps up national parks, and pays politicians’ salaries. We just don’t like that uncomfortable part that goes to war. In the house-in-order analogy we want to share our cake, but not have part of it be eaten by our neighbor the landmine manufacturer.

You might think about something as useful and simple as your credit cards. Who really wants to question those little pieces of plastic that make renting cars or buying great books over the Internet so easy? Even (especially) if you pay off your bill in full every month, there can’t be anything wrong, you think, in using a system that would collapse if everyone were responsible, saved their money before making purchases, paid off debts promptly, and weren’t willing to pay usurious interest charges. In particular, don’t think about how, if you do pay off your bill each month, the credit company tolerates your borrowing money free of charge only because others don’t pay up and you might not in the future. See? If you get started, who knows what trouble you will make for yourself Now you have to think about going inside to pay cash and talking to the gas station attendant rather than swiping the plastic card out at the pump!

Can we retain integrity in our relationship to money? Forget it! You know very well that money is not important enough to spend precious time keeping track of, even if some folks call it a representation of our life force. Better to spend time on that street corner protesting the lousy war. And heaven forbid the government would audit our finances, since we have been occupied with the real spiritual tasks of speaking truth to power in public places. They say money talks, but not like we can!

We’ve been told that early Friends opened their financial books to their meeting communities. We can’t do that anymore — it’s hard enough to talk about sex, but to talk about our money? Who can trust others that far — well, except if the others are insurance companies, brokerage firms, or retirement planners? We sure can’t trust our spiritual community to have the power and scale of resources to support us in need or relieve the fears of what would happen to us without money!

Yes, money is scary, so don’t bother pondering the irony of why fear of getting out from under its control ends up being even scarier then being part of a war-based society where you can believe whatever you want, as long as you pay up. It’s not worth it — and besides, a messy house is so much more comfortable!

The next article was by Elizabeth Boardman. She laid out the problem this way:

Among Friends, there is not much debate about whether war taxes are problematic. Depending upon the federal budget for the year and how you count the line items, about half of our income tax dollars will be used for the outrageous costs of war. Thousands of our personally earned dollars will be used to enrich the military-industrial complex, to make killers of young men and women,. and to cause death and destruction in the world. Letting our own money be used this way is not consistent with good stewardship, with right sharing, with Quaker testimonies, or with Christian teachings.

The question of whether and how we can resist is much more complex. Standing up to Goliath is possible only for the most confident David.

She mentioned a different set of anxieties than the Brauns had covered in their piece: worries that tax resistance or protest might trigger an audit (and then worries that such an audit might uncover math mistakes, or worse, “convenient” errors)… worries that the accountant who helps her with her tax forms will disapprove of her stand and maybe drop her as a client… difficulty reconciling willingly racking up IRS penalties & interest with her otherwise frugal and practical economic practices… difficulty finding the time to research and plan her tax resistance strategy… reluctance to break the law (or to be known as a law-breaker).

In the face of things like this, Boardman recommends that prospective war tax resisters start small: maybe with phone tax resistance, or some sort of symbolic protest like withholding $10.40 from your taxes or supporting the Peace Tax Fund.

She also recommended that people who resist quietly, by slipping below the taxable income line, start making some noise about what they’re doing — otherwise “we accomplish nothing but a sense of personal righteousness.”

Following this were an excerpt from John Woolman’s journals (see Excerpts from the Journal of John Woolman) and from the letter Woolman and twenty other Quakers sent to their fellow-Friends in to explain why they could not pay taxes being raised for war expenses (see ♇ ).

The next article in the set was by Steve Leeds. He described becoming a war tax resister in and then drifting away in discouragement after the IRS garnished his salary for the taxes, penalties, and interest. Then:

Fifteen years later, through renewed spiritual commitment and membership in a Friends meeting, I was led to take action with other Quakers on war tax resistance. It began among a few of us, and that’s all it takes.

, my meeting began cohosting war tax resistance gatherings with Northern California War Tax Resistance. We urged Friends in our meeting to engage in symbolic war tax resistance — refusing federal phone taxes, paying under protest, withholding symbolic amounts, or living below the tax line — and letting our legislators know about it. We found that a number of households in the meeting partook in some form of war tax resistance, symbolic or otherwise.

Philosophically, it’s a slam dunk. No more war. Not with my dollars.

Logistically, though, it’s easy to become fixated on the mechanics and legal aspects of war tax resistance. There’s a lot to learn and consider. My journey, through discernment, prayer, and the support of others, led me to focus on complex social and financial issues. Mostly, I have been confronting my fear of the IRS and the insecurity of not knowing where this will lead.

For I have held back $1,040 from the IRS (symbolic of the IRS 1040 form). Living with multiple feelings — fear, joy, and liberation — makes life whole. My faith as a Quaker, striving to be nonviolent and to oppose all wars, has led me down this path. I am sustained by the knowledge that many Quakers throughout history have resisted paying taxes for war. When I think that we as a faith community need to do more, I know that the we starts with me.

So! Quite a bit of material and many perspectives there — and a great deal of contrast in approaches between the pursuit of legal accommodation from the New York Quakers and the cautious but deliberate war tax resistance of the California Quakers (Boardman and Leeds were both from the San Francisco Meeting). It had been years since the Journal devoted that much attention to the topic, and they haven’t done so since.

The series of articles prompted a lot of discussion in the letters-to-the-editor column of subsequent issues — some of it quite hostile to war tax resistance.

  • Dennis P. Roberts noted that the Bible is full of stories of war, and that it “establishes beyond any doubt that the performance of an army in the field is directly correlative to the quality of the faith and spirit of the society or nation that put it there” and that because “the heart, faith, honor, and spirit of a nation” is best represented by “the fighting soldier, the fighting sailor, the fighting marine, the fighting airman,” he finds that “this nonpayment of war taxes can indeed be carried to frivolous extremes.”
  • Lucinda Antrim thought that war tax resistance “contradicts the Testimony of Community… We are, here in the U.S., members of the community of the United States.… I find myself agreeing, somewhat to my surprise, with the judge’s imposition of a ‘frivolous” fine on Dan Jenkins.” (Naomi Paz Greenberg responded that she could not understand how this vague and unarticulated “Testimony of Community somehow nullifies our historic Peace Testimony”.)
  • Perry Treadwell responded that he did not recognize the U.S. government as his “community.” “Thirty-six years ago I was led to refuse to pay war taxes… I currently send the small amount that I calculate this warrior nation wants to agencies that support the families of wounded military personnel. I have followed Thoreau’s warning: ‘What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.’”
  • David Zarembka wrote in to correct “the impression that the IRS is as omniscient as God, all seeing, all knowing, never making a mistake in getting the last farthing out of the helpless tax resister. Nothing could be further from the truth.” He recounted some IRS blunders in his own case, and said, “I have always made sure that the cost of the IRS getting funds from me exceeded any penalties and interest that they might charge. In my 37 years of war tax resistance I am certain that I (and all the other active war tax resisters I know as a group) have withheld much more funds for government war-making and given them to peace organizations than the IRS has ever collected, including penalties and interest. I don’t think that this excuse should be used by Quakers as a group as a cop-out for refusing to pay for our wars. In fact, if all Quakers in the United States were war tax resisters, the IRS couldn’t even cope with our collective resistance.”
  • George Levinger, who said he’d been a phone tax resister in the Vietnam War era, had soured on war tax resistance, considering it ultimately counterproductive largely because the government succeeded in seizing the taxes from him with penalties and interest. He suggested channeling the resources you might otherwise use in war tax resistance “to contribute to various sorts of peace-promoting organizations” instead.
  • Ruth Hyde Paine wrote in to promote the “penny poll” idea.
  • Gary Shuler wrote in to sing jingo bells: “As a retired military man, I take exception to anyone who wants to use the privileges of this country and not help to foot the cost. Many of my forefathers and yours died for this freedom and you don’t want to pay taxes to keep it? Move! Cuba is nice!” (Isn’t it cute that in someone was still using the idea of tyranny in Cuba as a contrast to the U.S. rather than an example of it?)
  • For Pamela Haines, the challenge presented by war taxes seemed largely to be a challenge to come up with good excuses not to resist them. Excerpts:

    I don’t think the problem is just lack of courage, at least I hope not! Part of the difficulty, I believe, is the extent to which we are embedded and enmeshed in a deeply violent world. It’s not just the portion of my tax dollars that goes to deadly warfare. It’s my computer, the disposal of which poisons poor people in Africa and Asia. It’s my everyday purchases from invisible corporations that destroy lives and habitats far from mine. It’s my energy consumption that threatens the very viability of future generations.

    If war tax resistance seems too hard for most of us, what do we do if that’s just the tip of the iceberg? Some Friends are not deterred by the seemingly impossible and set out to disentangle themselves from the whole mess — living below taxable level, with only the bare necessity of purchases and a minimal carbon footprint. This may be a true calling for some, and certainly a courageous one, but I know it’s not mine. To me the focused goal of living a life free from complicity with institutional violence would involve participating in another sin, that of separation from my neighbors.

    Is it better not to do a right thing, if by doing a right thing you would be being inconsistent in not doing all possible right things?

In the issue, Jamie K. Donaldson explained why she gave up on trying to change the United States and left it rather than continue to be part of its war machine. She’d contemplated tax resistance at one point, but decided it wasn’t for her. Here’s how she describes that decision:

I was haunted by the quote attributed to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig: “Let them march all they want as long as they pay their taxes.” Suddenly the television shots of millions of people in the streets protesting the start of war lost their inspiration for me, and I wallowed in our powerlessness to prevent it.

Haig’s cynical remark exemplified my inner struggle as well as a wrenching and age-old moral dilemma for all Friends. Some bear it as a cross, enabling them to continue the Lamb’s War on behalf of love, truth, and justice. Could I, too? Alas, the contradiction of working for peace while paying for war, of being complicit by mere participation in the U.S. “system,” became untenable and intolerable. I explored war tax resistance, but rejected it because I hold the assets of my incapacitated mother and could not allow the government to garnish money for her care to recuperate my taxes withheld.

An obituary notice for Stephanie Kennedy in the issue mentioned her work on war tax resistance. An obituary notice for Charles Richard Johnson in the issue called him “a dedicated war tax resister.”

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an ad from the Friends Journal in pitches the Monteverde community in Costa Rica, which was founded by American Quaker taxpatriates, as an ethical investing opportunity and also a potentially attractive tax-break junket

Some bits and pieces from here and there: