Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
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20th–21st century Quakers →
Friends Journal
Here are a couple of newspaper articles that give a glimpse of how American Quakers addressed war tax resistance at the New York Yearly Meeting gathering at Lake George in , where “the tragic situation in Viet Nam” was high on the agenda:
A report published after the meeting called on members of the Society of Friends to exercise their consciences and offered support to those Quakers whose actions resulted in financial or personal loss.
“We call upon Friends to obey the Inner Light even when this means disobeying man’s laws, and to risk whatever penalties may be incurred,” said the report.
“We call upon Friends to examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.”
“We call upon Friends to urge that young men consider in conscience whether they can submit to a military system that commands to kill and destroy.”
“We call upon Friends Meetings to support acts of compromise [sic] by setting up Committees for Sufferings to keep close touch with deeply exercised Friends and their families who may need spiritual and material care because of their witness.”
So far, there has been no indication that any Friends will not pay their taxes, or refuse the draft or disobey “man’s laws.”
But if any do they will be supported by other Friends.
“I’ve thought about it but I’m not persuaded that this is an effective way.
I admire people if their conscience leads them to take that action,” says John Daniels, clerk of the Albany Society of Friends.
An Associated Press dispatch from , put it this way:
Quakers in the New York area have been encouraged to refuse to pay taxes or hold jobs that contribute to the war effort in Viet Nam.
The Society of Friends office here made public a document or “testimony” approved at an annual meeting at Silver Bay on Lake George, N.Y.
Similar to the Peace Declaration of The Friends in 1660, the message was described as perhaps the “strongest message of the 20th century by a major body within the denomination.”
In the document, Quakers were promised financial help through special committees if they changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.
The new “testimony” warned Quakers that they may be facing a “supreme test” that could lead to persecution such as the sect suffered 300 years ago.
Entitled “Message to Friends on Viet Nam,” the document said members of the society must “stand forth unequivocally and at all costs to proclaim their peace testimony.”
Quakers were urged to express their concern over the war to lawmakers and the world community, and to “examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.”
The 72 Friends “meetings” or congregations in New York, northern New Jersey, and southern Connecticut were called upon to “support acts of conscience by setting up committees for sufferings…”
I also made note of this Lake George meeting in my entry.
At that time I was unable to find an on-line copy of the “Message to Friends on Viet Nam,” but in renewing my search, I found that someone had uploaded a scan of the Friends Journal.
That article didn’t get me any closer to the text I was hunting for, but it did include some other interesting items, including an article by Franklin Zahn on tax resistance, and another by Thomas Bassett about the New England Yearly Meeting that shows war tax resistance was on the agenda there too:
Tax Refusal, Law, and Order
by Franklin Zahn
In the President asked for a ten per cent surcharge on income taxes that might “continue for so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam require higher revenues.”
In words of Quaker simplicity, he was requesting a war tax.
What ought Friends to do about specific levies for war?
First, of course, they can work to prevent such legislation, using the agency they have set up for such purposes — the Friends Committee on National Legislation — and using the opportunity to tell congressmen again that Friends favor de-escalation rather than the escalation the new taxes are designed to permit.
If the President’s request becomes law, Friends may then pay under protest.
This situation might loosely be compared to that of a young man who joins the Army under protest: voicing his convictions is better than not voicing them, but it’s not a satisfactory solution.
After paying a war tax Friends may then through regular channels claim a refund, and although in the past this has never been granted on the basis of conscience, a number of California taxpayers plan to make a common court case.
Here the analogy might be to the young man who goes to court to get released from the Army — again not a very hopeful approach.
However, the young man is entitled by law to request exemption in the first place; unfortunately for Friends as taxpayers, no such legal choices are available to them.
Years ago Pacific Yearly Meeting suggested legislation embodying conscientious-objector provisions in Federal tax laws, and today some Friends are still considering such proposals, but for the foreseeable future, pacifists will have no legal tax alternatives.
Further, for most Friends there is not even a possible illegal alternative for their tax dollars, for if not paid as ordered, the dollars are frequently levied from bank accounts which unfortunately most Friends in their affluence today have.
It is as though a pacifist refused to bayonet an enemy and several strong men held the weapon in his hands and jabbed it for him.
The choice is not whether to participate in war or not, but whether to do so willingly or to drag one’s feet.
“We refuse to steal not as a protest against burglary — with consideration of how ‘effective’ we may or may not be — but simply because for us stealing is wrong.”
Many see a refusal to pay taxes voluntarily as only a protest.
Now it is true that we can designate any act we engage in as a protest against something.
We can fast and announce that our purpose is to protest the war.
A vigil, a march, a meeting, or a handing out of educational material can be a protest if so designated.
Even the young Friend who refused to carry the bayonet could refuse as a protest.
But we are not necessarily protesting anything when we refuse to do that which for us is wrong.
We refuse to steal not as a protest against burglary — with consideration of how “effective” we may or may not be — but simply because for us stealing is wrong.
Similarly, a Friend may refuse to pay taxes voluntarily, not in protest but because he feels he must not participate in war.
In Southern California’s Quarterly Meeting there are many individuals and three Meetings refusing to pay voluntarily the seven per cent war tax on telephone bills.
I do not know which are consciously doing this as a “protest” and which see it as part of the Friends’ code of conduct or way of life.
When Claremont Meeting, in its public statement, said that in refusing to pay it was following a precedent in Friends’ peace testimony, two newspapers used the term “protest” in their very good coverage and one did not.
All three papers quoted the portion of the statement that said, “Those of us who refuse to pay taxes which go to support war also are willing to accept the legal consequences of this refusal…”
Such willingness, along with complete openness, is an important part of any “civil” or, as one Friend terms it, “courteous” disobedience.
It might also be called “orderly” disobedience, for, contrary to the usual linking together of “law and order,” in these days of riots the two words are not necessarily related.
The war in Vietnam is considered by many Americans to be lawful, but to Vietnamese villagers the aftermath of a bombing raid would hardly appear orderly.
On the contrary, the refusal to pay taxes for such chaos may be unlawful, but when the decision is made openly, arrived at in the usually slow and quiet manner of Friends’ group decisions, and explained in nonevasive language with a willingness to accept penalties, it may be very orderly indeed.
Franklin Zahn, member of Claremont (Calif.) Meeting, free-lance writer, and compiler of the recent leaflet “Early Friends and War Taxes,” first refused the telephone excise tax in , during the Korean War, and had his telephone disconnected.
(In , the Internal Revenue Law was amended, permitting telephone companies to refer unpaid taxes to IRS.)
In he read this paper to Pacific Yearly Meeting’s session on civil disobedience.
New England Yearly Meeting
Reported by Thomas Bassett
Quakerism is uneasy everywhere in the face of long-continuing violence, “distress of nations, and perplexity whether on the shores of Asia or in the Edgware Road.”
Friends’ answers to problems of the Vietnam war and urban riots have ranged from evangelical mission to Quaker action.
Evangelical Friends eschew mere human “manipulation” and expect peace only when Christ reigns in human hearts.
Philadelphia and Baltimore Yearly Meetings, reinforced by AFSC and FCNL staffs in their midst, approved minutes to send medical aid to North Vietnam against the law if it could not be changed.
New England Friends were, as usual, in the middle of this scale.
The clerk opened the first plenary session with William Penn’s words on evangelism: “They were changed men themselves before they went out to change others.”
The last, eight-hour session approved a minute to oppose the President’s war surtax and urged its members to earnest consideration of whether they can conscientiously pay war taxes.
And take a look at this advertisement from the back pages:
On , I shared with you some interesting stuff from a edition of the Quaker periodical Friends Journal.
That inspired me to hunt around on-line and see if there were any other copies in the archives.
I was able to find a complete set, or close to it anyway, from .
And there’s a tremendous amount of material about war tax resistance in those pages.
War tax resistance, which had been such a core part of Quaker practice in America from the founding of Pennsylvania through the American Civil War, began to fade in , until by it seemed to belong to the same ancient past as “thee”s and “thou”s, and only an eccentric fringe of Quakers considered it a living practice.
But, from reviewing the back issues of Friends Journal, I see that the tradition had not died; it was only sleeping.
It woke up in and regained its place as a core part of the Quaker peace testimony and a frequent topic of discussion at Quaker meetings.
, hardly an issue of the journal didn’t have some discussion of war tax resistance, and there were periodic “special issues” on the subject (there was one as recently as ).
Then, , the topic started appearing less and less, and migrating into the back pages (and the obituaries — over 25% of the mentions of tax resistance in the Friends Journal are past tense references from obituaries and retrospectives… and the only such mention I found in the six issues from is in an obituary).
Have we entered a new era of forgetting, or just a calm before the next outbreak?
I should probably be careful about drawing conclusions from this data.
I have learned a lot about the content of one magazine, which gives hints as to the state of the Society of Friends, but may be biased by which Friends were subscribers and by the opinions of the magazine staff at different times.
Also: in the scans I viewed, sometimes parts of pages are obscured or damaged, and I relied on the results of automated optical-character-recognition to do my searches, so I may have missed some things.
I also was just doing a naive search for the word “tax” to find mentions worth investigating.
For this reason, I may have missed references to “contributions to the national treasury” and other such equivalent constructions that don’t use the word “tax.”
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
By the glacier that had crept over war tax resistance in the Society of Friends for almost a century had started to recede, and you can see evidence of this in issues of the Friends Journal from that year.
The issue mentions the legal case against A.J. Muste based on his tax refusal .
Excerpt:
At a hearing on , A.J. Muste declared that “on grounds of Christian teaching, conviction, and conscience” he could not help to pay for the development of more nuclear arms or hydrogen bombs.
(A follow-up article noted that “The United States Tax Court ruled in that the First Amendment to the Constitution, which assures religious freedom, does not give the conscientious objector immunity from paying taxes which are to be used in part for war or preparation for war.”)
Muste, however, was a Presbyterian, not a Quaker.
It is telling that although there was some latent sympathy for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends at the time, the number of exemplars seemed to still be few.
But that would change.
Here is an article from the issue:
Several Friends have sent letters to the Collector of Internal Revenue, United States Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., declaring they cannot pay taxes for war purposes.
The following letter by Wilmer J. Young of Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pa., is indicative of the trend and spirit of letters by other Friends, copies of which have been sent to the office of the Friends Journal:
I cannot voluntarily pay taxes which are used to prepare for the destruction of mankind.
For the past twenty-four years I have lived voluntarily on a scale which meant that I was not called upon to pay a tax on income.
In , however, due to unusual circumstances, I am eligible for such payment.
I am sending today checks to various organizations whose object is to encourage a nonviolent approach to the solution of international problems, which will more than cover the amount of my tax.
Taxes for the ordinary expenses of government, schools, roads, proper police activity, etc., I pay cheerfully and gladly.
But modern war has now become so serious a threat to mankind, that I would prefer spending the last years of my life in prison rather than deliberately supporting it.
In the issue, Frances G. Conrow briefly reviewed a seminar on “The Origin, Development, and Significance of Our Quaker Testimonies” that had been led by Clarence E. Pickett, and suggested:
In a world where there is no defense against modern war, there is need as never before for the peace testimony.
Is refusal to pay taxes for support of war effort emerging as a new testimony in support both of purity of purpose in simplicity and as a peace witness?
It goes to show how thorough the glacial forgetting of Quaker war tax resistance had been, that in war tax resistance could be described in a Quaker publication as possibly “emerging as a new testimony.”
(The same issue has an article titled “The Quaker Peace Testimony, : Some Suggestions for Witness and Rededication” that doesn’t mention taxes at all.)
In the issue, in an article on “The Peace Testimony and the Monthly Meeting” by Lawrence McK. Miller, Jr., he wrote:
Pacifist and nonpacifist Friends are also much closer to each other than they care to admit in terms of their personal involvement indirectly in preparation for war.
The tax-refusal cases are making it clear that through our federal taxes we are all contributing to the so-called defense effort.
In many other ways most of us are cooperating, if only in our reluctance to protest.
It is the pacifist in these instances who particularly must act with a sense of regret for the measure of his involvement and with real humility for the compromising position he is in.
Awareness is growing, but still the emphasis seems to be on sad-eyed, shoulder-shrugging regret, rather than resistance.
Tax refusal is largely still seen as something other people do, while Quakers are to just sorrowfully and humbly reflect on their complicity.
On , Robert J. Leach wrote to the magazine about the Geneva (Switzerland) Yearly Meeting and noted that one of the “high points” of the meeting was when an “octogenarian Friend, Elizabeth Blaser, pled with Friends to refuse to pay defense taxes.”
In the same issue where that report appeared, the pseudonymous Quaker history columnist “Now and Then” wrote about the emergence of the Quaker peace testimony in , and concluded by saying:
We may search our hearts to see whether we have allowed this testimony to grow as it should have done in three centuries or even in our own lifetime.
Have we kept abreast “the Truth,” as Friends used to call Quakerism?
Can we be satisfied with the feebleness of our efforts for peace even ?
Are there not too few Friends willing to find for our testimony more radical expression, which, whatever else it may do, will strengthen our own determination not to acquiesce in the trend to war?
Between the Fifth Monarchy rising and the cold war of a nuclear age there is a vast difference.
Should not our peace testimony become correspondingly more aggressive and more inclusive and more costly?
What will we do this anniversary year about civil defense, about biological warfare, about the hidden control by the Pentagon of our minds and property, about taxes that go to war preparation, about the suppression of the truth concerning the risks of nuclear war or even of testing?
The following years would show that many Quakers shared this dissatisfaction with the feeble state of the peace testimony, and that many saw war tax resistance in some form or another to be key to giving that testimony some backbone.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
By , war tax resistance, or at least increased anxiety about paying war taxes, has surfaced in the Society of Friends, and we can see evidence of this in the pages of Friends Journal from .
Groping towards a “peace tax” plan
The war tax resister’s equivalent to the alchemist’s “philosopher’s stone” is the “peace tax” — which is capable of turning the leaden bullets of taxes for war into the golden promise of taxes only for the nice things.
Like the philosopher’s stone, its existence has been theorized a great deal and demonstrated very little.
In , Friends began their search for the legendary beast.
In the issue is a mention that the Peace Committee of the Pacific Yearly Meeting had begun circulating a preliminary plan for something it called a “civilian income tax bill” in order “to sound out the interest of the peace movement before deciding whether to press for legislation, and specifically to get reactions to the stipulation that pacifists taking advantage of paying into the suggested alternative, UNICEF, would be willing to be taxed an extra five per cent.
No other test of religious objection to military defense, such as is presently required of draft age C.O.s is proposed.”
Egbert Hayes of Claremont, California, is given as the contact person for this effort.
A follow-up article in the issue draws the comparison between this effort and the ongoing effort of some of the Amish to win a conscientious objection from the social security system, but notes that “little support has been found [for conscientious objection to military taxation] from the newspaper writers and members of Congress who defended the Amish.”
In reply to the suggestion that conscientious citizens should have a right to “vote with their tax dollars” for alternatives to war, Senator Joseph S. Clark wrote that this “would cause great harm to our country’s fiscal system.”
He may have anticipated that those “voting” in such a way would be much more numerous than the members of small sects or groups, since many who do not think of themselves as pacifists might agree that there is a dangerous disproportion between the national expenditures for military threats and for the winning of world friendship.
Some thought had been given to the possibility that if “civilian” tax payers paid their money to UNICEF, Congress might simply reduce its own $12 million contributions to UNICEF and divert that money back to the non-civilian budget.
Also:
The Claremont bill, better as a proof of sincerity than the questionnaire method used by draft boards (who are no experts in theology), calls for tax payments that are five per cent greater than the computed tax and for publication of names.
The latter we could achieve now without waiting for an act of Congress.
Willingness to take an unpopular stand before one’s community is a surer test of conscience than any judicial inquisition.
And it is exactly the thing needed if we are to influence opinion.
As shown by many cases of war-tax refusers who have had property seized, there may be no real alternative to the payment of a required number of dollars by those of a certain income level.
Some write a protest on their tax returns, but this kind of protest, like the secret ballot, is far from enough.
As John Sykes pointed out in his book on The Quakers: A New Look at Their Place in Society, the prosperity and bourgeois status of the Quakers after their years of persecution silenced them in more ways than one.
And they are not more silenced than thousands of their natural allies, unknown and isolated, having other religious or nontheistic backgrounds.
It is not a Hamlet’s conscience that “makes cowards of us all,” but the structure of society with its oligarchy or power elite controlling most forms of employment and mass media.
The article continues in this vein for a while, explaining why it’s so difficult to stand up and dissent, and how even those who work up the courage to do so are so frequently drowned out, dismissed, or ignored.
[W]hy should not each Meeting, each local peace group, write its own statement, secure signatures from as many sympathizers as possible, and distribute copies?
The actionists do not always take time for reasoning or for a dignified approach that will persuade people to hear their reasons.
But they are right: reasoning is not enough.
It takes the combination of reason and personal courage; it takes individual decisions which do not wait for either our own or enemy governments to disarm.
We can rarely escape taxes, but we can speak.
There was another movement gaining interest in Quaker circles around this time, in which people were voluntarily taxing themselves one or two percent of their incomes and sending this money to the United Nations, which, at that time, was still seen by many people to have potential as a sort of global arbitrator or adjudicator that might “take away the occasion of war” (this in the face of the fact that the U.N. had recently authorized the U.S. war in Korea).
I don’t see much evidence of overlap between the people advocating this and the people rekindling interest in war tax resistance, but the fact that this was in the air probably helped to shape the “peace tax” plans and redirection efforts that followed.
One note in the issue does seem to suggest that war tax redirection was one motivation for people participating in this voluntary U.N. tax project:
An opinion of the legal department of the United Nations has made clear that gifts to the U.N. or to its specialized agencies are not tax-deductible.
Any checks sent directly to the controller of the United Nations should be marked for a specific program to avoid having them go to the general fund of the U.N. and thereby merely reduce the assessments of member governments.
Here’s another note of interest on this topic, from the issue:
The Friends Meeting at Pittsburgh, Pa., has expressed publicly its serious concern for the Amish farmer whose work horses were recently seized by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of social security taxes.
Friends see in this infringement upon an act of conscience a much broader threat against all those who will not cooperate with the government in support of war and preparation for war.
They point to the alternative of voluntary payments to special U.N. funds in addition to income tax payments.
Maurice McCrackin
In , the Presbytery of Cincinnati began defrocking the Reverend Maurice McCrackin, ostensibly because they thought his war tax resistance was unbecoming of a minister (some suspect it was his work against racial segregation that really raised the ire of his foes — his church was the first in Cincinnati to be integrated).
The Friends Journal kept an eye on the case.
In the issue, a contributor notes that the racially-mixed children’s camp “Camp Joy” was having financial difficulty because of the church action against McCracken, the camp’s administrator.
The Camp Joy Committee has this past year purchased a 314-acre farm as a new site since in the Cincinnati Park Board refused to turn on the water at the previous site, which was Park Board property, because of the income-tax stand of two staff members.
It seems unlikely that a regional park board would actually have a policy of refusing to turn on the water for clients who were behind on their federal income taxes, so I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to those who suspect that animosity to his racial integration projects was probably behind the trouble.
The issue noted that “Almost every day brings to the Journal office fresh protests or statements opposing the military venture of the United States in Vietnam.”
One of these came from McCracken:
Copies of an appeal to those who wish to withdraw their support from war (particularly the U.S. war in Vietnam) by refusing to pay all or part of their income taxes or by reducing their incomes to a nontaxable level are available from the No Tax for War in Vietnam Committee, c/o the Reverend Maurice McCrackin, 932 Dayton Street, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Incorporated in the appeal is a statement to which tax-refusers can sign their names and addresses.
Signed statements sent to Maurice McCrackin before the tax deadline will be used by the Committee as the basis for releasing to the press on that day names and addresses of the signers.
The Committee suggests also that copies of the statement be printed in publications, posted on bulletin boards, and read in meetings by those who have signed them.
The issue had a larger article about the Presbytery’s inquisition against McCracken.
Excerpts:
The presbytery has shown inconsistency and indecision… In , after Maurice McCrackin’s release from prison, the presbytery issued a statement of support, saying, “Rev. McCrackin has not broken his ordination vows.
It is not the function of the presbytery to collect taxes, and we find the West Cincinnati-St. Barnabas Church and its pastor are bearing a strong witness to Jesus Christ.”
Maurice McCrackin was tried in a civil trial in , but the charge was not his nonpayment of income tax for the past eleven years.
He was charged only with not answering a summons to come to the Bureau of Internal Revenue.
He was carried into the courtroom because he would not walk, and he would not stand before the judge.
On this charge he served a six-month term at Allenwood Federal Prison.
“All the while our community work was expanding,” he recalled in a sermon on the Sunday before the first hearing of the trial, “cold war tensions were increasing.
Nuclear bombs were fast being stockpiled, and reports were heard of new and deadlier weapons about to be made.
Fresh in my mind were the bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.… If churches, settlement houses, schools, if anything were to survive in Cincinnati or anywhere else, something must be done about the armaments race.… I preached about the dangers which the entire world faced.… I was preaching, but what was I doing?
“If I can honestly say that Jesus would support conscription,” he concluded, “throw a hand grenade, or with a flame thrower drive men out of caves to become living torches, if I believe he would release the bomb over Hiroshima or Nagasaki, then I not only have the right to do these things as a Christian; I am even obligated to do them.
But if I believe that Jesus would do none of these things, then I have no choice but to refuse, at whatever personal cost, to support war.”
The charges are:
The Rev. Maurice McCrackin has resisted the ordinances of God, in that upon pretense of Christian liberty he has opposed the civil lawful power, and the lawful exercise of it…
He has published erroneous opinions and maintained practices which are destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the Church…
He has failed to obey the lawful commands and to be subject to the authority of civil magistrates, [all these actions being]… contrary to the Constitution of the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Confession of Faith, chapter 20, paragraph 4, and chapter 23, paragraph 4).
Specifications of these charges include the withholding of income tax, the failure to file returns, and advocating that others do the same.
“I felt free,” said Maurice McCrackin, when he was in the grip of the criminal court.
“I could not have walked.
I doubt if my feet would have functioned.
Had I walked I would have felt I was in prison, but in not walking I felt that I was free.… It may be that the authorities will again take possession of my body; but it is my earnest purpose, God being my helper, that no man, no circumstance, no place shall be allowed to take possession of my spirit and my conscience.”
In its issue, Friends Journal reported the Presbytery’s decision to suspend McCracken, and McCracken’s decision to appeal.
A follow-up in the issue noted “the strangeness of a verdict that acquiesces in the motivation of the defendant but in effect finds him ‘guilty’ for failure to test the income tax law in the civil court.
The seeds of the presbytery trial go back three years,” according to Christian Century commentator Virgie Bernhardt, a Quaker, “to reactionary forces stirred up in the community by McCrackin’s integration activities.”
A further follow-up in the issue noted that McCracken’s appeal “to the Permanent Judicial Commission of the United Presbyterian Synod of Ohio” was accepted.
The Commission “rebuked the Cincinnati presbytery for its ‘unduly severe’ judgment and the lack of proof that the minister had disturbed the peace of the Church, as the local presbytery had charged.”
They told the local presbytery to try again.
The following year, in the issue, a brief notice mentions that the United Presbyterian General Assembly approved McCracken’s dismissal, and notes that 28 members of his church have split off from the Presbyterians as a result and have formed a new church under McCracken’s ministry.
It’s hard not to see all of this attention given to an internal battle in another church as a proxy for an anticipated controversy that was just beginning to stir in the Society of Friends.
(McCracken would return to the pages of the Journal to tell his own story in the issue.)
Other war tax resistance mentions
A report on the Switzerland Yearly Meeting in the issue read: “We were stimulated by the call to action and the living witness of several Swiss Friends who regularly refuse to pay their taxes for military expenditure and then bear the consequences.”
The issue includes a letter to the editor from J.H. Davenport in which he writes, “I would be glad if through the Friends Journal it could be made known that some Friends (at least one) regret that some members feel it right to participate in so-called ‘civil defense’ activities, ‘national defense’ contracts, and the payment of income taxes, the major portion of which goes to so-called ‘defense’ activities of the national government, especially when the name of Friends is used as a sort of endorsement.
¶ I have taken the liberty of painting in the word ‘SOME’ in front of the poster that I have been carrying during my lunch hour in front of the New York City Civil Defense headquarters.
The poster now reads, more truthfully, ‘SOME Quakers say No to All War.’…”
The issue has one of the earliest mentions of a Quaker meeting formally encouraging war tax resistance:
Yellow Springs Meeting, Ohio, has been deeply concerned about support of the national defense policy through payment of federal income taxes.
Some of the members have chosen to be conscientious tax refusers.
The following is an excerpt from a statement approved by the Meeting in : “We recognize that payment of federal income tax, like service in the armed forces, is a demand which may properly move Quakers and other responsible citizens to take a position of conscientious objection.
“Provided their action is imbued with a spirit of humble honesty and loving social or religious dedication, we support both those who are conscientiously impelled to pay their taxes in full, and those who undertake conscientious resistance to war taxes.
Such conscientious resistance may take many forms: refusing to pay part or all of the tax, refusing to file a return, working only at a job where no tax is withheld from wages, intentionally keeping one’s income so low that it is not taxable, resisting coercion by tax collectors, courts, and their agents, supporting other resistors and their families, and giving public testimony and witness.
We feel that persons undertaking nonviolent civil disobedience should be prepared to accept the consequences.
“We urge Congress and the President to consider legislation permitting conscientious tax objectors to choose alternative service for that portion of their tax dollars which would otherwise be assigned to military purposes.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
An odd article leading off the issue begins: “It is timely to remind Friends that during the first third of our almost three centuries in America Friends did not pay taxes; nor were they taxed.”
The author, Godfrey Klinger, quotes a historian about the aversion of the settlers in Pennsylvania — both the Quakers and the later Dutch and Germans — to being taxed.
But Klinger seems to me to be sort of dancing around the topic of Quakers and their proper response to war taxes without ever mentioning it directly.
His concluding paragraph says:
It was only after the Quakers in the [Pennsylvania colonial] Assembly permitted themselves to be influenced by the dire predictions of the warmongers, whose real aim was to rob the Indians of their land, that taxes and conscription were imposed and much-needed capital wasted on the tools of war, a crime which, in the next two hundred years, was to reach today’s proportions of half of every man’s labor and self-respect.
In the same issue, Guy W. Solt penned an article on “Friends and Their Money” in which he asked “whether there is virtue in accumulating more money than we expect to use in our lifetime.”
Among the reasons he thinks Quakers should find wealth-accumulation to be suspect is this:
Federal and state taxes consume a large portion of our income.
In general, the more wealth we have, the more taxes we pay.
The portion of our federal taxes used for military purposes is 80 per cent, or more.
This portion is very problematic for some Friends who oppose militarism, because if they refuse to pay the portion of federal taxes used for military purposes, they may be penalized and pay far more than the regular tax.
Some Friends resent taxes because of government waste.
Regardless of our attitude toward taxes, the fact remains that Friends are responsible for a part of their tax problem if they retain more money than is needed during their lifetime.
We pay taxes on the value of our property in addition to the income from it.
An opening editorial in the issue on the subject of “Direct Action,” asked, in passing: “Does the refusal to pay taxes still deserve the name of direct action when the objector has a bank deposit waiting to be confiscated?”
A later article in the same issue, on the subject of peace activists in England, noted: “Tax refusal is difficult for us, for, if we earn, we have tax deducted before we are paid.
Some of us asked to be transferred to another schedule so that we might withhold tax and send the equivalent to the World Health Organization or another good cause, but we were informed that this was not permitted.”
A report in the issue on the “round tables” that had taken place at the Friends General Conference in New Jersey , mentioned a round table discussion on “The Visible Witness: Friends and Direct-Action Projects” at which it was noted that “Avoiding a martyr complex is important.
Vigils and tax refusals as the most conspicuous witness were discussed.”
All of these mentions are conspicuously incidental: brief surfacings of war tax resistance in the context of a discussion of something else.
In “ ‘A Place to Stand In’ ” in the issue, Mildred Binns Young cast a suspicious eye on the middle-class ordinariness of the current Society of Friends, when contrasted to the crucible of sufferings in which the Society had been born.
“If friends are now indistinguishable [from any other class of quiet, honorable, successful, comfortable, and useful citizens], is it because all the causes for which we had to stand have been won, as the right to silent worship or the right to affirm in court have been won?”
Indeed not, she says — “we are living in a time when things are as wrong as they were when Christians were being thrown to lions, and as wrong as they were when Friends for years together were lying by hundreds in filthy dungeons.
Where now are the Christians, and where the Friends, prepared to suffer in resistance to these wrongs rather than to acquiesce in them?”
Specifically:
Where are the Friends who refuse to pay the taxes that go to build the armaments we abhor, as early Friends refused to pay the tithes that supported an ecclesiastical establishment they abhorred?
A few Friends do refuse, mostly Friends with such small taxes to pay that the government can afford to ignore them; and many Friends pay the taxes, but with sorrow.
Recently I saw a letter from a young man who had served a prison term for refusing to register for the draft after the Second World War.
He had chosen his present job with great care, putting aside more lucrative offers to keep as free as possible from war-making.
But his letter says wryly: “I have just solemnized my contract to give the government $600 toward war-making.”
He meant he had just signed and filed his income tax report.
What if all the young Quaker heads of families in America had been refusing to file for this tax?
What if all the older, even the wealthiest, Quaker heads of families had been refusing it?
What if we had been prepared, as the early Friends were, to pool resources in order to take care of the families of men who lost their jobs or their land, or were imprisoned?
Friends never have failed to make it clear that, officially and as a body, they refuse to recognize war or other violence as a legitimate means of settling disputes among nations or individuals.
But what about our tacit consent to an economic system that thrives on war preparation and has not learned to exist without it?
What about our easygoing participation in — nay, our prosperity within — an economic system that, to hold its own, trades in death, manufacturing the capability to destroy all that we love, and brandishing this capability of destruction as irresponsibly as a boy brandishes a stick with a nail in it?
Granted that there no longer exists any way to refuse all complicity in this system and continue to live, how often do we consider accepting only simple subsistence from it — laying up no treasure from it, refusing to operate in it to our own advantage?
As long as we are living well on it, we are not likely to be fully committed to changing it; we talk of peace, and sometimes we talk hopefully of it, while we know that peace is no lid that can be applied over a seething volcano, no plaster to lay over a festering abscess.
And with this, no longer was the coverage of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal the sympathetic coverage of fringe (and largely non-Quaker) activists, or the solemn and sorrowful contemplation of taxpayer complicity.
The gauntlet has been thrown, and now Quakers need to declare where they stand and what they plan to do about it.
(It’s worth noting that Young was on the Board of Managers of the Friends Journal at the time, and so was well-positioned to light a fire under its coverage of, and practice of, confrontational Quaker activism.)
Baltimore Yearly Meetings
The Baltimore Yearly Meetings seem to have had a burst of interest in war tax resistance around this time, and an article in the issue gives the credit to “Mildred Binns Young’s lecture” (which I believe the just-quoted article above was based on).
One “concern” expressed at the Joint Meetings for Business of the Baltimore Yearly Meetings in “advised all member Monthly Meetings to consider the responsibilities of Friends in paying or refusing to pay their taxes, now that much of our government’s funds is spent on violence, and to consider the Meeting’s possible response to the needs of Friends and their families if individuals conscientiously refuse to pay.”
The issue reported the results of a survey of 350 adult members of the Baltimore Yearly Meetings concerning the peace testimony, and bemoaned “the lack of responsible feeling about personal financial policy, something that it would seem most persons could consider with little extra effort.”
Less than 60 per cent would refuse to invest in arms production.
Only a little over half would prefer their tax money to be used for nonmilitary purposes.
Only two or three would go so far as to undertake the difficult course of refusing tax payment on this account.
It is encouraging that not far from half would be willing to tax themselves in some degree for support of the United Nations.
(This has been a growing concern, judging by the increase in such contributions.)
Drifting a bit from to keep this line of thought intact, I find in a future issue a calendar notice for a “Open panel discussion on tax refusal… sponsored by Baltimore Yearly Meetings Joint Peace Committee” featuring the speakers “Jesse Yaukey, Lawrence Scott, and Oliver Stone.”
Remembering Quaker history
In the issue, LaVerne Hill Forbush looked back at “Suffering of Friends in Maryland, ” and noted that there were 296 cases of Friends suffering fines in one region, 34 “for refusal to pay priest’s wages, [but] the greater number of fines had to do with military assessments, under such headings as refusal to go to war, refusal to muster, refusal to sign association papers or join the militia.
War taxes were doubled or trebled when Friends refused to pay them.”
In the article that recounted the results of the survey of Baltimore Yearly Meetings members, the author spent some time recounting how the Baltimore Yearly Meeting had coped with these issues in the distant past:
In Baltimore Yearly Meeting added to the Queries: ‘Do you bear a faithful testimony against bearing arms, military services, or contributing to the support of war?’ (italics ours).
In the Yearly Meeting recorded: “Most Friends appear to be careful in maintaining our testimony against war by refusing the payment of taxes.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Issues of the Friends Journal from give some additional hints of the reemergence of war tax resistance as a widespread practice in the Society of Friends… and also the first example of the backlash against it.
The lead editorial in the issue concerned “Taxes for War” and covered the war tax resistance of Quakers in England.
The article begins: “Friends in England are under the weight of the same concern that occupies American Friends: what can, or should, we do about taxation for military purposes?”
…short of outright refusal to pay taxes there seems no way out for those objecting to militarism.
The voluntary payments to U.N. funds, such as various Friends groups are making, will undoubtedly contribute to easing the moral burden, yet these sensitive donors would be the last ones to claim that their voluntary self-tax is a satisfactory solution to the problem.
The editorial then describes a quirk of British tax law by which if a taxpayer there “ ‘covenants’ a certain annual amount to a charity for seven years, the Internal Revenue will then, as The Friend (London) reports, pay over to the charitable organization ‘a sum equal to the tax normally payable on the amount of the covenant.’
The ‘charity,’ then, receives not only the contribution but also the tax paid upon it.
On the average a subscriber to a charity will have to pledge one half of his normal tax payment in order to recover that proportion usually allocated to armaments.”
While “far from flawless” and while “this plan exists only in England,” this plan “nevertheless affords some moral relief,” the editorial states.
This is the first in-depth discussion of a practical war tax resistance method in the pages of the Friends Journal, but it is only “practical” to most of its readers in the abstract — as something Friends in the old country might do.
As with the Journal’s earlier coverage of Quaker war tax resisters in Costa Rica, or of war tax resisters Milton Mayer, A.J. Muste, and Maurice McCracken, the magazine still seems most comfortable when talking about war tax resistance as something that other people do and American Quakers admire.
The article can be seen as a hunt for an excuse: “If only we had a law like the British do, we could resist our war taxes… maybe some day we will have one, perhaps we can even advocate for one, but until then there’s nothing we can do.”
Another example of the “there’s nothing we can do” point of view, in the same issue of the Journal, comes in a report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, whose sessions were held :
Our sympathy was aroused for businessmen and taxpayers trapped in the war system and, recognizing our common sense of guilt, we acknowledged the fact that all enterprise is thus enmeshed.
The next paragraph begins “We were encouraged to break out of this trap…” but no mention of resisting war taxes follows.
The issue includes an article about the United Nations that includes this observation about those countries, like the U.S.S.R., that “have refused to contribute to U.N. projects of which they disapprove”:
There is a puzzling similarity between the attitude of these countries toward the U.N. budget and the attitude of those pacifists who refuse to pay income tax because they disapprove of some of the projects of the United States Government.
Note: “those pacifists” and not “those Friends” or “those Quakers.”
Again, there’s deniability about whether Quakers are the sort of people who do this sort of thing.
But here is a letter-to-the-editor, from Wilmer J. Young of Wallingford, Pennsylvania, that shows how war tax resistance was beginning to reawaken in the Society:
The following letter, signed by Clarence Pickett and Henry Cadbury, was sent to about twenty persons:
Dear Friend:
Many Friends have for years felt uneasy about paying that part of their income tax which goes into preparation for war.
A very few have refused to pay; but the majority of Friends have felt this to be an ineffective way to protest, or they have felt for various other reasons that this was not the way for them to bear witness for peace.
At the same time, many of them have been unhappy at not bearing a clear witness in this regard.
The signers of this letter invite thee to attend a meeting of a small group of Friends who feel concern in this matter.
We hope to discuss whether there is some action (perhaps not in violation of any law) which would be a clear indication of our position on war preparation, and might have some meaning both to the participants themselves, on one side, and to the general public, on the other.
Our consideration will of course be looking toward next year, as it is already too late for this.
Most of those invited to this meeting attended it.
There was an earnest and searching discussion for two hours.
However, no consensus appeared and no action was taken.
Some of us who are clear that we cannot pay this tax can but wonder whether it is weak intelligence or misguided conscience that has led us to our decision.
The issue included a report on “The Peace and Social Order Committee of the Young Friends Committee of North America,” which
…concerned that many Friends have lost the meaning of the peace testimony, organized a peace caravan this summer.
The seven Young Friends who joined in this Peace Caravan traveled in the Middle West asking Friends: “What does the Peace Testimony mean?
Is it relevant to our personal lives and our national policies?
If so, what is required of us?”
The article suggested some “Queries” that could be used to delve into questions like these, including this one: “Do we consider Christ’s teachings to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us when we make decisions about our attitude toward military training and taxation for war?”
The same issue of the Journal contains the first example of backlash against war tax resistance I found in that magazine — a letter to the editor by Harold H. Perry in which he says that tax resisters are “by implication” showing a lack of support for all the good things the government does: not just the usual list of roads, schools, and the like, but even “many and considerable civilian services of the military establishments such as the work of the Corps of Engineers and much of the research that aids civilians, including medical and health benefits.”
He acknowledges that some resisters redirect their taxes to things of less-questionable benefit, but says that “[t]his may be laudable theoretically, but if widely practiced or permitted would lead to endless confusion, imbalance, and injustice.”
He concludes by encouraging Quakers to instead “work through established democratic machinery” to try to get their ideals reflected in government behavior.
A friend of mine, 43 year old Arthur Evans, a medical doctor with offices in Denver, Colorado, was sent to jail by Judge Alfred A. Arraj of the Denver district court, for his refusal to pay his part of the income tax (about 50 pct.) which would be used for the annihilation of the human race.
He sent it, instead, to the United Nations, to promote peace in the world.
In a statement circulated by him to his friends he says in part: “My lawyer, the judge, and other lawyers, tell me that there is no law, no constitutional provision that provides for the individual to refuse to pay taxes for annihilation.
So I go to jail, for I will not, I cannot in conscience be party to financing the means to annihilation.
The Jews under Hitler were taxed to buy their crematoriums. The same happens here — but it is not only the Jews who finance their means of destruction — it is almost every income earner in the United States.
This is called democratic because we are all taxed alike.”
Letters of approval have been pouring in to Dr. Evans, and since he is only allowed to write very few, his mother in Philadelphia has taken up the task of acknowledging them, sending at the same time a typewritten sheet explaining the affair in detail.
A little over a century ago, in , another man (who is now considered one of America’s greatest) was picked up in Concord, Mass. on the way to his shoemaker, and brought to jail because he had refused to pay his poll tax to a government he thought misguided and evil because it allowed slavery and was also at that time waging a war with Mexico to extend its slaveholding territory.
I mean, of course, Henry David Thoreau.
Out of that incident came his famous Civil Disobedience, which influenced Gandhi and Nehru; Thoreau’s ideas are very much alive in many parts of the globe today.
Strange, how history repeats itself!
Some day, perhaps after another century (if we escape a war of annihilation), Dr. Evans will be spoken of with appreciation and respect.
We have a way of crucifying the great while they are with us, and of exalting them after they are gone.
At present a medical doctor is doing laundry duty as a “trusty” in the Jefferson County Jail in Golden, Colorado, and he may like to hear from you.
How would the Friends Journal cover this?
Would it, as in the earlier case of Milton Mayer (see ♇ 5 July 2013), mention it but try to downplay its connection to Quaker practice?
Let’s see.
In the issue is a three-paragraph piece in the “Friends and Their Friends” section on the case:
Arthur Evans, Denver physician and member of the Society of Friends, went to jail on for three months because he has refused to pay part of his federal income taxes and because he would not produce his financial records.
For at least twenty years the doctor has paid to Internal Revenue Service only the proportion of his income tax which corresponds to the percentage of the national budget devoted to non-military purposes.
The part he has not paid to IRS he has devoted to charitable purposes and to agencies working for world peace.
Not until , when he declined to file an income tax return, has he been personally pursued by IRS, which heretofore had subtracted from his bank account amounts he was refusing to pay.
So the magazine is forthrightly recognizing this tax resister as one of its own flock, though its coverage is considerably more subdued than even the example from the mainstream media that I quoted above.
(Incidentally, if the Journal article is accurate and Evans was resisting as early as , this would put his resistance well in advance of that of the Peacemakers of , which I usually think of as the birth of modern American war tax resistance.)
The Evans case got another mention , in the issue, which reprinted excerpts from his letter to the Director of Internal Revenue (and which also explicitly identifies Evans as “a Friend”).
“We doctors have pledged to serve life,” Evans wrote:
I find no way to finance mass murder — be it called war, defense, or security — and be true to this pledge.
I care about life and the dignity of each individual, and desire to serve people everywhere, no matter who they are religiously, nationally, or racially.…
I cannot voluntarily fund that overwhelming part of my nation’s budget that finances acts based on retaliation, based on fear and hatred psychology, based on threats of injury and killing-in short, acts based on returning evil for evil.…
If this results in my going to jail for breaking laws that support injustice, slavery, death, and destruction, then in jail, with Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, Peter, and Paul, I will attempt to serve wherein I can.…
“Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor [which includes thy enemy] as thyself” are precious laws of life to doctors and to all who would cooperate with the Christ.… Many men still believe… that they can deal with the evil acts of men by destroying the men who do these acts.
Yet I know no one who believes that conflicts… are resolved by mass murder.… The majority have not yet discovered that love is the only power that overcomes evil.…
I will continue to pay that percent of my tax liability that goes for nonmilitary acts of my government and enclose $200 toward same.
I am sending double the amount I am not paying for war to Quaker House at the United Nations for transmission to the United Nations Organization for its technical assistance program.
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:
The Federal Income Tax provides 75 per cent of the money by which the
military is financed.
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.
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.
It is inconsistent for them to encourage young people to refuse military
service while they themselves continue to “serve” in this way.
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.
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!
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.
True democracy requires that all Federal laws provide for conscientious
objection.
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.
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
Three people dominated the meager Friends Journal
coverage of war tax resistance in : Johan
Eliot, Margaret Dungan, and Gordon Christiansen.
Johan Eliot
Eliot, “a member of Ann Arbor
(Mich.) Meeting,” says the
issue, “has received a
considerable amount of newspaper and radio publicity recently because of his
refusal to pay the balance of his income tax
on the ground that the major portion of his tax money goes for armaments which
threaten the world. According to an Associated Press dispatch he decided to
make this protest after
U.S. planes began
their raids on North Vietnam.”
This prompted the Journal to publish a more in-depth
explanation, penned by Eliot’s wife Francis, in its
issue. Excerpts:
The concerns of many Friends about war taxes, expressed from time to time in
letters to the Journal; the Yellow Springs (Ohio)
Meeting’s Discipline on Friends and Taxes; the Bill for a Civilian Income
Tax Fund proposed by Pacific Yearly Meeting; the historical material prepared
by Franklin Zahn of Claremont (Calif.) Meeting; The Catholic Worker and its
witness against participation in war and preparation for war; and the
Peacemakers’ movement — all of these have helped to guide our thinking in
the past several years.…
…I expect the government will just fetch the taxes due out of our bank
account. There is a possible penalty of $10,000 fine and/or a year in prison,
but relatively few tax-protesters have been prosecuted under this provision.
Meanwhile, Jo has sent to the United Nations twice the amount of taxes due,
earmarked “for technical assistance,” with a letter to U Thant, expressing
appreciation for his efforts for world peace. In terms of this year’s taxes,
this gives roughly $2000 to Caesar (the withheld portion) and $180 to
God — still not a very satisfactory balance!
…Our mail is running 8-to-1 in favor of Jo’s stand!
Margaret Dungan
A report on the annual session of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the
issue included the brief note that
“Margaret Dungan reminded Friends of the possibility of protesting military
policies by refusing to pay Federal income tax.”
Upset at this abbreviation of her comments, she wrote in to the
Journal to clarify that she meant only “refusing to
pay the military part of the income tax,” as “I earnestly believe
that citizens of the United States should support their Government in all its
operations for human welfare, and should refuse to support only what violates
the divine law of human brotherhood.”
Dungan’s obituary, in the
issue, says: “Early in life Margaret showed a rugged independence of spirit in
becoming a suffragette, a vegetarian, and one of the founders of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom. Her unwavering dedication to
nonviolence was expressed in many other ways, including the refusal to pay
taxes for military expenditures.”
Gordon Christiansen
Christiansen, a former member of the American Friends Service Committee, spoke
at the “Speak-Out at the Pentagon” rally sponsored by the Committee for
Nonviolent Action on . The
issue of the
Journal reported on the vows of noncooperation and
resistance he made there, including: “I refuse my financial support… I will
not willingly pay my income tax.”
represented a lull in coverage of war tax
resistance in the Friends Journal, but things would
pick up again and then gallop
on without let-up for
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
a Vietnamese postage stamp featuring Norman Morrison
On , a 31-year-old American Quaker named Norman Morrison went out to the sidewalk in front of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office in the Pentagon, doused himself in kerosene, and set himself on fire as a protest against the American war on Vietnam.
His suicide stunned the Society of Friends and made more urgent the already percolating questions about the moribund Quaker peace testimony and how much Friends were willing to put on the line for it.
This is reflected by the increased attention given in the pages of Friends Journal in to the issue of war tax resistance.
In , a “Friends’ Conference and Vigil on the War in Vietnam” asked the “Friends Coordinating Committee on Peace… to prepare a bulletin urging Friends to consider how paying taxes and buying war bonds involved them in financing the military.”
A number of Quakers signed a “No Taxes for Vietnam War” tax refusal vow that was organized by Maurice McCracken’s “No War in Vietnam Committee.”
These included, according to the issue of the Journal, “Franklin Zahn, Bob and Marj Swann, Arthur Evans, Bradford Lyttle, Johan W. Eliot, Staughton Lynd, Wilmer Young, George and Lillian Willoughby, and Marion C. Frenyear.”
The lead editorial in that issue was entitled “To Pay or to Protest?” and the author was determined to give no definitive advice on either side of that question.
The editorial begins by stating the case for Quaker taxpayer misgivings, then moves on to note that “a few pacifists” have been resisting, and to claim that “this year the number of tax-refusers will be far greater than ever before,” while other taxpayers who share their misgivings are either unwilling to take on the risks of tax resistance or believe that such an action amounts to “dodging the law and leaving someone else to carry a burden which they themselves will not assume.”
The editorialist then quotes from a letter written by a resisting employee “to her employing group” (why so coy about which group?) in which she writes that while she would be happy to “pay twice as much as required by the present law” for the more benign things the government buys, “I cannot bring myself to furnish money to be used in a way that will bring death to fine young American boys and men and also to Vietnamese men, women, and children.”
If “the employing group” were to cooperate in her request to stop withholding income tax from her salary, the editorialist wonders, “[w]ill it (or its members) be penalized?”
This is another strange example of the Journal taking an issue that was obviously a direct concern to Quakers and to Quaker Meetings, and trying to abstract it and cast it off into the distance somewhere in order to consider it dispassionately and indecisively.
From here the editorialist compares the Quaker war tax resister of today to the Quaker abolitionist “in the years before the Civil War when some members wanted to give all-out aid to the cause of abolition while others counseled caution, advocating strict adherence to the letter of such laws as those requiring fugitive slaves to be returned to their masters.”
Nowadays we tend to view with shame the historical evidence that all Friends did not work wholeheartedly for the abolition of slavery; will the time come when the Friends who follow after us have a similar feeling about those of their predecessors (including the present writer) who lacked the courage to resist conscription of their dollars to do the killing that they themselves refused to do?
After a quick detour through “There are those who say… there are others who counterargue…” territory, the editorialist recommends that people interested in tax refusal contact the Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes or the Peacemakers, and gives their addresses.
Finally, there is a brief nod in the direction of war tax resistance being a time-honored Quaker practice.
The editorialist mentions that Franklin Zahn has authored a booklet on “Early Friends and War Taxes,” which includes the quote that ends the editorial, from the letter sent by John Woolman & co. to their fellow-Friends in :
Raising sums of money [for] purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess… appears to us in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto by the payment of a tax for such purposes.
In the issue, an article about a Quaker movement in which people voluntarily taxed themselves 1% of their income for the support of the United Nations began this way: “All Friends, whether or not they would refuse to take up arms, are caught up in the military machine through payment of Federal income tax.”
This seems to indicate that there was still a blind spot that was making it difficult for some Quakers to even see the various alternatives to paying the federal income tax.
A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the same issue noted:
After consideration, the Yearly Meeting concurred with the concern of the Friends Peace Committee that fresh attention be given to the effort to devise a formula acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service and to Congress, which would permit persons to withhold that proportion of their income taxes applicable to military purposes and apply it to constructive purposes of government.
Because a Monthly Meeting secretary and a youth worker for the Peace Committee have asked their employers to cease withholding income tax from their salaries, the problem is being thrust upon the Yearly Meeting.
Friends, whatever their judgments about a particular action, are sympathetic toward those who engage in it for reasons of conscience.
In furtherance of its concern… the Friends Peace Committee received authorization to seek personal conferences with officials of the Internal Revenue Service to acquaint them with the basis and reality of the concern to refuse payment of taxes for military purposes.
Perhaps such conversations may increase understanding on the part of the officials and may enable them, while carrying out their duty and enforcing the law, to understand and respect the refusers.
A conference at Pendle Hill “on the search for peace” in , concerned the “basic question… [of] whether the militaristic society in which we all live could be influenced through techniques of reason or whether religious pacifists, in their deep alienation, should rather seek a more radical strategy of protest.”
At one point, according to the coverage in the issue of the Journal, William Davidon “spoke frankly and clearly on the moral philosophy behind his refusal to pay those taxes which, he felt, would support the war in Vietnam.”
Martin A. Klaver contributed the lead editorial in the issue — “More on Tax-Refusal” — which is worth reproducing completely here as a good overview of the issue of war tax resistance as it stood at that time:
“Friends Journal,” writes John R. Ewbank, patent attorney and a member of Abington Meeting, Jenkintown, Pa., “might well mention the ‘mildest form of tax-refusal for Milquetoasts’: the refusal to pay the federal tax on telephone usage when billed for it.
The telephone company can carry the accumulated unpaid tax until it equals the deposit, and then assess a charge for nominal discontinuance and reconnection, so that the penalties for prolonged persistence are paid to the phone company instead of to the government.
How long it is worth while to carry the protest is a matter of individual judgment…”
For nearly a hundred years, John Ewbank adds, Americans have not been faced with a levy so conspicuously labeled “war tax” as this revived tax on telephone usage.
According to his letter to the telephone company, “The publicity connected with the telephone tax has been so specifically related to the Vietnam war, and I am conscientiously so opposed to the Vietnam war, that my payment herewith omits the $1.03 federal tax.
There are so few opportunities for protest — even feeble, futile protest — that [this] becomes one of the few available gestures.”
For Milquetoasts or not, feeble or not, the gesture is a form of civil disobedience differing more in degree than in kind from refusal to pay the federal income tax — or that part of it that goes for war.
It seems a little unfair to make it at the expense of the telephone company, which is thereby put to added trouble and expense, if only in its bookkeeping department, but it is a protest.
This year, it appears, the thin ranks of those refusing to pay income taxes for reasons of conscience were somewhat augmented.
An release from the office of A.J. Muste cites a statement signed by 360 persons, declaring that they would refuse to pay taxes voluntarily as long as United States forces continue to be used “in violation of the U.S. Constitution, international law, and the United Nations Charter.”
The release says that some signers are leaving the money they owe the government in banks, where the Internal Revenue Service can seize it, while others will contribute it to CARE, UNICEF, or similar agencies.
It also notes that, according to the Internal Revenue Code, “willful refusal to pay taxes may be punished by jail sentences of up to one year and fines as high as $10,000.”
This is not tax-refusal for Milquetoasts, although in the past fines and jail sentences have been rare indeed.
The law is enforced by placing a lien on the tax refuser’s property or attaching his salary.
There have been a number of instances where actions instituted against individuals were simply dropped.
But if tax-refusal should reach important proportions, the present seemingly casual attitude might change; the IRS might decide that it must do something to show that it is not virtually inviting more and more trouble.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was concerned this year with the problem posed by employes of two Quaker groups who have asked their employers not to withhold federal taxes from their salaries.
The Yearly Meeting’s Peace Committee is not only seeking a solution to this problem but is also seeking special conferences with Internal Revenue Service officials to acquaint them with the reasons why some Friends refuse to pay their taxes.
During the Yearly Meeting’s discussion it was brought out that Friends Committee on National Legislation for some time has been exploring the possibility of drafting legislation in this area making it possible for Americans who have conscientious objections to having their property used for war to pay equivalent taxes for other uses.
A number of congressmen have been receptive to the idea, but so far no formula has been found that promises to attract the necessary support.
Meanwhile most Quakers (like this one) pay their income taxes (including the reimposed telephone tax) without a murmur.
But there is a consensus on a fundamental: Friends’ basic belief that in matters of conscience each individual must choose his own course.
If that course brings him into conflict with government, he must decide for himself what he must do: obey in silence, obey and at the same time protest, or resort to civil disobedience of one kind or another.
Whether any government can grant any of its citizens the “right” to violate any of its laws is open to debate.
The citizen can hardly lay claim to such a right, yet when he feels that he has a duty to break the law, when he says, “God helping me, I can do no other,” then we must accord him our respect.
The issue noted that “two young Quaker workers… have voluntarily taken drastic cuts in salary rather than pay taxes for war in Vietnam.”
The two were John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton, who reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding began — something on the order of $75 per month.
The Conservative branch of the Ohio Yearly Meeting met in .
According to William P. Taber, Jr.’s report on the meeting, “we asked our members to consider supporting tax refusal and the sending of aid to the civilians of all Vietnam.”
On the other hand, at the Westerly (Rhode Island) Monthly Meeting, the message was more mixed: “Many Friends feel that not to pay their taxes is disrespect for the law, breeding anarchy.
Yet they deplore the fact that their tax money is being used to prosecute a morally indefensible war in Vietnam.”
The best they could come up with was to approve a suggestion that Friends accompany their tax payments with a statement of protest.
The pseudonymous history columnist “Now and Then” took up the issue of war tax resistance in the issue:
A scruple against paying taxes which directly or indirectly support war has had a long if sporadic history among members of the Society of Friends.
It received official support in London in when decision was made that fine or punishment for such refusal could be reported by the meeting in the annual listing of “sufferings for Truth.”
At Philadelphia Yearly Meeting every year lately this concern has been voiced by individuals.
In the Meeting went so far as to authorize some minor action on the subject, including a delegation to visit the Internal Revenue authorities and to explain the tender conscience of the increasing number of Friends who refuse part or all of their Federal income tax.
The most intensive consideration of the matter among the Meeting’s membership appears to have occurred more than two centuries ago.
Before the Pennsylvania Assembly was asked by the mother country to supply men and funds for British military enterprises in the colonies.
The Quaker legislators, when they complied, did so uneasily, with the excuses that it was for defense or that the money was voted nominally for the sovereign’s use and that they were not responsible for what use the king (or queen) chose to make of it.
They also accepted as a permanent unqualified mandate the words of Jesus, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Sometimes Friends distinguished as acceptable mixed taxes and as unacceptable those taxes that were definitely labeled for war.
We are indebted to John Woolman’s Journal (Chapter Ⅴ) for an account of the exercise that arose in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting both in and in .
In the former year a committee was appointed which issued an epistle expressing the feeling that “the large sum granted by the late act of Assembly for the King’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony,” and that “as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.”
Woolman speaks of the conference on the subject “as the most weighty that ever I was at.”
There was not unanimity in the group.
Some who felt easy to pay the tax withdrew, but twenty-one substantial Friends subscribed the epistle; they included John Woolman, John Churchman (who also mentions the matter in his Journal), Anthony Benezet, John Pemberton, and Samuel Fothergill, an English public Friend visiting America.
In the Yearly Meeting of the matter was opened again, and a committee of about forty Friends were appointed to consider “whether or no it would be best at this time publicly to consider it in the Yearly Meeting.”
Visitors from other Yearly Meetings — including John Hunt and Christopher Wilson from England — were asked to join the committee.
The decision was negative.
There was difference of opinion on the subject, and “for that and several other reasons” the committee unanimously agreed that it was not proper to enter into public discussion of the matter.
Meanwhile it recommended that Friends of differing opinions “have their minds covered with fervent charity towards one another.”
One wonders why the different result from two years before and what were some of the “other reasons.”
Part of the answer, I think, is to be found in a letter to John Hunt and Christopher Wilson, sent to them by the Meeting for Sufferings in London.
This letter is dated and is signed by Benjamin Bourne, clerk.
I shall quote it as I have copied it from the manuscript minutes of the Meeting.
It falls in date between the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings described above, at the second of which Hunt and Wilson were present and in a position to transmit the urgent advice of London Friends.
The main purpose of their mission to Pennsylvania, as is well known, was to prevent the home government’s proposed requirement of an oath for members of the Assembly by asking Friends to refuse to run for election.
The British Friends asked the government to let them attempt first to bring about the purging of the Assembly of Quakers.
In this they succeeded to the extent that most Friends withdrew from the Assembly; thus the threat was averted.
Evidently the same pressure was exercised to encourage Friends to pay provincial war taxes to the British crown and particularly not to publicize their scruple against paying them.
But neither the minutes of Philadelpha Yearly Meeting for (under ) nor its epistles — whether to London Yearly Meeting or to its own members — are so explicit as the letter.
After repeating the primary commission to the English delegates to try “to prevail on Friends in Pennsylvania to refuse being chosen into Assembly during the present commotions in America” and “to make them fully sensible of their danger, and how much it concerns them, the Province, and their posterity to act conformably to this request and the expectations of the government,” the letter continues:
And as you will know that very disadvantageous impressions have been made here by the advices given by some Friends against the payment of a tax lately laid by the provincial assembly, it is recommended in a particular manner that you endeavour to remove all occasions of misunderstanding on this account, and to explain and enforce our known principles and practice respecting the payment of taxes for the support of civil government agreeable to the several advices of the Yearly Meeting founded on the precept and example of our Saviour.
May that wisdom which is from above attend you in this weighty undertaking, and render your labours effectual for the purposes intended that you may be the happy instruments of averting the dangers that threaten the liberties and privileges of the people in general and restore and strengthen that union and harmony which ought to subsist in every part of our Christian Society.
Two brief lists were delivered with the above letter: extracts from London Yearly Meeting minutes of , , , , and , in which the payment of dues to the government is inculcated; and titles of Acts of Parliament, seven chapters in four Acts from the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne, “wherein it is expressed that the taxes are for carrying on a war.”
The final phrase was to leave no doubt that English Friends encouraged no escape on the ground that a Quaker conscience could assume the doubtful or peaceful purpose of the legislation.
The grounds on which the scruple among Friends was silenced in are clear.
Friends had long paid such taxes and wished to obey the laws.
If Pennsylvania Friends refused to vote for them as assemblymen or to collect them as tax collectors or to pay them as subjects, the liberties enjoyed in the colony, such as permitting affirmations in place of oaths, would be terminated.
The exhortations in the gospels and New Testament epistles in favor of paying Caesar his dues were applicable.
The early Quaker examples of civil disobedience in other matters were forgotten, and the relevance of the continuing Quaker testimonies against personal participation in war and against the payment of tithes was not cited.
In the latter area Friends were resolutely against payment and suffered ruinous distraints.
Evidently dues for the support of “hireling ministers” seemed more obnoxious than taxes for the prosecution of war.
If Colonial Friends disagreed with the practice of Friends in England or even with one another they would expose the Society to disharmony.
When Woolman’s Journal was reprinted in England in the whole section on paying or not paying taxes was omitted, but in America the problem already was taking a different form.
Friends and others had opposed taxation without representation when the Stamp Act was passed in .
With the outbreak of the Revolution the issue was one of using continental currency or of paying taxes to support war against Great Britain.
This, many American Friends (like Job Scott) and Meetings were willing openly to oppose.
The New York Yearly Meeting issued a statement “on the tragic situation in Vietnam,” saying that it represented “a supreme test” to “the spiritual vitality of the Religious Society of Friends.”
The statement, reprinted in the issue of the Journal included this point:
We call upon Friends to examine their conscience concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine either by tax refusal or by changing their occupations.
The issue noted that “the newsletters of several Friends’ organizations” are encouraging their readers to “protest your telephone war tax” but also suggests that in some cases the protest was a pretty pathetic one: “Stickers saying ‘The Vietnam War Tax Included in This Bill Is Paid Only Under Protest’ are available from the American Friends Service Committee.”
The following issue included a letter-to-the-editor from Franklin Zahn in which he encouraged a more practical approach: “Each month I pay all of my phone bill but 7 percent, informing the company it is against my conscience to pay the direct war tax.
For five months the company added the unpaid balances to each new bill, then wrote it was referring the unpaid total to Internal Revenue Service and wiping my bill clean of debt… How will Internal Revenue handle this?
Past experience with unpaid income taxes indicates IRS may ask for payment but make no bank account seizure until the amount totals more than $5, at which time it takes an extra 6 percent (per annum) as fine.
Not paying direct war taxes is part of Quaker peace testimony.
Don’t pay for a wrong number.”
Franklin Zahn
We’ve encountered Franklin Zahn before.
He was listed as the contact person for “a leaflet on tax refusal” in a issue, and also something described as “the historical material” on the subject — “Early Friends and War Taxes” (perhaps the same leaflet).
Here is some more of his work:
In the issue, he responded in a letter-to-the-editor to an article that apparently suggested “that Friends drop their middle-class attitude of changing law and join the less privileged whose only method has been evading law.”
Zahn responded:
A basic test for conscience is the categorical imperative: What happens if everybody else did the same?
For [draft] evasion, I can see only the tightening up of conscription law.
For open resistance, however, the end of conscription.
For myself, personally beyond the applicable age, the corresponding form of resistance is refusal to pay war taxes.
If everyone in the world practiced it, the result would be close to total elimination of war.
I recently harbored an AWOL who jumped ship fifteen minutes before it sailed for Vietnam, but a better Quaker witness and confrontation would have been for both of us openly to declare our civil-military disobedience — he, his desertion; I, my aiding and abetting, and face the penalties for our actions.
But maybe I should rejoice in that having evaded the law I have lost some middle-classness.
In the issue, he suggested that the spirit of the gospels meant that the “Render Unto Caesar” episode should be interpreted anew:
In the matter of war taxes, were Jesus addressing Christian stewards of God’s wealth who were citizens in a free democracy and responsible for its conduct and were be to pick up an American coin with its inscription, “In God We Trust,” his words might very well be:
If the God you trust is Mars, pay your taxes to him.
In the issue, he gave “a historical summary” of how Quakers had dealt with the issue of war taxes:
With war taxes as with slavery, John Woolman stands out as the pioneer in getting the Society of Friends to face the issue.
His motivation in bringing the concern to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in came from the increasing willingness of the Quaker government of the colony of Pennsylvania to vote money for war.
The Quaker Assembly had begun to weaken in its peace testimony in .
First it had refused to vote £4000 for an expedition into Canada, forthrightly saying, “It was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another.”
But later they voted £500 “for the Queen” as a token of their respect, with a rider saying, “The money should be put into a safe hand till they were satisfied from England it should not be employed for the use of war.”
But in a similar request resulted in £2000 being voted, with Isaac Norris echoing Fox in explaining: “We did not see it to be inconsistent with our principles to give the Queen money notwithstanding any use she might put it to, that not being our part but hers.”
That same year William Penn reputedly wrote the Queen (I have not found historical verification): “Our civil obedience is only due to Christ, not to confound the things of God with Caesar’s; for no man can be true to Him that’s false to his own conscience, nor can he extort from it a tribute to carry on any war, nor ought true Christians to pay it.”
[I also have been unable to find a source for this quote —♇]
Whatever influence the letter may have had, the fact seems to be that none of the £2000 voted “for the Queen’s use” was spent on the military expedition.
But the principle of passing the buck for war seems to have been established in the Assembly, which took the view that while Quakers refused to bear arms themselves they did not condemn it in others.
In the Assembly told the Governor it could not vote money for war, but acknowledged that on the other hand it had obligations to aid the government.
The crisis, however, came in the French and Indian War in , when individual taxpayers decided they could no longer pass the war buck to the Assembly.
In of that year John Churchman and other Friends met with Assembly Friends, and about twenty of them said, in part:
“…As the raising sums of money, and putting them into the hands of committees, who may apply them to purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess, …appears to us in its consequences, to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto, by the payment of a tax for such purposes; and thus the fundamental part of our constitution may be essentially affected, and that free enjoyment of conscience by degrees be violated;…”
The setting for this ultimatum is of interest: Quaker tax-payers, one-third of the population of the colony, Quaker Assemblymen a majority in a legislature which had non-Quakers like Benjamin Franklin — the most important person in the colony.
The Assembly, when the vote came, said it could not give money for munitions but that, as a “tribute to Caesar,” it was voting £4000 for “bread, beef, pork, flour, wheat, or other grain.”
The Governor who had received the request from New England for a grant to buy a different granular material, told the Assembly that their term “other grain” meant gunpowder and so spent the money.
Woolman’s thoughts about war taxes and his journeying to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year with his concern are familiar in his Journal.
One passage, however, seems pertinent to as Friends urge a divided Congress to cut off war funds:
“Some of our members who are officers in civil government are… called upon in their respective stations to assist in things relative to the wars… if they see their brethren united in payment of a tax to carry on the said wars, may think their case not much different, and so might quench the tender movings of the Holy Spirit in their minds.”
On , he; Churchman and others drew up an Epistle to Pennsylvania Friends:
“…The large sum granted… is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony; we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto, by paying the tax directed by said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.… Though some part of the money to be raised… is said to be for such benevolent purposes as supporting our friendship with our Indian Neighbors and relieving the distresses of our fellow-subjects, who have suffered in the present calamities, …we could most cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we cannot… show our hearty concurrence therewith without at the same time assenting to… practices which we apprehend contrary to the testimony which the Lord hath given us to bear…”
The “tax” committee of Yearly Meeting decided that refusal should be an individual matter, and in we find Friends like Joshua Evans conscious there was no solid front: “I found it best for me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to pay the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.”
The effect of such witness was not to stop the war but, as Woolman may have felt of even greater importance, to help Quaker legislators to be true to their own “tender movings.”
In that year the last of the Quaker Assemblymen had resigned and no more ran for the office — in Franklin’s approving words, “choosing rather to quit their power than their principle.”
The 70-year experiment of a Quaker government came to an end over the question of war taxes.
By , according to James Pemberton, it was clear the war-makers were extracting their toll: “The tax in this country [is] pretty well collected and many in this city particularly suffered by distraint of their goods and some being near cast into jail.”
Two decades later, when the bigger test of the Revolutionary War came and the “fighting” Free Quakers separated, tax refusal was so well established that some Quakers appear almost to have over-reacted.
In The Quakers in the American Colonies, Rufus Jones writes:
“There was plenty for the overseers to do in these early days of the war.… Shutting their hearts against the pleadings of mercy for their brothers and sons who had joined the ‘associators’ or paid war taxes, or placed guns for defence upon their vessels, or paid fines for refusing to collect military taxes, or in any way aided the war on either side, they cleared the Society of all open complicity with it.
The offense was reported to one Monthly Meeting, and at the next the testimony of disownment would go out.”
While by today’s permissive standards of the Society such peace witness seems more hysterical than historical, we need to be aware that in this period as in the Civil War, “tax” sometimes meant the substitutionary amount paid in lieu of military service by COs.
In New England the question of paying war taxes to the rebelling colonial governments was the precipitating cause for the split-off of Free Quakers.
There, as elsewhere, when the Revolutionary War broke out, Friends generally agreed they should not pay specific war taxes but on “mixed” taxes — the subject of the 1755 Epistle in Pennsylvania — there was no consensus.
Job Scott in New England Yearly Meeting was the most erudite and detailed advocate of not paying mixed taxes.
In his essay, subtitled “A truly conscientious scruple with respect to the payment of such taxes as are in part demanded for and applied to the support of war and fighting,” and addressed to “Friendly reader,” he reasoned in 1780:
“Now then, if a collector of taxes comes to me and in Caesar’s name demands a tax of £20 which I am persuaded is so far mixed, part for war and part for other charges, that my conscience forbids my paying it… I am not to blame for not paying it: if Caesar pleaseth to separate them I can gladly pay the one part and refuse the other.… though magistry be a divine ordinance, yet it does not follow that every requisition of the civil magistrate ought to be actively obeyed, anymore than because it is a duty indispensable and incumbent on all mankind to pay all their just debts, that therefore we must pay all demands however unjust.”
Tradition-minded Friends who used the Caesar argument sometimes pointed to George Fox who in , paying a specific war tax for the Dutch war, made a distinction between this and direct military service.
But the homeland of Quakerdom by had also moved towards tax refusal; in London Yearly Meeting minuted its censure on “the active compliance of some members with the rate (tax) for raising men for the Navy” and directed local Friends to have such cases under their care.
Those who paid war taxes without even waiting for the process of distraint were considered to have acted “inconsistently.”
In less material on taxes was published by Friends.
Perhaps there is here a fruitful field awaiting some researcher of yearly and quarterly minutes [indeed there is –♇].
Was there less interest in the problems, or was refusal taken for granted?
Did non-Friend Thoreau’s ringing call to refusal in the Mexican-American War preempt the field?
Whatever the reasons, as Friends face today’s violence with its automated battlefields and nuclear missiles — where the conscription of human bodies for mass armies may become less important — and conscription of money for sophisticated technology more important — the relevancy of the tax question to a modern, effective peace testimony has reached an all-time high.
In its issue, the Journal noted that the IRS had made a half-hearted attempt to seize Zahn’s “1955 Dodge station wagon” for $6.58 in resisted phone tax.
Although contemplating lying in front of the car as a final protest before the towing, Franklin calmly removed his personal effects from the car and showed no agitation at this seizure of his property.
At the last minute, however, the IRS men suddenly removed the chains, saying, “We just got new orders — we’re calling off the dogs.”
The mood changed from one of tense formality to joviality as the men left.
“It was as though,” Franklin says, “they were glad the little bluff had failed.”
A letter-to-the-editor from Zahn appears in the issue, in which he responds to “a frequent objection to war tax refusal: that it logically leads to a host of other tax refusal.”
He suggests that because military expenses are such an overwhelming part of the federal budget, only war resisters are likely to find tax resistance to be a tempting tactic.
And anyway, “if a few other than war objectors choose to refuse, I see no objection to their doing so.”
In the issue, Zahn writes in to make a fresh case for war tax refusal:
In refusing personal service, one considers one’s integrity — conscience: Can I be part of a machine geared to agony and death?
But often a different criterion is applied to refusal to pay: How effective a protest is it?
If the protest-value of tax refusal is the only consideration, Friends may feel the effort is better spent in writing a legislator or phoning the White House.
(But I have found that a letter to the government saying I am refusing to pay war taxes is one letter officials never ignore.)
Arguments against the effectiveness of war tax refusal can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
Friends may not wish to join a public witness which is so small it attracts little notice — therefore it remains small.
Yet it is possible that an announcement of intention to pay no further war taxes would be the most single effective act against the arms race that members of the Society of Friends could take.
But sudden, dramatic decisions for effectiveness are not in the manner of Friends.
Perhaps we should forget all about witness and consider tax refusal purely as personal integrity.
This basis, after all, is the one for our day-to-day decisions in matters of principle.
We refuse to steal, not as some witness in influencing others, but because for us stealing is wrong.
We refuse to cheat, not as some protest against dishonesty or against anything else, but because cheating is not the way of the life of the Spirit.
Questions of effectiveness become irrelevant.
The corresponding question for taxes could be, explicitly: Should I, a person in whom there is that of God, voluntarily pay all money asked of me for the purpose of injuring and killing millions of other persons in whom there is also that of God?
If trying to hold back some one-third of our federal income tax (which will go next year for current military uses) is too boggling, we can start modestly and refuse payment of only ten dollars — a small pinch of incense not voluntarily laid on Caesar’s altar.
It can, to our conscience, be a symbol of our refusal of total submission to the military-industrial complex.
But it can also symbolize the positive.
It can be given to the Right Sharing of World Resources of Friends World Committee.
It is possible a small amount like ten dollars will not even be collected by IRS.
Each of us can try such an experiment for one year, and from then proceed as way opens.
Finally, in the issue, the Journal announced Zahn’s death (nearly a year after ).
It called him “a peace activist and worldly ascetic” and said that he practiced “religious asceticism — regular meditation, vegetarianism, celibacy, and voluntary poverty — as both the sustenance for his personal spiritual life and public witness to the power of love and truth in the world.”
He was among those conscientious objectors who at first accepted alternative civilian service, and then decided to resist the draft entirely.
He also was among those who tried to sail into nuclear weapons test zones to disrupt the tests.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
By , though there was still no consensus in the Society of Friends about whether paying taxes was the right thing to do (and if not, how best to resist it), the issue had become impossible to avoid.
The issues of the Friends Journal published that year reflect this, with most of them including at least a mention of war tax resistance or of the dilemma for Quaker taxpayers.
War tax resistance was again on the agenda of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual conference , but the Journal only includes the topic in a list of “special concerns” that were covered on , without giving any details of how the conversation went.
In the opening article in the issue, “Tithing for Peace” by Alan Strain, the author expresses his anguish over how much he has “tithed for war and instruments of war… several dollars each day to create a warfare state in which fear and violence have become ever more accepted and expected.”
However: “I cannot see how to disentangle myself from this madness… I cannot even see a way to end my involuntary tithing for war.”
Rather than resist the war tithe, he has decided to try to match it with a peace tithe: “giving this amount to private or public agencies working to remove the causes of war and to develop the conditions and institutions of peace.”
In that same issue, a note about the Canadian Friends Service Committee’s humanitarian efforts in Vietnam includes a parenthetical remark that some of the $60,000 donated to the cause came from “two U.S. churchmen who sent money normally used to pay income taxes.”
In the issue, the American Friends Service Committee tried to capitalize on the new craze with this ad:
In the Baltimore Yearly Meetings approved a minute “including refusal to pay the surtax for the war if such a tax is imposed.”
An article by Cynthia E. Kerman on “The Rationale of Protest” in the issue made note in passing of the communicative possibilities of war tax resistance: “Tax refusal, for instance, may be a means of speaking to people — not only of purifying our lives.”
In the issue, a letter from Lucy P. Carner picked up where Cynthia E. Kerman left off, asserting that there are “possibilities for witness inherent in tax refusal” that are not immediately obvious to people who are looking for a quick fix “to put a stop to war.”
Excerpts:
Tax refusal enables one to “speak truth to power.”
A letter to the Revenue Service protesting the tax, but paying it, is likely to get less attention than one explaining why one is not paying a portion of the tax.
In the latter case, the Revenue Service has to do something about it.
A representative of the service has to make a telephone call reminding the taxpayer of his delinquency.
Here is another opportunity to witness.
“You mean you do not intend to pay?” said the incredulous voice of the representative.
I explained to him what I had already written to his office.
“Yes, I know that you will eventually get the money from my bank.
That isn’t your fault and you have very courteously fulfilled your duty.
But this is my way of saying that I think the war is wrong.
Only for that reason would I break the law — I’m not accustomed to breaking laws.”
“Yes,” said he, rather helplessly, and hung up.
A few months later a bank official will send a letter saying how much the bank would regret allowing the tax collector to take money from my account and won’t I please pay up and avoid this embarrassment.
Here is another opportunity to write my objection to the war.
Refusal to pay the additional Federal tax on my telephone bill provides similar opportunity to make my voice heard.
Tax refusal, then, is a manner of speaking to government officials, to banks and business concerns.
It is a nonviolent way of reaching the hard-to-reach, for it has nuisance value.
It deserves wide consideration as one way of bearing witness to one’s conscientious objection to war.
The lead editorial in that same issue, by Ruth A. Miner, suggests that instead of resisting war taxes, Quakers should pay an additional tax — “the same amount (or a practicable fraction of it — or even more!)”
— to the United Nations.
This, she suggests, would be in the spirit of Jesus’s suggestion that “whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.”
That issue was also the first to feature the ad from “Southern California Business Service” (see ♇ 1 July 2013) that included the message: “A word about tax refusal: Since we limit our income to avoid paying income tax, our rates are low — and — in hiring our help we actively seek out C.O.s and/or tax refusers.”
Phone tax resistance
James B. Osgood, in a letter-to-the-editor in the issue, takes note of the American Friends Service Committee’s “stickers which one can attach to one’s phone bill to make payment of the war tax under protest” (see ♇ 13 July 2013).
This form of protest is better than nothing, but its practical effect is next to nothing.
No real witness is made; no war funds are withheld from the government; no one’s reputation is put on the line.
Those of us who have refused to pay the ten per cent tax hope that others joining us will make a great visible witness and will cause sufficient trouble to the government to give it pause for thought over both collection and prosecution of those who conscientiously refuse.
This, however, will require a real step forward, not a mere licking of a label.
Maris Cakars of the Committee for Nonviolent Action also wrote in, and his letter appeared in the following issue.
He believed that there were “hundreds” of telephone tax resisters who had not notified the Committee of their resistance, and hoped they would speak up so that the campaign could move on to its next phase: “placing advertisement in newspapers and holding press conferences.
For this phase to have maximum impact it is important for us to have as complete a list of tax refusers as possible.”
The issue announced that the Claremont (California) Meeting had decided to resist the telephone tax on its meetinghouse phone.
In the issue was a letter from a representative of 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, in which they noted that two other Meetings had contacted them about actions they had taken in response to their call for phone tax resistance, and said “we would be pleased to act as a clearinghouse on positions taken by Meetings on telephone-tax refusal…”
In the issue, George Lakey wrote an article about why he was joining the crew of the Phoenix to illegally (by U.S. law) bring humanitarian aid to North Vietnam.
He described the escalation of his activism, from letter-writing and congressman-lobbying to his current action.
Along the way, he says, “I stopped paying the telephone tax.”
War tax resistance internationally
The issue noted that Quakers in The Netherlands had formed a “Conscientious Objectors’ Committee Against Paying Taxes for Defense Purposes” which was trying to come up with some sort of government-approved “peace tax”-style plan.
I got a wry smile out of the closing sentence: “In The Netherlands it is not permitted to affix protest stickers on tax forms; instead one must use a written announcement of protest.”
The fourth Friends World Conference was held .
The “Protest and Direct Action group” there “called upon Friends in countries party to the [Vietnam] conflict to ‘go as far as conscience dictates in withholding support from their governments’ war-making machinery,’ first by direct communication with those against whom the protest is made, and then if necessary by public witness and individual action, including the possibility of refusal to pay taxes for war.”
“Corporate Witness and Individual Conscience”
The lead (guest) editorial in the issue was “Corporate Witness and Individual Conscience” by Lindsley H. Noble.
It cautioned Quaker corporate bodies (like Meetings) that were contemplating civil disobedience actions like phone tax resistance.
For one thing, he says, a Quaker group should make sure to have the consent of all of its members before it takes such a drastic step, something he thinks some groups have been careless about.
Secondly, even if every member of the group consents to civil disobedience, the group as a corporation has a different relationship to the state than individuals do.
While individuals and their consciences predate and arguably supersede the state, corporations are creatures of the state and are therefore necessarily subordinate to them.
Quakers incorporate their meetings in part in order to get government privileges associated with legal incorporation.
“In voluntarily putting ourselves under the law to receive these subsidies do we not morally forego corporately the right to refuse to obey other laws not to our liking?”
If Quakers, as a group, find a law so intolerable that they must disobey it as a group, he says, they should first legally detach themselves — “withdraw from our contract with the state and give up our subsidies before setting out on this path.”
This led to months of discussion in the letters-to-the-editor sections of future issues, in particular:
Victor Paschkis thought that Noble’s argument failed on both points.
First, his call for groups to reach consensus before taking a civilly disobedient stand should be understood for what it is — merely a preference for the law-abiding status quo.
After all, “inaction in a given situation may violate the conscience of some members just as action may violate the conscience of others.”
Secondly, a Quaker Meeting, whether or not it has incorporated under the laws of the state, still has a yet higher allegiance to God that must be taken into account.
Also, what’s the point of having Meetings if they do not have “corporate insight” greater than the sum of their parts?
Stephen G. Cary mirrored some of this: “There are times when inaction speaks to the world as clearly as action.
In these situations inaction does not leave us neutral, but committed by default.
Responsibility is not a one-way street, resting only on Friends who wish an action taken.
Those who oppose the action are committing the Meeting, too.
I do not suggest that the proponents’ views should necessarily prevail; I only want it recognized that responsibility to conscience cuts both ways and requires both sides to search their hearts.”
He is also suspect of the idea that corporate entities have no responsibility to disobey unjust laws: “Does the Nuremburg principle have no bearing on the institutions of society?
I prefer to regard the corporation as the creature of those who create and operate it, and the fact that the state charters it does not make the state its ultimate master.”
Marie S. Klooz also defended “corporate witness” as being not exactly “the witness of a corporation” but the collective witness of the corporation’s “component members.”
Such a thing is not only justifiable, but is particularly important to Quakers: “Each member is supposed to test his light by the corporate light.”
And: “If the light requires social action, it is our duty to labor lovingly with those whose light differs, not to refrain from action.”
It is no more necessary for a Meeting to divest itself of its corporate charter to be civilly disobedient, than it is necessary for an individual to first renounce his citizenship.
Pat Foreman found himself uncomfortable with the peace testimony “as interpreted by most Friends” and thinks Quakers like him “sometimes have the feeling that we are being shunned.”
He wants “to remind Friends that Quakerism is a religion and not a prodigious committee.”
Evan Howe thought that dissenters were asking too much if they were asking Quaker Meetings to give up their corporate privileges in order to engage in civilly disobedient actions under the direction of the “sense of the Meeting.”
Such a “surrender of subsidies, as I see it, while apparently a demand of conscience, is rather a surrender of conscience with the ultimate consequence of destroying the society.
I do not believe that dissent gives anyone that right.”
Norman J. Whitney stressed that “Meetings do have a responsibility for corporate witness if the integrity of our testimonies is to be maintained.
It is not enough to shift responsibility to ad hoc committees or special groups among us.”
Roy W. Moger suggested that Noble had hit on a truth when he suggested that legal incorporation was a sort of “trap” that the Religious Society of Friends had fallen into, “thereby placing our conscience in jeopardy.”:
I wonder if the Religious Society of Friends should not begin to unincorporate and remove itself from the trap into which it has fallen, so that Friends can once more seek dependence upon the Holy Spirit, act under guidance of that Spirit as a corporate body, and not have to say, “As a group we dare not take corporate action [and offend the state] because our corporate life depends upon the State, and we are obligated to obey.
The individual can alone take the risk and break the law of the State if he feels the law of the State breaks the law of God.”
Roger S. Lorenz said that because there is a good argument that the Vietnam war is itself illegal, both under international and under domestic law, what it means for a person (or a corporation) to remain within the law under our circumstances is no easy question to answer.
David Hartsough
Over the years, starting in , David Hartsough contributed several pieces to the Friends Journal touching on war tax resistance:
In the issue, he set out a simple, compelling case for war tax resistance — “is it not our responsibility to set the example and refuse to pay our taxes for the weapons and ammunition which inflict this suffering?”
He also suggested that if enough people were to refuse, the government would probably legalize some form of conscientious objection to military taxation.
In the issue, he paraphrased George Fox’s advice to William Penn: “Pay the military portion of thy tax as long as thou canst.”
He suggested that people begin now by resisting the phone tax, and then prepare to resist “the 69.2 percent of our income taxes which go for war” .
In the issue, he told the story of what happened when an IRS agent came to his office to try to collect his unpaid income taxes.
Excerpts:
We talked about the Nürnburg trials, in which the Americans told the Germans that they should obey their consciences rather than their state.
I told him I felt that when we are bombing and burning people and their homes in Vietnam, I cannot condone this action by paying other people to do it.
“I want to make it clear that I have no argument with you on your position about the war,” he said.
“I do not argue that you shouldn’t follow your conscience.
But it is my responsibility to get this money.”
…he gave me a financial statement to fill out.
I refused.
He reminded me: “It’s my job to get this money in any way I can.
I don’t like to do this, but we can take any property you have — your house, your car, or whatever.”
“I have a bicycle downstairs,” I said, “and the suit I’m wearing.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t take your bike or your suit.”
He also expressed concern about the dangers of the poorer neighborhood where I live — a concern beyond his responsibility.
“I guess I’ll have to do what I believe is right,” I said when he was leaving, “and, friend, you will have to do what you believe is right.”
He left without collecting the overdue tax or taking any of my property.
In the issue, he penned another exhortation: “Let us, like Friends through the years, blaze the trail and set the example for others, rather than wait until there are masses of people taking this action.”
He recommended redirecting taxes to the American Friends Service Committee or the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which “will do a much better job of putting our beliefs into action than does the Pentagon.”
David & Jan Hartsough returned to the Journal in with a letter expressing the same basic argument, and giving some details as to how their tax resistance technique had evolved: “Each year we write a check to the Department of Human Services (rather than the IRS) for the 50 percent of our taxes that we do pay.
Along with the check, we send our 1040 form to the IRS and ask them to spend all that money for healing and education, not for killing.
And the other 50 percent (the war portion), we refuse to pay.
Instead, we contribute those funds to organizations helping to feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless, and work for justice and peace in the world.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
The momentum of war tax resistance continued to build in the pages of the Friends Journal in 1968.
A letter-to-the-editor from Wilmer J. & Mildred B. Young in the issue mentioned the 500-person-strong “writers & editors” tax strike advertisement, and a second one from the “No Tax for War Committee,” and noted that the War Resisters League was “also collecting signatures for this purpose.”
— “Some Friends are participating.
Should not many more do so?”
At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions in , “[t]here was talk of establishing a common escrow account into which all tax-refusers could pay, and finally a suggestion that the Yearly Meeting participate in the AFSC suit [see ♇ 15 July 2013]”
A note in the issue concerned a “Quaker pacifist, Neil Haworth,” who was facing prison “for not revealing his assets to the Government and for refusing to pay his income taxes because of his religious scruples against taxes of which seventy per cent go for war purposes.”
David D. & Barbara C. Houghton had a letter-to-the-editor in the same issue in which they explained why they were embarking on war tax resistance: “Letters to our congressmen and public demonstrations of disapproval have not been enough.
We feel compelled by our consciences to perform the symbolic illegal act of withholding that part of the Federal telephone tax reinstated as a result of the war expenses in Vietnam.”
(The following year, they wrote in to say that in anticipation of a proposed federal income tax surcharge for Vietnam War expenses, “[a]s a constructive expression of protest we have increased our contributions to organizations working for man’s welfare so that the added deduction entirely offsets the tax surcharge.”)
The issue had an article about expatriates who had settled in Canada that included this note:
Several young married couples whom we met expressed relief that they had left the United States and that they could now bring up their families in a land where there is less emphasis on violence, where the military is less powerful in national affairs, and where their taxes do not rise so greatly to support military activities — especially war.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
Also in , the New England Yearly Meeting’s gathering “adopted a… statement giving approval and support to Friends who in conscience refuse taxes for war and conscription.”
A letter from Geoffrey D. Kaiser in the issue tried to remind Quakers that war tax resistance was not some crazy innovation of the longhair set:
With the institution of new taxes which avowedly are largely for Johnson’s war, many Quakers are asking if they can in good conscience pay them.
Some, on the other hand, are saying that all civil disobedience and refusal to pay taxes is unquakerly.
A statement by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on the subject is as follows: “It is the sense of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchase of drums, colours, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”
This quotation is from page 98 of the 1825 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Discipline.
Who now are the conservatives?
The Richmond Declaration
In , in Richmond, Indiana, 203 delegates from “nineteen Yearly Meetings, eight Quaker colleges, fifteen Friends secondary schools, the American Friends Service Committee National Board and its twelve regional offices, and nine other peace or directly-related organizations” met to draft a “Declaration on the Draft and Conscription.”
Most of the statement concerned the draft, but war tax resistance got a mention.
Excerpts:
We call on Friends everywhere to recognize the oppressive burden of militarism and conscription.
We acknowledge our complicity in these evils in ways sometimes silent and subtle, at times painfully apparent.
We are under obligation as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends to break the yoke of that complicity.
We also recognize that the problem of paying war taxes has intensified; this compels us to find realistic ways to refuse to pay these taxes.
We commit ourselves to validate our witness by visible changes in our lives, though they may involve personal jeopardy.
We cannot rest until we achieve a truly corporate witness in the effort to oppose and end conscription.
Let us hold each other in the Light which both reveals our weaknesses and strengthens us to overcome them.
“Nonviolence: Ends and Means”
In the first Friends Journal issue of was a piece about nonviolent direct action by Lawrence Scott, in which he urged Quakers to take civil disobedience more seriously and to examine more closely the means and ends involved.
“Such direct action will include civil disobedience against conscription, war taxes, and armament construction,” he wrote.
But he was concerned about the way people were engaging in civil disobedience.
He hoped people who practiced civil disobedience would do so not in disrespect for government and law, but “in such a manner as to enhance the principle of just and democratic laws and government.”
He also thought that people should adopt a more satyagraha-like version of civil disobedience — in particular, that they should submit to arrest and legal consequences without resisting.
He was concerned that practices like “going limp, or trying to pull away” during arrest, or “noncooperation with normal court and jail procedures” tended “to transform the witness being made against a specific law or immoral practice of government into a witness against the principle of government itself.”
Such tactics “tend to attract and foster anarchists and angry persons who are opposed to all regulations and seek the disruption and overthrow of all government” and this in turn reduces the influence of the movement.
Scott’s anarchist-baiting resulted in a letter-to-the-editor from Jim Giddings, who said that when it comes to keeping means and ends in harmony, it is the people who try to defend both Gandhian nonviolence and coercive government who should be on the defensive:
I assert that “law” (as the term is used today) is based on violent coercion; the means and ends that we who use noncooperation advocate are in harmony.
Our goal is the establishment of a society free from coercive law.
The law, the police, the courts, the prisons, the army — they are all there to enforce privilege.
In the following issue, Samuel R. Tyson defended the tactic of going limp on arrest, saying “I have seen it done with great dignity.”
He then played the generation gap card, saying that Scott’s article seemed to be “another sad instance of younger people’s being turned off by the rigidity of adults.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
On , U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signed a law that added a 7.5% surcharge to most income tax bills , and 10% for .
Johnson sold the tax as a necessary measure for the Vietnam War effort — “to give our fighting men the help they need in this hour of trial.”
Some may hear in this message a call to sacrifice.
In truth, it is a call to the sense of obligation felt by all Americans.
The inconveniences this demand imposes are small when measured against the contribution of a Marine on patrol in a sweltering jungle, or an airman flying through perilous skies, or a soldier 10 thousand miles from home, waiting to join his outfit on the line.
This surtax was the most explicit war tax the government had yet imposed.
When Quakers began filling out their income tax returns, even some who had been wobbly and skeptical about resisting the “mixed” taxes began to feel that to pay this tax was a step they were not prepared to take.
In the issue of Friends Journal, Colin W. Bell explained why this surtax had pushed him over the line:
Line 12B — Tax Surcharge
Every person who fills out an income tax return this year and finds he owes the government some money will face the above line in print, and its implications in his conscience.
The idea of a surcharge was first presented in a broadcast to the nation by the President.
It was set then in the context of Vietnam, and was to be continued “so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam require higher revenues.”
As now levied, it remains a tax necessitated by the Vietnam war, whatever justifications may be advanced for it on economic or social grounds, as a curb on inflation and so on.
Mr. Johnson reiterated in his Budget message that “it is not the rise in regular budget outlays which requires a temporary tax increase, but the cost of Vietnam.”
I am miserably aware that a large portion of the regular federal income tax I pay is spent for past, present, or future wars.
I have not done a number of things others have felt impelled to do to witness against taxation for war.
A few people live calculatedly with incomes below the taxable level; a few refuse voluntary payment of all or part of the required taxes; some identify the non-reduction of the telephone tax with the Vietnam war and do not pay it of their own accord.
For me, this line about the tax surcharge is, in a quite literal sense, the point of no return!
I shall not fill it in or make voluntary payment.
I claim no logic for having arrived at this position at this time — but I do have a strong sense that this line on our tax form represents a specific and unavoidable challenge to those of us who live in comfort, or even affluence.
Each of us will have to reassess the validity of those arguments we have previously used to justify our tax payments.
Indeed, the individual answer will have to be found not at the level of argumentation, but at deep levels of inward conviction.
Is it easier, or more difficult, to resist tax conscription than conscription of the person?
Is it fair to make an analogy between the son’s moral dilemma concerning his body and the father’s concerning his money?
Most of us older Friends are law-abiding persons for whom the idea of practicing any sort of civil disobedience is deeply distressing.
We do, however, frequently recognize the purity of motive of some of our contemporaries who practice it; and we unite in finding inspiration in those who down the years have enriched the Quaker witness by obeying higher laws which brought them into conflict with the ordinances of their times.
Most of us accept the principle of taxation to pay for governmental services.
We want to bear our right and proper share of the tax obligation, and many would uncomplainingly accept heavier taxation for constructive purposes.
Our imaginations are lively enough to envisage possible consequences of tax refusal, and we are not blind to the fact of the government’s power to collect unpaid taxes and impose penalties which would in fact increase the total paid.
What, then, shall we do about “Line 12B — Tax Surcharge”?
Our bodies are not conscripted because they are not useful for war service.
The young must face that heaviest of all demands.
We are, however, contemplating a quite specific induction notice, though at an infinitely lower level of sacrifice — the call-up of our money for war service.
This year, in a most pointed way, we who fill out our tax forms cannot escape giving an answer of some sort to this draft of our resources.
It is an answer that, I believe, can be made only after those deep quakings of spirit which earned us the nickname we prize and would like to honor in our lives.
In the issue, Philip Dudley Woodbridge wrote in to explain why he was “refusing to pay part of the income tax due at this time as a symbol of my intention not to support wars — past, present, or future.… I will not support this mass murder and the possible destruction of mankind.”
At ’s New York Yearly Meeting, according to a report in the Journal,
Realizing that Friends often are called to different witness and that we have a corporate responsibility for each other, we decided that organizations of New York Yearly Meeting should support the witness of individual Friends by refusing to help the government collect (out of salaries due) taxes that these Friends have in conscience refused to pay.
The discussion of the issue of war taxes was long and difficult and required us to grapple with the realization that while breaking the law may seem to violate the consciences of some, refusing to break certain laws may violate those of others.
This situation creates a constant tension that cannot be resolved by each going his own way but only by all of us continuing to labor together in love.
In light of this, the Meeting finally agreed that its offices should not pay the telephone excise tax, which is earmarked for the Vietnam war.
Newton Garver later wrote in to give his impressions about the New York Yearly Meeting, and he included these remarks, which seem to partially contradict the above report:
It was urged that Yearly Meeting refuse to pay the federal excise tax on its telephone bills and also that the Yearly Meeting treasurer not withhold or pay to the government federal income taxes of those who are conscientiously opposed to paying them.
Eventually the first sort of corporate tax refused was approved [sic] and the second not.
The issue is a powerful one, and I have mixed feelings.
On the one hand I am gratified that the Yearly Meeting feels called on to offer resistance to the war machine.
On the other hand I was disappointed that there were so few qualms about the appropriateness of tax refusal for this purpose.
There were, of course, qualms about doing something illegal, but they seemed the same as the qualms about sending medical aid to all parts of Vietnam, whereas the situations are fundamentally different.
Prohibiting humanitarian aid is evil in itself whereas taxation is not — and both the income tax withholding and the telephone excise tax are, although introduced with wartime rhetoric, reasonably equitable and efficient forms of taxation.
Tax refusal inevitably hits at the manner of taxation and the lifeblood of government, as well as at the purposes for which the money is spent.
Tax refusal is therefore a desperate measure and also relatively unsatisfactory, the trouble being that it hits broadside and lacks the clear focus of acts like sailing Phoenix to Haiphong or reading the names of the war dead at the Capitol.
This does not mean that tax refusal is wrong.
Although I stopped refusing some months ago, feeling that I was refusing more and enjoying it less, I refused to pay the telephone excise tax for about two years.
Like many others, I was desperate to stand somehow against the all too civilized brutality of our government in Vietnam.
What troubled me at Yearly Meeting was that these tax refusal actions were presented as if they were clear and unassailable pacifist measures rather than steps of desperation.
Perhaps a confession of our desperation would have been more appropriate, but I do not know how others feel.
The issue printed some excerpts from the deliberations that had taken place during the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s proceedings.
Among these was this paragraph:
Twenty cents of every tax dollar is used in actual killing of our fellow man.
Friends recalled the statement by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on the use of our bodies and our resources, which has never been rescinded.
That Minute, reading as follows, might well be our statement in : “It is the judgment of this Meeting that a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colours, or for other warlike uses cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimonies.”
What is important is that all Friends search their hearts to decide at what point they must take their stand.
In the issue, Kenneth H. Champney wrote in to ask for advice on how to deal with a tax-resisting employee.
“I believe in government, in laws, and in taxes to support constructive activity.
Yet it is evident that the Federal income tax is largely a war tax.
Last month, a young conscientious objector told me: ‘If you withhold my tax you will be forcing me to participate in killing.’
I could not withhold his tax, and so notified the Internal Revenue Service.
I would be interested in knowing the experience of others who have been in a position similar to mine.”
A report on the Pacific Yearly Meeting in the same issue included the brief note that “La Jolla Meeting leafleted the local draft board and refused to pay the telephone tax.”
The Missouri Valley Friends Conference also reported in a later issue that they “approved minutes on [such subjects as] withholding taxes for military purposes, and exploring the possibility of a peace tax beyond the One Percent More program.”
And the Green Pastures Quarterly Meeting “approved a minute that the United States’ continuation of the Vietnam war was morally wrong, that it questioned the moral rightness of paying taxes to support it, and that it gave ‘approval and loving support’ to those who conscientiously refused to pay such taxes.”
In one of two “called sessions” of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in , “Friends considered tax refusal as a possible form of corporate witness against the war in Vietnam.”
Friends suggested several techniques.
One was a refund claim, such as the one filed by American Friends Service Committee in the First District Court of Philadelphia against the Internal Revenue Service.
It is based on an alleged violation by IRS of the First Amendment in its imposition of an involuntary withholding tax.
In the AFSC case, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting will be a “friend of the court.”
The Meeting, awaiting the outcome of this suit, at the request of three of its employees, is holding in escrow in a savings account income taxes withheld from their salaries.
The Meeting also has refused to pay levies imposed by IRS on the salaries of employees who have not paid the telephone tax.
Young Friends pleaded for sharing and sacrifice instead of trying to find ingenious ways of evading the payment of income taxes.
“Americans would rather be dead than poor,” one of them said.
The meeting did not reach consensus, and agreed to meet again.
The caption to a photo from a “Called Meeting for Worship and Declarations of Freedom from Conscription” noted that “Eight individuals expressed their intentions to refuse the payment of war taxes.”
“Sneaky” resistance
A letter-to-the-editor in the issue from Lloyd C. Shank advocated “the ‘sneaky’ way” of tax resistance — comparing crafty tax evasion to the necessarily surreptitious illegality of the Underground Railroad.
“After all, the punishment for cheating is far less than for murdering.
And ‘cheating’ is only an oppressive government’s name for a good man’s refusal to murder.”
I believe… that often we are blinded to practical resistance by our over-conscientious concern with so-called deep ethical implications.
Jesus cleansed the temple — not a profound decision or deed (two angry boys might have done the same) — but a practical demonstration against religious hypocrisy and greed.
If Christ had consulted the religious community of hair-splitters, he never would have received a go-ahead.
He obeyed the Spirit: Simple, sweet, quick, effective.
Betty Stone did not agree.
She wrote in to contrast “the ‘sneaky’ way” with that of “the experts on effective nonviolent action:”
Jesus, who demands thoroughgoing honesty (“purity of spirit”) and Gandhi, who said, “truth is even more important than love.”
How far could Dr. King have gone had he lacked character and credibility?
Stone may have overplayed her hand when she then attacked the Underground Railroad analogy by attacking the Underground Railroad itself, saying that perhaps it “represented violent treatment of slaveholders… [that] led to secession and the Civil War.”
Instead, she felt, a more non-violent solution would have been one of “love in action” that was designed to transform the slaveholders — for instance “if large numbers of Friends had combined to compensate slave owners for slaves whom they aided to escape?
What if Friends had gone to the plantations and offered to do the work of the slaves who had escaped — to take their beatings and lynchings and to train the slaves by example in the use of transforming power in their own behalf?
Could Friends have popularized the principle of emancipation with just compensation?”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
By , references to war tax resistance in the Friends Journal had become more casual and matter-of-fact, but also less urgent and less thorough.
ad in the Friends Journal
In the issue, the pseudonymous history columnist for the Journal, “Now and Then,” examined the tradition of tax and tithe resistance in the Society of Friends:
Render Unto Caesar
For some years Friends have been aware of an anomaly in their traditional response to military requisitions.
When they have been conscripted for military service, they have officially and in large numbers refused to go.
Many governments have made provision for this expression of conscience.
This has taken the form of allowing the payment for a substitute by the conscript, or some form of alternative service.
Many Friends have accepted the latter.
But when our money is demanded, particularly as part of a more general tax, although we know its ultimate purpose is for war, only sporadically have Friends objected.
Without recounting again all the data in our history in this matter, I inquire here why this curious contradictory situation has come to exist.
Young men stubbornly refuse actual direct participation in war and do so with the sympathy of their parents, but the latter usually have contributed in money to the very cause to which their sons refused to contribute their bodies.
And governments have usually provided no alternative to military payments.
A recent Yearly Meeting memorandum lists several of the reasons (excuses?) why Friends have abstained from refusing war taxes.
Many of these reasons simply are practical considerations.
But the first one on the list is the gospel phrase: “Render unto Caesar…”
The context of these words of Jesus is precisely that of a general Federal tax.
They are therefore not taken out of context when applied to modern Federal taxation.
Compared with them, there is nothing in the Gospels so explicitly quotable for or against military service.
In former times… as well as today, this text has been repeatedly referred to by Friends in extenuation of their complicity by means of tax payment in the waging of war.
Why is this?
Does it mean that Friends follow Jesus most readily when he seems to have left specific instructions, while where he is less specific they arrive at the stance of war resister in spite of this contrast?
Undoubtedly, elsewhere in Quakerism we see evidence of Biblical literalism alongside of an almost contradictory dependence on the Spirit.
Or is the contrast between submitting to war taxes and refusal of war service due to the fact that the latter problem for a long time rarely arose, at least in England?
While militia dues were refused as early as , compulsory military service scarcely began there until our own time.
Another Quaker financial refusal was early and widespread.
That was of tithes levied on agricultural produce for “priests’ wages.”
No single ground of resistance and persecution was so durable in our history.
The money was for support of the official “hireling” ministers.
Why was tax money to support war-making not equally obnoxious?
I wonder whether today “Render unto Caesar” can, as a saying of Jesus, bear the weight that we give it when without twinge of conscience we pay taxes of which so large a share finances war.
At one time Friends — or at least some Friends — did refuse taxes levied exclusively for war costs.
They distinguished them from what they called “mixed taxes.”
It is not like Jesus to legislate on explicit social problems — and if he did, are we to take his words as rules for our own late generation?
His followers did not always or in other respects blindly obey the government.
When Caesar ordered pagan sacrifice in the following centuries, Christians would not offer even the token pinch of incense.
In those days, Christians also refused participation in war.
Under some circumstances, obedience to “the powers that be” seemed commendable; under others, Christians knew they must obey God rather than man.
Indeed, neither historical scholarship nor grammar leaves the intention of the Gospel saying quite so sweeping in its bearing.
According to Luke, Jesus was accused of forbidding to give tribute to Caesar.
Some modern students of the Gospels suspect that behind their present portrait lies a much more politically nonconformist Jewish subject of Rome.
The saying I quoted ends “…and unto God the things that are God’s.” Was not this the real thrust of original injunction?
Perhaps Jesus never really answered the question, “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not?
Shall we give or shall we not give?”
And the apparent command to give tribute to Caesar may be only an analogy or a conditional clause, vindicating the major obedience — obedience to God.
In the same issue, David Nagle wrote in with his own lesson from history.
He brought up the case of Joshua Maule, who at the time of the American Civil War was resisting a tax that was very similar to the recently-enacted Vietnam War income tax surcharge.
Maule had written:
On this ground [the Scriptures] we believe the testimony stands and our discipline is established, which is clear against “paying taxes for the express purpose of war.”
For war destroys that which is God’s, and invades the things which have not been committed to Caesar.
And when the civil government commands us to co-operate in this work, either by personal service or payment of money for that express purpose, if we render unto God the things that are His, we should decline all voluntary payment of money demanded for the direct support of war, and be willing to suffer and bear whatever may be permitted to come upon us; rendering ourselves into the hands of the Lord, and trusting in him.
Nagle wrote: “I was impressed by the resemblance of this situation to ours today.
The only significant difference seems to be that in the backsliders were in the minority and today few Friends have the courage to refuse to pay a tax intended expressly for the war effort, such as the present ten percent surtax.
I ask that Friends give this concern the solemn consideration it deserves and seek the will of the Lord in regard to future actions.”
Also in that issue, Robert E. Dickinson wrote a curious piece, accompanied by photos, on “My Tax Refusal Furniture” — “a set of furnishings that easily could be moved or disposed of” that Dickinson designed and built after he was served an IRS seizure notice for “my property, including my furniture.”
When the authorities are at the door, the furniture can be demounted to flat slabs of plywood for ease in moving and storage.
The issue quoted from a statement issued by Hanover Monthly Meeting when it decided to start resisting the phone tax — “with regret but under compulsion of conscience” — and from statements issued by Alura and Donald Dodd, who had decided to pay their taxes into an escrow account rather than to the federal government.
In the issue, in an article mostly devoted to the Christian obligation of tithing, the issue of tax resistance sneaked in:
I suspect that the observance of tithing has fallen off partially as a result of the churches’ betrayal of their own stewardship.
They have diverted to the needs of their own buildings and grounds that which should have been held in trust for all.
They have faithfully received and have paid into the storehouses (or banks) but have stood guard to make sure that nothing but the interest flowed out.
They have tied strings to their giving, withholding from those who do not meet with their approval and forgetting that God, whose stewards they should be, causes the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust alike.
Tithes, it seems to me, should not be given or withheld in an effort to bring pressure upon God or to coerce the workings of the Spirit.
If we have lost faith that our own religious body is not administering its trust with true compassion for our troubled world, we may be well advised, not to renounce tithing, but to seek another storehouse — perhaps a church in the ghetto — where the Spirit may be less hedged about with anxiety and paternalistic caution.
And here, I believe, is the relationship — and the difference — between paying taxes and tithing.
We should continue to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, including obedience and respect as well as taxes, for so long as they are his due and his requirements are not in conflict with those of God.
If the government turns away from righteousness, forsakes justice and mercy, and puts our taxes to ungodly uses instead of caring for all of its people, I believe we have the right to refuse and to reallocate to constructive causes that percentage of our income which is assessed as tax.
On the other hand, our allegiance to God is paramount.
Under any and all circumstances we are required to render unto God that which is God’s including our tithes.
However, just as we may need to consider withdrawing our financial support from a government that is not doing what a government is supposed to do, we may wish to consider reallocating our tithes if our own religious body fails to be responsive to the Spirit of Christ which is the foundation of our faith.
A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions in the same issue mentioned, but only in passing, that there had been “three called sessions on tax refusal and the Black Manifesto” over the past year.
A report on the General Conference for Friends in the issue reprinted a “query” that had been proposed by the “discussion group on tax refusal and tax avoidance”:
Have Friends considered their implication in the immoral war system through the payment of telephone excise and Federal income taxes, which are largely used for military purposes, and have they sought ways in which to make clear their testimony against such immorality by refusing, when possible, payment of such taxes and/or avoiding tax payments by changing their life style to live below or at a lower level of tax liability, bearing in mind that the spirit in which such action is taken is crucial and that divine guidance should undergird the individual’s response?
An article on individual spiritual growth in the issue casually included tax resistance as one of the issues a spiritual seeker might be expected to confront:
What do you do when you come to a stumbling point or dead end in your search?
(Examples: Defining or identifying God, refusing to pay taxes, accepting the label “religious,” surrendering autonomy to a group, praying privately, and teaching one’s beliefs about religion to one’s children.)
That issue also reprinted a sarcastic notice from the Fifteenth Street (New York) Preparative Meeting’s newsletter:
Special offer for complacent Friends!
The Peace and Social Action Program of New York Yearly Meeting is offering for sale two copies (paperback) of the Journal of John Woolman.
These copies are unique in that all the radical passages have been removed by mechanical excision.
They were cut to prepare a pamphlet of Woolman excerpts called, “John Woolman on Seeds of War and Violence in our Possessions, Consumption, Taxpaying, and Lifestyles.”
The special clearance price, only $19.95 a copy.
Which is a bargain, considering that it saves you the trouble of removing these passages yourself!
The issue noted that the Saint Louis Monthly Meeting was administering an escrow account to accept money from Friends who were refusing to pay the Federal excise tax on phone service.
Don Kaufman’s book “What Belongs to Caesar?” was reviewed in the issue.
The reviewer was sympathetic to the book’s thesis — that war tax resistance and Christianity are compatible — but thought the book “would be even more valuable if the author had felt as free to quote from the Bible as he was to quote from other books and articles.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance continued to come up frequently in the pages of the
Friends Journal in .
In the issue, Clifford Neal Smith
examined radical, communal economic restructuring as one potential Quaker
approach worth considering — not state Communism, but something along the
lines of Hutterite communities that took their inspiration from
Acts 2:45–46: “All that believed were together, and
had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them
to all men, as every man had need.” Smith suggested “that Friends give thought
to the possible restructuring of our Meetings into communes” along these lines.
In particular, he thought, “the communal way will recommend itself to Friends
who with to resist the payment of war taxes, for, as the Hutterites have
found, there is a considerable tax saving to the communal way, particularly as
practiced by a religious organization.” He also anticipated that “in the event
that Friendly testimony against the military-industrial complex should become
effective enough to be recognized by the establishment as the real foe of the
present system,” communes would help Quakers be more resilient against the
persecution that would inevitably follow.
In the same issue was a letter-to-the-editor by Philip van der Goes in which
he made the hopeful suggestion that the government allow taxpayers to
designate on their tax forms which federal agencies they want to fund.
In the following issue, Betty Gulick wrote a piece in which she expressed that
Quakers, by “personally lending support to the most violent of societies (our
own) by our taxes, our jobs, our investments, by silence and by our merely
going along with things as they are,” lose the credibility they need to have
to recommend nonviolence to the “aggressive victims of aggressive prejudice
and poverty.”
In that issue also was an article about activists in Puerto Rico who had
constructed a chapel in a
U.S. Navy firing
range on the island of Culebra, in defiance of a Federal injunction. One of
those arrested was Dan Balderston. The article reprinted his statement, from
which I take the following excerpt:
My people, the Quakers, have always insisted that God is to be obeyed and not
men, and that we are neither to be satisfied with the state of things, nor
with a promise of salvation in the hereafter, but live as though the Kingdom
were already here — without doing violence or harming our brother. They
refused to own their brothers as slaves, refused to kill or to pay taxes to
kill — for example, my great-great-grandfather, Lloyd Balderston, refused to
pay war taxes during the Civil War and the government expropriated several of
his hogs. The Quakers have fallen with the rest of the Babylonians, but there
is a remnant which seeks to recall the voice of Jesus to the Society of
Friends, and I think that we of A Quaker Action Group seek to act for that
remnant and to find once more the spirit of the early Christians and the
early Friends.
In seeking the will of Jesus for our time, some of us have been led to break
the laws of the United States — thus A Quaker Action Group sent the sailboat
Phoenix to North Vietnam with medical supplies in violation of the law
against “trading with the enemy,” and thus I have refused to register for
war, and last year refused to pay the ten percent war tax on telephones.…
Jane Meyerding wrote in from prison, where she was serving time for her action
in destroying draft board,
U.S. Attorney, and
FBI records. Excerpts:
We have to stop this war. We have to end the military takeover of our
economy, our minds, and our young men. We have to retake control of this
nation in order to stop its wanton destruction of lives here and abroad.
Of course, these things will not be accomplished simply because we want them
to be. The first step in the direction of change is to look for opportunities
to act effectively. This first step is harder than it sounds. I had to be
practically hit over the head with it before I opened my eyes to see how I
could be useful. (I thank God the action was successful even with my
reluctance to accept disruption of my “business as usual.”)
After the opportunities are discovered, they have to be taken. We
all have opportunities to stop paying war taxes, to publicly remove our
support from the government’s war policies, to “aid and abet” those who take
direct action against the institutions of war. Why do we so often leave the
most radical and risky parts of our witness to the young men who have already
put at least some aspects of their futures in jeopardy by refusing to comply
with the draft?
With so much to be done, we all just have to become activists of one
sort or another. From now on — each time a step away from war and toward peace
needs to be taken — if I do not take it, you will have to; if you do not take
it, I shall have to. None of us can afford to miss any more opportunities.
So, what will I be doing when I get out? As much as I can of what needs to be
done. With as many friends (and Friends) as possible.
The issue noted that the Ann Arbor
(Michigan) Meeting was asking telephone tax resisters to pay their phone bills,
minus the excise tax, as a group, in order to “[p]rotest the obscenity of war.”
Brinton Turkle shared his decision to start resisting in the
issue:
One of the most familiar Quaker stories concerns William Penn’s reluctance to
give up wearing his sword when he became a Friend. With great wisdom (and
some humor, I think), George Fox is supposed to have told William Penn to
wear his sword as long as he could. On , I sent this letter to the Internal Revenue Service and thus took
off a sword I had been wearing long enough:
Sirs:
To repudiate a government that no longer represents me, I am not filing a
federal, state, or city income tax this year.
I am self-employed. In the past, federal taxes I have filed but refused to
pay in protest were simply seized from my savings account. To make my
earnings less accessible for uses I abhor, I have been deliberately remiss
in keeping records of my income and expenses. An accurate assessment of my
taxes is therefore impossible.
I expect harassment and retribution to follow my defiance of a government
that has made my nation the greatest scourge mankind has ever suffered.
Imprisonment may end my career as a creator of books for children. It is a
privilege to be able to bring enrichment and delight to young people. It is
work I do with love and pride. My work is not murder.
I would not release a bomb or pull a trigger. I would not pay another man to
do these things, nor would I buy his weapons.
My Lai stops with me.
Brinton Turkle
How long was it before the awareness of the sheer senselessness of
encumbering himself with a sword caused William Penn to discard it? What a
relief it must have been to him to be rid of it!
It was a long time until the awareness of the enormity of underwriting murder
brought me to the act of civil disobedience I have just committed. About
twenty years ago, I began to see that America’s war machine rolled on our tax
dollars and nothing else. Tentatively, I sent notes to Internal Revenue with
my tax payments disapproving of our national priorities and the Korean war.
When the horrors piled up in Vietnam five years ago, I sent a letter of
protest instead of payment with my federal income tax file. I thought I was
facing prison, but it turned out that I was not a criminal — only a
delinquent. There followed a correspondence of one-sided passion between me
and a computer. Internal Revenue took the money from my savings account with
six percent interest.
The war continued. A Quaker president in the name of peace-seeking opened up
the war in Cambodia and Laos and began to show unmistakable signs of
affliction: Either he was captive to his own overweening ambition, or else he
was in pawn to the Pentagon and the industries it supports. Perhaps he was
doubly afflicted and thus worthy of a compassion that I did not have the
goodness to give him.
Holding in the Light a man to whom truth is a mere expedience, a man who is
using his power to tear our country apart, a man who has caused the death and
maiming of thousands, is beyond my present capabilities. My tax status,
however, as a self-employed person gives me a peculiar opportunity, and I
have grasped it.
I have heard the objections. Some of them I cannot answer. One does what one
must. Swordlessness will never be understood by some.
Father Daniel Berrigan has summed it up for this Quaker:
“…To be right now in some serious trouble with respect to the ‘powers and
principalities’ of this nation means to occupy a most important geographical
position — if one wishes to struggle with others all over the world for their
freedom; and by the same token to be in no trouble at all is to share in what
I take to be a frightening movement towards violence and death. To resist
that movement is one’s choice.”
A choice has been made, and I feel pounds lighter.
The issue brought the news
that the New York Yearly Meeting planned to file a friend-of-the-court brief
in the AFSC lawsuit challenging mandatory employer income tax withholding from
the paychecks of conscientiously resisting employees (see
♇ 15 July 2013). The
issue added that the Meeting
also “agreed to publicize… a two-year-old minute regarding the non-payment of
the telephone tax for war by the Yearly Meeting Office. It urges Friends who
are also nontaxpayers to join in a possible advertisement” and proposed a
“minute on the deliberate nonwithholding of wage tax levies for Internal
Revenue Service when requested by Yearly Meeting employees. The complex
procedure would notify Internal Revenue Service of the percentage of wages not
withheld and the possible setting up of a special fund of these monies for
peaceful uses.”
The “Sufferings” column of the
issue include listings for Paula & Howard Cell, who “[h]ad an automobile
seized by Internal Revenue for refusal to pay the war tax on their telephone,”
for Bill Himmelbauer, who was “[s]entenced to one year in prison for refusal
to pay war taxes on his income. To do this he openly altered his W-4 form,”
and for Lilian & George Willoughby, who “[h]ad an automobile seized by
Internal Revenue for refusal to pay the war tax on their telephone.”
Robin Harper
The issue brings the first
mention of the war tax resistance of Robin Harper, who will periodically
appear in the context of war tax resistance in the magazine for
. His first
appearance comes in the “Sufferings” column:
Robin and Marlies Harper, London Grove Meeting, Pennsylvania: Falsely
assessed, after a decade of resistance to military taxes, for $32,000 in
alleged unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties. The Harpers actually refused
less than $8000, including penalties, over these years.
The “Sufferings” column in the
issue gave an update:
[The Harpers s]ucceeded in convincing
IRS to
reduce its claim upon the family for a decade of unpaid federal income taxes
from thirty-two thousand five hundred dollars to a bit more than seven
thousand dollars.
Robin explained: “Under duress, I sent
IRS
income tax returns for to
set the record straight — a clear compromise in order to protect our family
from great financial hardship should
IRS
proceed to seize such unwarranted sums from me.”
The issue mentioned Harper
among a number of war tax resisters, and described his resistance thusly:
Conscientiously opposed to participation in war of any form, Robin began his
tax resistance in in opposition to the
nuclear arms race. The war in Indochina has deepened his conviction. He
insists that during he contributed $3,385 to “organizations engaged in constructive
programs designed to repair ravages of war abroad and counteract the ugly
wounds inflicted by segregation and discrimination at home…” The
IRS,
however, claims he owes $3,206 plus $1,502 in penalties and $2,700 in
interest. Robin is asking the
U.S. Tax Court to
reject all
IRS
claims for the 10-year period.
In the issue, Harper is
mentioned as being “a member of the War Tax Concern Support Committee” who
addressed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting about that subject, “urging a
symbolic tax refusal of a small portion of these taxes as a witness to the
Peace Testimony.” Alas, “[a]fter a deep and searching discussion, there
remained some who did not feel comfortable with this kind of witness. Later in
the week a revised minute was presented, and after renewed searching it was
adopted.” No details are given about this revised minute.
I next notice Harper in the Friends Journal
archives in the edition,
which finds him again (still?) battling the
IRS in
court:
In three court hearings, attended by as many as 40 supporters, tax resister
Robin Harper… testified recently that he could not be compelled against his
religious beliefs to participate in the collection of taxes for war purposes.
In the final hearing, Edwin Bronner, Haverford College history professor,
appeared as an expert witness to spell out the 300-year history of the
Friends Peace Testimony.
The government apparently considered the arguments presented, including an
excellent brief prepared by volunteer attorneys, as too compelling.
Department of Justice lawyers abruptly withdrew their subpoena issued to
Harper a year earlier to force him to present documents and answer questions
in federal court in Philadelphia.
In the issue, Harper wrote at length
about war tax resistance in the Society of Friends. He mentioned the cases of
three Philadelphia Yearly Meeting employees who were resisters, and how the
IRS had
filed lawsuits to try to compel the Meeting to levy their salaries.
In her decision in , Judge Norma
Shapiro denied the validity of the [refusal to pay] penalty but upheld the
levy, which the yearly meeting then paid “under duress.” In each instance the
yearly meeting incurred legal expenses, but the individual employee
reimbursed it for the full amount of the actual
IRS
collection.
Harper then proposed a series of queries “for the purposes of discussion and
discernment… mindful that beneath each lies the Grand Query: ‘What does the
Spirit require of me?’ ”:
Query 1: If I am opposed to the military conscription of my body, am I called
to bear witness to the military conscription of my tax dollars?
Query 2: How do I approach the dilemma of paying taxes for constructive
government programs while resisting payment for war preparation?
Query 3: Does the fact that billions of military tax dollars are unearmarked
and hidden “in the mixture” in the
U.S. treasury
lessen my burden to bear witness?
Query 4: Have I sought clearness on what to do with the money I have refused
to pay in military taxes? Are alternative funds that use my refused taxes to
pay for peace and social justice initiatives an adequate spiritual response
from me?
If the Peace Tax Fund were passed by Congress, would the escrow account
thereby established be an acceptable alternative?
Query 5: How much inconvenience or suffering am I prepared to accept for the
“moral disarmament” of my federal taxes, such as penalties and interest on
refused taxes, seizure of bank accounts, salaries, or other assets, or loss
of credit?
Query 6: As a military tax refuser, am I sufficiently sensitive to the impact
my witness may have on loved ones, co-workers and others who may not share my
conviction but whose personal, spiritual, financial, or professional
well-being might be affected by my witness?
Query 7: When a Quaker employer must choose between compliance with
government demands and honoring the conscientious witness of an employee,
where does its allegiance lie? What issues of faith make this decision a
difficult one?
Query 8: Honoring the conscientious witness of an employee may place serious
risk on the Quaker employer, its members, and other employees. How do Friends
institutions balance support of employee conscience against these risks?
Query 9: Should Quaker employers rest easy serving as collectors of federal
military taxes by routinely withholding income taxes from their employees and
remitting them, without protest, to the Internal Revenue Service?
Query 10: When making a strong, public witness against military taxes by
protest or refusal to pay, is a Quaker institution likely to strengthen or
weaken the peace movement? The Religious Society of Friends? The possibility
of doing successfully the work for which the institution was created? (This
query is taken from page 189 of the Handbook on Military
Taxes and Conscience, edited by Linda Coffin…)
In the issue, Harper responded
with a letter-to-the-editor to a critic of war tax resistance as a Quaker
practice who had published a piece . Harper recommended a carefully-designed form of war tax
resistance that might overcome the critic’s objections:
[L]et us suppose a conscientious taxpayer, engaging in open civil
disobedience,
refuses to render 100 percent of her/his federal income tax to
the Internal Revenue Service (say “no” to war).
carefully calculates the tax liability and redistributes the entire
sum to recipients engaged in building up civil society in peaceful
ways, thus excluding any personal benefit. Includes list of
recipients/amounts and a “letter of conscience” along with tax return — a
transparent witness (say “yes” to peace).
declares to
IRS
that he/she recognizes a moral responsibility to contribute to the
general welfare by paying one’s fair share of taxes — hence this
“alternative service” for the tax (taking personal responsibility).
clarifies to
IRS
that the full tax would gladly be paid, provided the government
would assure the taxpayer that it would be spent exclusively for
nonmilitary purposes, as defined by Congress, which is the
legislative architecture of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill,
still pending in Congress (support legal relief for this dilemma of
conscience).
Finally, in the issue, Harper’s
war tax resistance got a mention in an article by Parker J. Palmer, based on a
speech he gave on the occasion of the 80th
anniversary of the founding of the Pendle Hill Quaker Center:
I am going to end with a small story that has big meaning for me. Back in the
day, a wonderful man named Robin Harper was head of buildings and grounds…
Robin was and still is a conscientious war tax refuser. Not only did this
mean the possibility of prosecution and imprisonment, but tax resistance made
very heavy demands on his life. He had to be employed by people who would
agree not to withhold any taxes, which shrinks one’s job opportunities
dramatically, and he could not own any real property that could be seen by
the IRS
as capable of being turned into cash. But he has never done time because his
integrity is so self-evident, not unlike that of John Woolman.
When I was a young man here, I shared Robin’s abhorrence of war (as I do to
this day), but I could not imagine taking the risks and making the sacrifices
required of me. I was at that stage of moral development where I had very
high ethical aspirations and equally high levels of guilt about the way I
continually fell short. One day I went to Robin and told him of my dilemma.
“I believe what you believe,” I said, “and I want to put my beliefs into
action, but I just cannot bring myself to do what you do.”
Robin responded plainly,simply, and with great compassion. “Keep holding the
belief,” he said, “and follow it wherever it may lead you. As time goes on you
will find your own way of resisting violence and promoting peace, one that
fits with your gifts and your calling.” That is Quakerism at its best. That
is community at its best. That is teaching at its best. That is friendship at
its best.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In the issues of the Friends Journal, more attention is being given to the practical concerns of how to best go about war tax resistance in a way that is most effective and that most honors the Quaker way of going about things.
There’s another example of backlash in the issue: a letter from Stephen C. Conte in which he explains why he is leaving the New York Yearly Meeting for the First Evangelical Friends Church.
He lists a number of reasons, including the New York Yearly Meeting’s positions opposing laws against marijuana possession and homosexuality, and what he sees as a lack of appropriate respect for scriptural authority.
But the first example he mentions is war tax resistance:
The Christian is bound to pay his taxes.
This is the point of the famous “Render to Caesar” passage in Matthew, which we Quakers have been quite willing to quote in support of the Peace Testimony.
We, who are so willing to invoke the authority of certain passages, must likewise accept the authority of all scripture.
I cannot, therefore, as a Christian and a Friend, accept the position of the Yearly Meeting in support of nonpayment of the telephone tax.
My Christian freedom consists in rendering to God my allegiance and love, rather than in playing games with the Internal Revenue Service.
That same issue of the Journal covered the Sweden Yearly Meeting, which seemed to have tried to grapple with the question of war taxes in the most round-about way possible, by suggesting that Quakers “work for establishment of a differentiated tax [which] would mean that part of the tax that goes for military defense could instead be channeled into, for instance, the social sector.”
Sara P. Cory wrote in to the issue to say that for her, phone tax resistance had become “too feeble a gesture” and that she was going to withdraw further from the “life as usual” which was “helping to keep our war economy going” — for example, by giving home-crafted Christmas gifts or donations to charity in place of store-bought items.
The “Sufferings” column of that issue noted that Bill Himmelbauer had finished his prison sentence “for resisting the payment of war taxes.”
In the issue, Donald Ary advised those Quakers who were unwilling to reduce their incomes below the tax line to instead try to take advantage of some of the tax provisions designed to help wealthy people shelter their income from taxes.
For example, consider a Friend who is paying income tax at a twenty-percent rate and has two thousand dollars in a savings and loan account.
If the account is paying five percent interest, the Friend has a one-hundred-dollar income from it and pays a twenty-dollar tax on that income.
If the Friend puts his two thousand dollars into common stocks that pay a dividend of one hundred dollars a year, he pays no tax, as the first one hundred dollars of dividend income is exempt from taxation.
The Friend might choose to send the twenty-dollar saving to American Friends Service Committee.
The war effort is poorer by twenty dollars, AFSC is richer by twenty dollars, and the Friend is four dollars ahead when he deducts his contribution to AFSC.
The value of common stocks can go down, but, remember, the tax laws encourage speculation.
If the Friend sells his stock for one thousand dollars, the whole loss is deducted from his income; therefore eight hundred dollars is the Friend’s loss and two hundred dollars is the government’s. If the stock increases and is sold after six months for three thousand dollars, the tax laws provide preferential treatment for this increased income.
It is classed as long-term capital gain, and the Friend pays ten percent tax on this, rather than the twenty percent he pays on his salary.
“Friends may ask: ‘This is legal, but is it moral?’ ” Ary notes.
I would reply that the tax structure in the United States is grossly immoral, and any participation in it is immoral.
The tax structure is immoral because the taxes are used for war and because the tax laws are an instrument of gross injustice.… Friends who allow their incomes to reach a taxable level must choose the lesser of two evils by minimizing their tax.
Friends have spent too much effort refusing to pay unimportant symbolic taxes, such as the telephone tax.
If Friends were to employ systematically and blatantly the rich people’s tax-avoidance procedures, the people of this country might just sit up and take notice.
In the same issue was a brief note that the “Peace and Social Action Committee” of the Twin Cities Friends Meeting had “recommended that the Meeting not pay the Federal telephone tax, which is used to finance the Vietnam war.”
The issue included a brief review of Robert Calvert’s war tax resistance guidebook Ain’t Gonna Pay for War No More.
In the issue, Horace Champney shared his letter to the IRS.
Excerpt:
Since I returned [from Vietnam] in , I have openly refused to submit any tax return to the Internal Revenue Service.
I have preferred to risk jail than support an immoral, insane war.
This year again, although legally required to file, I must publicly refuse to do so.
I have been deducting the war tax from my telephone bill.
I will gladly pay Federal taxes when my Government turns off on war and mobilizes against real enemies: Pollution, poverty, disease, ignorance, chauvinism, and gadget-hungry, profit-crazed overproduction.
I must urge every compassionate and concerned American, no matter what uniform he wears, to face up to his Government and find his own way to say “No!” to this war.
Henry Thoreau’s famous words to Emerson during the Mexican war — Don’t ask why I am in jail, ask why you are outside!
— are as relevant today as they were one hundred twenty-three years ago.
The “Sufferings” column of that issue led off with the case of Sally Buckley:
Convicted of three counts of claiming extra dependents on a W-4 withholding form.
Sentencing was put off indefinitely by Judge Miles Lord, who expressed reluctance to sentence her.
At he sentenced her to thirty days and stayed sentence for sixty days to give her another chance to pay the taxes.
Her Meeting approved the following minute: “The Twin Cities Friends Meeting supports Sally Buckley in her act of war tax resistance and those of our Meeting and other war tax resisters who have followed their consciences in not contributing to the support of war and the preparation of war.
“In addition, the Meeting takes a further concrete step in support of these actions by withholding its telephone tax as a protest against the Indochina War.”
The “Sufferings” column in the issue moved forward in the magazine to share the page with the masthead and table of contents.
It included these listings:
Ellis Rece, Jr., attender of Augusta Meeting, Georgia: Sentenced to one year in prison with 320 days suspended and fined $500 for refusing to pay taxes that go to the war.
Ellis had openly claimed additional dependents on his W-4 form to prevent deductions from his earnings.
A called meeting for worship was held in Augusta Meetinghouse before the trial.
Mark Riley, attender of Sacramento Meeting, California: Has completed a six-month sentence in Terminal Island Federal Prison for refusing to pay taxes that go for war by altering his W-4 form.
A note on the Baltimore Yearly Meeting in the issue noted that although “[w]e spent much time and prayer on the best methods of protesting the Indochina war, reaching agreement on some, [we were] unable to find unity on corporate involvement in the refusal to pay war taxes.”
In the issue, David Green wrote in to promote a different tack on telephone tax refusal:
, I explained to the secretaries in the law school where I work that I will not use the telephone, either to make or to receive calls, as long as the government continues to impose the war excise tax on its use.
I have told the same thing to the people where I am living.
I commend this course to the consideration of Friends.
I understand and support those who continue to use the telephone while refusing to pay the war excise tax.
Complete telephone refusal does, however, have advantages over telephone-tax refusal.
First, it communicates more effectively.
The telephone-tax refuser can explain his reasons to the government agents who try to collect the tax and to someone in his bank where the government seizes the tax money.
The telephone refuser, however, has repeated opportunities to explain why he cannot be reached by telephone, for either business or social reasons.
Second, the telephone refuser shares in the inconvenience caused by his position.
The telephone-tax refuser inconveniences the government and bank employees, but the telephone refuser finds himself fully involved in the inconvenience his decision causes.
In the past month, I have trudged all over Washington on errands I would have performed in a few seconds by telephone.
On other occasions I have had to write notes and letters instead of making telephone calls.
But this gives some unsought rewards too — there is a real gain in simplicity.
Life is less cluttered, less hectic, if one is not a slave to every jangle of a telephone bell.
And, faced with the effort involved in using only written or face-to-face communication, much is eliminated.
Third, refusing to use telephones withdraws financial support from the telephone company — a prime war contractor — as well as from the government.
And here, as another byproduct, the refuser saves money.
Instead of a considerable charge for long-distance calls, last month I owed nothing.
A refreshing change.
Fourth, telephone refusal eliminates the tax completely instead of merely postponing its collection.
I understand, sympathize with, and support the position of the telephone-tax refuser.
I unite with his desire to be clear of voluntarily paying a tax used only in war-making.
But I ask all Friends to consider that by entirely refusing to use the telephone, they could be clear, not only of voluntarily paying the tax, but of paying the tax at all.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Quaker war tax resistance methods and theories diversified and became more developed, as can be seen from the pages of the Friends Journal of .
One thing that stood in the way of some Quakers (and some Quaker organizations)
adopting war tax resistance was a bias toward being law-abiding, and a worry
that civil disobedience might be one step too far on a slippery slope to
anarchy. In the issue, lawyer
(and Quaker) Allen S. Olmsted Ⅱ tried to remove this impediment:
Those who in sweeping terms condemn all law breaking seldom stop to inquire what the law actually is and who declares it.
Is the policeman or the draft board or the tax collector the law?
All of these have been reversed by the Courts time and again.
Is the demonstrator who defies a police ban, a draft resister who refuses to shoulder a rifle, or a citizen who refuses to pay war taxes, ipso facto a law breaker?
These citizens seek to vindicate their lawfulness, i.e. their loyalty to the Constitution, by breaking and then appealing the “law” which the lowest echelon of authority is seeking to enforce.
Perhaps the feature of the war resister’s mind which most clearly differentiates him from other law defiers is his complete loyalty to the spirit, as distinguished from the letter, of the law.
This is most evident in his reaction to the tax laws.
The spirit of the tax laws is, as some of us see it, that the government must go on and all of us should share the expense thereof according to our means.
Let us take the example of a retired school teacher, or minister whose income
is somewhat over the exemption and deductibles. His income tax is, say, $100.
He advises the tax collector that since 70 percent of the government’s income
is used to prosecute an unjust war he is refusing to pay 70 percent of his
tax and encloses his check for $30. He has defied the law and in due course
the government will clamp down on his bank account and collect the $70 plus
penalties.
Now take the example of the man with an income of $100,000, some of which is gained in selling war supplies to the government.
Does he feel that in the spirit of the law he should contribute his fair share to the support of the government from which he has profited so handsomely?
Merely to ask the question seems to most people quixotic, naive and bizarre.
Our wealthy tax avoider employs a man learned in the letter of the law to show him how he may avoid any taxes whatever.
As long as he keeps within the letter of the law he may pound his chest and say “What a smart boy am I.”
The difference between the tax refuser and the tax avoider is twofold: (1)
The first violates the letter of the law, the second does not. (2) The first
is motivated by the love of his country, his brothers, and his God; the other
by the love of himself and his money.
Those who break unjust laws because they are unjust and not for personal profit or convenience, who do so in a humble spirit of submission to the moral law and without breaking the peace, are moving not toward anarchy but away from it.
In the name of all that is holy — and I do mean holy — let us stop calling the nonviolent conscientious law resisters breeders of anarchy.
Immediately following that piece was a poem by Raymond Paavo Arvio that began “I am one with the tax refusers, / The long beards, the jail birds / … / The pacifists / The anarchists”.
And immediately after that was an article by Mary Timberlake that considered
Quaker meetings and Quaker action to be the necessary one-two punch of Quaker
practice:
I learn that 60 percent of all income taxes go to the military.
I must refuse to pay that when my income becomes taxable.
Ten percent of the phone bill is a federal excise tax, an appropriation approved by Congress in solely to provide additional funds for our operation in Vietnam (so reads the Congressional Record).
I have a telephone.
My meeting has a telephone.
Dear Friends, the dollars the government collects from us in this way fall as napalm in Vietnam.
I must refuse to pay all war taxes, urge you to refuse, take my personal funds out of banks so the government cannot get the money by placing a lien on my account; support instead an alternative fund — to send medical aid to North and South Vietnam, to rechannel this money into my own community where it is needed so desperately; to continue this effort after the war ends in Indochina, because what is the sense of winning the arms race and losing the human race?
I do not want to go to prison. but more I don’t want a Vietnamese person or my American brother in uniform (his name is Billy) to die because of a bullet I bought.
The issue opened with a report about a creative action by Peace Investors of Eugene (PIE):
“More Pie for the People, Less for War” is the slogan of a fast-growing alternative fund begun by tax resisters in Eugene, Oregon.
Called Peace Investors of Eugene (PIE), the fund is aimed at redistributing refused tax money to meet human needs by helping to finance a day care center, a free clinic, a crisis switchboard, and a half-way house. the founders of the fund, including members and attenders of Eugene Meeting, handed small slivers of pumpkin pie to persons entering the state employment building and explained, “Sorry we can’t give you more, but the rest goes to the military.” 64 percent of each pie was handed to a person representing the military, and these large pieces were later distributed to local armed forces recruiters.
Other creative actions by tax resisters involved in PIE include providing a peace-oriented tax consultant service and posting notices at places where 1040 forms are distributed advising people of the proportion of the federal budget assigned to war-making.
At the IRS where such notices were prohibited three of the group stamped directly on the forms the phrase, “Warning: more than half of your taxes go for war.” Charles Gray of PIE says the group has grown not only through such actions, but also through their cooperative relationship with people in the community service groups to whom money has been given. “We feel that in a small way, the war machine has been replaced by new and more loving social priorities.”
The issue opened with “Some Friendly Tax Tips” from Meg Dickinson.
Excerpts:
Fortunately for us there has been a dramatic change in tax resistance.
The IRS itself has revised its forms to permit resistance without “falsifying” records, i.e. claiming more dependents than actually exist, a practice that even when done quite openly (with accompanying letters) left something to be desired.
For many… the essential question continues to be how to refuse much larger amounts, so that we are not only protesting but actually removing our taxes from the syndrome of destruction our government seems committed to.
How can we not only protest, but stop paying for, stop buying war?
This is where IRS’s revised W-4 helps.
For wage earners it is always possible to submit a new W-4 to the employer.
The revised one does not even mention the word “dependents.” Instead it asks
how many allowances you claim. “Allowances” is not defined, but is used to
indicate dependents, special conditions such as blindness, and also amounts
of anticipated itemized deductions. If you decide you will itemize your
deductions and claim a peace deduction for the amount that might otherwise go
to military expenditures, you simply add these allowances to those you have
taken for family members,
etc. On the form
you give your employer you enter only the total.
Another part of the IRS revision changes the statement you must sign.
No longer does one “under the penalties of perjury” certify that the number is correct.
Instead one certifies “to the best of my knowledge and belief” that the number is right.
To figure how many allowances to claim, divide your annual salary by $750.
This gives you the total number of allowances in your salary. You then add
the number of allowances you have for family members,
etc., to the
number of allowances that correspond to the percentage of the remainder that
you want to refuse. With $15,000 salary you have 20 allowances. If with a
family of four (4) you wish to refuse 66 percent, subtract 4 from 20 (16
allowances left) and take 66 percent of 16 (13 allowances). Adding 13 to 4,
you take 17 allowances.…
This brings up the question of what to tell your employer.
Obviously individual decisions vary from complete candor to no discussion at all. IRS regulations are clear in making the wage earner, not the employer, responsible for the accuracy of the W-4.
One thing that should be understood is that if you take allowances for
anticipated peace deductions (or Gandhian deductions or Woolman witnesses or
name your own) you are committing yourself to filling out the regular 1040
Form the following April. Unless you have this intention you are
misrepresenting your allowances on the W-4. Prosecution seems unlikely,
according to tax resistance lawyers, but is a possibility.
IRS has
strengthened our claim of legality by actually returning money to surprising
numbers of persons claiming war crimes deductions. There are even instances
of individuals receiving refunds two years in a row.
A frequent question from those who have given tax refusal some thought concerns IRS’s collection.
Doesn’t the government always get the money?
Many who refused the phone tax found it was taken from their bank accounts (with hefty bank charges added sometimes) and felt too little had been accomplished by the action.
The change in this situation lies not with IRS but with the development of creative ways to use the refused funds.
Alternative funds have proliferated over the country, some giving the interest from the accounts to worthwhile projects, some using the whole amount to offer short-term loans to peace and community-oriented groups.
The Philadelphia People’s Bail Fund is in large part using refused taxes for their contingency fund.
Collection can be delayed through a series of routine conferences, usually a
total of four or five in a period of a couple years. These not only allow
dialog with
IRS
people but keep your funds in the service of peace longer. The culmination of
these can be a petitioning of tax court in your own behalf, thus contesting
the constitutionality of various factors involved in taxes and military power.
Tax Resistance may seem complicated, but it is really a very simple concept: finding the ways you support war and removing them from your life.
It is hard indeed to live in such a way as to take away the occasion for all war, but harder still to do it while helping to pay for the Pentagon’s program.
Robert Schultz responded to this with a letter-to-the-editor in the issue in which he wrote that he thought it was folly to try to only resist a certain percentage of the tax or a certain “war tax” (since all the money you give to the government is fungible), and also questioned whether Dickinson’s approach might be “un-Quakerly.” Excerpts:
[T]he encouragement to resort to subterfuges, claiming that you are entitled to certain deductions or allowances according to your particular religious or ideological scruples… does not seem quite honest to me….
I would prefer to come out in the clear and say frankly that I am not paying what the law requires me to pay because I do not approve of either the way, the means, or the end of the payments.
Frankly, I believe that the recommendations suggested, if followed to their logical conclusion, are pointing directly to anarchy and chaos.
Government has to function, and for an individual to take upon himself the responsibility of determining what that functioning should include strikes me as being a bit of arrogance.
I respect the Quakerly concern in regard to war. But I would rather further
it by complete simplicity of living, a renunciation of all unnecessary income
(following the example of John Woolman), a discriminating selection of all I
consume or the services I use, and a careful examination of all sources of my
income.
Also, one should avoid using any article or service upon which a Federal excise tax is levied.
To do otherwise is to negate all one thinks one gains by withholding Federal taxes directly and raises the question of the sincerity of one’s convictions.
Dickinson was also mentioned in the issue, concerning a Tax Court filing in which she was trying to get the government “to return taxes taken from her during .”
She has contributed amounts, comparable to those refused, to organizations she believes would use the money responsibly.
She charges that payment of these taxes makes her an accomplice in war-making and is against her right of religious freedom.
The issue also opened with tales of tax resistance:
“Common Sense” is the name of a storefront tax consulting service set up this spring by members of the Roxbury Alternative Fund.
This group of Boston area tax resisters drew on the expertise of trained tax accountants to provide two services: counseling for tax resisters and aid to anyone in preparing tax forms.
The project ran .
Clients often were poor or working class people.
Many were helped to avoid tax overpayments, and a large degree of friendly communication was established.
Members of Cambridge Meeting started the Roxbury Fund, and several participated in Common Sense.
On the North Columbus (Ohio) Friends Meeting decided to discontinue its telephone service “as the only course on which we are able to unite in meeting the dilemma of the payment or non-payment of the telephone tax.” For the previous two years, the Meeting had been unable to reach a consensus on phone tax resistance.
The issue of the Journal announced that “Young Friends of North America” was making available an “informational packet on Friends and War Taxes, including practical suggestions for the Friend troubled over taxation for war” called Who Buys the Guns?
The Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting and Association met in
. According to a
Journal report on the gathering, “[f]riends were
sobered by a call to be present at the
trial of a Durham,
NC, Friend for
refusal to pay income tax for war purposes.”
In the issue, Marion Dobbert and Jeannette Marquardt proposed what they called “Legal Resistance to War Tax”:
DeKalb, Illinois, Friends have developed a stop-gap measure for resistance to payment of war taxes.
We suggest that all Friends wishing to protest war taxes in a legal manner file form 843 with the IRS for the return of that portion of their taxes which they calculate to be war-related.
This form is used to file for the return of already paid taxes which have been “illegally, erroneously or excessively collected.” Friends should find it easy to claim that collecting taxes to be used for the making of war is as much a violation of their freedom of religion as would be required military service, since both service and tax money involve the individual in the taking of human lives.
The completed Form 843 is sent to the same office where you filed your Form
1040 for the year in question. The commissioner for that office then has six
months to rule on the validity of your claim. If your request to have the war
tax portion of your income tax returned is denied, you may appeal within the
IRS,
or take your case to the proper district court. In either case, you will need
a lawyer.
Each individual can make his filing of Form 843 more effective by sending a letter with the form explaining that you are protesting war taxes, and why.
A copy of this letter should be sent to each senator and representative, along with a covering letter asking for a change in the law to provide an alternative for conscientious objectors who wish to channel their tax money into projects other than military.
DeKalb Friends Meeting has created a committee on Legal Resistance to War
Taxes to collect the names of interested individuals, keep them informed on
what is happening, what they might do to help, and co-ordinate the efforts of
groups throughout the nation. Eventually, we hope to find lawyers who will
help us appeal adverse rulings on our Form 843 claims, both within the
IRS
system and in the courts. Anyone wishing to join in our work may sign the
following and send it to: Legal Resistance to War Tax,
c/o Dan and Marion
Dobbert, 327 River Drive, DeKalb, Illinois 60115.
I am conscientiously opposed to war and must in conscience refuse to pay war taxes.
I will therefore take the legal means open to me to avoid paying such taxes.
As one step to this end.
I join with like-minded people in the Legal Resistance to War Taxes and seek a provision in the tax laws for conscientious objectors.
Signed…
Ernest & Marion Bromley
Ernest Bromley had been resisting the federal income tax since .
Here are some excerpts from a newspaper article on Bromley, whom it identified as “a Methodist minister”:
The Rev. Ernest Bromley, leader of a pacifist tax refusal movement, is shown as he appeared in Nassau , holding a “Call” by 300 ministers for non-registration for the draft.
Forty-three pacifists throughout the country, led by the Rev. Ernest Bromley, who created a stir in Nassau when in a sermon he advised young men not to register for the draft, declared today they would refuse to pay federal income taxes this year as a “civil disobedience” protest against the government’s military expenditures.” [sic.]
A tax refusal committee of Peacemakers, pacifist organization with
headquarters in New York City, announced the stand for 41 of the group. The
Rev. Mr. Bromley now of
Wilmington, Ohio, is chairman of the committee. Another list was issued at
the same time by Walter G. Longstreth, Philadelphia lawyer, which included
11 names, all but two of which were contained in the Peacemakers’ statement.
…He has refused to pay taxes before.
The 25 men and 16 women of the Peacemakers group declared in a statement they
were “determined upon a course of civil disobedience” being “unwilling to
contribute to preparations for war.”
“We plead with our fellow citizens of the United States to join us in acting for peace by refusing to manufacture weapons of war, refusing to serve in the armed forces, and refusing to finance war preparations,” the statement said.
The committee said some would pay no part of their tax, since they maintain
the major activity of the federal government is war, with 80 per cent of the
national budget devoted to “past, present and future wars.” Others will
refuse to pay that percentage of their tax which corresponds with the
percentage which the government spends for military preparations. Some of the
refusers are Quakers, while others are members of various other Christian and
Jewish denominations and some follow a humanist philosophy.
In Albany.
Walter R. Sturr, collector of internal revenue, said imprisonment of the group is unlikely since fraud probably would not be involved.
He said the government would probably move against the group as against others owing tax money and could, as a last resort, seize property or bank accounts.
On the peacemakers’ list is Robert C. Friend, formerly a Unitarian
religious education director in Schenectady, who moved to Los Angeles last
summer where he is engaged in the same kind of work.
Bromley’s stand didn’t make the pages of the Friends Journal until 1973.
In the issue was this note:
Do peace activists have any responsibility for federal income taxes on monies paid through a sharing fund to families whose wage-earners were in prison for draft and war resistance?
This and other important questions are involved in a case brought by the Internal Revenue Service against Marion Bromley, a Cincinnati Quaker, and Ernest Bromley.
The IRS has assessed the Bromleys $9,000 and Gano Peacemakers, Inc., which owns the home where they live, $21,000.
This assessment is based on an IRS contention that the Peacemaker movement is synonymous with Gano Peacemakers, Inc., and that everyone who received checks from the Peacemaker Fund were actually employees of Gano Peacemakers and that therefore income tax, Social Security and other monies should have been withheld from the payments.
The IRS, however, has been informed by many persons that there is a clear distinction between Gano Peacemakers, Inc., and other Peacemaker activities and organizations.
Members also insist that recipients of aid from the sharing fund were not employees.
The Bromleys and Gano Peacemakers,
Inc., are unwilling to
cooperate with
IRS in
its attempt to collect thousands of dollars, mostly for war uses. They are
also unwilling to cooperate with such total misrepresentation. Ernest Bromley
points out that “the spirit and focus of any action should not be on the
protection of property or personal security, but rather on continuing to deny
money to a war-making government and to encourage tax refusal.” If any steps
are taken toward seizure of assets or property of The Peacemaker
or Gano Peacemakers,
Inc.,
a campaign of public education, direct action and publicity will begin in the
Cincinnati area.
In the , the Journal published a follow-up on the case, with an interesting editor’s note attached (note also that Ernest Bromley is now also identified as a Quaker), written by Journal editor James D. Lenhart:
Pacifism and the IRS
“The position of the pacifist is unbearable if he (or she) does not undertake intense, practical action of his (or her) own… We need the firm rock of well-directed action if we are to resist the terrible drift dragging us towards reactions of fear, hatred, and violence.”
Pierre Ceresole
Editor’s Note: With post-Watergate disclosures of apparently illegal activities by officials of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Internal Revenue Service vying for space in national news media with statements by Pentagon spokesmen who are beating the drums for increased military spending in general and continued support for South Vietnam’s President Thieu in particular, the following news from Cincinnati of “intense, practical action” and its consequences probably will not receive very much attention anywhere else.
So we decided to print it here.
Two acres and a house in Gano, twenty miles north of Cincinnati, were purchased by a small group of pacifists in .
In they formed a nonprofit corporation, Gano Peacemakers, Inc. and within eight years had paid off the mortgage on the property.
Meanwhile, Ernest Bromley, a Quaker, had become editor of The Peacemaker, a small newspaper that promotes and publicizes nonviolence.
In , the publishing address was moved to the Gano residence but the records, funds and operations of the corporation and the newspaper were kept entirely separate.
They still are separate.
Between a sharing fund
administered through the newspaper received money from those opposed to the
Vietnam war who wanted to help support dependents of imprisoned war
objectors. Monthly checks were issued to the dependents, most of whom were
mothers of young children. Other expenditures were exclusively for the
newspaper and other literature about nonviolence. There was no paid staff and
all work was done without pay.
Ernest Bromley and his wife; Marion, have refused to pay income taxes for many years as a form of witness to the peace testimony.
It is their claim that the money contributed to the sharing fund was not taxable and that even if it were, the Internal Revenue Service would have to take action against the newspaper.
Instead, IRS made an assessment of almost $25,000 against Gano Peacemakers, Inc. and on two IRS agents posted notices of seizure on the front and back doors of the Gano house where the Bromleys live.
The Bromleys have openly and consistently stated their refusal to pay taxes
for war. In fact, they do not favor going to court to protect their rights
but instead rely on personal witness and public disclosures of the abuse of
power. Ironically, while the Bromleys were taking and proclaiming their
stand, the
IRS’s
recently revealed “Special Services Staff” was secretly investigating
organizations and individuals opposed to United States policies in Southeast
Asia. Its audit of The Peacemaker newspaper began during this same period.
This is what Ernest and Marion Bromley have to say.
“Writing on the day after
IRS
posted a notice of seizure on the house here in Gano, we wanted to let you
know how we were feeling about the threatened sale.
“Of course we would hate to see such a horrendous sum as nearly $25,000 collected by the government for the budget which is so preponderantly spent for weapons, death and destruction.
Since we feel so strongly about that, it seems to us that this is a good time to have attention focused on refusal to pay taxes for war.
There aren’t many other ways people in this country can make meaningful protest about the proposed additional appropriations for Saigon and Phnom Penh, for example.
“If we had been under any illusions about the justice and ‘lawfulness’ of
this system and this government, it might be quite shocking to see
IRS
proceed to seize property on the basis of an entirely false tax claim. There
is no basis whatever for a claim against Gano Peacemakers,
Inc. — and
IRS
knows this. But we have realized for a long time that governments do not
dispense justice — they wield power.
“…we feel the same as we did in the beginning about noncooperation with IRS.
Even though this claim is a very false one, we still feel that the witness is being made.
“We want to call attention to the actions of
IRS in
any way we can, and others may think of ways to do that.”
We invite readers to suggest ways.
Meanwhile, you can write or send telegrams to either or both the District Director of IRS and the Regional Commissioner of IRS, Federal Office Building, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
And you can inform others of your actions and urge them to express their opinions, too.
Painful as it might be to law-abiding Friends, you also could consider refusing to pay taxes yourself.
You certainly would be in good, even Friendly, company.
There was a further follow-up in the issue:
Ernest Bromley, a Cincinnati Friend, continues to witness to the whole truth of the Quaker Peace Testimony by refusing to cooperate with the Internal Revenue Service and by steadfastly proclaiming that payment of taxes to support a budget that spends billions for military purposes is wrong.
And he continues to feel the weight of the cross he is bearing.
The IRS
moved to seize his and Marion Bromley’s home… on
. On
Ernest began distributing
leaflets outside the Federal Office Building in downtown Cincinnati. The
leaflets simply and clearly stated the facts as the Bromleys and others saw
them, and clearly and simply pointed out that more than half of the
federal budget will be spent for war or
war-related purposes. On he was
arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and obstructing official business.
While being transported to jail he received a two-inch cut on his head which
officials could not explain. These charges were subsequently dismissed.
In this entire process Ernest Bromley has refused to recognize any authority of the IRS or the courts over himself.
While he was in jail he fasted totally.
When he is physically able, he intends to resume his witness.
The Executive Committee of Friends General Conference, meeting in Cincinnati
, adopted a
minute expressing general agreement that the arrest and charges are
unjustified and supporting “these acts of conscience by Ernest Bromley and
others that issue from leadings of the Spirit. Individual members of the
Committee were encouraged to take specific actions in support of Ernest
Bromley and Peacemakers.” These actions could include messages to the
District Director of
IRS and
the Regional Commissioner of
IRS…
The following illustration comes from the issue:
Signs of the Times
On this house near Cincinnati hang two signs.
One is a notice of seizure placed there by the Internal Revenue Service.
The other sign, written by Josephine Johnson Cannon and placed on the house by members of Community Monthly Meeting in Cincinnati, supports Ernest and Marion Bromley’s refusal to pay taxes as a modern witness to the Quaker peace testimony.
The second sign reads as follows:
Historical Home of the Gano Peacemakers
“This house has sheltered a group of people who live by an extraordinary and unusual code of ethics.
It has been owned by people who do not condone killing, who do not kill, and who do not support killing with their lives or money.
“The Gano Peacemakers believe in equality, and brotherhood, and
practice equality and brotherhood. They believe in the
conservation of natural resources and a simplicity of life, and they
practice the conservation of resources and they live a
simple and productive life. They believe in sharing and they
share. They believe in the principles and essence of the religions
of the world, and they practice these principles.
“This house has a unique significance and should be preserved as a rare historic site for future generations to look upon as a beacon and guidepost for the building of a better way of life.”
As you may remember from earlier Picket Line posts on the Bromleys, the story has a happy ending.
Here is how the Journal put it in its issue:
A verbal commitment was received on , from IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander and IRS Cincinnati District Director Dwight James that the Bromley/Gano Peacemaker House will be returned! Peacemakers presented IRS officials with a detailed analysis of IRS files and actions pointing out that the bases for the confiscation of the Bromley home were shot through with political biases, faulty logic, and lacks of evidence.
At a meeting with Peacemakers that afternoon, IRS officials revealed their decision to return the property: “We realized that IRS was in a no-win situation and decided to do what was right.” Legal technicalities, however, are still being worked out.
Despite this cause for celebration, it must be kept in mind that little has
changed: taxation for warmaking goes on, the production and development of
weapons grows daily funded by our tax dollars, 11,000 persons and
organizations remain on the secret
IRS
enemies list. Again, Friends are urged to take action to stop tax funding of
war and to promote the development of a peaceful and loving world community.
And a follow-up to that came in the issue:
While Marion Bromley and her husband, Ernest, were struggling against the Internal Revenue Service’s illegal seizure of their home in Cincinnati, Marion wrote, “We appreciate the expressions of concern for us personally, and if we are unable to prevent sale of the house we will have to turn to the question of where we would relocate.
But our energies now are directed to exposing the arrogant power methods the IRS revealed in dealing with Peacemakers, and in urging the people who learn of this to take some responsibility for their own support of a government which seems to be permanently locking the people into a war system… We think if enough public clamor is raised about the wholly fraudulent actions of IRS in the matter of seizure of the property of Gano Peacemakers it might cause IRS to remove the lien [Ed. It did.] and more important, it would serve the larger purpose of educating the public about the methods of the warfare state.” [Ed. Did it?]
The next mention of the Bromleys’s tax resistance that I found was, alas, in an obituary notice for Ernest Bromley in the issue.
Excerpts:
In , Ernest was arrested for not paying an automobile tax, the proceeds of which would have gone to help pay for the expense of World War Ⅱ.… Throughout Ernest worked with other Peacemakers on local and national political issues, including integration, opposition to nuclear weapons testing, and war tax refusal.… In the Internal Revenue Service attempted to take their house away.
Their resistance to this effort brought them to the attention of President Richard Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell.
Ultimately, they were able to keep the house because it belonged to the land trust.
During , despite failing eyesight, Ernest continued to correspond with peace activists and war tax refusers throughout the country.… In his last years, Ernest… maintained his communication with tax refusers, continuing his life-long radical pursuit of peace and justice.
Lyle & Sue Snider
Another case whose coverage began in was that of Lyle Snider.
The issue gave this report:
Lyle Snider, clerk of Durham Meeting and teacher at Carolina Friends School, was arraigned for “willfully filing a false and fraudulent withholding statement.” He had filed a W-4 form in claiming 3 billion dependents — approximately one for every person on earth.
Lyle’s reasoning: “At least half of our tax money will be spent on the instruments of war.
Every person on earth depends on someone in this country to say ‘no’ to the military and to raise a voice to protest militarism.” Both Durham Meeting and the school have passed minutes in support of Lyle’s action.
He faces up to one year of prison.
The issue gave this follow-up:
Tax resister Lyle Snider was tried in Greensboro, NC, for willfully filing a false and fraudulent W-4 form….
Over 80 supporters of Lyle and his wife, Sue, including students and staff from Carolina Friends School and Quakers from several North Carolina meetings, gathered at a pretrial celebration and at the court itself.
Despite conflicts with the court system (Lyle was cited 16 times and Sue once for contempt because of refusal to stand for the judge), Lyle reports, “Sue and I and other supporting witnesses were able to communicate extensively and powerfully on the spiritual nature of our war tax resistance.” The jury required over a day of deliberation to find Lyle guilty.
He was sentenced to 8 months for tax resistance and 30 days for contempt of court, and Sue was given 10 days for contempt.
All sentences are being appealed.
Lyle writes of the trial experience: “We created a presence of love in and
around the courtroom… fused with a strong and unequivocal witness for peace
and nonviolence. Many people felt that the trial… had changed their lives in
a very significant way… The suffering of the Indochinese people is still very
much with us in our thoughts and prayers. We continue to search for ways of
expressing our love and compassion for these people.”
The Sniders were back in the pages of the issue:
North Carolina Friends Lyle and Sue Snider have been acquitted by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals of charges stemming from Lyle’s claim of three billion dependents in order to avoid paying war taxes.
The court found that Lyle had engaged in “hyperbole,” not willful fraud, that he was exercising his right of free speech, and that persons may choose not to stand for a judge without being guilty of contempt.
Last summer Lyle was sentenced to nine months in jail after a trial attended by some 80 supporters of the Quaker couple.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There were a couple of heartfelt individual expressions of beginning war tax
resistance in the pages of the Friends Journal in
. (At this point, also, the mentions in
passing of war tax resistance and of “peace tax fund” advocacy had become so
frequent that I stopped taking note of them unless they were exceptional or
illustrative in some way.)
On , Perry E. Treadwell
resigned from his position at a medical research and training university,
stating that his “philosophy of life, of education, of human and environmental
responsibility, and of research” had grown to be “at odds” with the
university’s philosophies. He had a variety of complaints about the university
and his position in it, but among them (as he explained in the
issue of the
Friends Journal) was this:
I also resigned in protest that my labors in the form of income and other
taxes go “to the maintenance and promotion of war, military might, and
oppression of people both here and abroad by an irredeemably corrupt federal
and corporate power structure. These
U.S. priorities
are in direct conflict with my conscience; they are positions with which I am
philosophically and morally opposed and can not continue to support with the
product of my labor.”
I support with my taxes a federal government which in the past decade has
become corrupt, violent, oppressive and ineffective beyond belief, the
complete antithesis of the expectations of my upbringing. I cannot continue
to support by my present life style the military dictatorships in the
Philippines, Brazil, South Korea, Greece, and other countries; the torture
and tiger cages in Vietnam; the war called peace in Southeast Asia; the vast
military expense for electronic murder; the strip-mining and waste of my
America for corporate profit which protracts the withering affluence of
convenience-greedy consumers; the federal welfare for the wealthy at the
expense of the poor; and the relaxation of environmental health standards at
the expense of everyone.
The following notes appeared in the
issue:
Telephone Tax
“This year South Vietnam is receiving $2 billion in
U.S.
aid — 90% of their budget — and $1.5 billion more in direct American military
aid.” The quotation is from a letter sent to local papers by the clerk of
Community Friends Meeting in Cincinnati in order to state publicly the
meeting’s continued refusal to pay the telephone war tax.
Pay or Pay
In Media (PA)
Monthly Meeting it was reported that a notice had been received from
IRS to
the effect that unless the back telephone tax were paid, there would be a
levy against the meeting bank account. The meeting newsletter comments: “It
was felt that we should pay this back tax in spite of our position on war
taxes…”
An article by Lois S. Andress in the
issue urged Quakers to support the “World Peace Tax Fund Act” and explained
how this version of the “Peace Tax Fund” would operate. Excerpt:
[The Act] provides an alternative for taxpayers who are conscientiously
opposed to participation in war. The bill would establish a fund to receive
and distribute to qualified peace-related activities tax payments that now go
to military purposes. The remainder of the taxes would go to the general fund
of the U.S.
Treasury for non-military purposes.
The Friends Committee on National Legislation tried to exploit the concern
with taxpayer complicity for war in a full-page ad on the back page of the
issue:
The ad, in a form that resembled an income tax return form, invited readers to
estimate how much of the federal income taxes they had paid in
had gone to military spending.
It then quickly solicited a donation for the
FCNL’s
lobbying work, and made two suggestions for “alternatives” — either to “[u]rge
your Congressmen to support the World Peace Tax Fund Act” or “[t]hink up
alternatives of your own.” War tax resistance is not mentioned as an option.
On , Jack Cady mailed a letter to
the IRS
(excerpted in the issue of the
Journal):
For twenty, or perhaps twenty-two years, I have timely filed my tax return
and paid what the government said I owed. I did this all through the Korean
War, and God help me, I also did it through the Viet Nam War. In the past few
years I have felt worse and worse at tax time, but not because of the money.
Those who know me will attest that I give a lot, or even most of it, away.
The reason I felt bad is because it seemed an exact endorsement of the
actions of this nation’s government.
Now I have to refuse those actions. I have no idea what that means… it may be
that you will have to try to strip me of property, harass me from one year to
the next, or eventually put me in prison — for I will not pay this
tax… in the current state of
U.S. affairs it
may be that the only honorable place for
a man is prison.
The problem, as I understand it, is this: This nation, which once believed
itself a nation under God, has somehow come to the point where it advertises
that it has the capacity to kill everyone in the world seven times. The
proposed military budget is now the highest money budget in our history. This
in a so-called peaceful year. I can only understand that what the military is
saying is that it wants the capacity to kill everyone in the world eight
times. Either that, or there is another possibility. My study of history
shows me that it is usually dying governments that arm themselves to the
teeth… and large standing armies have traditionally gotten their training
abroad only to come back and use it on the home population.
I feel that the
U.S. is better
than that. In all of the great days of our history we have been concerned
with life and living, not preoccupied with avoiding or inflicting death. We
kill the best part of ourselves by arranging to kill others.
Part of the reason is that for the last six years I have been writing and
teaching about the origins of America. I have spoken in too many classes
about the Pilgrim spirit, the Puritan spirit and the dissenting Quaker
spirit. I have read George Fox, Jonathan Edwards, John Woolman, Rufus Jones,
Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Emerson and the myriad other voices of our history
who said that life was good and true and finally, honorable. I still believe
in the basic truth of America because of those people; and people like Anne
Hutchinson and William Bradford, Martin King and Clarence Darrow, Ephraim
McDowell and the thousands of others who have believed in a higher cause than
murder. You can surely understand, since I have been thinking and talking
about these folks, how I must believe that the American people are still not
so weak that they must invest in more and more weapons. I think you can
understand why I must refuse this tax as the truest gesture of love for my
country.
Finally, the issue included
this brief note:
Hanover (N.H.) Friends Meeting has decided to continue withholding its telephone tax for the present.
The equivalent of the monthly tax is placed in the War Tax Alternatives Fund.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
By in the Friends Journal there is a lot less discussion of why people should resist war taxes, or whether war tax resistance is proper, and a lot more news about how war tax resistance is taking place, and what individual Quakers and Quaker Meetings are doing to resist or to support resisters.
The issue began with this note:
Members of Orange Grove Friends Meeting (Pasadena CA) took part in in a 30-mile walk from Los Angeles Federal Building to the Federal Correction Institute on Terminal Island.
The object was to bring attention to the witness of Martha Tranquilli, who is jailed there on a charge of non-payment of war taxes, and also celebrate a call for a Year of Jubilee and forgiveness.
That issue also included the following recommendation:
A Friendly Tax Tip
With income tax time here again, we want to recommend an excellent folder, “Saying no to War Taxes — An Imperative.”
Prepared by Peacemakers at 1255 Paddock Hills Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio 45229, copies can be ordered at 35 for $1, 100 for $2 or 300 for $5. A more detailed 52-page booklet also is available at 65 cents per copy.
Much of the other editorial comment about war tax resistance up to this point had been sympathetic but noncommittal, so I thought it was somewhat remarkable that the Peacemakers’ folder got the Journal’s unreserved and caveat-free recommendation.
This may be an indication that war tax resistance had by this time become a thoroughly mainstream position in the Society of Friends in America, or at least in that part of it that was the Journal’s target market.
The issue noted a letter that “two members of the Albany [New York] Meeting” had sent to the IRS:
They explain that their reason for not paying forty percent of their tax “is that we find we can no longer pay taxes to finance wars, preparation for wars, or furnishing arms to other countries for them to use in wars with their neighbors… We will instead send (this amount) to UNICEF, because its program is for saving life, for enhancing the health of children, and for binding the human family more closely together in mutual help and love…”
The issue remarked on an experiment that the Stamford-Greenwich (Connecticut) Friends Meeting conducted, in which they asked Friends “to write down anonymously one-quarter of the amount of the income tax they paid” (an amount they suspected was “probably too modest” but was meant to represent the percentage allocated to the military).
The result: “5 respondents, including one paying no tax, $12,070.00.” Assuming this was a representative sample: “85 tax-paying units from Meeting list × ⅕ of above sum: $205,960.00.”
In that issue also, Gertrude P. Marshall, who for had been a member of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s “Representative Meeting” (a sort of ongoing Yearly Meeting body with representatives from the various Quarterly Meetings that make up the Yearly Meeting), wrote in about her experiences — and in particular about how that body struggled to cope with demands from more politically radical members to take bold stands that some other Quakers thought were far too bold.
“It became increasingly clear to me,” she wrote, “that although Friends in the local meetings might trust Representative Meeting for more routine decisions, on large matters of policy, especially in peace and race, it is vital to communicate with and to listen to the monthly meetings.
Our lack of unity on the matters of the proposed refusal to pay the Yearly Meeting’s telephone tax or of the proposal to join Project Equality testify to that.”
“Income below taxable level” was a selling point in this help-wanted ad in the Friends Journal
In the issue, Sue Kinchy wrote in response to an article that urged “the [U.S.] taxpayer who provides those billions for the Saigon regime” to raise his or her voice to “bring about the necessary change in U.S. policy towards Southeast Asia.”
Kinchy wrote:
I am inclined to believe the billions of dollars will cease to be sent to Saigon only when we all refuse to provide the money to the U.S. government.
As long as the U.S. government furthers the war in Indochina, supports political dictatorships and continues to commit crimes against peace and humanity, we must refuse to provide the money needed to carry on these activities.
…I suggest that Friends consider to what purpose their tax money is going.
The necessary end to the continuing war in Vietnam may only come when we refuse to pay for it.
As the April 15 deadline comes near, Friends should consider putting their money in an alternative tax fund and support life rather than death.
Quaker Bruce Baechler was sent to prison on for refusing to register for the draft.
The Journal quoted from a statement of his:
The only way we are going to have peace is by each individual (especially you) standing up to her/his government and saying “No, I won’t be a party to war.”
Many of us feel that it is worth the risk of prison.
I invite and urge you to join us by refusing to cooperate with or register with the Selective Service, and by refusing to pay any Federal taxes (such as those on telephones, income, tobacco and alcohol), as much of the money thus collected is used to pay for war, past, present, future.
And I urge you to do this openly to inform and encourage others.
Phone tax resistance by Meetings
After the end of direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, there apparently was some question as to whether war tax resistance should continue.
The issue includes this note:
Princeton (NJ) Monthly Meeting consulted Friends Peace Committee about whether to continue withholding the telephone tax from the monthly bill.
FPC answered that it still advocates refusal to pay this tax as a viable form of protest against our continuing military activities in Vietnam.
The issue noted that the Community Friends Meeting of Cincinnati “decided not to pay the telephone excise tax because it is a war tax.
Nor did it fill out the form sent by the tax office.
Instead, the meeting sent in another statement of why it had refused to pay.”
The issue noted that the Hanover, New Hampshire, Friends Meeting Peace Committee recommended “that the meeting continue to withhold the telephone tax as a direct war tax levied to pay for American involvement in Southeast Asia,” and added:
The question of the effectiveness of this protest has been raised.
How can we, by not paying a few dollars a month, possibly influence anything, particularly since the government automatically collects the tax without our consent?
This, we believe, is not a good way to view our protest.
If we measured everything we did against shortterm results, we would close shop today.
Friends have traditionally been exceedingly patient but insistent in their protests.
The tangible fruits may not be seen within any of our lifetimes, but we must be mindful here and now if they are ever to be seen.
The intangible fruits of this protest, our continual education in peaceful ways and our disentanglement from a violent society, are enough to justify the continued withholding.
The issue added the Mt. Toby (Massachusetts) Meeting to the list, saying it had “ ‘reviewed and continued’ its decision to withhold the telephone tax ‘with efforts to give publicity to the refusal.’ ”
The issue repeated the news that the Lake Forest, Illinois, Meeting “reaffirmed its intention to decline payment of the war tax levied on the meetinghouse phone.
It was suggested that the latter be applied to relief work in Vietnam or to an alternative tax fund that supposedly exists in Chicago.”
“Peace tax fund” plans
The issue talked up the latest version of “peace tax fund” legislation that had been introduced in the House of Representatives.
It described the plan this way: “[It] would establish a fund from tax payments of those morally opposed to war.
The fund would support non-violent methods to resolve international conflicts and other peace-related projects.”
The issue quotes from a monthly meeting newsletter in describing the purpose of the proposed Fund:
[U]nder the present system in this country, taxpayers who are conscientiously opposed to war are compelled to violate their beliefs by contributing to war through compulsory tax payments.
Thus they must either violate what to them represents the law of God: “Thou shalt not kill” or break the federal laws which require them to contribute to the military system.
“It is felt that a nation founded upon the principle of freedom and respect for the rights of the individual does not have the right to force upon them this intolerable choice.
Monies contributed to the Fund (which would otherwise be used for military hardware and the destruction of human life) would be used in support of research and other activities designed to develop and demonstrate nonviolent methods of solving international conflict.
How much longer will humanity continue to waste its resources, its skills, and creative capacity in the refinement of the instruments of murder?
‘Man is the only species,’ declares Erich Fromm, ‘that is a mass murderer, the only misfit in his own society.’
No animal, only man kills beyond his physical needs.”
Lloyd Lee Wilson wrote in to the issue to say:
I have been a war tax resister for two years now, redirecting a portion of my income taxes to peaceful uses by making an interest-free loan to the AFSC equal to my refused war tax.
When the World Peace Tax Fund Act is passed, I intend to recall the AFSC loan and give the money to the World Peace Tax Fund.
Finally, the issue described the bill as “legislation that would allow taxpayers to divert tax money from the military into a fund for nonviolent alternatives to international conflict and other peaceful purposes.”
the American Revolution was portrayed as the culmination of a tax revolt in this educational cartoon short that aired frequently between Saturday morning cartoons in the United States in
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
your humble editor and his little brother in
I was a little too young to be much of an observer of the political scene, but I remember as being something of an orgy of innocent patriotism.
America was sick of being cynical and wanted to go back to being stupid — besides, the Vietnam War was mostly over, at least for most Americans, and we’d given Nixon the heave-ho — and so there were plenty of red-white-and-blue commemorations of the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Friends Journal wasn’t quite so willing to get with the star-spangled program.
In particular, it intensified its coverage of war tax resistance during the bicentennial year.
The issue was the Friends Journal’s first special issue devoted to war tax resistance.
It starts off with a couple of inspiring quotes on the subject from A.J. Muste and David Dellinger, then opens with a piece by Jennifer S. Tiffany on how she met the challenge of deciding whether to pay or to resist.
Excerpts:
This fall was a time when I was grappling a great deal with the question of war tax resistance.
To start with, I knew and had known for a long time that I could not be clear in paying taxes to any state which would use them to pay for war-making.
Particularly, I could not contribute to the nuclear death race between this nation and the Soviet Union.
Perhaps it goes back to the civil defense tests and simulated nuclear air-raids which had terrified and confused me when I was a child.
Anyway, the imperative, the need to keep clear of war (to use Bruce Baechler’s words), had always been strong.
I had been acting on it, in small ways, for a long while-avoiding earnings beyond the taxable minimum, for example, and claiming six “peace dependents” on my W-4 form when my income did exceed this minimum.
I also corresponded with the IRS concerning my views and actions.
However, a disclarity still existed regarding full resistance, with all the possible ramifications on my life and lifestyle.
The question was, to me, was I strong enough and centered enough to maintain a taxable income level, restructure my life in such a way as to prevent eventual government levies, and go on with my resistance?
Could I face creatively the possibility of putting a good deal of energy into court cases with the eventuality of prison?
I came into meeting for worship one morning at the height of these grapplings.
As I settled in, I was astounded.
Somehow the fears and conflicting leadings within me changed.
They did not fade or diminish, but grew into context.
The spirit of the meeting, the presence of loving Friends, who loved whether or not they agreed with one another’s approach, literally overwhelmed me.
The presence of God wholly covered the gathering, and finally clearness came.
Our God, the Presence in our worship and acts of witness, is a gentle, healing, loving, empowering God, one who speaks strongly and softly from within us.
At the same moment as making demands on our lives, this Presence says, “You need not fear; if you act on this I will sustain and strengthen you throughout the whole process.
I am…” This was a moment of resolution for me.
I was no longer entangled in a negative refusal to pay taxes, but was healed and sustained and led to a positive witness.
I could go on.
It is in this context that tax resistance has its roots and life.
War tax resistance, any resistance to war and to those authorities which bring about war, is not a negative presence: every no implies a yes, and this no to killing and death can be a yes to healing and life.
Within tax resistance dwell seeds which can help a whole new order to grow — seeds which deny fear and powerlessness in the face of death; seeds which lead us to the creation of healing alternatives to structures which sustain death.
As John Woolman puts it, “to turn all we possess into the channel of universal love becomes the whole business of our lives.”
I can speak only of my moment of resolution, the clearness and joy which is liberated in my life through a tax witness.
As I see it, this issue of Friends Journal is not a coercive tool, saying “you must for these reasons refuse to pay your taxes or I will no longer judge you to be a good Friend.”
The point of this issue is not to define terms for judgment, to draw lines of inclusion and exclusion.
Our faith is an experiential one, and your experience of real clarity is as right and valid for you as mine is for me.
The point is to lay ourselves open to what speaks truthfully in us, to really open ourselves to the spirit which utterly denies war, to really grapple with the questions this raises and the demands it makes on our lives.
One of those questions has to do with tax resistance.
This is an invitation to grapple with it, and a reaching out which says there is a great company of people, past and present, who have done so.
There is a process of empowerment, growth and the birth of community among people which can take root through tax resistance.
First comes the knowledge that the authorities of death are not all-powerful, that the laws and structures which sustain any war machine are in fact quite weak.
As Marion Bromley says in her article, “What can they take away that is of real value?”
Second dawns the realization that alternatives are possible: through the flaws in the death order, we glimpse the order of life.
And, although such consequences as possible imprisonment or loss of property, and the inward struggle with fear, are largely borne alone, the vision is shared by a growing company of sisters and brothers.
Isolation is hard to feel when so many glimpse the possibility of a new order — an order beyond war.
Finally and especially, tax resistance often grows as an act of ministry, an act of obedience to the loving and healing spirit.
War tax resistance is one aspect of a community set on fire with the presence of a gentle, empowering God.
Bruce Baechler thought the question of whether Quakers should resist war taxes was a no-brainer.
He wrote in from prison (where he was doing time for draft resistance) with this defense of war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
Do Friends support war?
At one time this could be answered with a “not at all.”
These days, though, it seems to depend on how one defines support.
Friends, generally, denounce war in the strongest terms. Indeed that’s all many people know about us.
But for the most part Friends can no longer claim to renounce, or “utterly deny” war.
Friends today are not compelled to bear arms… instead of fighting with outward weapons ourselves, we are merely asked to buy the weapons through taxation, and leave the dirty work to others.
And most of us do.
Yet we cling to our traditional peace testimony, often expressed as early Friends did in the Declaration of :
We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever; this is our testimony to the whole world.
This is strong language.
One cannot, without being hypocritical, utterly deny something and still give it material support.
But most Friends do.
There are many reasons given for paying taxes.
Most of these are quite valid, if one thinks of tax resistance as a protest.
But I see a difference between various types of protests, such as vigils and letters to Congress, and nonsupport, or remaining clear of war, as by tax resistance.
In protesting, one makes her/his views known, but leaves it up to someone else (the government) to make the decision.
Governments are not noted for their receptivity to the pacifist message, and it is unlikely they will be in the near future.
I am not deriding protest — much has been accomplished through it.
I am just saying that it is not enough.
Nonsupport, on the other hand, emphasizes individual responsibility.
To refuse to pay one’s taxes is to accept responsibility for the way they would be spent, and to refuse to allow them to be spent for immoral purposes.
Tax resistance should not mean just withholding taxes from the government.
An integral part of tax resistance is to redirect the money normally spent for taxes into life supporting channels.
In many places this is done through Alternative Funds, where the resisters in a community band together to make most effective use of the money.
Thus not only is money diverted from warmaking, but at the same time it is made available as a resource for peaceful activities.
Perhaps the biggest problem most Friends have with not paying for war is that it is illegal.
One faces the prospect of prison for it, and this alone is enough to make most people give it only superficial consideration.
Hopefully the World Peace Tax Fund, if established by Congress, will alleviate some of this problem in much the same way that the Conscientious Objector provisions in the draft laws gave a legal alternative to the army.
But in the meantime the problem remains.
Friends have often suffered for their beliefs.
Throughout our history large numbers of Friends have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed for preaching and practicing the message of the Inward Light.
Would you stay away from a Meeting for Worship if to go meant certain arrest?
Would you attend but not speak when moved, if that would be dangerous (a situation facing Korean Friends today)?
Would you join the army to avoid prison?
Kill to avoid being killed?
The question is where to draw the line.
When, to you, does the personal suffering involved in a course of action outweigh the reasons for taking that course?
Each person must decide for her/himself.
Another response to the problem of imprisonment is that if any substantial number of Friends did engage in tax resistance, the likelihood of their being imprisoned would be small, and some provision in the law would probably be made for them, thus eliminating the problem and encouraging more people to resist.
Jack Cady shared his long, meandering letter to the Director of the IRS.
Excerpts:
[O]ur first confrontation… will be the examination of my tax return.
I expect the examination is prompted by my refusal last year to pay half of my income tax.
I will refuse. to pay half of the tax again this year, although because of withholding, your agency already has most of the money.
I refuse to pay half of the tax on various grounds, some of which are moral, some of which are legal.
The refusal is prompted by the expenditure by our government of over fifty percent of tax monies on the maintenance and purchase and use of armies and weapons.
Through its agency, Internal Revenue Service, the United States Government seeks my complicity in the violation of twenty centuries of moral teaching.
The government is in further violation of the Constitution of the United States.
It is also in violation of various international treaties and agreements, and is, in fact, engaged in crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.
In requiring that I pay taxes for the support of war, planning for war, offensive weapons and the maintenance of a standing armed force sufficient to engage combat on a worldwide scale, the U.S. Government through its agent IRS is in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees my religious freedom.
I am a member of the Port Townsend meeting for worship of the Society of Friends (Quaker).
The Quaker belief and effective detachment from war dates from the beginnings of the Society in .
The precedent of refusal to pay war taxes in America dates from when John Woolman, John Churchman, and Anthony Benezet refused to pay for the French and Indian wars.
Nonviolence and refusal to pay or endorse either side in a combat dates in U.S. history from the revolution when Quakers who refused to kill were stoned or beaten under the brand of Tory.
I claim my devout belief in God and the injunction that we may not kill as sufficient reason to refuse this tax.
I would expect that opposition to this view would also have to overcome three hundred years of Quaker nonviolence and two hundred years of U.S. acceptance of Quaker attitudes that insist on nonviolence.
[I]n asking taxes, the U.S.A. through its agent IRS seeks my complicity in crimes against peace and crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Principles.
These principles hold that citizens of a nation are guilty of crimes committed by that nation if they acquiesce to those crimes when, in fact. a moral choice is open to them.
In requiring that I pay taxes to support a war industry and armed forces capable of contending on a worldwide scale, the U.S. Government is threatening both my moral and my physical existence.
I am not being protected, because the U.S. builds atomic weapons, B-1 bombers, atomic submarines, poison gas, lasers, rocketry, napalm and all of the other expensive paraphernalia of war.
These do not protect me.
They invoke the suspicion and fear of other nations, and they provoke among other nations the building and stockpiling of similar weapons.
[T]he U.S. now gives every indication that it is, in fact, not a nation of laws but a nation of men and corporations.
This, despite the resignation from office of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.
I charge that the freedom of the citizen is largely illusory, and that the payment of taxes, the keeping of tax records, the invasion of privacy by IRS and other agencies of government, the making of rules by agencies (rules that have the force and effect of law but which are not to be challenged in courts), the maintenance of records or files on the political, religious, economic and moral statements and actions of the individual, the power to levy fines and licenses by agency rule, and the presumption by government that citizens are guilty of any agency charge and must therefore bear the burden of proof of their innocence; all of these show the citizens of the U.S. are no longer free.
I have two main intentions in this tax refusal.
The first is quite clear.
I do not intend to pay for the destruction of other human beings, nor endorse by word or deed the crimes of the United States.
The second intent is a little more nebulous but it is just as strong.
It is strong because I love my country.
In this refusal I intend that the United States will display by its action whether or not a citizen, raised to believe in U.S. principles of freedom, equality, protection under the laws; raised, in fact, under statements like, “With a proper regard for the opinions of mankind,” can indeed trust and believe in the way he has been raised.
Either the Constitution is sound or it is not.
The U.S. will either honor its national and international commitments or it will not.
The courts will either face issues or the courts will duck them.
…If the rules of IRS are bigger than the Constitution, the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles and the Christian teaching of two thousand years, then I believe it is time that the U.S. acknowledge this…
The next article came from Marion Bromley.
Excerpts:
Ernest and I began a tax refusers’ newsletter soon after our marriage in .
In all the time since, only a tiny proportion of Friends and other pacifists have become tax refusers, and we sometimes try to understand why.
It has been, for us, more a personal imperative than a carefully reasoned political position, though we have done what we could to expound on all aspects of refusing to allow one’s labor to be taxed for war and weaponry.
Most people, whether they are pacifists or not, seem to respect our “right” to refuse taxes when we have a chance to explain how we feel about it.
In turn we have to accept the “right” of others to continue to pay large sums in taxes, even though the U.S. budget continues to be overwhelmingly devoted to war and the war system.
Before 1800 taxes were levied largely for specific things such as bridges, schools, highways.
A levy for war was as separate as the others.
Quakers, Mennonites and a few others who had strong scruples against paying for the militia or for gunpowder refused to pay and sometimes suffered distraint of goods or imprisonment for their stand.
When all these items began to be lumped together into one, general tax, it was no longer so simple an issue.
Some, with a considerable feeling of relief, began to pay; others paid more out of frustration.
And one of the most potent testimonies against war during became lost.
Now, in , probably no reasonable person believes that the billions to be spent for weapons research, deployment of armies and nuclear weapons, nuclear submarines prowling the ocean floor, planes carrying nuclear bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles will be in any sense a “defense” for anyone.
Since such policies and practices will probably lead to a nuclear holocaust at some future time, maybe distant, maybe near, paying for these weapons comes close to being an evil act.
It may be that the reason most Friends do not see it in that light is that they are conscientiously committed to liberalism — to the direction the federal government began in and from which there is now no retreat.
The federal government, in order to ease suffering and to maintain control over its own populace, began to assume some social responsibility.
Possibly most Friends are in the same position as those who began paying the “mixed” taxes in .
But in the whole world has witnessed the kind of horror that a powerful military state can unleash even without resort to the ultimate weapon.
…In an individual such behavior would be deemed madness.
Would a mad individual be permitted to continue such activities because that individual was also performing some useful services?
Another aspect of liberalism that has probably influenced Friends greatly in the past fifty years is the commitment to law.
I cannot explain why most Friends think it is almost a religious principle to honor the law and the courts, while I feel it is very low on my list of loyalties.
My religious instincts are insulted when I observe a judge in the robes of a priest, high above others in the courtroom, the witnesses and observers in pews and the bailiff enforcing a hushed silence.
My view is that this holy-appearing scene is for the purpose of defending the property and the power of the people who have those commodities.
It is the same in a socialist or a capitalist state.
It is certainly an acceptable arrangement for people to agree on certain codes or laws, agreements about property.
I would not disobey laws for frivolous reasons.
But I have no qualms about disobeying laws which would force me to pay for murder and other crimes related to the war system.
Civil disobedience which requires long-term adherence, such as arranging to make one’s living without the withholding system, perhaps is considered impossibly difficult by many conscientious people.
For many Friends, commitment to a service type vocation seems to require “fitting in” with a professional life style.
The scale has not been invented which could balance service that is beneficial to others with the negative effects of supporting warmaking and possibly silencing one’s conscientious stirrings.
The only contribution I can make to such considerations is my testimony that refusing to pay income taxes has proved to be a blessing in many ways.
For one thing, it resulted in our “backing into” a simple life style, consuming less than we otherwise would.
Friends who have valued simplicity know of its blessings — the simple life is more healthful, more joyful, more blessed in every way.
A new friend we met following seizure of Gano Peacemakers’ property, our home for 25 years, wrote us after moving from Cincinnati that he supposed we were having a very sad summer at Gano this year, knowing that we would be evicted in the fall.
This notion was quite contrary to the way we felt.
We were enjoying the time here more than ever before.
The growing season seemed more productive than ever, and the surroundings more beautiful.
We were working very hard, preparing leaflets, signs and press releases, corresponding, thinking of new ways to tell everyone who would listen that the IRS claims were fraudulent and politically motivated.
We expected to be evicted but never had the feeling that we would “lose” in the struggle.
(The following paragraph, concerning the eventual IRS surrender in the Gano Peacemakers case, is largely obscured in the PDF.)
One of the pleasant feelings we have about the reversal of the sale (besides knowing that we can continue to live on these two acres) is that many people have told us they got a real lift when they heard that some “little people” had prevailed in the struggle with the IRS.
We had the feeling that our daily leafleting and constant public statements during the seven months’ campaign had, at the least, the effect of showing that people need not fear this government agency.
People do fear the IRS and that is an unworthy attitude.
What can they take away that is of real value?
Jack Powelson struck a dissenting note, listing war tax resistance among a number of popular Quaker positions that he felt to be sentimentally motivated and economically naive.
Excerpt:
Friends are concerned about paying taxes to a government that allocates a high proportion of its budget to the military.
But we also know that if enough Friends refused to pay taxes so that the government was seriously impeded in its operations, the first items to be cut would be welfare and education, and the poor would suffer.
The Journal then quoted John A. Reiber on his vision for “a cultural revolution with political implications, not a political revolution with cultural implications.”
Excerpt:
The most effective social changes are not going to come from within the system, but without it.
We must realize that the vast, impersonal and powerful institutions are not intrinsic to our survival and well-being, but, in fact, extrinsic and harmful.
What we must do to achieve a cultural (r)evolution is to, first of all, withdraw our support of our unendurable, tyrannical and inefficient institution of the government.
One way of doing this is through tax resistance.
But tax resistance, by itself, is only a part of the solution.
Money, time and energy should be channelled into alternatives to our technological mass consumption/ mass waste society, our irrelevant and oppressive educational institutions and our mass media which don’t meet our informational needs.
Craig Simpson next gave a report on war tax resistance as it was practiced internationally.
Excerpts:
During the Peace Research and Peace Activists Conference in Holland in , I met Susumu Ishitani, a member of the Japanese Conscientious Objectors to War Taxes Movement (COMIT).
The group is the first of its kind in Japanese history and was started in .
It is made up of Christian pacifists — Mennonites, FOR members and Quakers — as well as non-church pacifists.
The group apparently has been growing rather quickly.
They have meetings all over Japan, print articles in newspapers, and hold press conferences.
Their emphasis is on the refusal of the 6.5% of their taxes which goes for the so-called “Self-Defense Forces.”
They have even written a “Song of 6.5% or 6.5% for a Peaceful World” protesting war taxes and expressing the need for money to stop death and the pollution of our environment.
Susumu is a wonderful and gentle member of the group.
Outside of his job as a university professor he is active as a member of the local Friends Meeting in Minato-ku (Tokyo).
He also trains students in nonviolence and works to raise consciousness about the Japanese government’s involvement with the repressive South Korean government.
He clearly sees the importance of not sending his money to the government for destructive purposes.
COMIT was still in operation at least as late as , but I haven’t been able to find much about them on-line.
France… has a long tradition of resistance to war and the military.
The tax refusal movement began in its present state in during the first French atomic tests in the South Pacific when a number of people decided to refuse the 20% of their taxes which would go to the war department.
This money was redistributed to organizations working for peace and developing social alternatives.
Groups soon were organizing in Orleans, Paris, Mulhouse, Lyon, and Tours and by were working in cooperation with one another.
They then made a decision to broaden the movement by asking people to refuse only 3% of their income tax.
They felt this way they would be able to attract more people because of the minimum of risk.
Many of these people decided to redistribute their money to the peasant-worker struggle in Larzac.
Larzac is a plain in Southern France where a group of peasants, farmers and shepherds have been resisting the expansion of an army training base onto land where they have lived and worked for centuries.
The Larzac struggle has become extremely important in France.
It receives broad support from leftists, environmentalists, workers and antimilitarists.
The peasants, who have come to believe strongly in nonviolent struggle, have used some very creative tactics to draw attention to their plight.
For example, they drove their tractors from Southern France onto the streets of Paris.
On the way, they were met in Orleans by 113 tax refusers who gave their tax money to the peasant struggle instead of to the military.
This link between the peasant struggle against the military and the people who refused taxes solidified the movement and both benefited.…
By , 400 French people had become tax refusers and at latest count as many as 4,000 are giving their money to Larzac instead of the government.
Many farmers, workers and pacifists are involved now in the refusal of taxes to support the Larzac struggle.
Most recently in France, pacifists are discussing and organizing for 100% refusal of their taxes as their non-cooperation with the military becomes more consistent with their lifestyles.
the issue also had a list of resources interested Quakers could use to find out more about war tax resistance
There were also several letters to the editor on the subject:
Mary Bye wrote in to explain the rationale behind her tax resistance.
“I believe that my tax dollars go to support a system which perpetuates misery and suffering in large parts of the world.
Here at home we have set up a monstrous military budget while the programs for the poor, the minorities, the disadvantaged and the defenseless are being cut.
I believe that the first step to moral health is to realize the callous role of oppressor we, as a nation, play abroad and at home.
The second step is to act.”
She said tax resistance works for her because “I know of no other way to introduce this concern into the courts, and… I want to commit my money to help meet human needs neglected by the government.
I give voluntarily an amount equal to that computed by IRS regulations to help build a community of caring.”
Ross Roby wrote in to promote the World Peace Tax Fund Act.
“Essentially, this bill would provide conscientious objectors to war (male and female, young and old) an alternative to having their Federal tax payments used to finance government agencies that wage war and those that contribute to the waging of war by our government and by other governments of this world.”
He complained that the proposal hadn’t gotten much Quaker support: “Are we unable to recognize a friendly hand when it does not come in Quaker garb?
Or, has vocal pacifism fallen so irrevocably into the hands of radical resistants that a congressional bill which proposes accommodating conscientious objection to the realities of the Internal Revenue Service (and vice versa) is automatically dismissed?”
He described the mechanism of the Act this way: “It sets up a Fund for Peace to which we, conscientious objectors to war, would automatically contribute as we paid our usual federal income tax.
If the federal budget were determined, by an impartial authority, to contain sixty per cent for military purposes, then sixty cents of each dollar we pay would enhance the treasury of a fund that builds peace…”
Jim Forest wrote about his decision to stop tax withholding from his paycheck by filing a new W-4 form.
“We will be using these moneys for human needs that aren’t being adequately met in the present world: hunger, housing, resistance to militarism, various efforts for impoverished people, etc. We receive fund appeals each day which, had we the means, we would respond to, or respond to more generously.
Now we will.”
Donald Hultgren gave a report of Robin Harper’s talk about war tax resistance and charitable redirection at the Quaker Meeting in Cornwall, New York.
Harold R. Regier, the Peace and Social Concerns secretary of the General Conference Mennonite church, wrote to thank the Journal for its “encouragement in our efforts to work at war tax payment/resistance issues.”
Harold R. Regier, the last letter writer I mentioned, said that: “One of our efforts along this line was to convene a war tax conference to look particularly at the theological and heritage bases for war tax resistance.”
The Journal article that followed concerned this conference.
A note at the top of that article said that “[o]ne hundred twenty persons registered” for a Mennonite/Brethren in Christ sponsored conference to seek theological and practical discernment on war tax issues.”
That conference issued a summary statement, which the Journal reprinted.
Excerpts:
After considering the New Testament texts which speak about the Christian’s payment of taxes, most of us are agreed that we do not have a clear word on the subject of paying taxes used for war.
The New Testament statements on paying taxes (Mark 12:17, Romans 13:6–7) contain either ambiguity in meaning or qualifications on the texts that call the discerning community to decide in light of the life and teachings of Jesus.
Although those in the Anabaptist tradition were generally consistent in their historical stand against individual participation in war, they were not of one mind regarding the payment of taxes for war.
Evidence suggests that most Anabaptists did pay all of their taxes willingly; however, there is the early case of the Hutterite Anabaptists, a sizable minority in the Anabaptist movement, who refused to pay war taxes.
In the later stages of Anabaptist history there is no clear-cut precedent on the question of war taxes.
During the American Revolution most Mennonites did object to paying war taxes, yet in a joint statement with the Brethren they agreed to pay taxes in general to the colonial powers “that we may not offend them.”
The record continued to be mixed until the present day.
Only a small minority chose to demonstrate their allegiance to Christ through a tax witness.
So far most discernment on the war tax issue has been done on an individual level as opposed to a church or congregational level.
Although individuals struggling with the issue have been supported by similarly concerned brothers and sisters, wider church support has been lacking.
While recognizing the need for a growing consensus in these matters, we know that not all in the Mennonite/Brethren in Christ fellowship are agreed on an understanding of scriptural teaching and a faithful response regarding war taxes.
We are ready to acknowledge this disagreement and seek to continue discerning God’s will in this.
But as a church community, we feel we should be conscious of the convictions and struggles of our sisters and brothers and supportive of the steps they have taken and are considering.
And all that’s just from one issue!
The issue included an article by Robin Harper about the Brandywine Alternative Fund, one of “a series of experiments [that] go by various names: fund for humanity, people’s life fund, life priorities fund, war tax resistance alternative fund.”
Excerpts:
As many as forty sprang into existence in as the country’s agony over Vietnam reached a crescendo.
Though each is organized and operated a bit differently, the basic concept is to pool federal war taxes (both telephone and income) conscientiously withheld from the IRS and redistribute them, by loans or grants, to community groups working for peace, social justice, and other areas of social change.
…the Brandywine Alternative Fund serves Delaware and Chester Counties just west of Philadelphia.
Although the greater part of the Brandywine fund comes from “reallocated” federal taxes, we also encourage deposits of personal savings.
This policy has not only enlarged the fund but has also broadened participation to include persons eager to help “reorder our nation’s priorities away from the military” who don’t choose to use the particular method of principled tax resistance.
In addition, seven monthly meetings, churches and civic groups have made deposits or contributions to the alternative fund, following the precedent of London Grove Friends Meeting.
This development of religious and other community groups investing in Brandywine is, I believe, a rather new departure for the alternative fund movement and offers an opportunity for sensitizing even larger numbers of people to issues of war preparations, civilian priorities and tax accountability.
Through the growth of our alternative fund, we have begun to take our central concern to the people of the communities in which we live; we are seeking creative ways to support financially some of those groups which are addressing a range of social and economic problems largely neglected by government; and we have undertaken the task of stripping the mask off one of our most powerful institutions — the IRS — as we portray its grim role in the betrayal of our society’s and world’s ultimate security.
World Peace Tax Fund promoters tried to jump on the bicentennial bandwagon with a bizarre logo they promoted in the issue
The issue had some Revolutionary War-era history lessons.
Nonviolence theorist Gene Sharp wrote an article on “The Power of Nonviolent Action” in which he pointed out (among other things) the usefulness of tax resistance in the struggle for American independence:
During the Townshend resistance, in … for example, a London newspaper reported that because of the refusal of taxes and the refusal to import British goods, only 3,500 pounds sterling of revenue had been produced in the colonies.
The American non-importation and non-consumption campaign was estimated by the same newspaper at that point to have cost British business not a mere 3,500 pounds but 7,250,000 pounds in lost income.
Those figures may not have been accurate, but they are significant of the perceptions of the time.
The attempt to collect the tax against that kind of opposition was not worth the effort, and the futility of trying eventually became apparent.
Finally, Lyle Tatum examined the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s activity around .
Excerpts:
Although the Yearly Meeting was clear that members should not participate in military activities or pay direct war taxes, some areas were more difficult to decide.
Bills of credit, a form of negotiable instrument sanctioned by the colonies, were controversial.
The use of them stood in a similar position to the payment of taxes today.
To those Friends who were trying to get other Friends to stop using bills of credit, the Yearly Meeting minuted a bit of advice:
…we affectionately exhort those who have this religious Scruple, that they do not admit, nor indulge and Censure in their Minds against their Brethren who have not the same, carefully manifesting by the whole tenor of their Conduct, that nothing is done through Strife, or Contention, but by their Meekness, Humility and patient Suffering, that they are the Followers of the Prince of Peace.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of met in , just a little more than two months after .
As we have seen, pressure on the peaceable testimony had been growing over the previous few years.
In the face of this, the Yearly Meeting minuted:
…we cannot consistent with our Christian peaceable Testimony… be concerned in the promoting of War or Warlike Measures of any kind, we are united in Judgment that such who make religious Profession with us, & do either openly, or by Connivance, pay any Fine, Penalty, or Tax, in lieu of their personal Services for carrying on the War under the prevailing Commotions, or do consent to, and allow their Children, Apprentices, or Servants to act therein do thereby violate our Christian Testimony, and by so doing manifest that they are not in Religious Fellowship with us…
In spite of their many hardships, Friends were holding firm.
Loyalty oaths were going strong in .
It was minuted:
…in some places Fines or Taxes are and have been imposed on those who from Conscientious Scruples, refuse or decline making such declaration of Allegiance and Abjuration, it is the united Sense and Judgment of this Meeting, that no Friend should pay any such Fine or Tax…
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance kept charging on through the early
issues of the Friends
Journal, though there was some indication of post-Vietnam War war tax
resister fatigue.
The issue gave an overview of
how various Friends in various places were meeting the war tax challenge:
“Friends in Illinois and Massachusetts, for example, have shared letters
to the
IRS,
to their elected representatives, to newspapers, and to the meetings in
which they have expressed the wrongness of militarism and their
conscientious refusal to support governmental expenditures for military
purposes.”
In Philadelphia, “when the
IRS
seized a car owned by Margaret (Meg) Bownan… [this] was met by many
members of the meeting and other supporters who went with her down to the
garage where the auction was held. A bouquet of bittersweet was placed on
the car’s hood, cranberry juice and cookies were passed out to everyone
(and graciously accepted by the police and the
IRS
representatives), and meeting members formed a special support corporation
and bought the car so that Meg and others may use it in their travels in
and about the city.”
Robert Anthony was fighting a Tax Court battle from Moylan, Pennsylvania,
with First Amendment freedom-of-religion arguments: “compelling the
payment of that part of the income tax that is used for war or war
preparation makes it impossible for a Quaker to practice his
religion.”
Thomas L. Carter of Santa Barbara, California, quoted Peter J. Ediger in a
parable about the Quaker peace testimony:
The devil took the Quakers to a very high mountain, the mountain of
academic-socio-economic success and showed them all the kingdoms of the
world, and the glory of them; and he said to the Quakers all this will I
give you…
financial security
acceptance in your society
many opportunities for doing good
tax exemption for your worship centers and your service programs
many other benefits too numerous to mention
if you will fall down and worship me…
bless the armies which protect your privileges
pay taxes without question for my armies around the world (a few
words of dissent to support your moral image are OK as long as you
refrain from any form of civil disobedience)
And the Quakers said (multiple choice/check one):
we want to keep our service program going, so…
we’re uneasy with your terms, but we like the benefits…
would you serve as one of our Trustees? We need more practical minds
like yours…
as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends
we are under obligation to free ourselves from this complicity.
In the issue, the clerk of the
Nashville (Tennessee) Friends Meeting wrote in about that Meeting’s decision
to disregard the legal exemption on local property taxes for church property
and to go ahead and pay the property tax on its meeting house.
The meeting’s decision had, according to Bob Lough, the clerk, four reasons
behind it:
The sense that churches are just as much the beneficiaries of city
government services (like “fire protection, road maintenance, libraries,
schools, social services, parks,
etc.”) as
anyone else.
That “a position in favor of paying taxes form which we are exempt may
enhance our credibility as tax resisters. we decided to continue refusing to pay the excise tax on
the meeting telephone as symbolic of our opposition to a foreign policy
which we cannot support.”
Being in favor of the separation of church and state, the meeting was
opposed to the implicit government subsidy of religious bodies owning
property that the tax exemption represented.
The meeting also felt that the property tax exemption for religious bodies
had encouraged churches to become property owners — erecting “modern day
‘steeplehouses’ which resemble country clubs more than places of Christian
service.”
The piece concluded by encouraging other meetings to consider following their
lead. “As Quakers we are noted for being conscientious about taxes, and
resistance of taxes for war-related purposes has a long history in our
tradition. Perhaps our tax record should not merely reflect our opposition to
the evils we see in society, but also demonstrate that we have a
responsibility that calls for support as well as dissent.”
an ad from the 1 February 1977 issue of Friends Journal
Ross Roby wrote in again (see ♇ 24 July
2013 for his earlier letter) to express his puzzlement about why Quakers
hadn’t gotten all enthusiastic about the World Peace Tax Fund bill. “[T]he
National Council for a
W.P.T.F. is
still operating on a shoe-string and still being warned by sympathetic
Congressmen that there is little apparent concern about the bill if they can
judge by their mail.”
Has Friends Journal any interest in developments in
the W.P.T.F.
bill…? There have been frequent opportunities in the last year for the
Journal to support and encourage lobbyists for the
W.P.T.F.,
and the chance was again present in the article of
on “Friends and the
IRS.”
For some inexplicable reason, the Journal has again
missed an opportunity to remind us that the tax laws can be changed by
legislative action — that the
W.P.T.F.
bill is a reasonable way to put conscientious objection as an alternative in
every citizen’s form 1040!
Again, Roby seemed blind to the real concerns that Quakers and other
conscientious war tax resisters might have with the plan advocated by the
“peace tax fund” advocates.
In the issue, George Lakey shared
his annual letter to the
IRS,
accompanying the letter with a telling comment: “I thought you might like to
print part or all of it to remind your readers that some of us Quaker tax
refusers are still doing it!” Although from my perspective, the
coverage of Quaker war tax resistance in the
Journal seems to be going strong, it seems that from
the perspective of this particular Quaker tax resister the practice had begun
to wane in the post-Vietnam War period. Excerpts:
Again I am asked to pay taxes to support an approach which reduces my actual
security as a human being… for paying taxes to this government means giving a
license for various kinds of international misadventures.
I see no reason, therefore, to change my own policy of refusing federal income
taxes. I very much support the principle of taxation, and encourage the
government to tax at a much higher rate the corporations whose interests it so
faithfully serves. Since it does not serve my interests nearly so well, I
withhold my hard-earned money until I see a basic change in values. I want to
see the government focused on human security, not “national”
security. I want to see the government make a serious commitment to
environmental quality. I want to see in all its policies the government taking
the side of life, not death.
To implement my tax refusal policy, I return the form only partially filled
out, lacking the financial information which would enable you to collect the
tax.
Virginia Snow Mountain and Darrell Bluhm shared their letter to the
IRS in
the same issue. Excerpts:
We have given ourselves a War Crimes Tax Credit for the amount your charts
would otherwise have had us owe and we request that you refund us the money
withheld from our incomes last year.
…Through our involvement with the Religious Society of Friends and our
personal experience of the Divine Spirit we have come to know that all life
is sacred. We are called to live in such a way as to “remove the cause of
war.”
…[O]ur vocations involve the nurture and education of children. Daily we work
to help guide young people to grow up to be peaceful, responsible adults.
They are our joy and our hope for the future. It is unthinkable to us that
any part of the wages that we earn in this work should be used to support
weapons systems or armies whose effect is to injure and kill people, or to
add to the great potential for nuclear holocaust that already exists with our
huge stockpiles of weapons. Knowing that more than half our tax dollar goes
to the death and destruction the American military represents has caused us
to conclude that we will no longer pay our Federal taxes. We cannot support
the military’s protection of corporate profit at the expense of human needs.
That issue also reprinted the text of a “petition” written by R.L. Anthony
(and invited others to sign or use it):
Members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) since the Society’s
beginning have been guided by a belief in the sacredness of life and have
implemented this by seeking ways of peace. This compels in conscience their
refusal to participate in war.
I believe the U.S.
tax laws deny us the constitutional right to religious freedom by
not providing under law an alternative to paying that portion of the income
tax devoted to war preparation.
If I should at present follow my conscience and my religious beliefs by
refusing taxes for war, I would have to face the prospect of forced
collection or legal prosecution and penalties. I believe the
U.S. tax laws
thereby deny me the free exercise of my religious beliefs.
In keeping with my beliefs and conscience, I wish to pay the war portion of
my income tax to a peace fund, such as the World Peace Tax Fund
presently in a committee of Congress, set up as a legal alternative under
U.S. law. I would
make this alternative payment instead of the war portion of my income tax if
the U.S. tax laws
provided such an alternative for all citizens conscientiously opposed to war
and the taking of life.
I wish my position made known to all branches of government concerned,
including the U.S.
Congress, the courts and the
IRS.
In the issue, Allyn Eccleston
compared the reemerging Quaker opposition to paying for war to the emergence
of Quaker abolitionism in American in the
.
Excerpts:
Today we have a different impediment in our relationship with God and we are
called, each one of us, to hold it to the light and test whether we feel at
ease. Our continued commitment to a world-wide arms race not only deprives
the world of comparable expenditures for human service, it enslaves the world
in a struggle for real and symbolic power that engenders hatred, fear and
greed. We are the masters in an arms race that enslaves the people
of this earth.
Do I feel at ease knowing that approximately fifty cents of each of my tax
dollars goes to military expenditures?
Do I feel at ease knowing the United States spends more money on armaments
than any country in the world?
Do I feel at ease knowing United States arms merchants have been peddling
ever more sophisticated weaponry to other nations, totalitarian and
democratic, undeveloped and developed, poor and rich; that in Greece, Turkey,
the Near East, and Latin America we have armed both sides of existing (or
potential) conflicts, as well as equipped and trained some of the most
repressive governments in existence?
Our country’s dependence on military manpower has been reduced even to the
point where conscription is no longer necessary. During the Vietnam conflict
it became the explicit policy of the United States to substitute wealth and
technology for manpower. This policy is directly responsible for more
indiscriminate killing and destructiveness (in ways contrary even to the
international conventions of warfare). We annihilated women, children, old
people and, in designated areas, all living things, and we did this by remote
control, thereby removing and insulating the killers from the acts.
Regardless of who actually handled the equipment, it is you and I and every
other taxpayer who paid for the weapons and are therefore responsible.
It is not as though a madman picks up our sledgehammer or another useful tool
and hits someone over the head with it. When soldiers, hired by us, use our
weapons to kill, it is not misuse-that is what the equipment is designed and
purchased for. And we must presume any future use will be as destructive (at
least) as what we witnessed in Vietnam.
It isn’t necessary to document for Friends why the preparation for conflict
is more likely to lead to war than to peace or how the evils of hatred, greed
and fear can be addressed by practical demonstrations of love, self-sacrifice
and self-confidence. Let us search for steps we might take that would set us
on a new course.
There are approximately 150,000 Friends in the United States. What would
happen if 30,000 Friends felt moved to take some step, however small, to
register their “dis-ease” in a meaningful way?
Suppose you are one of these Friends moved to register public dissent and
dismay by enclosing a personal statement with your tax return. If you owe the
government money, the letter would specify that at least a token amount has
been withheld as a testimony for peace. To be more effective, you would also
send copies of the statement to your senators, to your congressperson and to
your newspaper.
In addition to increasing the effect of your witness, this public declaration
protects you against accusation of intent to defraud the government.
Withholding some portion of your tax does subject you to the seven percent
interest charge plus a possible monthly penalty of one-half of one percent
per month up to twenty-five percent of the amount not paid. Therefore, it is
you who must determine the appropriate amount to withhold for your witness.
Some Friends might feel they should begin with one percent of their total
tax; others might be led to withhold ten percent or the actual percentage of
the budget allocated to military expenses.
If you are moved to witness this year but cannot withhold from the government
(because your money was already collected), you might consider requesting a
refund (form 843) of the amount you would have withheld. Whether you receive
a refund or not, the witness will have been strengthened. In the current tax
year, you can legally assure that you will owe some money to the government
by declaring expected allowances on your W-4 form at a level that takes your
peace witness into account.
If the burden of the witness gets too heavy, you can, and should, stop the
process by making the payment or by allowing the
IRS to
find and take payment from your bank account. (Beyond late-payment penalties,
the IRS
cannot take punitive action once you have paid the assessed tax.) The witness
already made to yourself and your friends, and the strength and truth gained
by this witness, will have moved us that much closer to world peace. We will
have another opportunity to witness next year, and the next and the next.
Each year we will have more knowledge and more strength and, if we are
mindful of the light, more love. And this will sustain us for as many
generations as it may take.
Some Friends will argue that since the government gets the money plus penalty
charges anyway, tax refusal is counterproductive. This is not so. The whole
system of tax collection is computerized and is dependent on voluntary
cooperation. By requiring the system to take special steps to collect your
tax, your message is felt. The message gains weight as the
IRS is
forced to put more and more time and attention on this matter. Friends may
feel easier about the extra money collected if they view it as a contribution
toward the government’s higher administrative costs. (There is no way the
additional money can be diverted into military expense.)
It will concern some Friends that this action is “against the law” or it
isn’t proper to claim a deduction for “peacework” if the money isn’t actually
spent or that there is no item under “Credits” where one could appropriately
list “peace witness.” True enough, the way of the tax refuser is not clean
and simple. We are confronting a system we believe to be immoral and, as
Friends have always done in similar situations, we must compromise, following
the path we believe moves us closer to the ideal.
This is why a tax refuser needs the insight, information and support of other
(Friendly) resisters. We need to discuss the pros and cons of the
alternatives open to us and to help each other in our witness.
IRS
regulations and procedures change. Individual circumstances change. If one is
isolated it can be confusing and lonely. It is important to stay in touch
with others, by mail, if necessary.
Regardless of the impact on the government, our witness will have an
immediate impact on each of us and on our meetings. This impact is likely to
differ from that which we may have experienced in visiting prisons,
counseling conscientious objectors, sorting clothes for AFSC,
or work in other worthwhile programs in which we minister and offer aid to
others. In tax refusal, we are concerned with our own brokenness and are
committed to a healing ministry of ourselves, not by words, but by deeds.
In addition to the most important witness of tax refusal, every Friend should
consider actively supporting the World Peace Tax Fund. If passed, this bill
would grant conscientious objector status to taxpayers in much the same way
as a conscientious objector status was granted to draft resisters and would
allow the military expense portion of a conscientious objector’s tax to be
diverted to a World Peace Trust Fund (for peace education and research, and
humanitarian use).
Those of us who are clear on this issue must act and we must support each
other. We must make our testimony public that others may find clarity and
courage. And when we are given the opportunity, we must lovingly and
patiently labor with other Friends who have not yet been moved to hold this
issue to the light.
The IRS
readily admits the whole tax system is dependent on voluntary cooperation.
Ultimate control is in our hands (not the Pentagon’s)! Whether we want to
acknowledge it or not, we are the masters, the slave masters. We can learn
from the early Quakers. We must seek truth in the light and speak truth to
power.
Finally, the issue gave the
unsurprising news that the “Ann Arbor Monthly Meeting was recently denied a
claim for exemption from payment of war taxes,” which it had asserted on
religious freedom grounds. Cleverly, at least from a propaganda point of
view, “[t]hey supported their claim by citing the
Buckley vs. Valeo
case where the Supreme Court decided it was unconstitutional to limit how much
money of his own a candidate can spend for his campaign, thus establishing
money expenditures as a means of free expression.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was hardly an issue of the Friends Journal in that did not at least mention war tax resistance, and some issues covered the topic in depth.
In the issue was an article by Scott Benarde about the Quaker community of Monteverde in Costa Rica.
Excerpts:
In , a year after the sentencing [of Marvin Rockwell for draft resistance], Rockwell and the small Quaker community of Fairhope made national news.
In a short article, Time magazine mentioned that “for the first time in history a group of Quakers were planning to leave the U.S. because of their peace-loving convictions.”
Seven Quaker families — including Marvin Rockwell and his parents — twenty-five or thirty people in all, had decided to move to the Central American Republic of Costa Rica.
, Marvin Rockwell recounts why he left the U.S. and what has happened to him since settling 5,000 feet up in the steep, rugged mountains of Costa Rica.
“We had a growing dissatisfaction with what we in Fairhope thought was a military build-up, a wartime economy.
We wanted to be free of paying taxes in a war economy,” Rockwell says in a soft, yet deliberate, voice.
“When the judge sentenced us he said, ‘If you’re not willing to defend your country, you should get out.’
So we began to think seriously of that possibility.”
That issue also brought the news that Quaker Richard Catlett “has been indicted on criminal charges of willful failure to pay income tax for three years” (the indictment was actually for failure to file).
The issue — under the theme “Can the Government Cancel Conscience?”
— had many mentions of war tax resistance.
The opening article, by Ruth Kilpack, began:
Ten years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, a Friend spoke directly to my condition at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting when he said, “Many of us support our sons’ conscientious objection to serving in the armed forces.
But what about ourselves?
Do those of us who are beyond draft age, or not otherwise subject to the draft, conscientiously object to giving our money for war?”
For me, this struck deep, as did the words, “Two things are needed to fight a war: warm bodies and cold cash.”
For the first, the full flush of youth is required for combat.
For the second, there is no age limit for those who must pay tax funds, over half of which are channeled directly into wars, past, present, and future.
Everyone is involved.
By the payment of taxes, all are required to support the “national defense,” or whatever the current euphemism is.
Kilpack’s article concerned the legal case of Robert Anthony, who was appealing his tax case on religious freedom grounds.
What Bob Anthony’s case was about that day was an effort to break the longstanding precedent set by the case of A.J. Muste, the great peace activist, who in had challenged the U.S. government in the matter of paying taxes for war.
The court had then ruled that the income tax does not interfere with religious practice.
Whatever attempts have been made since that time to break that precedent-and there have been many-have been thwarted, federal judges repeatedly refusing to examine the deep issues involved: the issues of rights of conscience and the First Amendment’s protection of religious belief.
As it turned out, according to Anthony, “the court came up with a complete backing of the government’s right to cancel conscience for the sake of the taxing system.”
The same issue reprinted excerpts from a letter that Media Monthly Meeting had sent to the court that was hearing the Anthony case, in which it said:
As a Meeting, we have consistently backed and encouraged [Anthony’s] position on military taxes.
We believe that any citizen who on the basis of religion or conscience is opposed to paying for armaments or war should not be compelled by the tax laws to pay taxes for these purposes.
Refusal to participate in any way in killing and warfare is a basic principle of the Quaker faith.
…Robert Anthony’s refusal of military taxes constitutes an essential and consistent implementation of Quaker religious principles.… We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military.
In the same issue, Bruce & Ruth Graves wrote of how their war tax resistance had grown out of their conscientious objection to the draft.
[O]ur early married years were largely those of family and professions, years in which we were no longer pressured by government to form external written attestations of belief to satisfy the draft board.
After all, we had done that.
What else could just we two do to alter this evil?
The pacifist ideas could safely rest — or could they?
In retrospect, those beliefs that had been yanked forth from us by society, perhaps too early in our lives, needed more time to mature, to become integrated into our very beings.
Perhaps ten years of integration preceded our realization that a different and subtler written attestation of belief was being required of us by our society.
This attestation was made not once, but every year and it was an attestation of beliefs we did not believe.
It was a lie.
It was our income tax return.
We signed it every year, and thus gave money, without objection, to buy the tools of war, even though we did not believe in killing.
It was subtle because it was money and did not look like death.
But when you put them together, it is a contract.
…All of this occurred during a time when militarism increasingly permeated national policy.
Here, then, we finally reached a point where the idea of our financing the arms race became unbearable.
After all, warfare was becoming more automated, thus relying far more on the expenditure of tax money than on the conscription of lives.
In fact, it now appears that conscientious objection itself may be tending toward irrelevance, unless the concept is expanded beyond the confines of the Selective Service system — especially for those over draft age.
At this point we changed our tax returns into something we could in conscience sign and our remittance checks into contracts for the Internal Revenue Service.
Each year, the item “Foreign Tax Credit” and about fifty percent of our normal tax “due” was entered.
Carrying that credit over to the first page as instructed, we showed each year on our signed returns a credit balance due us from the IRS.
To reduce IRS profit from interest and penalty, we still paid tax “owed” as calculated normally, but our check required the IRS to promise to refund the war tax we claimed by their endorsement because of a restrictive clause we placed on the back of the check.
Rather than our refund, the IRS has usually sent a notice for us to sign, correcting our return.
We have never signed these, because that means agreeing to the original war tax.
Yet the IRS seems to need our agreement to resolve each case legally — that is, unless it should decide to initiate proceedings against us in U.S. Tax Court.
That, in fact, happened to us in for tax year .
From here, the Graveses write about their frustrations with the legal system, which seems eager to latch onto superficial technicalities to avoid having to face head-on the issue of whether the government can force people to violate such core tenets of conscience as “thou shalt not kill” via the tax system.
They also express the need they feel for a stronger and more sustaining national war tax resistance organization:
At present, the community of war tax resistance appears to us to be a loosely-structured communications network of interpersonal contacts, newsletters, and small organizations perhaps not always widely known.
Entrance to this network, we presume, is often gained through need for help by individuals who then grow, gain experience, and are later able to help other newcomers in their various situations.
Whether they do help others or just gradually fade out of the network, however, is crucial to the power of the community.
If we, ourselves, were to fade out as our own tax problems become less immediate, for example, the experience and knowledge we will have gained (even though far from complete) would be lost to the others.
It would seem to be a sad waste to have this process repeated over and again for each member passing through the community.
There are a few organizations emphasizing war tax resistance (e.g., WTR, Peacemakers, etc.), from which a range of handbooks and information is available for individual action.
Some may provide counseling: for example, we have recently learned that CCCO is in liaison currently with the Philadelphia Office of War Tax Resistance (WTR), thus affording the wider range of counseling needed by this more recent form of conscientious objection.
They added:
There are other courses of individual action besides variations on how to fill out a tax return.
One such course is to reduce one’s income to a level of lower — or no — taxation.
For some, this would mean a change in profession, or else a donation of one’s professional services to his or her current employer.
If it is not desirable to put that kind of commitment into that particular employer’s pockets, one can give away up to fifty percent of taxable income to tax deductible organizations, thereby reaching three simultaneous objectives: a) continue one’s profession, b) support human interests of choice, and c) decrease war tax payments.
Tax liability on interest income can also be reduced by buying tax-exempt bonds or shares in exempt bond funds.
Both Individual Retirement Accounts and Deferred Tax Annuities (sometimes available through the employer) enable the postponement of income to retirement years, when, hopefully, the World Peace Tax Fund Act will have become law.
This provides a reasonable chance for legally claiming the exemption on a part of current income, the exempted funds then being redirected to the WPTF Trust Fund for uses more closely aligned with human values.
Also in that issue was an update on the Richard Catlett case, in which he was charged with “willfully and knowingly failing to file income tax returns for ” — he in fact hadn’t filed .
The Brandywine Peace Community wrote in with “some fundamental questions of reality and responsibility” for Quaker taxpayers.
The community ran an alternative fund “comprised of refused war taxes, personal savings, and group deposits, [that] makes interest-free loans to groups working for social change or providing change-oriented services.
Thus, the alternative fund is a small-scale act of beating swords into plowshares and initiating our own peace conversion program.”
Also:
In past January–April tax seasons, the Brandywine group and its supporters have been present at local IRS offices, presenting the option of war tax resistance, and posing the question, “H-bombs or Bread?” with peace tax counseling available.
The issue shared the story of John and Louise Runnings, who…
…have withheld payment of their income taxes in order, as they state, “to resolve the conflict between the spirit that dwells within and the violence implicit in surrendering our substance to the building of the war machine.”
They have submitted a brief to this effect to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Runnings feel that since their action makes them answerable to “those Quakers whose light allows them to pay the federal tax,” they must plead their case before the Society of Friends as well as before the Federal Court.
In doing so, they stress the fact that they share Friends’ testimonies against war but feel that these testimonies will be muted if they are not supported by actions which speak louder than words.
They question how we can “speak truth to power” when so large a part of our income supports that power.
They invite Friends to join them “in taking those uncomfortable actions which put us in conflict with the government rather than with the Spirit.”
That issue also brought the update that Robert Anthony’s appeal to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals had been rejected.
It also noted that, according to the Albuquerque Monthly Meeting’s newsletter, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the AFSC were contributing to the legal expenses in the case.
At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, according to the Journal, “[a] minute on nonpayment of taxes for military purposes was adopted” — but not one that required much explanation, apparently.
A letter from Austin Wattles appeared in the issue in which he encouraged the Journal to continue to cover war tax resistance, saying that to him, “[t]he movement seems to be growing.”
He told of the support he had received from Meetings in his area — specifically the Old Chatham (New York) Monthly Meeting and Worcester (Massachusetts) Meeting.
He concluded:
[T]ax resistance can have its penalties.
You don’t have money to send your kids to college if you change your profession in a way not to pay withholding tax.
I think certainly one reason so few Friends have considered this witness is it can hurt one’s profession so seriously.
It’s not only losing the wages, but Friends enjoy doing a good job where they are working and don’t know how else they can live.
I like Quakers very much.
I’ve always been an active Friend.
But I feel our being part of the world to the degree we are prevents us from following Christ if the price is too high.
Molly Arrison also had a letter in that issue, but she thought war tax resistance “to be a most unrealistic and disrupting idea” because it would lead to a slippery slope of every citizen withholding taxes for whatever items of government spending they disapproved of, leading to “50 million contingencies” that would overwhelm the government’s revenue system.
She recommended that Quakers instead “orchestrate consistent barrages of phone calls, letters, and lectures until the general public has more influence than the Pentagon.”
David Scull considered this same argument in a letter in the issue:
We wish not to pay taxes for what we so strongly disapprove of.
But there are those who equally strongly feel that government contributions to the United Nations, or government money to pay for abortions, violate their principles.
It would not be difficult to compile a long list of purposes objected to; of course we say that our cause is a matter of high principle, but one person’s principle is another’s foible.
Is there some guideline which would make it easier to distinguish between two paramount obligations when they seem to be in conflict, one to support those purposes which our society has determined (no matter how imperfectly) to be for the common good, and the other to obey our consciences?
It seems to me that this can best be judged by our willingness to make some tangible sacrifices on behalf of conscience.
Scull went on to say that this made him skeptical of the World Peace Tax Fund plan: “[I]f I understand it correctly, there is no personal sacrifice involved.
It is just too easy to say to the government, ‘Please send my money where I want it to go instead of where you want it to go.’ ” He suggested improving the World Peace Tax Fund idea by “add[ing] the principle of personal sacrifice”:
Suppose I say, “Instead of $1000 which you say I owe you, here is $1100 as evidence of my sincerity; now will you allocate it in these ways?
That is how much extra I am willing to pay for the privilege of having my money not go to pay for machines of war.”
The inclusion of such a sacrificial element in the WPTF program would make a great deal of difference in my own ability to argue for it, and I think it would make a very convincing argument as we work toward its widespread acceptability.
…When we ask to relieve our consciences because of the way our money is spent, we should be… willing to put a price tag on the privilege.
A letter-to-the-editor in response to Scull’s argument, from Bill Samuel, thought that while the personal-sacrifice angle “has some surface attractiveness…”
Put another way, the proposal amounts to a government tax on conscience, which is quite a different matter from a voluntary personal sacrifice.
Not only is it morally questionable for the government “to put a price tag on” conscience, but some legal authorities believe it would constitute unconstitutional discrimination as well.
The World Peace Tax Fund bill would not be a special privilege.
Rather, the WPTF bill is a practical means of implementing the rights of conscience guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Like women, blacks and homosexuals, pacifists should take the position that we need not earn our rights but that they should be respected as a matter of course in a free and pluralistic society.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with the concept of people of conscience making a sacrifice for their deeply held beliefs.
Rather than impose a ten percent tax on conscience, concerned Friends might send an amount equal to ten percent of their tax payment to the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund…
Corporately, Friends can also act to support those working to secure the right of pacifists not to pay for war.
One yearly meeting recently agreed to give $1,500 to the NCWPTF and several monthly meetings include the NCWPTF in their budgets.
Mennonites and Brethren each give a full time volunteer service worker to the NCWPTF.
While Friends do not have the kind of organized volunteer service effort that the other historic peace churches have, meetings can do their part by together contributing enough to support a full-time salaried worker.
Ross Roby also had some words to say about Scull’s argument against the World Peace Tax Fund plan.
He first begged for “immediate self-sacrificial labor and giving, on behalf of passage of a WPTF bill” and then wrote:
I would like to remind those who, like David Scull, have “difficulty with the World Peace Tax Fund as presently offered,” that there is nothing sacred and immutable about the present wording.
We can be quite certain that, when Congress takes a serious scrutiny of provisions for an alternative fund for C.O.s, much rewriting will be done.
The final bill. when passed, may look very different from the WPTF bill as now published.
He suggested that conscientious objectors to military spending should “soft pedal” the arguments amongst themselves over the details of the WPTF plan and instead concentrate on trying to convince the government to enact “a change in the income tax laws that will allow ‘free exercise of religion’ and give us the opportunity to build institutions for nonviolent solutions to international conflict with our present war tax dollars.”
His advice seems to have been followed, and the current campaign for “peace tax fund” legislation seems to have become so unwilling to use critical judgment and so eager to pass legislation of any sort that it has ended up backing a bill that would do nothing to help people with genuine conscientious objection to supporting military spending, nothing to reduce the military budget, and indeed nothing to increase spending on nonviolent conflict resolution — and yet even this bill has gone nowhere in Congress.
Such is the cost of “soft pedaling” internal debate.
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal
John J. Runnings confronted Molly Arrison’s argument more head-on in the letters-to-the-editor column of the issue.
Excerpt:
Our actions are determined by the degree of urgency we feel.
When our house is on fire we may exit by way of an upstairs window rather than by the conventional route via the stairs.
Many of us see the arms race as a fire out of control, and we are so adverse to feeding the flames that we are prepared to suffer considerable discomfort rather than do so.
So we break the law and are prepared to suffer the penalty.…
To break the law openly and expose oneself to the wrath of the power structure is to witness to the urgency and depth of one’s convictions.…
The early Quakers started at the places that Molly suggests, in the heart and in the community, but they went further.
They broke the law.
And they got themselves hanged and imprisoned; and they were heard above the contending clamors of their day.
And when the Constitution was written it contained provisions for freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Modern Quakers continue, as of old, to work from the heart and in the community, but if we are to outshout the Pentagon we will have to use a louder and more urgent voice than we have used heretofore.
Perhaps more and more and more of us will have to break the law.
Franklin Zahn also responded to Arrison’s slippery-slope argument: “In practice, the portion of federal income tax for the military is far greater than for any other item.
Currently thirty-six percent goes for present costs and another estimated seventeen percent for past wars.
Objectors to smaller items would not find withholding worth the bother… [W]ords alone eventually lose all effect if no one ever acts.
But if a few other than war objectors choose to refuse, I see no objection to their doing so.”
Sally Primm interviewed Lucy Perkins Carner for the issue.
Among other topics, Carner addressed her war tax resistance:
[Q:] “Did you ever consider not paying part of your tax?”
[A:] “Oh yes, for years I’ve taken out of my income tax payment a portion that the Friends Committee on National Legislation says is equal to what the Pentagon gets.
Then I write a letter to the income tax people.
It’s good propaganda.
I send copies to my representatives in Congress and the President.
“I know my failure to pay isn’t going to impoverish the Pentagon, but it’s good propaganda.
They go to your bank and get the money.
I send them a copy of the letter, too.
Some people have refused to give them the information and go to jail as a result, but I’m not heroic.
They get it out of my bank every year.
“The bank has a right to charge for that, a service charge.
Well, in the last few years, believe it or not, I’ve received a letter from the bank saying they won’t make the charge any more.[”]
[Q:] “Why did they say that?”
[A:] “Well, that just shows you what good propaganda will do.
They know why I’m doing it.”
[Q:] “And how long have you done this?”
[A:] “I don’t know; when I became a pacifist, whenever that was [around the end of World War Ⅰ, according to another part of the article —♇].
I don’t even know when the income tax started.”
The issue covered the “New Call to Peacemaking” in which representatives from the three historic “peace churches” (Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren) got together to try to put some oomph behind their peacebuilding efforts.
There was actually less about war tax resistance in this article than in much of the mainstream media coverage of the Call — perhaps because the civil disobedience angle was thought to be more newsworthy or attention-catching.
Here is where taxes were mentioned in the Friends Journal coverage:
The Friends Committee on National Legislation points out that all the federal income taxes withheld from your paycheck from January 1 to June 23 go for military purposes.
Not until June 24 do you begin to support any other part of the budget.
Especially in recent years — in light of increasing military budgets and the trend toward fewer soldiers and more expensive weapons systems — many conscientious objectors have chosen to witness against war by refusal to pay voluntarily those federal taxes that will be used to fund present, past, and future wars.
Some have done this by lowering their income below the taxable level; others who owe taxes have refused to pay the portion that would go for the military.
In the same issue, Robert C. Johansen wrote about the challenge of putting forward a pacifist alternative to mainstream political thinking.
In the course of that, he wrote:
Even though their goals are radical in the sense of seeking fundamental system change, political moderates will feel most comfortable using conventional means of education, consciousness-raising, lobbying, campaigning, organizing, and personal witness.
Those people who have tried such means and found them weak and insufficiently penetrating politically will search for other actions, such as tax resistance and civil disobedience, that convey a seriousness and urgency more equivalent to the threat of planetary militarization.
Maynard Shelly gave the Mennonite perspective in the wake of the New Call conference, and claimed that “[r]esistance to the payment of war taxes is becoming the witness of choice for a growing number of Mennonites.”
Charles C. Walker wrote in to the issue to suggest a token $1 resistance to the Pennsylvania state income tax as a way of protesting against its anticipated adoption of capital punishment.
The issue noted in its calendar that the Media Pennsylvania Friends Meetinghouse would be hosting a “National Military Tax Resistance Workshop” that would be “[i]ntroducing the program and services of the newly organized Center on Law and Pacifism.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance was a frequent topic in the issues of Friends Journal in , though there was still no consensus about how to go about it, and there was a lot of hesitance among Quaker institutions about how strongly to endorse it.
The issue was another special issue devoted to the peace testimony, which might as well have been a special issue on war tax resistance for how frequently it was mentioned.
Clearly by this time, there was no talking about peace work without talking about war tax resistance.
an illustration by Duncan Harp, from the issue of Friends Journal
Editor Ruth Kilpack opened the issue.
She noted:
I see the billions of dollars (including taxes from my own earnings) being poured into the “defense” budget.
I hear of vastly increased crime and see the wanton waste everywhere, much of it the direct legacy of our last war; I remember the lives still festering in military hospitals, the suffering from the wounds of war both here and across the world.
But now, there is a handful of people who are beginning to take a new view of war and war-making, realizing that it takes place not only when the bombing and shelling begin, but in the will of the people who make — or allow — it to happen.
War-making must be paid for.
As it is said elsewhere in this issue, “we pray for peace, but we pay for war.”
When we once understand that, great change will come about.
And especially, as war becomes more and more impersonal, with computerized strategic commands and weapons, more people are increasingly going to ask, “Who is waging this war?
Are we ourselves responsible, since we pay for it?”
(As the old saying goes, “Your checkbook shows where your heart is.”)
Take Richard Catlett, for example, a Friend who — as I write at this very moment in — is beginning his jail sentence of two months at the Kansas City Municipal Rehabilitation Institute (for first offenders) in Kansas City, Missouri.
That will be followed by three years of probation.
Richard Catlett has been an antiwar activist , refusing to file his income tax return .
In , his health food store was closed for non-payment of taxes (it is now under his wife’s ownership), and now, at sixty-nine years of age, Richard Catlett is treated as a criminal.
Clearly, he is being held up as an example of what can happen to a trouble-maker who dares to go against the tax law.… Richard Catlett’s age gives added emphasis to the warning to those no longer young and foolhardy.
(Besides, the pockets of those in his age bracket are usually better filled, and not to be overlooked by IRS.)
Catlett’s case was covered in more depth later on in the same issue by means of lengthy quotes from a Colombia Missourian article (see “Local war protester leaves for jail term” in ♇ 5 January 2013) and the following section from a Wall Street Journal article:
Tax Report
A protester got loads of publicity that drew criminal charges for nonfiling.
The IRS selects tax protesters for criminal prosecution based on the amount of publicity they get.
Usually protesters who don’t seek the spotlight are pursued by civil actions; criminal is reserved for the publicity hound.
Richard Ralston Catlett is a notorious war and tax protester.
The sixty-eight-year-old Columbia, Missouri, health food store owner argued that criminal charges of failing to file returns should be dropped because the IRS was guilty of “selective prosecution.”
The government is barred from selecting people to prosecute on grounds of race, religion or the exercise of free speech, or other “impermissible grounds.”
Catlett claimed that basing a criminal prosecution on publicity isn’t permitted.
But an appeals court disagreed.
His exercise of free speech wasn’t involved here, the court noted.
The IRS seeks criminal prosecution against publicized protesters to promote compliance with tax laws, the court observed.
“The government is entitled to select those cases for prosecution which it believes will promote compliance,” the court declared.
For some decades now we have been hearing the Church call on governments to take steps toward disarmament.
And it would be difficult to think of a thing more urgent or more appropriate for churches to say to governments.
It is hardly necessary here to give another recitation of the monstrous and unconscionable dimensions of the world arms race, culminating in the ever-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the refinement of systems to deliver their carnage.
The Church has done part of its duty when it has said that this is wrong.
But the time has come to say that the good words of the Church have not been, and are not, enough.
The risks, the disciplines, the sacrifices, and the steps in good faith which the Church has asked of governments in the task of disarmament must now be asked of the Church in the obligation of war tax resistance.
It is, at the root, a simple question of integrity.
We are praying for peace and paying for war.
Setting euphemisms aside, the billions of dollars conscripted by governments for military spending are war taxes, and Christians are paying these taxes.
Our bluff has been called.
In all candor it must be suggested that the storm of objection which arises in the Church at this idea borrows its thunder and lightning from the premiers, the presidents, the ambassadors, and the generals who make their arguments against disarmament.
War tax resistance will be called irresponsible, anarchist, unrealistic, suicidal, masochistic, naive, futile, negative and crazy.
But when the dust has settled, it will stand as the deceptively simple and painfully obvious Christian response to the world arms race.
A score or a hundred other good responses may be added to it.
We in the Church may rightly be called upon to do more than this, but we should not be expected to do less.
Let the Church take upon itself the risks of war tax resistance. For church councils to take the position that the arms race is wrong for governments and not to commit themselves and call upon their members to cease and desist from paying for the arms race is patently inconsistent.
This is probably a fundamental reason why the Church’s pleas for disarmament have met with so little positive response.
Not even governments can have high regard for people who say one thing and do another.
If governments today are confronted with the question whether they will continue the arms race, churches are confronted with the question whether they will continue to pay for it.
As specialists in the matter of stewardship of the Earth’s resources they have contributed precious little to the most urgent stewardship issue of the twentieth century if they go on paying for the arms race.
How much longer can the.
Church continue quoting to the government its carefully researched figures on military expenditures and social needs and then, apparently without embarrassment, go on serving up the dollars that fund the berserk priorities?
The arms race would fall flat on its face tomorrow if all of the Christians who lament it would stop paying for it.
It is not, of course, simple to stop paying for the arms race as a citizen of the United States, or anywhere else for that matter.
If you refuse to pay the portion of your income tax attributable to military spending, the government levies your bank account or wages and extracts the money that way.
If your income tax is withheld by your employer, you must devise some means to reduce that withholding, such as claiming a war tax deduction or extra dependents.
If, as an employer, you do not withhold an employee’s war taxes, you will find yourself in court, as has recently happened to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.
All of these actions are at some point punishable by fines or imprisonment, and none — in the final analysis — actually prevents the government from getting the money.
Nevertheless, it must be said that the Church has not tried tax resistance and found it ineffective; it has rather found it difficult and left it untried.
The Church has considered the risk too great.
Individuals fear social pressure, business losses, and government reprisals.
Congregations, synods, and church agencies equivocate over their role in collecting war taxes.
There is the risk of an undesirable response — contributions may drop off, tax-exempt status may be lost, officers may go to jail.
To oppose the vast power of the state by a deliberate act of civil disobedience is not a decision to be made lightly (an unnecessary observation, since there are no signs that Christians or the Church in the United States are about to do this lightly).
It would be inaccurate to give the impression that Christians, individually, and the Church, corporately, in the U.S. have done nothing about war tax resistance.
There have been notable, even heroic, exceptions to the general manifest lethargy.
The war tax resistance case of an individual Quaker was recently appealed on First Amendment grounds to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court refused to consider it.
A North American conference of the Mennonite Church is grappling with the question of its role in withholding war taxes from the wages of employees.
Among Brethren, Friends and Mennonites — sometimes called the Historic Peace Churches — there is a rising tide of concern about war taxes.
The Catholic Worker Movement and other prophetic voices in various denominations have long advocated war tax resistance, but they have truly been voices crying in the wilderness.
For all our concern about the arms race, we in the churches have done very little to resist paying for it.
That has seemed too risky.
But then, of course, disarmament also involves risks.
Could there be a moral equivalent of disarmament that did not involve risk?
In this matter of the world arms race, it is not a question of who can guarantee the desired result, but of who will take the risk for peace.
Let the Church take upon itself the discipline of war tax resistance.
Discipline is not a popular word today, but it should be amenable to rehabilitation at least among Christians, who call themselves disciples of Jesus.
How quickly does the search for a way turn into the search for an easy way!
And how readily do we lay upon others those tasks which require a discipline we are not prepared to accept ourselves!
War tax resistance will involve the discipline of interpreting the Scripture and listening to the Spirit.
In a day when the Bible is most noteworthy for the extent to which it is ignored in the Church, it is an anomaly to see the pious rush to Scripture and the joining of ranks behind Romans 13, when the question of tax resistance is raised.
In a day when the authority of the Church is disobeyed everywhere with impunity, it is a curiosity to see Christians zealous for the authority of the state.
In a day when giving to the Church is the last consideration in family budgeting, and impulse rules over law, it is a shock to observe the fanaticism with which Christians insist that Caesar must be given every cent he wants.
As the Church has grown in its discernment of what the Bible teaches about slavery and the role of women, so it must grow in its discernment of what the Bible teaches about the place and authority of governments and the payment of taxes.
War tax resistance means accepting the discipline of submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the nitty-gritty of history.
Call it civil disobedience if you wish, but recognize that in reality it is divine obedience.
It is a matter of yielding to a higher sovereignty.
Those who speak for a global world order to promote justice in today’s world invite nations to yield some of their sovereignty to the higher interests of the whole, and those persons know the obstinacy of nations toward that idea.
It may be that the greatest service the Church can do the world today is to raise a clear sign to nation-states that they are not sovereign.
War tax resistance might just be a cloud the size of a person’s hand announcing to the nations that the reign of God is coming near.
It is clear that Christians will not rise to this challenge without accepting difficult and largely unfamiliar disciplines.
But then, of course, disarmament also involves disciplines.
The idea that one nation can take initiatives to limit its war-making capacities is shocking.
To do so would represent a radical break with conventional wisdom.
How is it possible to do that without first convincing all the nations that it is a good idea?
Let the Church take upon itself the sacrifices of war tax resistance.
It is never altogether clear to me whether Christians who oppose war tax resistance find it too easy a course of action, or too difficult.
It is said that refusing to send the tax to IRS and allowing it to be collected by a bank levy is too easy — a convenient way of deceiving oneself into thinking that one has done something about the arms race.
And it is said that to refuse to pay the tax is too difficult.
It is to disobey the government and thereby to bring down upon one’s head the whole wrath of the state, society, family, business associates, and probably God as well.
Moreover, the same person will say both things.
Which does he or she believe?
In most cases, I think, the second.
The sacrifices involved in war tax resistance are fairly obvious.
They may be as small as accepting the scorn which is heaped upon one for using the term “war tax” when the government doesn’t identify any tax as a war tax, or as great as serving time in prison.
It may be the sacrifice of income or another method of removing oneself from income tax liability.
It can be said with some certainty that the sacrifices will increase as the number of war tax resisters increases, because the government will make reprisals against those who challenge its rush to Armageddon.
Yet, there is the possibility that the government will get the message and change its spending priorities or provide a legislative alternative for war tax objectors, or both.
In any case, for the foreseeable future, war tax resistance will be an action that is taken at some cost to the individual or the Church institution, with no assured compensation except the knowledge that it is the right thing to do.
But then, of course, disarmament also involves sacrifices.
The temporary loss of jobs, the fear of weakened defenses, and the scorn of the mighty are not easy hurdles to cross.
A moral equivalent will have to involve some sacrifices.
Let the Church take upon itself the action of war tax resistance.
The call of Christ is a call to action.
It is plain enough that the world cannot afford $400 billion per year for military expenditures, even if this were somehow morally defensible.
It is plain enough that the dollars which Christians give to the arms race are not available to do Christ’s work of peace and justice.
In these circumstances the first step in a positive direction is to withhold money from the military.
If we say that we must wait for this until everybody and (and particularly the government) thinks it is a good idea, then we shall wait forever.
Having withheld the money, the Church must apply it to the works of peace.
What this means is not altogether obvious at present, but there is reason to believe that a faithful Church can serve as steward for these resources as wisely as generals and presidents.
The dynamic interaction between individual Christians and the Church in its local and ecumenical forms will help to guide the use of resources withheld from the arms race.
This is a call to individual Christians and the Church corporately to make war tax resistance the fundamental expression of their condemnation of the world arms race.
Neither the individual nor the corporate body dare hide any longer behind the inaction of the other.
The stakes are too high and the choice is too clear for that, though we can have no illusions that this call will be readily embraced nor easily implemented by the Church.
But then, of course, we do not think that disarmament will be an easy step for governments to take either.
The Church has an obligation to act upon what it advocates, to deliver a moral equivalent of the disarmament it proposes.
If effectiveness is the criterion, it is certainly not obvious that talking about the macro accomplishes more than acting upon the micro.
A single action taken is worth more than a hundred merely discussed.
(When it comes to heating your home in winter, you will get more help from one friend who saws up a log than from a whole school of mathematicians who calculate the BTUs in a forest.)
To talk about a worthy goal is no more laudable than to take the first step toward it, and might be less so.
Michael Miller wrote an article for the same issue that noted that the National Guard is a U.S. military combat function that is largely paid for out of state budgets, not the federal budget.
He concluded:
I am now more fully aware how the military affects our daily lives and activities.
I also realize that not only is the objection to payment of war taxes a federal issue, but it is also a very real state issue.
State budgets contain rather large amounts in this respect.
As Friends, we must be constantly aware of the issues involved with our tax dollars.
The military has a great influence over our lives and our tax dollars, whether or not we recognize it.
We have a responsibility to make ourselves aware of the issues and how they influence our lives.
Alan Eccleston contributed an article on war tax resistance as a method of testifying for peace — aligning ones life with ones values.
This, he felt, could be done in a variety of ways:
We do not have to be prepared for jail to be a war tax resister.
We do not have to be ready, at this moment, to subject ourselves to harassment by the Internal Revenue Service.
We do, however, have to be truthful on our tax returns.
We do have to be clear about our belief in the peace testimony and our desire to align our lives with this belief.
And that is all!
If you are clear about that, you can withhold some amount of your tax.
It can be a token amount, if that is where you are, say five dollars or fifty dollars.
Or it can be the same percent of your tax as the military portion of the current budget, currently thirty-six percent excluding past debt and veterans benefits.
(An easy way to do this is to insert the amount under “Credits” as a “Quaker Peace Witness,” line forty-six.
Alternately, some people declare an extra deduction, but this is more complicated, since the deduction must be substantially larger than the amount you desire to withhold.)
It may bother you that three times or even ten times what you have chosen to withhold is going to be spent for war preparations.
But far better to take this small step than to turn away from the witness. Write your congresspersons and tell them of your concern.
Urge them to pass the World Peace Tax Fund which would acknowledge your constitutional right to practice your religious beliefs without harassment and penalty.
Alternatively, if the government owes you money fill out the (very short) Form #843 “Request for Refund,” asking that they refund the amount you wish for peace witness.
One can also anticipate the withholding problem by filling out a W-4 Form at your place of employment declaring (truthfully) an allowance for expected deductions that includes the amount of your peace witness.
Then what?
You can expect a series of computer notices stating that you calculated your tax incorrectly and you owe the amount shown on the notice.
This may also include an addition of seven percent annual interest on the amount owed.
(Currently IRS seems not to be adding on penalty charges but that is a possibility.)
You have a choice: you can ignore the notice; you can write or call IRS and discuss it; or you can pay the tax.
Sooner or later you will receive a printout that says “Final Notice.”
If you again fail to pay the amount owed, you will probably receive a call from someone at IRS who will try to convince you that the whole process has gone far enough and that your purpose is better served by paying the government.
IRS wants to collect.
That is their job; when they have done it, they are through with you.
They cannot, by law, be harsh or punitive.
There is no debtors’ prison in this country.
If you declare the intent of your witness on your tax form and by letter to Congress, you cannot be convicted of fraud; therefore, you are not risking criminal penalties.
In other words, the tax resister controls the process.
One can witness to peace so long as it can be done lovingly and, if it is to be a meaningful witness of peace, that is the only way it can be done.
However, if one’s family obligations or other matters are too pressing, or if one’s spiritual resources are being unduly strained, it is time to lay down this particular witness.
One can carry on the witness and still bring the process to a conclusion by letting the payment be taken from a bank account or peace escrow fund.
Another round of letters to Congress and the president will testify to your continuing concern even after the pressure of collection has been relieved.
In your witness, no matter how small the amount withheld or how short the duration, you will gain strength and courage and insight.
This brings new resources to your next witness.
It gives you knowledge and resources to share with others, which in turn helps their witness.
In sharing, you both are strengthened.
Thus, a personal witness becomes a “community of witness,” and the “community of witness” gains strength, courage, and insight in its mutual sharing.
This witness and this sharing of Christian love becomes its own witness to the testimony of peace — the testimony of love for God, for ourselves, for humankind.
(A letter from Dorothy Ann Ware in a later issue credited the Eccleston article for spurring her to “make a token Quaker Peace Witness by withholding a very small portion of my income tax.
So Step One has been taken…”)
The same issue reprinted a Minute from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting which encouraged Quakers “to give prayerful consideration… to the option of refusal of taxes for military purposes.”
Furthermore:
We reaffirm the Minute of the yearly meeting which states in part that “…Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practices of Friends… We warmly approve of people following their conscience, and openly approve civil disobedience in this matter under Divine compulsion.
We ask all to consider carefully the implications of paying taxes that relate to war-making… Specifically, we offer encouragement and support to people caught up in the problem of seizure, and of payment against their will.”
We request the Representative Meeting to arrange for the guidance of meetings and their members on the form of military tax resistance suitable for individuals in accordance with that degree of risk appropriate to individual circumstances, for advice on consequences, and for consideration of legal and support facilities that may be organized.
We also request Representative Meeting to provide for an Alternate Fund for sufferings, set up under the yearly meeting to receive tax payments refused, for those tax refusers who may wish to utilize this fund.
We recommend cooperation with the Historic Peace Churches and other religious groups in further consideration of non-payment on religious grounds of military taxes.
Following that, John E. Runnings wrote of his and his wife Louise’s war tax resistance, and decried the injustice of a “society that requires that Quakers, who renounce war and recognize no enemies, must pay as large a contribution to the support of the war machine as those who fully accept the malicious nature of other nationals and who are so frightened of their ill intent that no amount of extermination equipment is enough to assure security.”
The social reforms that we credit to George Fox’s influence did not come about by his waiting on the Spirit but rather by his responding to the Spirit.
If just one man could accomplish so much by responding to the Spirit, what would happen if several thousand modern Quakers were to respond to their spiritually-inspired revulsion to assisting in the building of the war machine?
If Quakers could be induced to discard their excuses for their financial support of the arms race and to withhold their Federal taxes, who knows how many thousands of like-minded people might be encouraged to follow suit?
And who knows but what this might bring a halt to the mad race to oblivion?
There was a brief update about Robert Anthony’s case.
Anthony hoped to use his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination (presumably in response to a government request for financial records or something of the sort).
The judge in the case asked if the government would grant Anthony immunity from prosecution for anything he disclosed, which would have cut off the Fifth Amendment avenue of resistance, but the government wasn’t prepared to do that, and that’s where the matter stood.
The issue included a notice that the Center on Law and Pacifism had “recently published a military tax refusal guide for radical religious pacifists entitled ‘People Pay for Peace’ ” but also noted that “the Center states that it is in ‘urgent and immediate need of operating funds.’ ”
A later issue gave some more information about the Center:
The Center was started after a former Washington constitutional lawyer and theologian, Bill Durland, met a handful of conscientious objectors who were appealing to the U.S. courts for their constitutional rights to deny income tax payments for the military.…
That was in .
The Center is now producing regular newsletters and has published a handbook on military tax refusal.
It has organized war-tax workshops for pacifists representing constituencies in the Northeast, South and Midwest.
One of its projects was the “People Pay for Peace” scheme, under which it was suggested that each individual deduct $2.40 from his/her income tax return to “spend for peace”: that sum being the per capita equivalent of the $193,000,000,000 which will be consumed in for war preparation in the United States.
This was a protest action against the fifty-three percent of the U.S. budget allocated to military purposes.
The Center on Law and Pacifism is a “do-it-yourself cooperative” which relies on both volunteer professional assistance and individual contributions.
Hmmm… my calculation for 53% of the federal budget in 1979 is more like $214,618,730,000… and per-capita (by U.S. population, anyway) that would be $953.63 per person.
If you use the $193 billion value, that’s still $857.57 per person.
Even if you use world population, you still get $44.08–$49.02 each.
Somebody’s confused… maybe it’s me.
Wendal Bull penned a letter-to-the-editor in the same issue about his experience as a war tax resister twenty years before.
Excerpt:
In I received a lump sum payment of an overdue debt.
This increased my income, which I normally keep below the taxable level, to a point quite some above that level.
I distributed the unexpected income to various anti-war organizations.
I anticipated pressure from IRS officers, so in the autumn, long before the tax would be due, I disposed of all my attachable properties.
This action, under the circumstances, I believe to be unlawful.
But it seemed to me a mere technicality, far outweighed by the sin of paying for war, or the sin of permitting collection of the tax for that purpose.
After disposing of all attachable properties, I wrote to IRS telling them I had taxable income in that year but chose not to calculate the amount of it because I had no intention of paying it.
In the same letter I explained my reasons for conscientious non-cooperation with Uncle Sam’s preparations for war in the name of “defense.”
My letter appeared in full or in generous excerpts in at least three daily papers and several other publications and I mailed copies to friends who might be interested.
I am not a publicity hound nor a notorious war resister.
The publicity did seem to effect a fairly prompt visit from the Revenue Boys.
They paid me three or four visits.
On one occasion two men came; one talked, the other may have had a concealed tape recorder, or was merely to witness and confirm the conversation.
After quizzing me for an hour or more they left courteously, whereupon I said I was sorry to be a bother to them.
At that the talker said, “You’re no trouble at all.
I brought a warrant for your arrest, but I’m not going to serve it.
It’s the guys who hire lawyers to fight us that give us trouble.”
If they had caught me in a lie, or giving inconsistent answers to their probing questions, I suspect the summons would have been served.
I was fully prepared to go to court and to be declared guilty of contempt for not producing records to show the sources of my income.
I had told the men I was in contempt of the entire war machine and all officers of the legal machinery who aimed to penalize citizens for non-cooperation with war preparations.
Later came two visits from a man who attempted to assess my income for that year, and the law required him to try to get my signature to his assessment.
I considered that a ridiculous waste of taxpayer’s money.
The man agreed with a smile.
Still later, there came several bills, one at a time, for the amount of the official assessment, plus interest, plus delinquency fee, plus warnings that the bill should be paid.
These I ignored, of course.
The head men knew I would not pay; and they knew they had not any intention of trying to force collection.
I have no idea who decided to quit sending me more bills.
I think the claim is still valid since the statute of limitations does not apply to federal taxes.
It is inconvenient to have no checking account, to own no real estate, to drive an old jalopy not worth attaching, and so on.
Some of us choose this alternative rather than to let the money be collected by distraint.
In the same issue, Keith Tingle shared his letter to the IRS, which he sent along with his tax return and a payment that was 33% short.
He stressed that he didn’t mind paying taxes — “a small price for the tremendous privilege of living in the United States with its heritage of freedom, equal protection, and toleration” — but that “I do not wish my labor and my money to finance either war or military preparedness.”
Stephen M. Gulick also wrote in.
“Because the military and the corporations need our money more than our bodies, war tax resistance becomes important — in all its forms from outright and total resistance to living on an income below the taxable level,” he wrote.
“Fundamentally, war tax resistance must lead us to look not only at warmaking and the preparation for war, but also at the economic, social, and political practices that, with the help of our money, nurture the roots of war.”
Colin Bell attended the Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting:
“I think,” Colin said, “that as a Society we are standing at another moment like that, when our forebears took an absolutely unequivocal stance” and we don’t know what to do.
Are we looking for something easy, he wondered, suggesting that it probably should be tax resistance.
Accepting the title Historic Peace Church, he declared, makes it sound like a worthy option, rather than it being at the entire heart and core of Christendom.
A letter to the editor of the Peacemaker magazine from John Schuchardt is quoted in the issue:
I have recently received threatening letters from a terrorist group which asks that I contribute money for construction of dangerous weapons.
This group makes certain claims which in the past led me to send thousands of dollars to pay for its militaristic programs. The group claimed: 1) It was concerned with peace and freedom; 2) It would provide protection for me and my family; 3) It was my duty to make these payments; and 4) I was free from personal responsibility for how this money was spent in individual cases.
Last year, for the first time, I realized that these claims were fraudulent and I refused to make further payments…
That issue also noted that the Albany, New York, Meeting “joined the growing number of meetings which are calling on their members to ‘seriously consider’ war tax resistance…” That Meeting was also considering establishing its own alternative fund, and was hoping Congress would pass the World Peace Tax Fund bill.
This “seriously consider” language, along with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s earlier-mentioned call for Quakers “to give prayerful consideration” to war tax resistance, is a far cry from the sort of bold leadership John K. Stoner was calling for.
But then again, Quaker Meetings were no longer the sorts of institutions to bandy about Books of Discipline and threaten “disorderly walkers” with disownment, or even to give them “tender dealing and advice in order to their convincement.”
Meetings had in general become much more humble about what sort of direction they should provide and what sort of obedience they could expect.
It is hard to imagine a Meeting from this period adopting a commandment along the lines of the Ohio Yearly Meeting’s discipline — “a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”
The issue included a review of Donald Kaufman’s The Tax Dilemma: Praying For Peace, Paying for War, a book that defends war tax resistance from a Christian and Biblical perspective.
“What is the individual’s responsibility in the face of biblical teachings and the history of tax resistance since the early Christian centuries?
Some biblical passages have been used to justify the payment of any and all taxes.
But Kaufman warns us to consider these passages in their historical context and in the light of the primary New Testament message: love for God, oneself, one’s neighbor, and one’s enemy.”
That issue also included an obituary notice for Ashton Bryan Jones that noted “[h]is courage in the face of the harsh treatment that he endured in the struggle for social justice and against war taxes…”
The issue reported on the New England Yearly Meeting, which held a workshop on war tax resistance, and also agreed to establish a “New England Yearly Meeting Peace Tax Fund.”
Recognizing that each of us must find our own way in this matter, the new fund is seen not as a general call to Friends to resist paying war taxes but specifically to help and to hold in the Light those Friends who are moved to do so.
The fund will be administered by the Committee on Sufferings, which came into being last year to support Friends who are devoting a major portion of their time and energies to work for peace.
New Call to Peacemaking
The “New Call to Peacemaking” brought together representatives of the Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers in , and to try to strengthen their respective churches’ anti-war stands.
It continued to ripple through the pages of the Journal in .
Barbara Reynolds covered the Green Lake conference that drafted the New Call statement in the issue.
Among her observations:
In my own small group, I saw social action Friends struggling with Biblical language and coming to accept many scriptural passages as valid expressions of their own convictions.
And I saw a respected Mennonite, a longtime exponent of total Biblical nonresistance, courageously re-examining his position and corning out strongly in favor of a group statement encouraging non-payment of war taxes.
Elaine J. Crauder gave another report on the project in the issue.
Excerpts:
Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren are known as the Historic Peace Churches.
How do they witness against evil and do good?
Where does God fit into their witnessing?
Are they responding to the urgency of the present-day world situation, or are they truly “historic” peace churches, with no relevance to today’s complex world?
The New Call to Peacemaking (NCP) developed out of exactly these concerns: Where is the relevance and what is the source of our witnessing?
The answers were clear.
To seek God’s truth and to witness, in a loving way, by doing good (through peace education, cooperation in personal and professional relationships, living simply and investing only in clearly life-enhancing endeavors) and by resisting evil (working for disarmament and peace conversion, resisting war taxes and military conscription).
Crauder says she first started thinking about her support of war through her taxes in :
The 1040 Income Tax form didn’t have a space for war tax resisters.
Either I would have to lie about having dependents, or my taxes would be withheld. l didn’t feel that I had a choice.
It did not occur to me to claim a dependent and then support that person with the funds that thus wouldn’t go for war.
So, I did what was easiest — nothing — and paid my war taxes.
In , she says:
I started to think about my taxes again.
Maybe I could lie on my form.
It was definitely not right to work for peace and pay for the war machine.
I even went to one meeting of the war tax concerns committee.
But there were enough meetings that I had to go to, so I managed not to find the time to struggle with my war taxes.
Words of John Woolman seemed to fit my condition:
They had little or no share in civil government, and many of them declared they were through the power of God separated from the spirit in which wars were; and being afflicted by the rulers on account of their testimony, there was less likelihood of uniting in spirit with them in things inconsistent with the purity of Truth.
Woolman was referring to the early Quakers when he said it was less likely that they would be influenced by the civil government in questions of the truth.
It seemed to me that in Woolman’s time it was also easier to be clear about the truth — we are so much more dependent and tied to the government than they were.
Perhaps it is always easier to have a clear witness in hindsight.
I think Crauder has it a little backwards here.
Woolman was speaking of early Friends in England, who were being actively repressed by the government and banned from much of any exercise of political power, and contrasting them to the Quakers in Woolman’s own time and place (colonial Pennsylvania), where Quakers held political power, and were by far the dominant party in the colonial Assembly.
In Woolman’s time the government and the Society of Friends were as tightly linked as they ever have been.
Historical notes
In the issue, Walter Ludwig shared an interesting anecdote about Susan B. Anthony’s father, Daniel Anthony:
During the Mexican War he made the quasi tax-resisting gesture of tossing his purse on the table when the collector appeared, remarking, “I shall not voluntarily pay these taxes; if thee wants to rifle my pocketbook thee can do so.”
I hunted around for a source for this anecdote, and found one in Ida Husted Harper’s The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898), where she put it this way:
In early life he had steadfastly refused to pay the United States taxes because he would not give tribute to a government which believed in war.
When the collector came he would lay down his purse, saying, “I shall not voluntarily pay these taxes; if thee wants to rifle my pocket-book, thee can do so.”
But he lived to do all in his power to support the Union in its struggle for the abolition of slavery and, although too old to go to the front himself, his two sons enlisted at the very beginning of the war.
John Woolman was invoked in the issue as someone who “took as clear a stand on payment of taxes for military ends as he did on slavery.”
He was quoted as saying:
I all along believed that there were some upright-hearted men who paid such taxes but could not see that their example was a sufficient reason for me to do so, while I believed that the spirit of Truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods rather than pay actively.
Bruce & Ruth Graves
The issue brought an update on the case of Bruce and Ruth Graves, who were pursuing a Supreme Court appeal in the hopes of legally validating their approach of claiming a “war tax credit” on their federal income tax returns.
They were trying to get people to write letters to the Supreme Court justices, in the hopes that they would find influential the opinions of laymen on such points as these:
1) petitioners right to First Amendment free exercise of religion and freedom of expression, 2) paramount interests of government not endangered by refusal of petitioners to pay tax, 3) petitioners should be able to re-channel war taxes into peace taxes (via World Peace Tax Fund Act, etc.), 4) IRS regulations should not take precedence over Constitutional rights of individuals, 5) threat of nuclear war must be stopped by exercise of Constitutional rights, 6) other pertinent points at the option of correspondent.
There was a further note on that case in the issue — largely a plea for support, without any otherwise significant news.
Included with this was a message from the Graveses with this plea: “How can Friends maintain the secular impact of the peace testimony expressed through conscientious objection when technology has replaced the soldier’s body with a war machine?
Does it not follow that technology then shifts the emphasis of conscientious objection toward reduction of armaments by resisting payment of war taxes?”
The issue brought the news that the Supreme Court had turned down the Graveses’ appeal.
“[W]hen asked whether the frustrations of losing the long court battle had ‘generated any thoughts of quitting,’ Ruth Graves replied, ‘Never.
If I were going to let myself be stopped by seemingly hopeless causes, I’d just die right now.”
World Peace Tax Fund
A note in the issue reported that some people who had “sent in cards or letters expressing support for the [World Peace Tax Fund] bill” had reported that they had “been subjected to IRS audits and other harassment.”
A letter from Judith F. Monroe in the issue expressed some concern about the World Peace Tax Fund plan.
Excerpts:
I fear the World Peace Tax could become a device to appease the consciences of those of us who are not willing to face the consequences of civil disobedience.…
…One important purpose of the tax is to shake the complacent into a realization of the madness of our current armaments race.
I don’t believe the casual matter of checking a block on a tax form will ever cause extensive introspection on the part of most people.
How will peace tax funds be handled?
Will such a tax require more complex tax laws, IRS investigators, and tax accountants?
How can we believe in the government’s ability to use such funds constructively?
I can envision the Department of Defense receiving peace grants.
After all, they’re the boys who fight for peace.
This may be an exaggeration.
The point is I do not feel we can trust any large bureaucracy with the task of peacemaking.
If the majority or at least a sizable minority do not opt for the peace tax, all that will happen is a larger percentage of their taxes will go to armaments to compensate for the monies diverted by the few who chose a peace tax.
Under such circumstances, the peace tax would accomplish little.
Evidence of some critical appraisal of the “peace tax” idea is also found in a note in the issue, which summarizes an address by Stanley Keeble to the June General Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland:
If this were permitted, would not government simply raise military estimates to compensate for expected shortfall?
Would not people not conscientiously opposed to military “defense,” take advantage of such legislation?
Would the procedure be destructive of democracy and majority rule?
Should not individuals rather reduce their earnings to a non-taxable level, or would that deprive useful projects of legitimate funds?
Other such questions were raised, relating to possible effects on national “defense” policy.
For his part, however, Stanley Keeble felt that it was important to “bring a peace decision right to the level of the individual,” and added that of fifteen replies so far received from monthly meetings on the subject of a Peace Tax Fund, only one was completely negative, two uncertain, and “the rest endorsed the proposal whilst acknowledging certain difficulties.”
There were occasional reports on the bill’s status in Congress scattered through the issues of the Journal.
One, in the issue, said:
Endorsed by the national bodies of the Unitarian-Universalist Association, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Religious Society of Friends, this bill provides the legal alternative for taxpayers morally opposed to war that the military portion of their taxes would go into the WPTF to be used for a national peace academy, retraining of workers displaced from military production, disarmament efforts, international exchanges and other peace-related purposes; alternatively for non-military government programs.
That issue also quoted the newsletter of the Canadian Friends Service Committee on the legislation, saying: “Thousands of letters and postcards were sent to members and many meetings held across the country as well as slide-tape shows, television and radio programs. Newspaper coverage was also good.
The U.S. government is beginning to act in response.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was plenty about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , but it seemed to involve tax resisting Mennonites as least as often as tax resisting Quakers.
The issue announced that the Center on Law and Pacifism was organizing a critical mass style tax resistance action:
The Center… has prepared and has available a “Conscience and Military Tax Resolution,” which may be signed by any conscientious objector to military taxes, witnessed (not necessarily notarized), returned to the Center.
When officially notified by the Center that there are 100,000 such resolutions on file, the signer may carry out his or her resolve to withhold the military portion of the federal income tax.
Alternatively, he or she may deposit the withheld taxes in an escrow account for the World Peace Tax Fund, pending passage by Congress of the WPTF Bill, deposit them in an alternative fund or donate them to some other peace purpose.
The issue was all about anti-war work, and it opened with an article on the history of Quaker war tax resistance by editor Ruth Kilpack.
Excerpts:
[W]e should not suppose that this is a new concern among Friends and members of other Peace Churches, who, by the very nature of our faith, have a conscience tender to such questionings.
For Friends, the searching extends back to the seventeenth century, when Robert Barclay, the English Quaker apologist, wrote in :
We have suffered much in qur country because we neither ourselves could bear arms, nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.
This was the so-called “Trophy Money,” that could be distinguished as such.
But common or “mixed” taxes could not so readily be dealt with, since most Quakers believed it was their duty to pay taxes, and the part allocated to the military could not be separated out from the whole.
Today, like those earlier Quakers, we find ourselves in the same dilemma.
Law-abiding citizens, we continue to find ourselves troubled by the demand that we pay taxes for purposes we cannot in conscience condone.
We cannot pretend that we accept war as a legitimate function of the civil government which we support, and, just as some of our members have refused to serve in the armed services, many are beginning to question the contribution of our money for purposes we eschew for moral, humane, and religious reasons.
Quakers struggled with all these same questionings in the mid-eighteenth century and the period prior to the American Revolution.
One of the most articulate on the subject of war taxes was Samuel Allinson, a young Friend from Burlington, New Jersey, who in wrote “Reasons against war, and paying taxes for its support.”
The Samuel Allinson essay “Reasons against war, and paying taxes for its support” can be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.
Thus, in words written , he deals with the question of “a remnant who desire to be clear of a business so dark and destructive, that we should avoid the furtherance of it in any and every form.”
He describes it as a “stumbling block to others, [which] ought carefully to be avoided,” and sees such avoidance as advancing the Kingdom of the Messiah, that “his will be done on earth as it is done on heaven; a state possible, I presume, or he would not have taught us to pray for it.”
Further, says Samuel Allinson,
We have never entered into any contract expressed or implied for the paym[en]t of Taxes for War, nor the performance of any thing contrary to our Relig[ious] duties, and therefore cannot be looked upon as disaffected or Rebellious to any Gov[ernment] for these refusals, if this be our Testimony under all, which many believe it will hereafter be.
And finally, Samuel Allinson points out that even though earlier Friends paid their taxes (including that going to the military), that is no good reason for our continuing to do so.
It is not to be wondered at, or an argument drawn against a reformation in the refusal of Taxes for War at this Day, that our Brethren formerly paid them; knowledge is progressive, every reform[atio]n had its beginning, even the disciples were for some time ignorant of many religious Truths, tho’ they had the Company and precepts of our Savior…
Friends, we find ourselves in the very position of the Friends being addressed by Samuel Allinson two centuries ago.
For myself, I cannot think it is by sheer accident that I have stumbled upon his words now.
Neither is it by accident that a growing “remnant” of Friends are awakening to the ambivalence we feel in what we profess and what we practice regarding our involvement in the awesome “stumbling block” of nuclear warfare in our own age.
Friends in the past responded to the threats of the age in which they lived according to the light they had.
We of our generation have been given even greater light, and we must respond accordingly.
Given our heritage, if we don’t respond, who will?
In the meantime, I ask you to think on these things and, to paraphrase George Fox’s advice to William Penn, “Pay thy tax as long as thou canst.”
In the issue, Keith Tingle told readers that they should know “how easy it is to do” war tax resistance… at least in his experience:
My own experience in military tax resistance has been rewarding thus far.
By claiming a tax credit for conscientious objection to war on my income tax form, I was refunded $260 from my taxes.
Now that the IRS has discovered its mistake, I am resisting through federal tax court the recollection of this money.
My appearance in tax court has been reported favorably in three local newspapers, providing an opportunity to publicize the Quaker peace testimony, the history of war tax resistance, the economic impact of military spending, the pacifist position on the military draft, the concept of the World Peace Tax Fund, and the legal assistance offered by the Center on Law and Pacifism.
This has been accomplished with a total expense of about $30 and about thirty hours of time.
I have enjoyed the dedicated support of the Committee on War Tax Concerns of Friends Peace Committee and the legal guidance of lawyer Bill Durland at the Center on Law and Pacifism…
The issue noted that conscientious objection to military taxation was on the agenda at the Kent General Meeting in Canterbury, England — though from the sound of it, this was mostly in a theoretical way: presenting the argument that such a thing was a logical and practical counterpart of conscientious objection to military service.
That issue also reported on the case of Cornelia Lehn, an employee of the General Conference Mennonite Church who was trying to convince her employer to stop withholding federal income tax from her salary:
There was a “neither yes nor no” vote on this request by the 500 delegates present.
Those who favored a strong tax resistance program did not Nor did those who wanted members to unquestioningly pay taxes as a Christian duty.
There was a feeling, however, that neither side really lost.
Thirty percent of the delegates were ready for the conference to take action in “some sort of civil disobedience and tax resistance” and it was hoped the number will grow.
I’m struck by this last phrase — “it was hoped the number will grow” — which makes a pretty clear editorial statement of sympathy for those who favored corporate resistance by the Conference and antipathy for “those who wanted members to unquestioningly pay taxes as a Christian duty.”
At this time, few if any Quaker Meetings or organizations were willing to go out on that limb, in spite of strong urgings from Quaker war tax resisters that they do so.
But I don’t remember the Journal betraying an editorial bias when it reported on this debate in Quaker institutions.
One case in point is a report on the New England Yearly Meeting in which the lukewarm statement is made that “We approved a minute asking New England Friends to give prayerful consideration to non-payment of war taxes.”
The New York Yearly Meeting went so far as to “discuss” a “minute on Refusal of Taxes for Military Purposes” and to note that it “was to be commended for consideration by all monthly meetings and individuals.”
The issue had a followup in which the General Conference of the Mennonite Church was proposing launching a lawsuit in which it would seek a judicial ruling to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation, while at the same time it would increase its efforts to pass the “World Peace Tax Fund” legislation.
Maurice McCracken had a piece of autobiography in the issue.
Naturally, it touched on his tax resistance:
I had decided that I would never register again for the draft nor would I consent to being conscripted by the government in any other capacity.
In contradiction to this position, each year on April 15 I was letting the government conscript my money.
Thus I was voluntarily helping the government do what I vigorously declared was wrong.…
Realizing this inconsistency, I decided that in good conscience I could no longer make full payment of my federal taxes.
At the same time, I did not want to stop supporting civilian services supported by the government.
So, in my tax returns I continued to pay the small percentage allocated for civilian use.
The amount that I formerly had given for war purposes I hoped now to give to such causes as the American Friends Service Committee and to support other works of mercy and reconciliation which help remove the roots of violence and war.
As time went on I realized, however, that this was not accomplishing what had been my hope; for year after year the IRS ordered my bank to release money from my account to pay the money I had held back.
I then closed my bank account, and at this point it came to me with complete clarity that by so much as filing tax returns I was giving the IRS assistance in the violation of my own conscience, because the very information I was giving on my tax forms was being used in finally making the collection.
There is something else that those who withhold a portion of their tax on conscientious grounds should realize.
The IRS does not practice line budgeting.
All that it collects goes where the government wants it to go, which in ever-increasing proportion goes to finance wars, past, present and future.
I have not filed any tax returns, nor have I paid any federal income tax.
On , on charges growing out of my refusal to pay this tax, I was given a six-month sentence, which I spent at Allenwood, Pennsylvania, which is run by the Lewisburg penitentiary.
Some two years my release from Allenwood, in , the Presbytery of Cincinnati, on charges quite unrelated to the real issues, suspended me as a minister.
In , this action was upheld by the General Assembly, the highest court of the denomination.
In the presbytery declared my ordination to the ministry no longer valid, making a highly questionable presumption that they could cancel out whatever spiritual grace the Holy Spirit had bestowed on me when I was ordained at a meeting of Chicago Presbytery back in .
For nearly eighteen years our congregation has been a member of the National Council of Community Churches.
I have been accepted as a minister in full standing, and whatever validity my ordination had back in , is, for them, still valid.
A note in the issue recognized 86-year-old Pearl Ewald’s persistent activism: “Pearl Ewald continued her activities for peace, civil rights and war tax resistance, despite a recurring heart condition.
She has been arrested and jailed more than once for stubbornly refusing to discontinue her witness.
On one occasion, although desperately in need of medical attention, she refused to be admitted to a hospital, because it was a segregated institution.”
That same issue mentioned the case of Mennonite war tax resister Bruce Chrisman, “who was convicted of failure to file an income tax return in , was sentenced to one year in Mennonite Voluntary Service,” to which I can only think: “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch, Your Honor!”
“I’m amazed,” said Chrisman.
“I feel very good about the sentence.
The alternative service is probably the first sentence of its kind for a tax case.
I think it reflects the testimony in the trial and its influence on the judge.”
Chrisman could have been sentenced to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.
A letter from Mildred Thierman in the same issue challenged Friends:
Could we now unite this year in sending a flood of personal declarations to President Carter and our government, saying that we can no longer, in conscience, allow part of our taxes to be used for the purchase of annihilating weapons?
Can we back this up by joining together in significant numbers to withhold whatever portion of our income tax fits our circumstances, in order to make our protest noticed?
A review of Conscience in Crisis: Mennonites and Other Peace Churches in America, , Interpretation and Documents in the issue, summarized its version of the history of Quaker war tax resistance this way:
Testimony against participation in the military and refusal to pay Trophy Money — the English tax to raise money for military regalia (arms were, by law, furnished by the individual soldiers) — were traditional Friends’ observances by the beginning of the period covered by Conscience in Crisis.…
…Friends and other Peace Church members were, by and large, loyal subjects.
They paid taxes “for the King’s use” — including the royal decision to make war.
Friends began to question payment of taxes more broadly.
The essential issue, according to the authors, was that “the individual is responsible for the actions of his government in a free society.”
Israel Pemberton, John Pemberton, John Churchman, John Woolman, and nineteen other Friends petitioned the Assembly on the issue of taxes in :
…Yet as the raising Sums of Money, and putting them into the Hands of Committees, who may apply them to Purposes inconsistent with the peaceable Testimony we profess, and have borne to the World, appears to us in its Consequences to be destructive of our religious Liberties, we apprehend many among us will be under the Necessity of suffering rather than consenting thereto by the Payment of a Tax for such Purposes…
By the time of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, Friends decided not to discuss the issue of “mixed” taxes because of a significant lack of consensus.
Yet, Friends were increasingly beginning to question less direct forms of support for war not traditionally inconsistent with the peace testimony.
an illustration from the issue of Friends Journal
In the issue, Alan Eccleston wrote of his calling as a peacemaker, and how that manifested for him.
Excerpts:
For me personally, the witness to peace has led to war tax resistance.
Over the past six years of this witness I have been — and still am — strengthened by others who are not, themselves, war tax resisters.
The witness of war tax resistance is one that raises fear.
We have been conditioned to fear the Internal Revenue Service as something nearly equivalent to a ruthless secret police, in its imagined power to terrorize.
Most of us, unwilling to admit, even to ourselves, that fear alone would block us from a spiritual witness, find other reasons for willingly paying to produce weapons that can annihilate all humankind.
Based on my own experience, I would say fear imagined is greater in most people than fear actually experienced, and that this is by a factor of ten, at least — maybe 100. Fortunately, borrowing from each other’s experience and knowing others will be there to help us, we can find the courage to move ahead.
Then comes the surprise.
With dread and foreboding we make our stand.
Then, gradually, we become aware that a great weight has been lifted from us.
That nagging, cumbersome burden of blocking from consciousness our own complicity with this evil has fallen away.
We are lighter, more open, more truthful.
We are free, at last, to speak truth to power.
When this affirmation is truly clear in our lives, it will be seen and felt by the president and by Congress.
As in , when C.O. status was incorporated in the Selective Service Act, the tax laws will then be amended to create C.O. status for taxpayers and a “World Peace Tax Fund.”
That legislation, approved by the world’s leading arms supplier, will move the world one step closer to peace.
That portion of our population (approximately four percent during the Vietnam War) which is pacifist would then contribute to peace, not war, and these contributions would total in excess of $2.3 billion every single year — year after year.
For the first time in history, peace programs would have a significant budget.
The funds could be used to support: a National Academy of Peace and Conflict Resolution; research to develop and evaluate non-military, nonviolent solutions to international conflict; disarmament; retaining workers displaced by conversion from military production; international exchanges for peaceful purposes; improvement of international health, education and welfare; and education of the public about the above activities.
The Friends General Conference in drafted “A Statement of Conscience by Quakers Concerned” and collected signatures.
The statement said, in part:
We advocate conscientious refusal to register for the draft and wish young men of draft age throughout the United States to know that if, after thoughtfully considering the reasons and consequences, they refuse to register, we will give them practical and moral support in every way we can, even though our willingness to do so may result in our prosecution, fines and possible imprisonment for disobeying a man-made law that leads us in the direction of war.
Mary Bye wrote in response that although she signed the statement, it felt to her to be something “like a hollow gesture.”
[M]aybe we [adults] should make sure about the beam in our adult eyes before we concentrate on the motes in those bright young eyes of the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds.
“[W]hat would be our reaction to young Quakers pointing out that since it takes money as well as men to fight a war, they encourage Friends beyond draft age to refuse war taxes?
Finally, the issue presented the case of Ruth Larson Hatcher.
Excerpt:
Not wishing to contribute tax money for war-making purposes, she managed for years to have an income just sufficient for survival but not large enough to require payment of taxes.
Then in a friend persuaded her to accept the management and bookkeeping of a children’s art center.
Conscientious and religious beliefs caused her to oppose acceptance of insurance benefits under Social Security, as well as the payment of taxes for war.
Her claims for exemption under various sections of the Internal Revenue code of as well as under the First and Fifth Amendments were routinely rejected, until a Supreme Court judge approved her use of Form No. 4361. It seems that this form (and another previously ignored by the authorities) had been used by an Amish sect to avoid the taxes (and payments) of the social security system.
Although the Court of Appeals handed down the opinion that exemptions were enacted to accommodate individuals commanded by their conscience or their religion to oppose acceptance of insurance benefits, it refused to accept that this was the exact status of petitioner Ruth Hatcher.
It’s a little unclear what took place here, but it sounds like this is saying that the courts left an opening for people who were not members of sects that qualified for an exemption from the social security system but who held similar beliefs to gain the same exemption.
Interesting if true.
I was able to find the appeals court decision that ruled against Hatcher, and the earlier Tax Court decision to the same effect, and the District Court decision that affirmed the Tax Court decision.
I was not able to find any record of Supreme Court action on the case, but I did find some other cases that cited the Appeals Court decision as precedent, which seems to suggest that the Supreme Court didn’t overturn it (as the above excerpt implies).
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance remained very much on the agenda at the Friends Journal at the beginning of the Reagan era of aggressive military build-up in .
A letter from Jenny Duskey in the issue read, in part:
I belong to a community of disciples called Publishers of Truth.
Our testimony is that Christ’s disciples can have no part in war or preparation for war, and that this means not joining the military or being drawn into legally designated “alternatives” to conscription even when the law demands, as well as not paying taxes destined for military use when we can refuse them.
“Publishers of Truth” (see also the advertisement pictured in ♇ ) was centered around Larry and Lisa Kuenning, who came to prophesy an emerging paradise on Earth, centered on Farmington, Maine.
I’m tempted to do some further research in this direction, but am afraid of getting lost in some interesting by-ways.
Lisa Kuenning was a collaborator with Timothy Leary, and for a time an important figure in the psychedelic renaissance.
Last I checked, the Kuennings were running Quaker Heritage Press, which specializes in reprints of old Quaker books.
The issue had an in-depth article by Richard K. MacMaster on Christian Obedience in [American] Revolutionary Times, that included a discussion of Quaker responses to war taxes and militia exemption taxes.
Excerpts:
The Pennsylvania Assembly voted on to recommend to conscientious objectors “that they cheerfully assist in proportion to their abilities, such persons as cannot spend both time and substance in the service of their country without great injury to themselves and families.”
This would be a subsidy to poorer Associators, men who could not supply themselves with a musket and bayonet and needed help from their neighbors.
It was a far cry from the kind of nonpolitical relief work that the sects had in mind.
The Continental Congress did not help matters when it decreed in that members of the Peace Churches should “contribute liberally in this time of universal calamity, to the relief of their distressed brethren.”
Were these distressed brethren the poor of Boston or poor families in their own neighborhood or George Washington’s makeshift army camped on the hills overlooking Boston harbor?
The Peace Churches took the Congressional resolve as a last-minute reprieve and insisted that their contributions were for the poor, even though the money would be turned over to the County Committee.
“For we gave it in good faith for the needy,” a Lancaster County Brethren pastor explained, “and the man to whom we gave it gave us a receipt stating that the money would be used for that purpose.”
The Lancaster County experience was repeated in other Pennsylvania counties and in other colonies where Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites were numerous.
Most communities tried voluntary contributions, but in Frederick County, Maryland, and Berks County, Pennsylvania, the committees levied fines on men of military age who did not drill with the Associators.
The nonresistant sects had fallen into a trap.
No matter how they labeled them, the authorities understood their voluntary contributions as donations to the war chest.
And if contributions failed to come voluntarily, they were already preparing for compulsory payment of money as an equivalent to military service.
Time was running out on the Peace Churches by .
Soon after the elections, military associators began petitioning the Pennsylvania Assembly that
some decisive Plan should be fallen upon to oblige every Inhabitant of the Province either with his Person or Property to contribute towards the general Cause, and that it should not be left, as at present, to the Inclinations of those professing tender Conscience, but that the Proportion they shall contribute, may be certainly fixed and determined.
These petitions asked much more than an increased tax assessment on the conscientious objectors.
The petitions explicitly stated that every member of the community had an obligation to make some contribution to the common cause; the additional tax would be a concession to those who could not meet that obligation on the field of battle.
The Peace Churches rightly put their case on the high ground of religious freedom.
Quakers expressed their “Concern on the Endeavours used to induce you to enter into Measures so manifestly repugnant to the Laws and Charter of this Province, and which, if enforced, must subvert that most essential of all Privileges, Liberty of Conscience.”
They asked the Assembly not to infringe the solemn assurance given them in Penn’s Charter, “that we shall not be obliged ‘to do or suffer any Act or Thing contrary to our religious Persuasion.’ ”
The revolutionary government rose to the challenge.
All sixty-six members of the Philadelphia Committee proceeded in a body to the Assembly chamber to present their response to the Quaker address to the Speaker of the House.
The same day, the Assembly heard petitions from the Officers of the Military Association of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia and from a Committee of Privates.
They first narrowly construed the grant of religious freedom in the Charter and threw out of court the sectarian contention that religion was more than a Sunday worship service.
We cannot alter the Opinion we have ever held with Regard to those parts of the Charier quoted by the Addressors, that they relate only to an Exemption from any Acts of Uniformity in Worship, and from paying towards the Support of other religious Establishments, than those to which the Inhabitants of this Province respectively belong.
The representation from the Committee of Privates went still further.
They insisted that “Those who believe the Scriptures must acknowledge that Civil Government is of divine Institution, and the Support of it enjoined to Christians.”
Quakers ought not to question what governments did, according to this Committee of Privates, but simply obey; God had ordained the powers and thereby gave sanction to every action of the state.
The lines were thus clearly drawn between the sectarian view of supremacy of conscience and the secular view of the primacy of the state.
The Mennonites and Church of the Brethren simply set down the limits of what they could do in good conscience.
Their petition made little difference to the course of events.
The day after the Mennonite and Brethren statement was read the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to require everyone of military age who would not drill with the Associators “to contribute an Equivalent to the time spent by the Associators in acquiring the military Discipline.”
Later in , the Assembly imposed a tax of two pounds and ten shillings on non-Associators, which would be remitted for those who joined a military unit.
Under new pressure from the Associators they raised the tax to three pounds and ten shillings in .
The Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention incorporated the principle of taxing conscientious objectors as an equivalent to military service in the Declaration of Rights they adopted.
It made explicit what most Patriots already believed:
That every Member of Society hath a right to be protected in the Enjoyment of Life, Liberty and property and therefore is bound to Contribute his proportion towards the Expence of that protection and yield his personal Service when necessary or an equivalent… Nor can any Man who is conscientiously scrupulous of bearing Arms be justly compelled thereto if he will pay such equivalent.
Participation in warfare was a universal obligation, in their view, falling equally on every citizen; those who could not fight must pay others to fight in their place.…
The Assembly and the Convention clearly intended to make the Peace Churches pay for war and imposed the tax as an avowed equivalent to military service.… Religious pacifists carried the whole burden of the tax.
But a tax imposed on conscientious objectors as an equivalent to joining the army and intended for the military budget definitely infringed on the religious liberty guaranteed by William Penn’s Charter.
The war tax issue thus arose in a context of freedom of conscience curtailed for those whose Christian faith forbade their “giving, or doing, or assisting in any Thing by which Men’s Lives are destroyed or hurt.”
Maryland and North Carolina followed Pennsylvania’s example in levying a special tax on conscientious objectors; the North Carolina law made payment the grounds for exemption from actual service with the army.
Virginia and several other states required conscientious objectors to hire substitutes to take their place whenever their company of militia was drafted for combat duty.
Special tax assessments for military purposes passed every state legislature as the war dragged on.
And the rapidly depreciating Continental and state paper money that fueled a run-away inflation was itself a war tax.
Wherever Quakers, Mennonites, or Brethren lived, the problem of paying for war soon caught up with them
Could a valid distinction be made between military service and war taxes?
The Reverend John Carmichael, Scottish Presbyterian pastor in Chester County, Pennsylvania, had little sympathy with the nonresistant sects who refused to pay war taxes, but he saw no distinction between fighting and paying the cost of war.
In Rom 13, from the beginning, to the 7th verse, we are instructed at large the duty we owe to civil government, but if it was unlawful and anti-Christian, or anti-scriptural to support war, it would be unlawful to pay taxes; if it is unlawful to go to war, it is unlawful to pay another to do it, or to go do it.
Some Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers agreed that no real distinction could be made and consequently refused to pay taxes levied for military purposes.
In his sermon, Carmichael spoke of Mennonites “who for the reasons already mentioned will not pay their taxes, and yet let others come and take their money, where they can find it, and be sure they will leave it where they can find it handily.”
They would not resist the tax collector in any way; but they could not cooperate in wrongdoing by voluntarily paying war taxes.
The law took this practice into account and permitted collectors to seize the property of those would not pay their own taxes.
Quakers officially discouraged payment of war taxes and militia fines.
Many Friends went to jail for their refusal and still a larger number allowed the authorities to take horses, cattle, furniture, farm implements and tools to pay their taxes.
They refused to accept any money from the sale of their goods over and above the tax and fine.
In the Shenandoah Valley and in other Quaker communities, their neighbors found rare bargains when the sheriff sold a Quaker farmer’s property for taxes and purposely kept the bidding low.
Virginia Yearly Meeting protested to the authorities about the sale of slaves, freed by their Quaker masters in defiance of the law, who were taken up and sold to pay their former masters’ war taxes.
Refusal to pay taxes for military purposes had a close parallel in Quaker refusal to pay taxes to support an established Church; they accepted the right of civil government to appropriate money for either purpose, but denied that civil government could coerce their consciences, even at the cost of jail sentences.
This was a minority position among English and American Friends, even after John Woolman prodded their conscience on war taxes.
Woolman’s influence can be seen in a circular letter issued by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in , when Braddock’s defeat left Pennsylvania exposed to French and Indian raids and the Assembly ordered new taxes for mounting a fresh campaign.
The tax was a general one, including military appropriations with all the other functions of civil governments, but Friends agreed “as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.”
The issue in was much clearer: the taxes were levied entirely for military purposes and intended as an equivalent to military service.
With the passage of years, Friends had the meaning of nonresistance in much sharper focus and a much greater number accepted the challenge of faithful discipleship.
Mennonites also responded to the challenge by refusing to pay war taxes.
When the Pennsylvania Assembly passed an act in to require a tax of three pounds and ten shillings from everyone of military age who refused to turn out with the militia, Mennonite opinion was divided.
Christian Funk, bishop in the Franconia congregation, allowed payment of the tax and tried to convince his brother ministers.
But refusal to pay war taxes had taken deep roots in the Mennonite tradition by .
The mere rumor that Funk permitted payment of the tax was enough to bring complaints against him at the time of preparation for the Lord’s Supper in and to lead to his ouster from the ministry.
All of the preachers and a great many other Mennonites in eastern Pennsylvania opposed payment of the tax.
Andrew Ziegler, bishop in the Skippack congregation, spoke for them, when he declared: “I would as soon go into the war, as to pay the three pounds ten shillings if I were not concerned for my life.”
Zeigler and others could see little difference between fighting and paying for war.
In the face of a long-standing tradition of paying taxes without questioning the purpose of the tax, men of faith testified from their own conscience that for them there could be no distinction between refusing to fight and refusing to pay for war.
These Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers willingly accepted the penalty for their conscientious objection to war taxes in imprisonment and loss of property far in excess of the tax.
Their action reminded their brethren of the need for careful discrimination in rendering to Caesar the things that are really Caesar’s. They refused to let a majority vote in the legislature be their conscience and rejected the easy way of confusing Caesar’s will with the will of God.
In the same issue, Bill Durland of the Center on Law and Pacifism reviewed the attempts to get a sympathetic court hearing in the United States for the argument that conscientious objection to military taxation is a Constitutionally-protected right of citizens.
He described the founding of the Center in by himself, Robert Anthony, Bruce & Ruth Graves, Barbara & Howard Lull, Peter Herby, and Richard McSorley, and then described the various avenues of appeal the group was pursuing in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Anthony put his legal argument this way: to be compelled to pay war taxes “would force [him] to accept a creed, and practice a form of worship foreign to his convictions, and to establish as the only normative religious belief and practice, that adhered to by most Christian denominations, i.e., that it is both a Christian and an American duty to fight in just wars and pay for them.”
The Supreme Court wasn’t interested.
The Center tried again with the Graves’ case, asserting that the First Amendment’s assertion that “Congress shall make no law… prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” means that the governmental interest in having an efficient and uncomplicated tax system is trumped by the citizen’s right to a religious practice that forbids funding war.
Again, the Supreme Court turned up its nose.
The Center then made an attempt with the Lulls & Peter Herby as petitioners.
As the First Amendment arguments had failed to make any headway, this time they made a Hail Mary pass with a Ninth Amendment argument.
“This amendment recognizes that there are certain fundamental, inalienable rights not enumerated in the Constitution which the people possess that are preexisting to any constitution, are inherent in the individual, and are not subject to divestment either partially or completely by the state.
These rights have also been called ‘natural’ and are those held by an individual in a state of absolute liberty.
In contracting to enter into a state of society, the people collectively, and the person individually, only divest themselves of those natural rights which they expressly relinquish by enumeration.”
Nice try, but the Supreme Court yet again denied cert.
The article notes that in addition to First Amendment-based arguments, “each of the three cases raised at the Federal Court level a compelling legal position based on International Law and, in particular, the Nuremberg Principles.”
(Not compelling enough, apparently.)
An article in the same issue, by William Strong, profiles war tax resister Bruce Chrisman.
Excerpts:
[H]e cannot pay that portion of his federal taxes that he knows will be used for preparations for war.
For that, he is serving a criminal sentence that includes one year of humanitarian service without pay, three years of probation, a fine of $2,400 for court costs, and the payment of all back taxes due.
He deems this result a moral victory, however — the sentence could have been up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Over the years Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s minutes have reflected the repeated return of the war tax concern.
In a striking, sensitive minute was approved.
The unity reached at that time calls upon “all Friends to continue to search themselves deeply on their responsibility to separate themselves from preparations for war.”
Where does that searching lead?
“We encourage dialogue between conscientious war tax refusers and other concerned people struggling with the issue of paying war taxes.
We seek to build a community of deeply committed persons.”
Friends offer their real support — spiritual, moral, legal, and material — to that growing community, and close the minute by reaffirming:
Our strength and our security are derived from our belief in the reality of a loving God and the oneness of that of God in all people.
In order to say yes to this belief, we must seriously consider saying no to payment of war taxes.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s “War Tax Concerns Support Committee” works to carry out that minute.
Its mandate is broad, from war tax refusal and resistance, questing for administrative (IRS) and judicial relief, to a spectrum of wholly positive approaches.
The committee seeks “legislative relief” in pursuing the World Peace Tax Fund law that proposes alternative service for war taxes, for conscientious objectors to monetary conscription.
In the war tax concerns section of our Peace Testimony, as in most fields of Quaker endeavor, certain Friends are ’way out front.
They have been going down a committed road for years.
George and Lillian Willoughby, Bob Anthony, Lorraine Cleveland, and Robin Harper in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting come to mind.
“Not to worry” — most of us are beginners, and we don’t need to catch up.
What stride do we take this year — or this quarter — in the Light? We tackle the big issues by taking the next step, getting a bit more involved.
Saying “no” to that small, lingering, now two percent Vietnam War telephone tax, which does indeed produce a billion dollars in direct war taxes, is one such step.
Adjusting our withholding so that we take more control of our tax payments, with more options, is another.
Or do we match what the government requires of us in war taxes with comparable contributions to peace organizations?
Everyone ultimately decides his own next step, but often it comes out of shared, caring discussion with other Friends, “wrestling as I am, with the harder questions of our faith and practice.”
That issue also had a few short notes that mentioned war tax resistance:
“In Japan, COMIT (Conscientious Objection to Military Tax) is planning to sue the government for breach of constitution by taxing for war.”
“In Switzerland, 300 people belonging to the group ‘Pour une Politique de Paix Active’ refused to pay their military tax or some part of the duty levied for national defense.”
“[N]ine members of the Pacific Yearly Meeting Peace Committee testified ‘against rendering unto Caesar that which is God’s’ by declaring their solidarity with those Friends who refuse to cooperate with war taxes and draft registration.
Some seventeen others present at the yearly meeting also signed the statement.”
“A statement from Orange County Meeting asks: ‘If we recognize our involvement in militarism through the payment of taxes used for military purposes but do not act to end such involvement, then are we not hypocritical to tell Friends faced with registration to refuse military service?’ ”
The issue included a mention that the Australian Yearly Meeting was pursuing its own Peace Tax Fund plan “as a method of allowing taxpayers to direct a proportion of their tax to peace purposes instead of military spending.”
The issue noted that a “Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes is preparing a packet of study materials to provide information on the biblical basis of war taxes and the World Peace Tax Fund… together with suggestions for personal and political action.”
Maurice McCracken wrote in to the issue to chide anti-war activists for their timidity.
Excerpts:
Indeed it is a feeble gesture to do what we do not believe in; even though we protest doing it.
The only valid protest is resistance and complete noncooperation with what we believe to be wrong.
[A] law… threatens anyone who advises a young man not to register for the draft with the same penalty as the non-registrant — a possible prison sentence of five years and a possible fine of $5,000. In the draft registration resistance movement I find that considerable time is spent on how to counsel young men about registration so it will not appear that we are actually advising them not to register.
Why this hesitancy and timidity?
I not only advise young men of draft age not to register.
I urge them not to register.
This military juggernaut which threatens to destroy all human life and all animal and plant life on the planet must be stopped.
It must be resisted at the point of not filing a federal income tax return and of not registering for the draft.
A thief-says, “Your money or your life.”
The Pentagon says, “Your money and your life!”
I refuse to give either one!
Won’t you join me?
In the issue, E. Raymond Wilson tried to envision a “Quaker Peace Program” that would be adequate to the challenges of .
He advocated working toward a more powerful U.N., drastic disarmament, global economic/social development with an emphasis on underdeveloped areas, and active reconciliation of global adversaries.
Much of this work would involve lobbying and other pleading with powerful people whose inclinations are largely in the opposite direction; but there was also a nod toward conscientious objection:
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal
Friends should seriously consider the recommendations of the Second New Call to Peacemaking Conference that individuals should withhold all or part of their income tax going to military and war appropriations, now estimated at more than forty-eight percent of the budget controlled by Congress.
War tax resistance came up at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in .
War tax resister John Beer wrote down some questions that people had about resisting, and in a Friends Journal issue , Bill Strong (of the Meeting’s “War Tax Concerns Support Committee”) answered them.
The questions were:
“If we refuse $100 of our federal war taxes and give it to some organization working for peace, what steps will the IRS take?”
“What options do we have in dealing with the IRS actions?”
“Is the initial letter we send with our tax return, stating the reasons for our tax refusal, important in terms of the subsequent legal proceedings?”
“Should we get help from a lawyer or tax refusal group in composing the letter?”
“What kind of advice can you provide which will allow us to profit from the experience of those who are already refusing to pay war taxes?”
“What happens to persons who refuse war taxes year after year?”
Some excerpts from the answers give a window into how war tax resistance was practiced by Quakers and by Meetings:
Both at Celo (NC) Meeting and at Central Philadelphia Meeting members asked others to share their examination or audit with IRS agents.
The first was in the refusers’ home, the latter in a federal office building.…
One Friend has been refusing for 23 years.
His witness continues and collection is still in the future, so much of the obligations of the early years have lapsed.
Another Friend, whose refusal goes back even further, has had the funds due taken at irregular intervals from her checking account.
A report in the issue noted that the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting in had “considered a minute on war tax concerns” based on queries from the New Call to Peacemaking Conference:
“If we believe that fighting war is wrong, does it not follow that paying for war is wrong?
If we urge resistance to the draft, should we not also resist the conscription of our material resources?”
The minute concluded: “We reassert the historic peace witness of the Society of Friends.
We commit ourselves to wrestle with the contradictions between our testimony and our government’s tax regulations.
To continue quiet payment for war preparations is to the conditions for war.”
Each meeting was urged to appoint a representative to the World Peace Tax Fund.
Finally, the issue brought a meditation on “the peaceable kingdom” by Susan Furry.
She believed that the Kingdom of God, the peaceable commonwealth, was “at hand” as Jesus said it was, and that it was the duty of Christians to “begin to live there.”
She reflected on how she came to include war tax resistance in her vision of how to carry this out:
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal
…I felt that I had to begin to look into the question of war tax resistance.
This led to a long period of study and self-examination.
To me, becoming a war tax resister meant making a final commitment to pacifism, and I didn’t do it lightly.
It took a lot of prayer and thought and the help and support of many people in my meeting to bring me to a point of clearness, where I know, solidly and comfortably, that this action is right for me.
Since then I have found myself being led not only to resist war taxes for myself but also to speak about it to others and to offer counsel and support to those who are considering this action.
I have helped prepare a packet called “Quakers and War Taxes” which is on sale at my meeting and have been involved in setting up the New England Friends Peace Tax Fund, an escrow fund for tax resisters under the care of my yearly meeting: I’ve been given a lot of encouragement to continue and to grow in my tax resistance activities through the support of others in my meeting, many of whom are not tax resisters themselves but friends who recognize that it is the right thing for me to do.
I’ve found that obedience to the divine leading I have felt in this matter has brought me closer to God, has given me new courage, and has opened me to further leadings.
In practical terms, war tax resistance seems to be a futile, irrational, and perhaps risky undertaking.
I think by now I’ve probably heard all the possible arguments against it.
The only answer I can really give is, “This is something I must do, to be faithful to my conscience and my understanding of God’s will.”
For it is part of the foolishness of God, which is wiser than human wisdom, as Paul tells us in First Corinthians.
It requires me to acknowledge my dependence on God’s guidance and strength.
I don’t know where my action will lead in practical terms, but I trust God to make use of it; I don’t know what the consequences will be for me personally, but I trust God to help me to face them.
In one way or another, perhaps, peacemaking may bring all of us to that place of acknowledging our dependence on God.
For me it has come through tax resistance.
For another it may come through the old dilemma about Hitler or through an experience of physical violence on the street.
In any case one comes to a place where one has to say, “I don’t know what will happen, but I place my trust in the God of love and accept the consequences.”
In coming to rely on God more, I have begun to learn that God really is dependable.
I have felt God working through the beautiful support I have received from many individuals and from my meeting.
I’ve been to tax court twice and was sustained by a powerful sense of God’s presence.
I’ve faced the certainty of financial loss and found that it doesn’t trouble me as much as I feared it would.
However, I still worry about the future; I haven’t reached the point where I can really leave it all in God’s hands.
Sometimes I even wonder about going to jail.
Right now the government isn’t prosecuting many war tax resisters, but it is always a possibility.
My actions are not very unusual; there are over forty war tax resisters in my meeting alone and many more in New England.
I know many people who have sacrificed more and taken greater risks for peace than I have.
But I have learned that when you follow God one step down the road, God usually asks you to take another step.
Who knows what God may ask of me in the future?
I have friends who have gone to jail for conscience’ sake, and I wonder if I could face that if it came to me.
My action in refusing to voluntarily pay taxes for war is largely symbolic — like the early Christians who refused to put a pinch of incense on Caesar’s altar.
Is it worth the risk to make a symbolic gesture?
Such questions take me back to the Christian roots of my faith.
I know that my way of thinking about these things and the language I use do not work for everybody, but these are the symbols which make sense to me, so I must use them.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Is the dilemma facing pacifist Quakers who are asked to pay a war tax best resolved by conscientious objection and civil disobedience, or by lawsuits and lobbying?
Both approaches could be found in the pages of the Friends Journal in .
On , the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, in U.S. v. Lee, that an Amish person who conscientiously objected to the social security system did not thereby have a First Amendment right to opt out of it.
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.
Because the broad public interest in maintaining a sound tax system is of such a high order, religious belief in conflict with the payment of taxes affords no basis for resisting the tax.
As a reductio ad absurdum on the losing legal argument, the court noted that if Lee were allowed to assert the right to opt out of social security on conscientious grounds, it would open the door to other similar challenges:
If, for example, a religious adherent believes war is a sin, and if a certain percentage of the federal budget can be identified as devoted to war-related activities, such individuals would have a similarly valid claim to be exempt from paying that percentage of the income tax.
A note in the issue of the Friends Journal noted that this had also slammed the door on the various First Amendment arguments for conscientious objection to war taxes that people had been pursuing:
In the light of a negative judgment rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court against an Amish employer on , the judicial action committee of the General Conference Mennonite Church has recommended to its General Board that a planned suit against the IRS on the issue of tax withholding “be put on indefinite hold.”
Having been turned away by the judicial branch, they decided to double-down on the legislative:
Rather than take a negatively-shrouded course of action at this time, the General Conference committee urged the General Board to make more money available “to promote the World Peace Tax Fund.”
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue reviewed two books on war tax resistance: Affirm Life: Pay for Peace from the Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes, and People Pay for Peace by William Durland.
The first of these opened with this challenging statement:
A wedge of contradiction is opening a wide fissure in our peace testimony.
While nearly all of us declare ourselves to be conscientiously opposed to war and preparations for war, and while many work tirelessly for its elimination, the overwhelming number of us continue voluntarily to pay for what we openly abhor.
The book, according to the review, covered the “biblical and historical basis for military tax refusal” and presented “a systematic exposition of the proposal for a World Peace Tax Fund.”
It also “gives large place to the significance and importance of achieving religious clarity and motivation.”
However, “[i]t does not… adequately address the mechanics of military tax refusal.”
That gap was filled by the second of the books, of which the reviewer said: “Most useful, I think, is the section entitled, ‘How to Refuse to Pay the Military Tax.’ ”
The same issue had an obituary for Lois Mae Handsaker which noted: “Before there were any peace marches in , she was apprehended during the picketing of the local post office to protest the use of income taxes for war.”
The issue announced that the Iowa Peace Network would be collecting money withheld from taxes by war tax resisters and using it to buy grain which it would submit to an IRS office in lieu of tactics to “symbolize opposition to taxes for the Pentagon and emphasize the need for funding human services.”
The article noted: “In the event that the IRS refuses to accept the grain, it will be donated to local meal programs for the needy.”
Alas, the notice followed-up that news with the silly idea of protesting against war taxes by writing “not for military spending” in the memo field of the check you write to the IRS.
“If enough people take this step, a class action suit against the IRS may be filed” — by some sort of magic, one supposes.
At Canada’s Parliament passed a “Constitution Act” which made it yet more independent of the British government.
The act enshrined “freedom of conscience and religion” as a fundamental freedom.
The Canadian Peace Tax Fund Committee said it was going to “test” this “by assuming that [our legislators] mean we can divert our defense taxes from killing to peaceful uses, on conscientious grounds.”
The notice of this, in the issue, didn’t give any details as to how this “test” would take place, but pretty quickly shifted to “hopes” that the legislature would enact a Peace Tax Fund in the spirit of the new Constitution Act, so lobbying may have been all the testing they planned to do.
ad from the issue of Friends Journal
Similarly vague was the report from the meeting of Carolina Conservative Friends, which decided on “asking ourselves and other American Friends to make some sort of statement against the use of tax money for military purposes, through coordinated activity in filing our returns .”
A report on the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting also vaguely mentioned “continued explorations within monthly meetings about war-tax resistance.”
Another report on the New York Yearly Meeting said that “[s]ome Friends planned to take further individual action supporting nonregistration and tax refusal.”
This consistent vagueness makes me suspect that there was some embarrassment and certainly no consensus about war tax resistance in these meetings.
Trudy Knowles brought things more in the brass tacks direction in the “Memoirs of a War Resister,” an article that concentrated mostly on the plight of Vietnam War veterans in the United States, that she shared in the issue.
Her resistance included tax resistance:
I do not pay the federal excise tax on my phone bill which is earmarked for the military.
I refuse to pay the 50 percent of my income tax that goes to preparing this country for war.
I put this money instead into an escrow account to be held until the government establishes a means by which this money can be used for the peaceful resolution of national and international conflicts — or until they take it by force.
There was a thoughtful overview of the “Holy Experiment” of William Penn’s founding of a colony run on Quaker principles in Pennsylvania by Margaret H. Bacon in the issue.
Toward the conclusion, it discussed war tax resistance as a possible way of advancing the experiment:
Through [John] Woolman we come to the most pressing unfinished business of our Holy Experiment: freeing ourselves from complicity in war.
Penn and his colonists hoped to govern without weapons, placing their hopes on “seeing what love can do,” as well as on the establishment sometime in the future of the instruments of arbitration, Penn’s Congress of Nations.
Neither the personal practice of nonviolence nor the best efforts of the United Nations have yet worked to rid the world of the threat of war, and now time is running out.
Earlier Friends were at least able to separate themselves from complicity in preparations for war by refusing to pay militia taxes as well as refusing to serve in the militia.
Today the principle of conscientious objection for the bodies of our young men (and perhaps young women) is well established with us, having been pioneered by a handful during the Civil War, a few hundred during World War Ⅰ, and some thousands in World War Ⅱ.
The idea of demanding conscientious objector status for our tax dollars is in its infancy.
In the past years, a few courageous souls have refused to pay the government that portion of their federal income taxes that supports war.
Today more and more monthly meetings and yearly meetings are beginning to wrestle with the problem.
Is it time for the Society of Friends as a whole to get behind this move?
Surely if we did it, and the Mennonites did it, and the Brethren did it, we could make a change in the law.
Is there not some simple, single forward step that we could make together in ?
Some Friends find this issue complicated, because the graduated income tax supports many good things, and Friends who designate their taxes solely for peace purposes are just making it necessary for others to pay solely for war.
The same arguments can be raised against conscientious objection to military service.
But is there not a deep and inward side to tax refusal?
Do some Friends feel, as Woolman felt, that they cannot pay these taxes and still keep in touch with the living and life-giving Holy Spirit?
Let us be tender before we argue with our tax refusers, for they may be pointing our way to new light.
The issue brought the news that “25 members of the Friends House staff in London” had embarked on war tax resistance.
The Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting agreed to put 34% of the taxes withheld from the objectors into an escrow account, “the intention being to release it to Inland Revenue after assurances that it would be used for non-military purposes.”
An obituary notice of Roberta Dickinson in the same issue noted that “[s]he supported the peace testimony through organized war tax resistance.”
At the meeting of the Friends World Committee for Consultation, that group decided to refuse to submit withheld taxes to the government from its war tax resisting employees (according to a Journal report ).
Walter Ludwig reflected on contemporary and historical Quaker war tax resistance in an article he wrote for the issue.
Excerpts:
The writings from George Fox, John Woolman, Joshua Evans, Timothy Davis,
Moses Brown, and Samuel Allinson that are mentioned in Ludwig’s essay can be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.
Members of our meeting [Rahway and Plainfield (New Jersey) Monthly Meeting] several years ago began as individuals to withhold a percentage of their income tax in protest of its use for war.
No devastating consequences have resulted.
Courteous, almost sympathetic Internal Revenue Service agents have visited one member, telling her a red tab has been affixed to her folder in the file.
She hopes the IRS will soon run out of red tabs.
I have withheld the military third, sending it the first year to the American Friends Service Committee and since then to the Quaker Peace Tax Fund, custody of Albany (N.Y.) Monthly Meeting.
The first response from the IRS came just .
They want the “underpaid tax,” $939.58 in penalty and interest.
My refusal to support mass murder will likely be ignored, as have been my explanatory notes of “conscientious deduction” sent quarterly during the past three years
In my letters of refusal I have mentioned membership in the Religious Society of Friends.
Do I thereby leave with the IRS the impression that of course Quakers do not pay military taxes, as they once refused to pay tithes to a state church they could not in conscience support?
But has refusal to pay taxes for war been within the main stream of Quakerly testimony and practice?
May war-tax-resisting Friends today take aid and comfort from a tradition of military tax refusal?
George Fox was clear on the matter.
A restored portrait of Fox presents him as a man of property from a well-to-do family with enough investments to give him private means.
He paid his taxes.
If we pay we can plead with Caesar and plead with them who hath our custom and hath our tribute.
Refuse to pay and they will say: “How can we defend you against foreign enemies and protect everyone and their estates and keep down thieves and murders?”
And again:
To bear and carry weapons to fight with… the man of peace cannot act… but have paid their tribute [taxes] which they may still do for peace’s sake… In so doing Friends may better claim their liberty.
Sara Fell kept the Fox family account book after George married her mother, Margaret.
Her accounts disclose that the family paid the poll tax to carry on England’s war against the Dutch in .
When England fought the French, the entry reads: “ by M paid to the Poll Money by father and mother 1 pound 2 shilling.”
Robert Barclay, foremost Quaker theologian, wrote in :
We have suffered much in our country because neither ourselves would bear arms nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.
Such “trophy money,” as these direct taxes were called, many early Friends refused to pay.
Most, however, paid the general or “mixed” taxes even in time of war.
Their willingness may be found in the advice of the gathering at Balby encouraging “all who are indebted to the world endeavor to discharge the same.”
As Fox put it in , “Keep out of debt; owe to no man anything but love… Pay to Caesar, as to your fellows, what is due.”
[H]omespun-clad John Woolman was given a cool reception by elegant London Friends.
They were securely of the propertied class with enterprises in heavy industry and were largely in control of the Atlantic trade.
They would not give their persons to the business of war-making, but did they make nice distinctions in how the empire used their tax money in extending colonial rule?
Philadelphia Friends, like London’s, were well placed in government and trade.
“The richest,” wrote a visiting London doctor, “talk only about selling of flour and the low price it bore.”
Using George Fox as authority, some Quakers tried to persuade others to pay a tax levied for an armed expedition against Canada in .
When war with the French and Indians finally came in , John Churchman, Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, and other Friends refused to pay war taxes that were mixed with taxes for civil uses.
In extenuation of Fox and early war-tax-paying Quakers in England Woolman said:
To me it appears that there was less danger of their being infected with the spirit of the world than is the case with us now.
[They] had had little share in civil government… our minds have been turned to the improvement of our country, to merchandise and the sciences… and a carnal mind is gaining among us.
When ten Quaker members of the Pennsylvania Assembly resigned rather than vote for the War Supply Bill of , the remaining “secular” Friends voted the war taxes and penalties for nonpayment.
The abdicating legislators and their supporters in the Society then began close cooperation with Mennonites, Dunkers, and other pacifist groups that carried on through the Revolution.
When military officers appeared in Mount Holly to draft for the French and Indian War, Woolman noted in his Journal, “In this time of commotion some of our young men left these parts and tarried abroad till it was over” (a prelude to Vietnam).
Woolman in had recorded his uneasiness about paying war taxes:
A few years past, money having been made current in our province for carrying on wars… by taxes laid on the inhabitants, my mind was often affected with the thought of paying such taxes… To refuse the active payment of a tax which our Society generally paid was exceedingly disagreeable but to do a thing contrary to my conscience appeared yet more dreadful.
Joshua Evans in wrote:
I found it best for me to refuse paying taxes on my estate which went to pay the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made up of many drops.
Committees appointed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting agreed on an “epistle of tender love and caution to Friends in Pennsylvania” signed by those who felt free to do so and forwarded to monthly and quarterly meetings.
It was in keeping with William Penn’s earlier statement, made when he refused to send money to England for war against Canada:
No man can be true to God and be false to his own conscience, nor can he extort from it a tribute to carry on any war, much less offensive, nor ought true Christians pay for it.
I’ve tried many times to track down a source for this Penn quote, with no success.
The war was in full swing when queries sent annually by London Yearly Meeting to English Friends were adopted in by yearly meetings in Virginia, Maryland, Philadelphia, New York, and New England.
They asked:
Do you bear a testimony against bearing arms and paying trophy money or being in any manner concerned in privateers letters of mark, or dealing in prize goods as such?
Friends were expected not to pay voluntarily to hire a substitute for military service or voluntarily pay any tax solely and directly for military purposes.
Every other tax, even mixed taxes that would be used in part for the military budget, Friends were expected in conscience to pay.
The Revolution shifted the locus of tax-raising authority for Americans from London to state and federal governments.
Whereupon Timothy Davis in circulated his tract titled, “Advice of a Quaker to Pay Tax to American Revolution.”
War taxes, especially mixed ones, should be paid, wrote Davis, and he quoted a weighty Friend, Thomas Story, who had declared, “If the officer demand tax from me and tell me ’tis to maintain war, I’ll pay it.”
Sandwich (Mass.) Monthly Meeting took a dim view of the Davis publication and disowned its author.
Quaker books of discipline of the time counseled disowning members who paid war taxes.
During the Revolution Moses Brown reminded Friends:
Our ancient testimonies were and remain to be supportable of paying tribute and customs for the support of civil and yet refuse to pay trophy money and other expenses solely for war.
He suggested Friends might ask, with the war over, for a separation of taxes into their several budget purposes.
“If it should be refused we might be united in refusing even those the greater part of which may be for civil uses.”
The clearest Quaker statement on war taxes during the Revolution came from the pen of Samuel Allinson, a young Friend of Burlington, New Jersey.
In Allinson circulated manuscript copies of his “Reasons against War and paying taxes for its Support.”
War is not a defensible function of civil government, reasoned Allinson, and each generation must apply biblical truths to the issues of its own time.
Peace committees of monthly meetings might well spend a session with Friend Allinson’s cogent thinking.
Quaker support of withholders of war taxes was recorded in a minute approved by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in , reaffirmed in , and used as model for a minute approved by New York Yearly Meeting.
It reads, in part:
Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is in keeping with an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practice of Friends… We warmly approve of people following their consciences and openly approve civil disobedience in this matter under divine compulsion… We ask all to consider carefully the implications of paying taxes that relate to war-making… Specifically we offer encouragement and support to people caught up in the problem of seizure, and of payment against their will.
The same issue noted that a minute passed at the gathering of the New England Yearly Meeting “supported efforts to establish a World Peace Tax Fund and current forms of war tax refusal.”
Also in that issue was an announcement about the formation of a war tax resisters’ penalty fund:
The Tax Resister’s Penalty Fund is a network designed to distribute the burden of penalties or interest levied against military tax resisters.
For example, 200 people would share a $500 penalty at $2.50 each.
For information contact TRPF, Box 25, North Manchester, IN 46962.
The fund was still in operation at that address until fairly recently.
It has not formally disbanded, though it appears to no longer be operating effectively.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
1984 brought the Friends Journal’s second special issue on war taxes, at a time when even its critics acknowledged war tax resistance as a mainstream practice in the Society of Friends.
In a letter-to-the-editor in a issue of the Journal, Tim Deniger, a supporter of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation, had pointed out some of its flaws, for instance that it “does not address the problem of spending for defense versus social welfare; it is simply a bookkeeping proposition which would ease the consciences of pacifists.”
(See ♇ .)
Bill Strong wrote back, and, in a letter that appeared in the issue, defended the bill against its critics.
Excerpts:
[T]he World Peace Tax Fund Bill…[’]s enactment won’t lessen defense spending; Congress will still need to do that.
What it will do is establish a Peace Trust Fund (like the eminently successful highway trust fund), enabling our society to make a striking (i.e., dollar-worthy) commitment to seeking peace (via, for example, funding a peace academy, U.N. peacekeeping forces, the use of mediation, negotiation, and reconciliation techniques — none of which are currently part of U.S. commitments).
As to alternative service for war tax dollars being but an “accounting illusion” or only easing the consciences of pacifists, the same applies to the now-established alternative service of C.O.s. Although men choose alternative service, our government has never lacked the bodies to pursue any conflict any place, any time; but the C.O.’s personal witness still stands for what it is, a man’s conscientious decision not to be a part of the war system.
If we could have C.O. status for men over 20 and all women, allowing them not to pay for war but to have their tax dollars go toward peacemaking, our society would make a new and totally different kind of statement to this violence-weary world.
There’s a little bit of sleight-of-hand here in comparing people who would pay their taxes into a government-run alternative fund with only those conscientious objectors who would be willing to enter government-run “alternative service” in lieu of combat roles (as opposed to the many conscientious objectors who refused to be conscripted into any service whatsoever).
But it’s also important to note that these earlier versions of the “peace tax” scheme were much more conscientious about segregating the “peace tax” payments so that they would pay for new, additional, nonviolent, peace-seeking measures.
This enabled promoters to make a much stronger case in favor of the bill than today’s poor “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund” promoters — who have to somehow defend the idea that “peace tax” payers’ dollars will somehow magically get routed just toward the non-military portions of the government’s usual budget.
the cover of the issue of Friends Jounal
The issue of Friends Journal was dedicated to “Our Taxes and Peace” — the second such issue devoted to the war tax issue that I found in the archives.
Vinton Deming, a war tax resister and now the Editor-Manager of the Journal, introduced the issue.
Excerpts:
[W]hat can we do, many of us are asking, to stop the flow of our tax money to the Pentagon?
It feels as if the Society of Friends has come more under the weight of this concern in the past year.
My yearly meeting (Philadelphia) wrestled with the question of tax resistance a year ago, and monthly meetings have been asked to consider the question further as they prepare for yearly meeting sessions this month.
Within my own monthly meeting I have attended clearness meetings this year for members seeking direction and support on the issue.
And I have seen a marked increase in the number of members taking tentative steps to withhold at least a portion of their taxes.
Reports from abroad include London Yearly Meeting’s minute of support this past summer for its employees who seek to hold back the military portion of their taxes.
Robert F. Tatman proposed a Minute on the subject, confidently presenting a target that was well in front of what any meeting had been prepared to accept thus far.
Excerpts:
[W]e are led to declare for ourselves that all participation in war and preparation for war — in any form — is contrary to the Spirit and teachings of Christ.
By this, we mean that membership in the armed forces of the United States or of any country, whether under arms or as a noncombatant; participation in, including registration under, a system of military conscription; acceptance of the privilege of alternative service as a conscientious objector; payment through taxes, both direct and indirect, for wars past, present, and future; and all other forms of participation in the war system, which now holds the world in such deep oppression, are in direct opposition to the Peace Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends.
Friends are advised to examine themselves, their finances, their possessions, and all of their associations to discover whether they are clear of such participation in war and preparation for war, and if they are not, to seek guidance and support from their monthly meetings in their efforts to attain clearness.
We accept that this search for clearness will inevitably bring us, both individually and corporately, into conflict with the laws of the United States and of other countries, and we pledge our full moral, spiritual, and financial support to any Friend or meeting in need of such support as a result of this minute.
We realize that there are many Friends who will not be in full unity with this minute at present, who will feel it is their duty as U.S. citizens to continue paying the taxes demanded of them by the federal government, and to support and counsel cooperation with military conscription.
We recognize the depth of their convictions but stand in loving disagreement with them, and we pledge them, too, our full moral, spiritual, and financial support as they struggle to reach clearness on this concern laid upon us by the Lord.
We are indeed loyal citizens of the United States, but first we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, and the higher law must always take precedence over the lower.
Kingdon W. Swayne went the opposite direction, feeling that Friends had gotten too carried away with war tax resistance and ought to reconsider.
Excerpts:
Most of the current discussion of “war” taxes within the Society of Friends is based on the implicit assumption that those who don’t pay them are morally superior to those who do.
The charge of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to that of is to come up with a “stronger minute” on war tax concerns than the one currently on the books, clearly implying that greater “strength” in this area must be morally superior.
In a discussion several months ago at Representative Meeting in Philadelphia, those who obey the law were compared to the Quaker slaveholders of , and not a dissenting voice was raised.
As a member of the substantial majority of Friends who are dutiful taxpayers, I have felt intuitively that my position has every bit as good a moral claim as the contrary view.
I have sought to examine that intuition in two ways: first, to identify the moral assumptions that underlie it and, second, to identify the moral ambiguities in the tax refuser position that render it unattractive to me on moral grounds.
Swayne argued:
It is important to him to be a vigorous participant in the various “circles of community” that he finds himself in, and only to be a disruptive force in those circles in the most extreme circumstances, when productive participation is no longer possible.
He feels that the national circle in the United States has not reached such a stage, and so it’s better to play by the rules.
Friends overemphasize “the dramatic, large-scale evils associated with the national security system” while remaining indifferent to other man-made sources of suffering, for instance “our transportation system [which] has brought more death and injury to U.S. citizens than all the wars of .”
The national security establishment is just a large-scale version of such thoroughly moral defenses as “police forces and locks on houses” — they are not evil in and of themselves, though they can be used in evil ways or can become aggrandized in an evil way.
But war tax resistance treats them as pure evil.
He then described the varieties of resister: the one who reduces his or her income below the tax line (the “most admirable” variety, according to Swayne), the one who tries “limiting but not eliminating federal income tax liability, and paying the required tax” (Swayne considers himself one of these, saying he “does so from prudential rather than pacifist motives” because “I think I give money away more wisely than does Uncle Sam”), and the one who refuses a symbolic “military” percentage of the federal income tax (this, he calls the “mainstream” variety).
He sees problems with this third variety:
It actually means the government gets more money in the end.
The calculation of the “military” percentage is flawed.
“It requires one to assert unequivocally that one’s own reading of the will of God is superior to that of others, not only with respect to goals but with respect to the tactics needed to achieve those goals.”
By filing legal cases contesting government actions against resisters, these resisters undermine their moral position, becoming not civilly disobedient martyrs but mere plaintiffs.
Such war tax resisters incorrectly deny that their position sets a precedent for tax resisters of all sorts.
Law-breaking reflects poorly on the peace movement in the court of public opinion.
But, he concluded:
As for the tax refusers, I hope other Quaker taxpayers will join me in accepting their position, despite its ambiguities, as being in the mainstream of Quaker thought, and therefore entitled to support from Quaker bodies.
I will support them not out of a sense that theirs is the morally superior position, but only because they are taking a greater risk.
Following that, Franklin Zahn promoted phone tax resistance as “a simple way of continuing Friends’ tradition of witnessing for peace.”
He first wrote about why resistance was important (indeed, he felt, as a regressive tax at a time of reduced social welfare spending and tax cuts for the rich, resisting this particular tax could be justified even without reference to military spending), and then explained the mechanics of how to resist and how the phone company is likely to respond.
No one has ever been jailed for refusing the telephone war tax.
Although the tax is small, its refusal by thousands of Friends could be a significant force for peace.
Gandhi, for instance, made good use of a very small salt tax.
Being “effective,” however, need not be the main motive in refusals.
A draft-aged person refuses induction not primarily to be effective but because it is immoral to support war.
The same motivation can apply for tax refusers.
There was also a brief note in that issue about a new “study document” from the National Council of the Churches of Christ on “The Churches and War Tax Resistance,” but it didn’t give much indication about the content or the context in which it had been produced.
The issue brought the news that a group of “peace tax fund” promoters in Canada had incorporated and were planning to pursue a test case in the courts that they hoped would establish a right to conscientious objection to military taxation under the new Canadian Constitution.
Kingdon Swayne’s challenge to what he identified as the orthodox Quaker position in favor of war tax resistance drew some responses that were printed in the issue.
Roland Smith, “a rather recent tax refuser,” thought Swayne’s criticism was “helpful” but not always correct.
In particular, he didn’t think that it was true that war tax resistance always would mean the government would come out ahead in the end, and he felt that the difficult (Swayne called it “arbitrary”) practice of trying to discern the military portion of your tax bill represented “not a drawback but… an opportunity for the refuser to exercise his or her conscience in deciding which percentage of which budget figure to use.”
More troubling, he thought, was the threat to democracy embodied in the idea that people could conscientiously choose to support some decisions of their elected representatives and not others.
Irving Hollingshead denied that “self-righteousness” was behind war tax resistance.
“The moral point is that war and the preparation for mass killing are wrong, and most Friends feel a moral obligation to oppose it.
Tax resistance is merely one tactic consistent with this moral position.”
Tor J.S. Bejnar looked at Swayne’s three varieties of resister and decided that the second variety, to which Swayne (and until recently, Bejnar) belonged, “barely connects spiritual and earthly matters” and so he has decided to move into the first category, which he termed “deliberate poverty.”
Alan Eccleston was glad to see that Friends were “open[ing] ourselves to the question” rather than evading it.
He felt that framing the issue as being about “moral superiority” was counter-productive and judgmental.
And he also felt that more important than strong Minutes from Meetings about war tax resistance was “the continuous witness of those who, under a concern, constantly hold the question before us through their own loving commitment.”
My personal experience suggests that we feel most anxious when we are in a stage of determined avoidance, when, intuitively, we sense something stirring within us for which we believe we are not ready.
All of our defenses are mobilized and we shut ourselves off from that inner stirring — but at a price!
Scott Crom questioned the consequentialism implicit in Swayne’s critique.
“[S]ometimes we are called upon to act in certain ways, or refrain from acting, regardless of the consequences.
Here one does not judge the morality of a choice by its results or its impact, but by something else.
This approach is the one I prefer, and I believe it has ample precedent, both in the Bible and in Quaker history.
The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount do not say, ‘Thou shalt accomplish such-and-such,’ but speak directly to actions and to attitudes.”
Ben Norris wrote that “Some Quakers are motivated especially towards striving to keep their own lives pure, simple, or consistent, and this inner spiritual state is the focus.
Others note that it is quite impossible to exist outside of some sort of economic and social system… and therefore, such an action as war tax refusal is part of a vastly complex involvement in responsible citizenship, the right ordering of our economic and social systems. Both motivations may exist in the same person.
But to concentrate on which person’s actions, public or private, are ‘more moral’ than someone else’s usurps a judgment not given to mortals, and trivializes both the spiritual and political motivations of rational change in our lives.”
Karl Meyer wrote in to promote his “cabbage patch” method of tax resistance:
the Internal Revenue Service began using a special $500 penalty against people who make protest claims on income tax returns.
This “frivolous tax return” penalty is a significant and intolerable assault on the inalienable rights of freedom of speech and religion.
It seems to me both a challenge and an opportunity for mass civil disobedience by people of conscience.
The only act needed is to assert the rights of conscience on an income tax form.
As an experiment in showing the way, I have begun to file daily protest returns for each day of .
My net income from my work as a carpenter in will be reported and distributed on 365 tax returns, at an average of about $38 per day.
Each return will be addressed to a different employee or office of IRS.
A copy of the daily return will be sent each day to a different newspaper, magazine, public officeholder, or peace organization.
If the IRS imposes penalties for all of my returns, the total assessment may rise to more than $180,000. I have already received notice of one penalty for $500. Of course I don’t intend to pay or allow collection.
I invite Friends to join with me in resisting war taxes and this penalty on the expression of conscience.
This is a good project for people like me, who feel able to protect their income and assets from seizure by IRS.
Some others, whose assets are more vulnerable to collection, may participate by filing protest statements on tax return forms, in the names of some of the victims of U.S. militarism worldwide.
G.M. Smith trotted out the argument that paying taxes is no more of a moral issue because of how the government will spend the money, than handing your wallet over to a violent mugger is because of how he might spend the loot.
He suggested instead of tax resistance that people donate (in a tax-deductible way) to charity.
“Thus, through contributions one could reduce his or her tax liability legally and at the same time be contributing to good in the world.
It is important, however, not to make one’s contributions in a tax-supported area.
There’s nothing government would like better than to dump the entire burden of social services on the private sector and have all those extra tax dollars for bombs.”
Robert R. Schutz questions Swayne’s casual assumption that because the national security apparatus is something like the local police apparatus writ large (and the police are something like the locks on our doors anthropomorphized and handed pistols) that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a military.
Schutz agrees with the theory but denies Swayne’s conclusion.
Rather: “The use of police power may be even less morally defensible than war because it is deliberate, pre-planned, cold-blooded, and because it is entirely mercenary — we hire other people to do our killing for us.”
A report on the annual Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the same issue noted that “[m]uch of Saturday was taken up with Friends’ wrestling with war tax concerns.”
The minute which finally resulted said, in part, that “Friends are uneasy in conscience that a substantial portion of their tax dollars goes for military purposes”; that we “are ready to support a wide variety of approaches to war tax witness in accord with individual circumstances and leadings”; that “while Friends do not urge one another to undertake civil disobedience, Friends are ready to give strong support to members led to refuse payment of taxes for military purposes”; and that “most Friends strongly endorse passage of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation.”
The minute concluded, “We realize that we have no single or simple answer to the dilemma of praying for peace and paying for war.
We ask for Divine Guidance as we proceed in struggling with the issue of taxes levied for war-related purposes.”
The issue will be considered again at the sessions.
In the issue was a letter from Donna and Jerome Gorman in which they explained how they had extended tax resistance-like techniques to a State-level battle against capital punishment.
They held back a symbolic 1¢ from their electric bill to protest against the Virginia Electric and Power Company’s complicity with the state’s electrocution method of executing prisoners, and later began to also withhold 1¢ from their phone bills in a similar protest because of a state excise tax on phone service.
They saw this largely as a method of getting the attention of people to whom they could then direct anti-death-penalty outreach.
We refer to this economic and tax resistance as “penny resistance.”
Multiple innovations in economic and tax and other forms of resistance are most urgently needed to impede the various methods of carrying out capital punishment.
We pray and we hope that many others will consider joining in this resistance.
Jeff Hunn promoted the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund in the issue.
He described it this way:
The Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund is a sort of “mutual aid fund” for war tax resisters.
Formed in , the Penalty Fund is supported by people who contribute small amounts of money periodically to help war tax resisters pay fines and interest levied by the IRS.
Funds contributed are used to help pay not the resister’s original tax burden but what the IRS terms “statutory additions”: interest, penalties, and fines imposed because of war tax resistance.
When each supporter contributes his or her small amount, the total becomes enough to reimburse the resister for the additional cost of his or her witness.
For example, 200 supporters contributing $2.50 each could cover the aforementioned $500 “frivolous” penalty.
The Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund has grown from 85 supporters in to 400 supporters .
The larger we grow, the bigger an impact we can make and the smaller each supporter’s contribution will need to be.
Finally, in the issue, Dan Merritt reminded people that phone tax resistance was still a good option, and noted that the Claremont, California, Friends Meeting had been refusing to pay the phone tax since the Vietnam War.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was lots about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , including an active debate about the worth of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation.
In the issue Jill Penberthy shared how a “committee on clearness” organized by the Middlebury (Vermont) Friends Meeting helped her decide how to use an anticipated IRS levy as an outreach opportunity.
Excerpts:
…I struggled to figure out how to respond to an Internal Revenue Service computer’s $1,800 bill for taxes, penalties, and interest on my account withheld as a war tax protest.
I also remembered a tai chi class in which we were taught to yield with the aggressor, using his or her energy and our own creativity to change the process.
I was puzzled about how to use these concepts with the IRS.
The computer was not listening to my numerous letters explaining my position as a war tax resister.
I was unable to contact anyone within the IRS with whom I could share my witness.
I brought my quandary to Middlebury Friends Meeting in Vermont and asked for a committee on clearness.
We gathered at my home and in the silence were moved to initiate a Peace Witness Fund under the care of the meeting that would be transferred to a local bank for seizure by the IRS.
The process became one of grace among us and within the Middlebury community.
The committee asked to share the penalty and commitment to peace represented by the withheld taxes.
Quaker history bears witness to conscientious objection through tax resistance.
We struggled to move beyond resistance to “yielding and overcoming,” and this we did with the guidance of the Spirit.
Letters of purpose were sent to Friends and sympathetic supporters requesting acknowledgment of the commitment to peace and offering a share in the assessed penalty.
They were asked to send copies of the purpose to elected officials and the IRS, and to join us on the Green in the center of Middlebury for singing and dancing before depositing the Peace Witness Fund in the bank.
We announced the peace gathering in the local papers — “Everyone is welcome.”
At the gathering we distributed leaflets explaining our concern about the present military escalation and preparation for nuclear war.
Babies and siblings, parents and grandparents, and retired military men all joined hands on the Green in a dance of peace, recognizing the Light within each of us.
“We are all one planet, all one people on earth,” sang a myriad of voices.
During the silence that followed, a professor from France said, “There are people you don’t even know about who are supporting you.
Let that be your strength.”
Another witness said, “This isn’t happening in my home state.
I’ll take it home with me.”…
…Our group proceeded up the hill and into the local bank where tellers and customers witnessed our Peace Fund deposit.
A brief note in the same issue said that “[s]ignatures of war tax resisters are being collected by the War Tax Resistance National Ad Campaign for placement in newspaper ads in ” and gave an address for the campaign.
A second brief announcement read:
A Peace Tax Fund has been established by Friends United Meeting.
The FUM general board established an escrow account this past fall into which war tax resisters who belong to FUM may deposit taxes withheld from the government.
Should the IRS take action against the depositor, the money may be withdrawn later.
Income generated from the fund will be used to finance FUM peace and justice programs. For more information…
The issue brought news that the Palo Alto (California) Meeting had endorsed phone tax resistance: “In keeping with our Peace Testimony,” a minute from the Meeting read, “Friends are encouraged to refuse payment of taxes which would otherwise be used primarily for killing and war preparation.”
The Meeting suggested redirecting resisted taxes to an alternative fund set up by the Pacific Yearly Meeting in .
At the Friends World Committee for Consultation meeting in , the group formed a new committee: “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.”
According to a Journal article on the meeting:
Sponsorship of the FCWTC followed two broad-based consultations the FWCC initiated in on questions of conscience raised by the use of Friends’ taxes for war and war preparations.
Drawing upon decades of experience with conscientious objection to conscription, representatives of all Quaker organizations formed the FCWTC to prepare a series of papers for discussion and to organize regional conferences and a conference for Quaker employers on the complex issues involved.
A later issue mentioned Wallace T. Collett as the new Committee’s clerk and Linda Coffin as “staff.”
It reported:
The FCWTC initially is focusing on three areas of work.
The first will be publication of educational materials, with the hope of reaching a broader understanding among Friends of the concern about war taxes.
The pamphlets will cover such topics as the biblical guidance for war tax refusal; Quaker history and recent Quaker statements on war tax concerns; recent experiences of individual Friends; positions of other churches and Christian denominations on the payment of war taxes; legal issues, IRS codes, and alternatives for those with war tax concerns; spiritual and rational bases for war tax concerns; possible legislative remedies for conscientious objectors; and a general annotated bibliography.
The second area is consultative services to Quaker employers who are involved in the issue through the actions of their employees and through their own role in the collection of taxes.
A conference for Quaker employers is being planned for or .
The third area is facilitating consultation and study throughout the Society of Friends through a series of regional conferences.
The first of these conferences, “Paying for War; Paying for Peace,” was held in Washington D.C., , under FWCC auspices.
The FCWTC also hopes to develop informal ties with other groups working on the issue of conscience and war taxes, including both those of other denominations and those outside the United States.
Barbara Harrison mentioned in a letter-to-the-editor in the issue that as her husband has an income that “meets most of our needs (wants, though, are beyond us), and as I wish to limit the amount of money we pay in taxes that goes for military expenses, I avoid most paid employment” and that this has freed up her time to volunteer to help at a local elementary school.
The issue brought an update on Karl Meyer’s “cabbage patch resistance” technique:
The Internal Revenue Service seized a trailer and a station wagon from Karl Meyer of Chicago during the night of .
Early two IRS officers came to his door and served him with a levy for $20,160 in frivolous tax return penalties and a “Notice of Seizure” for the vehicles they had already removed.
In , Karl Meyer, a long-time peace activist and pacifist, filed a daily protest tax return to the IRS — 365 in all.
On the day after the seizure, about 30 supporters joined him in a protest demonstration at the Chicago IRS office.
Meanwhile, he has been taking public transportation to his work as a carpenter.
The same issue also mentioned a sort of round-about form of tax resistance being pursued by Lucy & Sheldon Clark and Dorothy & Edward Snyder, Quakers from Baltimore, who were filing a lawsuit against the government for the return of that portion of their taxes that they believed had been spent on illegal acts of military aggression in Central America.
The issue noted that the suit was dismissed.
That issue also mentioned a seminar on war tax resistance would be among those offered at “The Rise of Christian Conscience, a national conference of Christian nonviolence and civil disobedience sponsored by Sojourners Peace Ministry.”
It also noted a quarterly newsletter from a General Conference Mennonite Church-associated group called “God and Caesar” concerning conscientious objection to military taxes.
The Lake Erie Yearly Meeting in approved a minute that “suggested that Friends General Conference set up a fund for Friends who wish to withhold the military portion of their taxes.”
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
In a weekend retreat was planned in Voluntown, Connecticut to discuss “the Philosophy of War Tax Resistance”.
Bob Bady appears to have been an (the?) organizer.
The issue noted that NWTRCC had published some brochures on topics like “Your Taxes Pay for the War in Central America,” “Your Taxes Pay for the Nuclear Arms Race,” and “Your Telephone Tax Pays for War” as well as “a Telephone War Tax Resistance Poster Kit.”
The issue noted that the IRS had seized an alternative fund from a Meeting to collect a tax debt:
Four IRS agents seized Craig MacDonald’s pickup truck on in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., in lieu of his federal income taxes.
Craig MacDonald, a member of Purchase (N.Y.) Meeting, attends Cornwall (N.Y.) Meeting, where he is clerk of the Peace Committee.
The IRS had ordered Craig to pay $1,440.85, which includes interest and penalty charges.
The original amount of taxes owed, $1,159.90, was put into the Stamford-Greenwich Friends Meeting Peace Tax Fund.
The IRS seized this money in addition to the truck.
The IRS explained in a letter that it did not know about the account until after seizure of the truck.
Neither truck nor money has been returned to Craig.
To pay the additional IRS charges, Cornwall Meeting has set up a fund for suffering for Craig.
The same issue noted that the Quaker Council for European Affairs had published a second edition of its pamphlet, Paying for Peace containing “facts for Friends concerned about conscientious objection to military taxation,” and that Conscience Canada had published a booklet called The First Freedom: Freedom of Conscience and Religion in Canada to promote the Maple Leaf State’s version of the peace tax fund proposal.
The “Peace Tax Fund” Debate
In the issue was an article by Christopher Hodgkin entitled “Second Thoughts on the World Peace Tax Fund.”
Excerpts:
The World Peace Tax Fund ranks almost as a motherhood-and-apple pie issue for Friends.… [It] now offers a legal basis for conscientious objection to taxation along with the chance to support a national, tax-supported peace fund.
Indeed, a multitude of pacifist organizations have endorsed the fund, including such Friends organizations as the American Friends Service Committee, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Friends United Meeting, Friends General Conference, and various monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings.
Such heavyweight support is impressive.
It is also, however, a nagging cause for concern.
Quakers have historically, and with good reason, been religious “contrarians.”
Often the proposals with the widest support need the closest scrutiny.
Truth most often comes on tiptoe and alone.
Is there something in this well-regarded and well-supported measure that needs to be more carefully examined?
[Proponents argue that] Conscientious objection to conscription of the body is recognized; why shouldn’t conscientious objection to conscription of the dollar be recognized equally?
Unfortunately, they are not parallel for two principal reasons.
First, one’s person and one’s dollars are not the same thing.
One’s person is a creation of God; one’s dollars are a creation of the state.
Jesus dealt with the different responsibilities for the two quite succinctly; I do not need to add to his teaching.
Second, military conscription and taxation have completely different scopes.
The draft is a single-purpose instrument.
It conscripts U.S. men for military duty.
It has no other dimension.
It is relatively simple to say that one accepts or rejects military service, and therefore accepts or rejects conscription.…
The income tax, on the other hand, is a multipurpose vehicle that supports the entire range of programs and activities of our government.…
Assume for a moment that our government conscripted people, as it conscripts dollars, to perform the complete range of government activities.
Does anyone doubt that the equivalent of C.O. status would be granted to, say, Catholics to exempt them from performing Medicare abortions?
If we conscripted people to teach the theory of evolution as truth in our schools, does anyone doubt that fundamentalist Christians would become conscientious objectors to that service?
If we conscripted people to perform death sentence executions, would all citizens perform such duty, or would some seek exemption?
Conscientious objection to war is the only conscientious objection currently sanctioned by our government not because there is something special about war resisters but because military service is the only bodily conscription now sanctioned by the government.
He later extends this point into the familiar slippery-slope argument in which if conscientious objectors to military taxes are granted a legal exemption from paying such taxes, the government would be acting inconsistently if it did not offer similar exemptions to people who have conscientious objections to other aspects of government spending.
[The promoters’ statement that war taxes mean “conscientious objectors must either violate their beliefs or violate the law”] is, of course, not true.
A number of individuals who object to paying taxes for war arrange their incomes and live so that they are not subject to taxation and therefore pay no taxes for war.
No law is violated.
What this argument really says is that conscientious objectors who are unwilling to undergo economic discomfort in support of their beliefs must either violate their beliefs or violate the law.
These objectors would not be likely to impress those early (and not so early) Friends who over the years have suffered a great deal more than economic discomfort in their commitment to Truth.
The simple fact is that any person who objects to paying taxes for war can legally avoid paying them.
What they may not be able to do is avoid paying taxes for war without making some sacrifices.
It is not the exercise of conscience that is at stake, but convenience.
Are Friends ready to endorse a major change in national policy and in the principles of shared representative government to support those whose principles may be less important to them than their comfort?
Those who would ask for the crown without the cross?
Perhaps the greatest irony in this issue is that the bill diverts attention from the real issue of peacemaking.
The World Peace Tax Fund bill is a special interest bill for a special interest minority.
If we truly believe in the need for a national peace effort — and I believe that many individuals who are not conscientious objectors recognize the urgent need for serious new approaches to peacemaking — we should be supporting legislation to add a serious commitment to peacemaking to the budget, legislation supported by all taxpayers, not just conscientious objectors.
Many U.S. citizens not yet ready to reject all defense spending are desperately afraid of nuclear war and would strongly support an active national peacemaking program.
But the World Peace Tax Fund allows no role to such individuals.
It demands that its supporters renounce all military spending at whatever level as a condition for participating in a tax-supported peace effort.
This exclusionary approach reduces the funds and personal commitments that could be available to a nationally supported peace program.
The World Peace Tax Fund claims to protect conscientious objectors to war from having their dollars conscripted for military purposes.
But that right already exists.
This proposal does not create the right; it makes its exercise painless.
The World Peace Tax Fund seeks special privileges for one religious minority that will inevitably lead to special privileges for a multitude of other religious minorities, quite possibly doing serious damage to programs that the fund’s supporters consider most important.
The World Peace Tax Fund seeks to provide taxpayer support for a national peacemaking effort, but ironically the approach taken may actually reduce the funds that could be made available if such an effort were undertaken as a normal part of our national budget.
As you might expect, this led to some debate in subsequent issues:
Brandt Chamberlain thought that Hodgkin’s slippery slope didn’t have anything very frightening at the end of it: “Laws permitting the diversion of tax dollars from programs felt to be morally objectionable could meet the demands of individual conscience while increasing our democratic influence on setting government priorities.”
He also is skeptical that resisting taxes by lowering income is such a great idea, as “economic disengagement in this manner could limit us in our efforts to help define and meet the material needs of our society.”
Wallace T. Collett wrote in to say that he is on the whole supportive of the federal income tax system as “the most equitable way to raise the funds needed for necessary government services,” and regrets that an overwhelming conscientious imperative forces him to noncooperate with it.
“But… we cannot separate the collection process from the use of the funds that are collected… military policies that lead toward the death of all life on earth.”
He hoped that once “a million” Americans either refused to pay war taxes or chose to pay into the World Peace Tax Fund, “then the dominance of the military on our nation’s policies will be overcome and our country and the world will be set on a new course.”
Robert Hull, then chairperson of the National Campaign for a World Peace Tax Fund, also wrote in.
He disagreed with Hodgkin’s scriptural interpretation of money as being a creature of the State, and therefore the State’s to do with as it will.
Conscripting a person’s money is tantamount to conscripting the time they took to earn that money.
When such large proportions of the exchange value of one’s labor (i.e., money) is confiscated through the federal treasury for military purposes, I believe there is a strong case for speaking of “military conscription.”
And if “military conscription” is operating, then conscientious objection is appropriate.
In our technological age, the young few have at times been conscripted for military duty; the many older are continually being conscripted through their labor.
Hull also had no fear of Hodgkin’s slippery slope.
…Hodgkin’s fear [is] that if we are allowed to divert our taxes away from military expenditures, the floodgates will open to every group with a conscientious dissent.
So be it!
Let each of them go to Congress and make their case, as we are doing.
We trust our representatives to sort out the true grievance of conscience from the false greed of opportunism.
Alan Eccleston defended the World Peace Tax Fund bill this way (excerpts):
…[A]t either a symbolic or substantial level, we can refuse voluntary compliance with a tax system that has God’s priorities turned upside down.
The institutional wheels of government start grinding and, in time, the IRS will collect the money withheld plus interest and penalties.
What has been accomplished?
Is this just an act of self-righteousness?
Has the world changed?
Yes, it has changed!
I know this experientially.
Praying for peace is powerful in itself.
When the prayer is made manifest in one’s daily life its power multiplies.
There are many ways for the manifestation to be expressed, and each of us must listen to our inner guide for direction.
Those of us who, through love, are led to say no to war taxes announce we trust God, not armaments, for our security.
In addition to creating a new ethical choice for most of the adult population, the World Peace Tax Fund bill establishes a separate trust fund that will disburse over one billion dollars a year for programs of health, education, and welfare.
I know of no other peace initiative that has this potential.
James B. Eblin wrote that the option of lowering his income below the tax line was not available to him as “I am morally and legally obliged to support my children.”
He therefore sees the World Peace Tax Fund as his only possible relief.
Lissa Field also criticized Hodgkin’s stark distinction between conscription of bodies and taxation of earnings.
“[W]e are responsible for both… as my taxes pay for the destruction of other humans and that of God within them, I am responsible for responding on the level of God’s rules, not Caesar’s.” She also, as someone who had faced a $5,000 fine for her resistance, found “particularly tedious” Hodgkin’s casting of tax resisters as unwilling to sacrifice.
Joe Marinello also thought that since income is the fruit of his labor, his person is very much wrapped up in his income, and so Hodgkin’s distinction does not hold.
“My labor (directly represented by my earned income) is the fruit of my being in this world.
I will not let my actions, my labors, be used to create weapons of mass destruction.
Nor will I allow my labor to be used by others to kill our neighbors.”
And he reminded Hodgkin of the sorts of sacrifices above-the-line resisters have to make so “that the government does not steal my labor.
I am self-employed, have no savings accounts, no property in my name, and I give away most of my income.
I have no desire to go to jail, but I will go to jail before I willingly pay any war taxes.”
Linda Coffin prefers the World Peace Tax Fund to living below a taxable income because the latter “would be shirking our responsibility to support the life-affirming programs of our government.
I could not take that option because it would mean ceasing my support for public schools, federal programs for the poor, health assistance programs, U.S. contributions to the United Nations and international aid agencies, and so on.”
In contrast, “The Peace Tax Fund bill… uniquely demonstrates the depth and sincerity of our concern for the moral use of our tax dollars.”
Ira Byock felt that conscientious objection wasn’t really what the World Peace Tax Fund was about.
“The real value of the Peace Tax Fund — like so much of what we do in peace work — lies in its symbolism, in its potential for heightening general public awareness of the percentage of our tax money spent on the military.
We bear witness to the morally objectionable so that others may pause to notice.”
That said, “the issue of conscience remains real.
To write one’s elected representatives, contribute to peace campaigns and organizations, take part in public peace activities, and then send in money for guns, subs, missiles, and bombs is inconsistent.”
And this is true even for people not willing to live below the tax line.
Anne Friend agreed with Hodgkin in his opposition to the World Peace Tax Fund.
Weirdly, though she was most persuaded by Hodgkin’s argument “that having a witness made easy dilutes its power and will probably deflect it from its ultimate goal,” she didn’t see this as a call for her to make a difficult witness instead, but rather to wait and meanwhile do nothing: “I am not yet ready to refuse the military portion of my income taxes.
But when that becomes an option [?], I expect the action required of me will be noncooperation, even if special status is available.”
Historical Notes
Margaret Hope Bacon penned an article on “Effective Peacemaking” in the issue that discussed the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends:
[T]he Quaker testimony against paying war taxes began with a few individuals who felt an opening and a “stop in my mind.”
Theirs was an even more difficult path than that of C.O.s, for the Society itself was not always behind them.
Friends have always refused to pay purely military tithes, but when the taxes are “in the mixture,” that is, war taxes and civilian taxes mixed together, or when the tax is not publicly stated as being for war, they have urged members to pay.
In , London Yearly Meeting disciplined a woman member who was advocating that Friends refuse to pay a new tax that she thought was clearly for war purposes.
She was told that for the past 1600 years Christians have always paid their taxes.
In this case the individual was trying to respond to the dictates of conscience (religion) while the group was concerned to prevent further persecution (politics).
This uneasy balance continued for years, until today, at last, monthly and yearly meetings are beginning to give more support to tax objectors, and some believe we will eventually have legal provision for the conscientious objection for our tax dollars as well as ourselves — a political result of a religious impulse.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a noticeable lull in coverage of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in .
The issue mentioned that the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was sponsoring “a demonstration on a theme that relates to sanctuary and war taxes: war tax resistance can help to stop the threat of nuclear annihilation and provide sanctuary for our children, our world, our consciences, and the homeless everywhere.
A refugee in sanctuary will be among the speakers at the event,” which was to be held at the Federal Building in Philadelphia.
“A key part of the demonstration will be the collection of refused tax monies, which will then be used to support local life-affirming work.”
There was also a notice that NWTRCC was collecting information about tax day protest actions for a press release it would be issuing.
The issue included an article by Patricia Gilmore about how the Boulder, Colorado, Meeting had come up with a plan to help Friends who were upset about their tax money going to the arms race but who wanted to respond with “something more creative than all this hassle with the IRS.”
Excerpts:
It was noted that for a person in the 30 percent tax bracket who itemized deductions, a $100 contribution to the meeting for someone to work on peace concerns would mean $30 less to the IRS.
In essence, the Friend’s $70 contribution would be matched by a $30 IRS contribution.
At the monthly meeting, consensus was reached for a peace secretary/coordinator program.
That’s when the real challenge began.
The meeting, to save itself disappointment, decided it would go no further until 50 percent of the $9,000 was raised from at least 20 families.
Within two months $11,000 was raised from 58 people.
Among the program’s early accomplishments was to convince a Colorado member of the U.S. House of Representatives to sponsor the World Peace Tax Fund bill.
They also engaged in vigils and protests, networking with other peace groups, publishing material on peace activism, advocating for conflict resolution education, developing speaker opportunities, pushing for a sister city project to link up Boulder with a city in the Soviet Union, among other things.
This seems to have been an attempt to try to build something approaching the plan anticipated by the World Peace Tax Fund bill — but from the grassroots up, rather than waiting for the politicians to grant it from above.
It reminds me of the new Norwegian Peace Fund I learned about while I was in Colombia (see ♇ ).
That said, it only really amounts to tax resistance — even if you interpret that very broadly — for those donors who could take advantage of itemized charitable deductions.
Really, it was more of a tax break than a tax resistance strategy.
But it’s interesting to see that war tax concerns were part of what launched the project.
a notice in the issue of Friends Journal
The issue reported on one of the regional conferences that had come out of the new Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns — held in Greenwich, Connecticut .
Excerpts:
Alan Eccleston, a member of New England Yearly Meeting and an active participant in the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and the New Call to Peacemaking, spoke on “Opening Ourselves to the Spirit.”
He emphasized that money is a very uncomfortable issue for many people.
Effort must be made to avoid judging each other’s choices and pushing others into an impasse of guilt or fear.
Our witness can be widely varied, as we search for answers together.
was strong in that spirit, as Friends shared openly their own questions and experiences.
Worship sharing and group discussions emphasized personal support, and understanding the spiritual basis for our witness.
Discussions covered lifestyle and choice of vocation, socially conscious investments, peace tax fund legislation, and group support for individuals.
A strong group spirit was fostered at meals prepared by three of the participants, and during walks and worship outdoors in beautiful autumn colors.
On , Friends were treated to a potluck dinner at Chappaqua (N.Y.) Meeting, followed by a panel of Friends sharing the “Experience of Concern for the Right Use of My Money.”
That issue also announced an workshop planned by the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund (which had evidently dropped the “World” part of “World Peace Tax Fund” by this time).
Supporters of the legislation could learn lobbying techniques and other ways to support the bill at the workshop.
The “First International Conference of Military Tax Resisters and Peace Tax Campaigns” was held in .
The Journal’s coverage didn’t come until , but here’s what they had to say:
More than 100 participants representing 14 countries shared personal histories and reported on the progress of the war tax issue in their homelands.
International cooperation was the major focus, with participants experiencing fellowship and awareness that they were not alone in their concerns.
Participants were invited by the German Peace Tax Campaign, Ohne Rüstung Leben (Live Without Arms), the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (German branch), the German Mennonite Peace Committee, the German Quaker Peace Committee, and the Military Tax Boycott Committee of Bielefeld/Bethel.
Organizations represented were Conscience Canada, Quaker Council for European Affairs, War Resisters International, National Campaign for a (U.S.) Peace Tax Fund, National Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, War Resisters League, and the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.
From their sharing, individuals discovered that people of conscience around the world are carrying the same concerns and struggling with the same complex issues of paying taxes that are used for military purposes.
Conscientious objection to paying for war goes far beyond national policies to the underlying philosophical and moral base of conscience.
There were differences between the groups, of course.
Some were political; some were religious (of these some were pacifist).
Each U.S. group had its own approach, its own program, and its own constituency.
In most of the other nations, one group usually embodied many facets, including legislative action, alternative funds for military tax money, and counseling.
Each campaign has its own character related to its national situation.
For instance, legislative action is strong in the United States and Britain, while the Canadian and Japanese groups are mounting challenges through the court system.
In Italy, Catholic clergy are taking the lead.
In the course of the conference, participants began using the new network by writing letters to each other’s governments, exchanging materials and addresses, and sharing experiences and wisdom.
They dreamed of integrating the issue of military taxes into the programs of all existing peace groups.
Many also felt that the church is an important international organization which holds a great deal of power.
Unfortunately, politicians are often able to use the churches as an excuse not to make morally imperative changes in policy, merely by saying, “Well, the church isn’t speaking out on this…”
Petra Kelly, member of the Deutsches Bundestag and the Green Party, spoke to the conference.
She urged us to help reach a goal of civilian and nonmilitary defense, moving us away from deterrence and a “peace” that oppresses us.
Nonviolence must be both the means and the end.
She quoted German theologian Dorothee Solie, “There are things we must just do, to feel worthy of ourselves, to be able to look ourselves in the face…”
The conference agreed upon three major actions: 1) to propose to our groups a World Peace Tax (Alternative) Fund; 2) to publish war tax news in the War Resisters International newsletter; 3) to make September 1 an international day of solidarity on war tax concerns (already a traditional day of antimilitarism in many nations.)
In a recent speech, frequently quoted at the conference, Dorothee Solie spoke of the great European cathedrals, which took as long as 200 years to build.
She said, “So a stonemason… never saw the finished building, only scaffolding and foundations and bits and pieces.
It’s no better for us, who are building the cathedral of peace.
We only see a few stones, but we must live with our dream, and learn from those who have begun the work before us.”
The Tiibingen conference seemed to be an important foundation stone for the cathedral of peace we are all building.
Another conference was announced in the issue: “Employers & Employees: Responding to Conscience” which was described this way:
[A] conference for Quaker employers sponsored by the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns, will be held at Pendle Hill, .
Participants will examine the dilemma of a Quaker employer who is caught between the role of a tax collector and an employee’s concern for the military use of income taxes.
Keynote speaker will be Kara Cole of Friends United Meeting; resource people will include tax lawyers.
Attendance is limited.
Finally, a brief note in the issue, about four U.S. military veterans who had ended a 47-day fast and vigil in protest of the U.S. government’s proxy war in Nicaragua, mentioned that the four — Charlie Liteky, George Mizo, S. Brian Willson, and Duncan Murphy — planned to continue to “withhold war taxes.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
The question of how Quaker meetings and other organizations ought to respond to the tug-of-war between the IRS and their war tax resisting employees was among the major concerns of Quakers in , as can be seen in the pages of the Friends Journal.
The IRS has long been trigger-happy with its “frivolous filing” penalty.
According to the issue:
Adding “signed involuntarily under penalty of statutory punishment” to the IRS form 1040 will no longer bring a fine for a “frivolous” return.
In a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in Montana, a district court ruled that Donna Todd of Billings, Mont., was protected by the First Amendment when she typed the above on her 1040 form.
The IRS is appealing the ruling; meanwhile, it has told its agents to refrain from imposing the frivolous-return penalty against taxpayers who editorialize on their return.
The agency didn’t seem to want to learn its lesson, and was still overapplying this penalty until very recently.
See The Picket Line for for another example of the agency being forced to back down on this issue.
A profile of Barbara Reynolds appeared in the issue, penned by her daughter, Jessica Shaver.
It focused on her war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
My mother is hardly your stereotypical tax evader.
At 70, she lives on Social Security, and her sole assets are a small apartment in downtown Long Beach, California, a beat-up Chevette (bright green), an electronic typewriter, and a six-toed cat named Marmalade.
But she has been a deliberate and most determined resister of taxes .
After years of courteous correspondence, responding to explanations of her position with repeated warnings marked “Past Due. Final Notice,” the IRS quietly closed in.
One day recently, her checking account balance was $131.14.
The next day it was zero.
She tried to make an electronic withdrawal from her savings account, which had held $799.
A message on the screen reported, “Funds not available.”
She was left with $3.06 in cash.
Only days before, Long Beach City College had voted her Senior Citizen of the Year.
At a luncheon in her honor, her efforts on behalf of Indochinese refugees were lauded, and she received a pen set inscribed “Barbara Reynolds, Woman of Peace.”
, she had dinner with Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, the Japanese government having paid her way to Hiroshima for the 40th anniversary of the first atomic bomb used on people.
Because of her many years of service to the survivors — entirely voluntary — she was the first woman granted honorary citizenship in that city.
A few months earlier, members of the War Resisters League named her their Person of the Year.
In , she was selected as one of 14 “Wonder Women” — women more than 40 years old recognized by the Wonder Woman Foundation for outstanding contributions to society.
The foundation flew her to New York for a press conference with Bill Moyers.
Polly Bergen introduced her and presented her award for “striving for peace and equality.”
So why is a little old white-haired “woman of peace” withholding taxes from the United States government?
It is precisely as a woman of peace that she withholds taxes.
She believes her stand on taxes to be consistent with her commitment to a world without war.
She doesn’t want her taxes, in whole or in part, to go for defense.
She has been up front with the IRS about her motives.
In one of her letters, she wrote, “Having spent 18 years in Hiroshima working with victims of our atomic bombs, I can only say that never, so far as it is in my power, will any portion of my income go to the government as long as it continues to base its economy and its foreign policy upon the development, stockpiling, and deployment of nuclear weapons and missile systems.”
For her, the honorable way to avoid paying taxes is to avoid owing them.
So she studiously attempts to keep her income below the minimum taxable level and gives generously to deductible causes.
In , however, Mum had to sell the old family homestead in Ohio.
In spite of her best intentions, the house had appreciated in value, and she wasn’t eligible for the one-time capital gains exemption.
She was appalled to find that she owed the government $1,189.
She paid the money but she didn’t pay it to the IRS.
She sent $667 to the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account and $522 to Friends United Meeting Peace Tax Fund.
CMTC calls itself “a mechanism to accept payments in anticipation of legislative action” now pending to create a federal Peace Tax Fund.
The FUM Peace Tax Fund is for members who wish their taxes to be used for life-affirming activities.
When and if such a federal fund is created, both accounts will have all individual deposits transferred to it.
In the meantime, because of penalties, she still owes more than $400.
It will be interesting to see how the IRS claims its remaining debts.
Maybe they’ll garnishee the six-toed cat.
A postscript noted: “[Reynolds] has received notice that the IRS has placed a lien on her property for $162.79 in taxes owed for and has seized $100.83 from her checking account. ”
In the issue was a fantasy by Charles R. Sides that imagined a more “user friendly” personal computer.
Excerpt:
I chose the Home Accountant which neatly arranges my expenses and income in spreadsheet form.
After booting the program I began to record my written checks.
A major expense for the month of April is my reconciliation of the past year’s taxes and the quarterly payment for the next year.
When I entered the check number, it responded correctly and asked to whom it was paid.
I entered IRS.
Next question was the amount.
I entered.
At prompting to enter my message the Corona suddenly asked, “Do you know what portion of your taxes goes to the defense department?”
“Have you contacted your congressperson concerning the World Peace Tax Fund?”
“Have you considered withholding your taxes as a protest against the administration’s military position?”
Unable to answer in good conscience, I exited the program.
Was this “user Friendly” computer going to continue its assault on my conscience?
I hadn’t counted on that possibility.
The “War Tax Concerns Committee” of New England Yearly Meeting — Cushman Anthony, Elizabeth Boardman, Alan Eccleston, Finley Perry, and George Watson — published a statement in the same issue:
New England Yearly Meeting, through various minutes, has declared that refusal to pay all or part of one’s income tax is an appropriate way to refuse to participate in war making, for those who feel led to engage in such a witness.
A number of members of the yearly meeting who have felt so called have been offered guidance and support through the Peace and Social Concerns Committee, the Committee on Sufferings, and the NEYM War Tax Alternatives Fund.
War tax resistance is usually an individual witness rising out of the Peace Testimony.
However, if one of our members who wishes to make this witness is also an employee of the yearly meeting, some additional considerations come into play.
The question presently facing us was raised by the Personnel Committee:
Should NEYM refuse to act as the federal government’s agent in collecting — by withholding and paying over to the IRS — taxes of an employee who refuses on the basis of conscience to pay war taxes?
The problem is not new.
Action has already been taken by other organizations, including Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, London Yearly Meeting, American Friends Service Committee, and the General Conference Mennonite Church.
Each of these organizations has wrestled with it for a number of years, and after careful consideration, each refused to withhold taxes.
Nobody yet knows the full consequences of any of these decisions.
There are difficult questions involving individual conscience on both sides.
We note some of the concerns and reasoning of the Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting in taking this step.
Some Friends saw the Society as having become a little too comfortable in its peace testimony and saw in this witness a gesture to all peace loving people.
It was noted that since Quakers are people who put principles into practice, the yearly meeting as an employer of conscientious objectors should assist them in their witness.
On the other hand, concerns were raised that should a witness be made, there would be criticism that “it was neither logical to juggle with the mathematics of tax monies, nor moral to opt out of the give and take of a democratic society.”
Another observation was that Friends “from John Woolman to draft resisters had been careful to place no one but themselves at risk,” whereas this refusal to withhold would place the yearly meeting itself at risk.
In a letter to the Board of Inland Revenue (), the clerk of the Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting noted, “The name Meeting for Sufferings derives from when Friends met to give support to those of their members who suffered in diverse ways for conscience’s sake and that at various times the Society of Friends corporately has recognized a religious obligation to stand with individuals whose commitment of conscience may not currently be recognized by the laws of this country.”
In deciding this question for ourselves as a yearly meeting, there is a case for joining the witness as an employer by refusing to withhold income tax money or refusing to forward withheld money to the IRS; and there is a case for continuing to withhold and to forward money to the IRS as required by law.
The Case for Continuing to Withhold as Required by Law
The United States has one of the most effective tax systems in the world.
Its success rests on the voluntary compliance of U.S. citizens.
Undermining this system by noncompliance with the law does great harm to the system.
Refusing to pay withheld taxes to the government would put us in opposition to the Internal Revenue System.
Our real dispute, however, is with the Department of Defense.
Consequently, this effort misdirects our energy and our witness away from that portion of governmental power which we would choose to oppose.
Failing to pay all of the tax money would not directly reduce the war making budget.
By legal process, the IRS would almost certainly collect the money plus penalties.
Even if it did not, the military would get its full appropriation anyway and would be unaffected by the witness.
This action could well jeopardize some assets of the yearly meeting, the standing of the yearly meeting as a taxdeductible organization, and the officers of the yearly meeting.
Since some members of NEYM are not in agreement with the war tax objection position, they should not be asked to put themselves and the yearly meeting in jeopardy for a cause in which they do not believe.
The yearly meeting is supporting and should continue to support individual war tax witness actions.
If the yearly meeting does not join the witness as employer, its employees will not be placed in any worse position than Quakers employed elsewhere.
A number of members of the yearly meeting feel required by their consciences to pay all the taxes which they owe to the federal government.
A decision by the yearly meeting to refuse to pay employees’ withheld taxes would violate the consciences of these Friends.
The Case for Joining the Witness as Employer
We live in a world where there are in excess of 15 million deaths a year by starvation (41,000 a day) while $660 billion goes to military expenditures.
It is estimated that just $60 billion, or less than 10 percent of all military expenditures, would eliminate starvation on this planet.
Purchasing weapons of war not only increases the likelihood of killing, it causes thousands of deaths each day by depriving people of the sustenance needed for their survival.
As a religious organization in a country that is one of the leaders in the arms race, we have a clear responsibility to address this issue.
Joining a witness as employer gives the yearly meeting an opportunity to take concrete action as a religious body on this critical problem.
Taking this position is not a threat to the voluntary tax system, since it is an open and honest witness, and tends to encourage others to be open and honest in their dealings with the IRS.
It is the creeping tendency to be dishonest in declaring one’s financial situation that threatens to undercut our tax system.
If this witness is viewed as a threat to the voluntary tax system, there is a remedy at hand — passage of the World Peace Tax Fund Act in the U.S. Congress.
New England Yearly Meeting’s action would work towards passage of that act, which would benefit individuals in the Society of Friends, as well as our country as a whole.
Friends’ testimony on peace is one of our central experiences of truth.
The weight of this issue in our world calls us to act with clarity and resolve, regardless of risk and possible complications.
The fact that the tax may be collected does not diminish the value of this conscientious objection to war.
Taking this action as a yearly meeting gives us an opportunity to define the differences between our beliefs and those of the U.S. culture in general.
This could then strengthen the resolve in individual Friends to speak out and take action in regard to our war making society.
Other Quaker organizations have already begun this witness, and our standing with them adds our testimony to theirs.
This amplifies the message to the world of Friends regarding war and peace, and at the same time will contribute to the unification of Friends.
We urge all Friends to weigh these considerations prayerfully and to seek clarity on how the yearly meeting should respond if one of its employees requests that it support him or her by refusing to pay withheld taxes to the government.
As an example of Friends weighing such considerations, the same issue reported on a meeting of 35 people from 21 Friends organizations at the Pendle Hill center “to discuss their responsibilities when employees are conscientious objectors to the payment of war taxes.”
Excerpts:
Wallace Collett, clerk of the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns which organized the conference, noted that this may be the first time so many Quaker organizations have come together to deal with the issue of how individual conscience flows into our corporate organizations.
In a talk formed by images of “Stones and the Builder” drawn from 1 Peter 2, Kara Cole, Administrative Secretary of Friends United Meeting, noted that Scripture shows how the lonely and isolated find themselves formed into a community which is the temple of God.
The issues for the conference revolved around choices, risk, and obedience, as they relate to appropriate use of our taxes.
Kara pointed out that when we choose Jesus, we choose to be with one who was alone in prayer, who was misunderstood, who was the living stone rejected by people.
However, we also find that we become living stones.
Not only can we find the temple in one another, we also find one another in the temple.
This image set the tone for the remainder of the conference, as participants sought ways to allow our institutions to be incarnated as communities under the influence of religious concern.
Representatives from the Friends Journal, the Friends World Committee for Consultation, Friends United Meeting, London Yearly Meeting, the American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and other Quaker organizations and groups were able to share firsthand experience with ways Quaker employers have responded to staff members’ conscientious objection to payment of war taxes.
A panel of three lawyers presented a particularly helpful analysis of the legal situation.
These materials and some queries and advices that emerged from small group discussions will be revised and made available by the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.
While participants struggled with complex technical issues associated with war tax resistance, there seemed to be agreement that Quaker institutions have a corporate responsibility to assist their employees in responding as openly and honestly as possible.
Employers were admonished to develop policies to clarify the situation for the employees.
Employees and employers were urged to work together to avoid any form of tax evasion.
Employers need to develop policies so that their employees are not put in the position of having to commit fraud to gain control of income that would be subject to withholding.
Employees need to practice full disclosure of their actual tax liability and redirect refused taxes to constructive programs.
Individuals were urged to seek clearness with their faith community (monthly meeting or church) before engaging in this witness.
A letter received from Marion Franz, Executive Director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, told Friends of the importance of corporate witness on war taxes.
She finds that most Congressional staffers — who are rarely asked to consider rights of individual conscience — sit up and take notice when informed that the issue is not just of concern to some individuals, but that organizations have begun to take stands in cooperation with their employees.
Bob Hull, of the Mennonite General Conference, reported that New Call to Peacemaking has tentative plans to hold a conference on war tax concerns for Mennonite, Brethren, and Quaker employers in .
This conference, somewhat delayed, was announced in the issue:
The Challenge to church organizations from employees requesting their federal taxes not be withheld will be the topic of a conference jointly sponsored in by New Call to Peacemaking and the Quaker War Tax Concerns Committee.
A note in the back of the issue said:
Conscientious tax resisters who are forthright in their dealings with the IRS are unlikely to face a criminal penalty, according to Peter Goldberger in War Tax Concerns: Options and Consequences.
This booklet offers the layperson an overview of the IRS tax collection process for those who may be considering war tax resistance…
A second note concerned the booklet Taxes and Idolatry which concerned “the forgotten biblical witness in which taxation is seen as an affront to God.”
The issue included an article that noted in passing that at the London Yearly Meeting “[i]n recent years… two clerks were threatened with imprisonment on the issue of whether the yearly meeting should withhold for taxation purposes a part of employees’ pay.”
That issue also announced an “seminar/lobbying day” on behalf of the Peace Tax Fund, and an “National War Tax Resistance Action Conference” — which is to say, a NWTRCC gathering.
A letter from Geoff Tischbein in the issue is a good and rare example of the fourth variety of war tax resister I mentioned in my typology of the American war tax resistance movement back in .
Tischbein takes issue with the assertion in the article from the War Tax Concerns Committee of New England Yearly Meeting that their real dispute is with the Department of Defense, not the IRS.
As a war tax resister, I’ve often struggled with this question, and for myself, I do not feel that my dispute is with either.
Most immediately, my dispute is with the U.S. Congress and its refusal to grant conscientious objectors to military taxes the same right of conscience granted to conscientious objectors to military service.
The legal arguments are manifold and include, among others, free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment and international law which involves Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution and the Nuremberg principles.
Indeed, much of the thinking and correspondence of the founding fathers indicates that freedom of conscience was a principle they strongly believed in, but one they did not specifically list in the Constitution.
I suppose, if I were to follow the thread of responsibility to the spool, it would ultimately lead to the entire population of the United States that, in some macabre contortion of expediency, has put the welfare of the state above the rights of the individual, more closely a description of communism than of Western-style democracy.
Ultimately, I feel that war tax resistance is a religious issue and no governmental power has any authority in the case; it is strictly a personal concern to be resolved, individually, with God.
Thus our goal, as I see it, is to convince Congress of the religious nature of this issue.
The “Sufferings” column in that issue concerned Jerilynn C. Prior:
[Prior], a member of Vancouver (Canada) Meeting who paid into Conscience Canada’s Peace Trust Fund that portion of her Canadian federal income taxes which goes for military purposes, has had her appeal to the Tax Court of Canada rejected.
In , Revenue Canada assessed the amount of tax that Jerilynn had withheld from her income tax.
She appealed the assessment, but was denied the appeal.
The forthcoming hearing will be in Vancouver; the case will eventually go to a Federal Court of Appeal and then to the Supreme Court of Canada as a test case of the Charter of Rights provisions for freedom of conscience and religion.
Legal costs will probably exceed $100,000. Donations, payable to the Peace Tax Legal Fund, may be sent to The Society for Charter Clarification…
Prior’s case got a more in-depth look in the issue.
Excerpts:
Jerilynn Prior, a member of Vancouver (B.C.) Meeting, will be the first person to claim in court that the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides the right not to pay for war, and she is prepared to follow this claim through the courts to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Her first war tax resistance was in with refusal to pay the 10 percent telephone tax which was reimposed specifically to support the Vietnam war.
Throughout the time she had an income in the United States she withheld various kinds of taxes and put the money into recognized charities when there was no peace trust fund.
She became a Quaker in Cambridge (Mass.) Meeting in .…
She went to Canada in and became a Canadian citizen in .
Beginning in (which was the year the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted) she consistently refused to pay the government that portion of her federal income tax which would otherwise be spent for war purposes.
She paid this money into Conscience Canada’s Peace Tax Fund.
Her decision to withhold the portion of her income tax which would otherwise be spent for war purposes and to deposit it in a Peace Tax Fund was made from a deep-felt conviction that war is wrong.
Her appeal in the tax court in against a ministerial decision that she should be assessed the amount she deducted in was pursued with the same spiritually-based conviction.
And when the tax court ruled against her, her decision to take the case through the federal court system was with the conviction that she could not honestly teach peace to her children while paying for war.
She feels that to have a strong belief and not to act on it is hypocrisy.
She insists that her action is not a political one and maintains she is not trying to change the government or the Income Tax Act.
She affirms the government of Canada and is proud to be in that country.
She does not wish to change government policy on taxation but merely wants a way in which to pay taxes and at the same time uphold her conscience and religious beliefs.
When asked if the government could assure her that none of her tax money would go to military purposes, would she pay the full amount of tax to the government, she replied, “I certainly would.”
Jerilynn has specifically asked that these legal proceedings not be referred to as “her test case,” for her action is being upheld by many others and is taken on behalf of all.…
A great deal of media attention was aroused when the decision by the tax court judge was made public.
No doubt an even greater media coverage will be given to the next court decision.
Such publicity gives to those who disagree an opportunity to voice their opinions, to hear responses, and to give the subject more thought.
When it increases public awareness of the urgent need for nonviolent solutions to disagreements, that is, in itself, an accomplishment.
We hope that the final Supreme Court decision will be affirmative and will set the stage for other equally sincere efforts in Canada, and perhaps elsewhere, toward a more peaceful world.
Prior’s Federal Court appeal was denied in and the Supreme Court declined to take up her case in .
She appealed further, to the UN Human Rights Committee, but they too refused to hear her appeal.
Another article in the issue concerned the Norway Yearly Meeting. Excerpt:
A growing feeling of guilty conscience among members led to drafting a letter to members of the government and various peace groups about the peace tax issue.
The meeting asked that ways be found to direct tax money from those who wish to humanitarian, ecological, or promoting peace instead of to the defense budget.
Leah B. Felton had a letter-to-the-editor printed in the issue that covered little new ground, and discussed war taxes (though not war tax resistance) and promoted the Peace Tax Fund as if nobody had ever heard of these things before.
It’s notable perhaps only for the opening phrase: “No doubt the overwhelming majority of Friends pay income tax…”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
The third of Friends Journal’s special issues on war tax resistance came in , and the topic came up in several other issues besides.
An article by Mary Bye in the issue showed how the arguments for war tax resistance were starting to break the bounds of the tax arena and take hold elsewhere.
Excerpts:
In a letter from the collection department of Philadelphia Electric Company demanded payment for a backlog of refused rate hikes.
I had withheld the 13.7 percent imposed to cover the construction costs of the Salem and Limerick nuclear reactors.
Why did I take this stand?
Looking back over the years for the source of my action, I could see it springing from a long-time insistence upon justice, a small but growing willingness to risk, a perennial sense of grief for suffering, and a blossoming love of the Earth.
These are the qualities of the spirit which began to unfold into action during the early days of the Vietnam War.
Somewhere along the line, I refused to pay the war tax portion of my federal income tax.
Later the Vietnam War ground to a halt when legislation ended financial support for it.
Was it just a coincidence that our war tax resistance preceded this legislation?
Or did citizens modeling the denial of monies not only support the growing disaffection with the war, but also provide a clue to a way to end it?
We had perhaps unwittingly slipped into an old Christian strategy of living as if the Kingdom were here now, and, behold, it manifested a brave, new world, or at least the beginning of one.
War tax resistance seemed an appropriate base upon which to build a new witness of caring for the whole Earth.…
…With crystalline clarity I selected my own utility, Philadelphia Electric, and refused the rate hike for Salem and Limerick.
After 1½ years of refusal, accompanied by monthly explanations, I received a warning letter from the collection department, threatening an end of service.
The initial fright yielded to a decision to continue resisting and move as swiftly as possible to establish my independence from nuclear power forever.
I faced a new, expensive, complicated simplicity: photovoltaic cells, which produce electrical current when exposed to light, and which could free me from bondage not only to nuclear generators but also fossil fuel-fired reactors.
As war tax resistance led me to a lower income, so rate hike refusal was pointing the way to lower energy demands.
My living standard may drop, but the quality of my life soars.
Meanwhile I have discovered that Philadelphia Electric is experimenting with photovoltaics in anticipation of the coming solar age.
If the price is right, I could purchase them there.
After all, nuclear power is the enemy, not the electric company.
This is the vision, but it is a dream deferred or rather only partially realized.
Philadelphia Electric Company and Solarex, which manufactures photovoltaic cells, want to establish a demonstration project at my home that would provide between one-fourth and one-third of the daily demand here for electricity.
The stumbling block is the cost, which would possibly necessitate a 35-year pay-back period.
So I am circling the photovoltaic issue in a holding pattern like a plane above an airport.
I am searching for answers to hard questions: such as what is the equitable balance between the cost of photovoltaics and the wattage generated?
What is a reasonable payback time?
If the cost is rock bottom right now, how do we gather funds?
How do we secure state and government support?
Are churches and meetinghouses able to model this kind of caring for God’s creation?
How do we dream this dream into reality?
I would welcome your suggestions.
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal
That issue also announced a “Conference for Quaker, Mennonite, and Brethren employers, airing ways to deal with war tax resistance by employees.
Sponsored by Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns and New Call to Peacemaking.”
That conference was covered in the issue in an article by Paul Schrag.
Excerpts:
The question of how church organizations can help their employees follow their consciences — and how to deal with the risks involved for both employees and employers — were the issues that 36 Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers struggled with at the meeting.
The church leaders, organizational representatives and lawyers affirmed their support for individual military tax resisters and for efforts to seek a legislative solution by working toward passage of the U.S. Peace Tax Fund bill in Congress.
They agreed to organize a peace church leadership group to go to Washington, D.C., to support the peace tax bill and to express concerns about tax withholding.
They also agreed to help each other by filing friend-of-the-court briefs if tax resisters are prosecuted and by sharing the cost of tax resistance penalties, if necessary.
People from churches that refuse to withhold federal taxes for employees who oppose paying military taxes shared their experiences with people from churches considering adopting such a policy.
The General Conference Mennonite Church and two Quaker groups are in the first category.
The Mennonite Church is in the second.
The meeting, held at Quaker Hill Conference Center, took place in an atmosphere of excitement generated by a gathering of people from different traditions who share a vision.
One conference participant said it was frustrating that many members of historic peace churches are unwilling to witness against financial participation in preparing for war, although they are opposed to physical participation in war.
Some said it was disappointing that so many people are unwilling to follow their consciences until the government, through the Peace Tax Fund, might allow them to do so legally.
One quoted Gandhi: “We have stooped so low that we fancy it our duty to do whatever the law requires.”
When a church or organization decides to honor employees’ requests not to withhold their federal income tax, it assumes serious risks.
Theoretically, a person in a responsible position who willfully fails to withhold an employee’s taxes can be punished with a prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
An organization can be fined $500,000.
But such penalties have never been imposed on legitimate religious organizations, nor are they likely to be, said two lawyers at the meeting.
The usual Internal Revenue Service response to war tax resistance is to take the amount of tax owed, plus a 5 percent penalty and interest, from the employee’s bank account.
However, the IRS has not taken even this action against General Conference Mennonite Church employees who are not having their taxes withheld.
They pay the nonmilitary portion of their taxes themselves and deposit the 53 percent that would have gone to the military in a designated account.
The IRS has not touched that account after church delegates approved the policy in .
All church personnel who could be subject to penalties have agreed to accept the risk.
Friends World Committee for Consultation, which has had a nonwithholding policy , has had tax money seized, plus interest and penalties, from its resisters’ bank accounts.
Friends United Meeting adopted a non withholding policy .
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends is considering such a policy.
A representative of the Church of the Brethren said he would use input from the meeting to work toward developing a denominational policy on tax resistance.
Lobbying continues for the Peace Tax Fund bill…
The bill would allow people opposed to war taxes to put the portion normally given to the military in a separate fund for peaceful purposes.
The rest of that person’s tax money also would be designated for nonmilitary use…
Whether or not military tax resistance is effective, participants agreed that people’s moral imperative to follow their consciences must be respected.
“No conscientious objector ever stopped a conflict,” said William Strong, a Quaker representative [and treasurer of the Friends Journal Board of Directors].
“But they had to explain what they did, and the vision was kept alive, and those ripples, you don’t know where they stop.”
A postscript noted: “ ‘A Manual on Military Tax Withholding for Religious Employers,’ written by Robert Hull, Linda Coffin, Peter Goldberger, and J.E. McNeil, will be available .”
from the cover to the issue of Friends Journal
The issue was the third special issue on war taxes from the Friends Journal.
It was prompted in part by the fact that the Journal itself had received IRS levies on the salary of its editor, Vinton Deming, who had been refusing to pay income tax .
The Treasurer of the Journal, William D. Strong, explained what was going on in the lead editorial:
The Friends Journal Board of Managers has twice been unable to honor the levy against the wages of our editor, Vint Deming, for unpaid federal taxes.
In our most recent reply to the Internal Revenue Service we stated that:
It is not possible for us as a board to separate our faith and our practice: we must live out our faith.
Our earlier letter… refers to our 300-year-old Peace Testimony.
To more fully describe that part of our beliefs we enclose copies of two sections of Faith and Practice, the book of spiritual discipline of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
[“The Peace Testimony” and “The Individual and the State,” pp. 34–38, were shared.]
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.
We know as well that other religious groups — Mennonites, Brethren, and others — are facing this same difficult dilemma.
For this reason, many of us support the proposed Peace Tax Fund bill in Congress.
The board agreed at our meeting in to make known this continuing witness, both individual and corporate, to you, our readers.
The dilemma is clearly not the Journal’s alone.
Many Quaker institutions in the United States, Canada, and England have faced this challenge.
Beyond the historic peace churches are Catholics, Methodists, and others who are considering the whole question of taxes and militarism.
In February representatives of some 70 institutions came together at the Quaker Hill Conference Center in Richmond, Indiana, for a New Call to Peacemaking consultation on “Employers and War Taxes.”
This followed a Quaker conference at Pendle Hill considering the same concern.
The Journal board has worked at and reached unity in this matter.
We will continue to seek the light in the months and years ahead.
For now, however, we would welcome the support and reactions of our subscribers and readers.
If you’d like to share in this witness with your moral support, let us know.
If you’d like to add practical support, we would welcome it, as we are establishing a Conscience Fund.
We don’t plan extensive legal undertakings at this time, but we know that there can readily be some fees and costs ahead, as well as possible penalties resulting from our refusal to honor the levies from the IRS.
We look forward to the response of our readers. We feel that we cannot host writings in the issues of the Journal on peace and justice, on our testimonies and faith and practice, without, as an employer, living them out to the best of our God-given abilities.
Another article in the special issue was an extract from J. William Frost’s Tax Court testimony in the Deming case, in which he explained the Quaker war tax resistance practice:
The peace testimony has been a basic part of Quaker religious belief .
The testimony has not been static; it has evolved over time as Friends thought out the implications of what it meant to be a bringer of peace.
Some of the most creative actions of members of the Society of Friends have come from the peace testimony.
For example, Friends’ primary contribution to world history is that they began and carried through the antislavery testimony.
Friends became antislavery advocates in , when they realized that the only way one could obtain a black slave was to take him or her captive in war.
Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn for religious liberty.
Penn believed, and so did the early settlers, that to create a Quaker colony meant there would be no militia, no war taxes and no oaths.
These were conceived to be part of religious freedom, and in the early years of Pennsylvania, there was no militia, and there were no war taxes and no oaths.
At first, the Pennsylvania Assembly refused to levy any taxes for the direct carrying on of war.
Instead, after when the British government requested money because it was already beginning its long series of wars with France, the Crown and the Pennsylvania Assembly worked out a series of arrangements.
Those arrangements provided that the Assembly (then composed primarily of Quakers) would provide money for the king’s use or the queen’s use, but the laws also stipulated that that money would not be directly used for military purposes; i.e., there would be almost a noncombat status for Quaker money.
It could be used to provide foodstuffs to be used to feed the Indians, or it could purchase grain or relieve sufferings.
It would not be used to provide guns and gunpowder.
This policy of no direct war taxes, no militia, and no oaths, was followed in Pennsylvania .
In , a group of members of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting began the debate on whether Quakers should pay taxes in time of war.
At this time, some of the most devout Quakers refused to pay a war tax levied by the Pennsylvania Assembly.
And finally the yearly meeting agreed that those whose consciences would not allow them to pay the taxes, should not.
So the heritage of Pennsylvania was that government accommodated the religion.
The Federal Constitution allows for an affirmation, because certain religious rights are antecedent to the establishment of the government, and the government can and will accommodate itself to religious scruples of those people who are conscientious good citizens.
there was less opportunity for tax resistance because there was no direct federal taxation.
The federal government was financed by tariffs, and the tariffs were used to carry out the full operations of government.
(The major exception came during the Civil War, and here the main issues were military service and Quakers’ refusal to pay a substitution tax.)
The main Quaker response to World War Ⅰ was the creation of the American Friends Service Committee.
This organization was designed to allow those young men who did not wish to fight (conscientious objectors) to have an opportunity for constructive service (i.e., to provide relief and reconstruction in the war zone).
Friends conducted relief activities in France, and then later in Germany, Serbia, Poland, and in Russia.
The War Department accommodated itself to Friends.
There was no specific provision in the draft law in World War Ⅰ for conscientious objectors.
The War Department allowed those Friends who wished to serve in the American Friends Service Committee to be furloughed so that they could go abroad to participate in relief activities.
A second way in which the authorities accommodated Friends at that time was in relief money raised by the Red Cross for Bonds.
Much of the Red Cross effort was for military hospitals, and Friends did not wish to support that effort.
Therefore in Philadelphia an agreement was worked out whereby Friends contributed money or bonds which would be earmarked for the American Friends Service Committee or for relief activity rather than for direct war activity.
There were instances in World War Ⅱ of individual Friends refusing to pay war taxes, and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting officially protested against certain war taxes, but the main movement against war taxes has occurred .
During the Cold War and particularly during Vietnam, war tax resistance has become a major theme in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, , has regularly put a discussion of war taxes on its agenda.
In many ways the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting position on war taxes is like its position was on antislavery before the Civil War: before , virtually all Friends opposed slavery.
, virtually all Friends oppose military taxation.
The difficulty in and in is that Friends are searching for a way to make their religious witness effective.
What Friends want to do is somehow change the focus of a policy which they see as destructive of what is basic to their value system.
In summary, the position of Friends is that religious freedoms preceded and are incorporated into the federal government.
Pennsylvania was founded for religious freedom, and religious freedom meant no taxes for war, no militia service, and the right of affirmation.
Friends think that the federal government incorporated part of that understanding in the affirmation clause in the constitution, in the first amendment, and in the religion clauses in the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Friends think that the government has in good faith tried to accommodate us in our position on military service, and what Friends are wanting from the government now is a like accommodation on a subject which is the same to us as conscientious objection: the paying of taxes which will be used to create weapons to threaten and to kill.
Deming represented himself next, in an article describing his “journey toward war tax resistance.”
Excerpts:
During a difficult moment [in the discussion over the Philadelpha Yearly Meeting’s response to the Vietnam War] a young Friend stood and spoke with deep emotion; and his words went straight to my heart.
It didn’t matter, he said, what older Friends might say in support of him and his generation (though support was needed and appreciated, for sure); what really mattered to him was that Friends look personally at their own lives to see how they were connected to warmaking.
If they were too old to be drafted (and most of us were) perhaps they could find other ways to resist the war.
About 20 years have gone by and I don’t even remember the name of the young Friend who spoke in meeting that day, but his words had a profound impact on me.
As a result of his ministry I decided to begin to seek ways to resist the payment of taxes for warmaking (what another Friend, Colin Bell, would term the “drafting of our tax dollars” for the military).
I should say that there was another motivating force at work on me as well.
My work for Friends in the city of Chester was bringing me into daily contact with poor and black people.
I was learning firsthand about a community — a microcosm of other urban areas across the country — that suffered the debilitating effects of chronic poverty, high unemployment, deteriorating housing, inadequate health care, and inferior public schools.
I was witnessing the insufficient funding of a so-called War on Poverty in Chester while millions of dollars and human lives were being expended in a war against other poor people in Southeast Asia.
I knew I had to do something to end my personal complicity in helping to pay for the war and to redirect these dollars to wage a more life-affirming battle against poverty and injustice here at home.
I soon discovered that it is hard to become a tax resister; there are so many basic assumptions about money and taxes that we have learned.
We are expected to do certain things in our society: when we work, we must pay taxes — this pretty much goes without question.
How else will programs get funded and bills get paid?
And those who don’t pay, well… there’s an institution called the IRS that takes care of such people and will make them pay!
There are so many good reasons for not resisting taxes.
Some of the ones I wrestled with are these:
I can’t get away with it.
IRS will eventually get the money from me anyway and I’ll just end up paying more in the end.
It won’t do any good.
The government is too powerful and they’ll not change their policies because of my symbolic act.
There are better ways to work for peace (i.e. writing letters to Congress, going to demonstrations, etc.)
There will never be a substantial number who will be tax resisters — it’s simply not realistic.
Well, there’s truth in all of these statements, but I had to start anyway.
Not to do so had simply become an even bigger problem for me.
So I began looking at the question of taxes for war and decided to start where I could, with the telephone tax.
I learned that the federal tax on my personal phone had been increased specifically to help pay for the war.
In talking with others who were refusing to pay this portion of their phone bills I learned that the risk was fairly small.
No one I knew about had gone to jail or suffered any severe penalties (beyond having some money taken from a bank account or such).
So my wife and I began to withhold these few dollars each month and include a note to the telephone company explaining our reasons.
This became an educational experience for me.
I started to get used to receiving the impersonal letters from the phone company and later from IRS, and I even came to enjoy the process of writing my own letters in response — I felt good about not paying.
In I began to feel more confident.
The IRS had not locked me up, or even taken any money from me, as I recall, so I gathered my courage and decided to take the next step — to resist paying a portion of my income taxes.
At first I included a letter with my tax form in April and tried to claim a “war tax deduction” and request a return of some of the money withheld from my salary but with no success.
The IRS computers were not impressed with my effort, and they routinely informed me that the tax code did not provide for such a claim.
So I came to a decision: it would be better to have IRS asking me for the money each year rather than my asking IRS.
So beginning in I began to seek ways to reduce the amount withheld from my regular paychecks.
Though some tax resisters at accomplished this by claiming all the world’s children as their dependents (or all the Vietnamese children), I decided to reduce the amount withheld by claiming extra allowances (which were authorized for anticipated medical expenses, etc.) and thus reduce the amount withheld.
Beginning in , when I started to work part-time at Friends Journal, and continuing until , I claimed enough allowances on my W-4 so that no money was withheld from my pay.
For several years as a single parent raising a young child, I lived very modestly, working just part-time and sharing living expenses in a communal house.
During those years I actually got money back from the government when I had paid nothing.
Since , however, after I remarried (and later had two more children) I started to owe money to IRS each year.
So each year at tax time I would write a personal letter to the president to be sent with a copy of my tax form (not completely filled out, usually just with my name and address) explaining why I could not in good conscience pay any taxes until our nation’s priorities changed from warmaking to peacemaking.
I would usually send copies of my letters as well to IRS, my representative in Congress, and friends.
Occasionally I would receive thoughtful responses, once from Congressman William Gray from my district, who is one of the sponsors of Peace Tax Fund legislation in Washington.
After a few years of this, IRS began to make some ominous threats and noises, followed by the first serious efforts to collect back taxes from me.
I should say that I redirected some of the unpaid taxes to peace organizations and poor people’s groups, some into an alternative tax fund, some into a credit union account to earn interest — and some was spent.
On two occasions — once in , again in — I went to tax court.
Each court appearance provided an opportunity to explain my witness more clearly, and to meet others in the community who were tax resisters or who wanted to be supportive.
My first day in court was in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was particularly meaningful.
About 30 of my friends went with me to lend support.
A local peace group baked apple pies and served small slices to people entering the courthouse next to a large “pie chart” that graphically showed the disproportionately small share of our federal taxes going to human services and the large piece to the military.
A local TV station interviewed me and carried a story on the evening news.
A wire service picked up on the story as well, and for several days I received phone calls from people throughout the South.
What occurred inside the courthouse was just as important.
The judge was very interested in my pacifist views:
At one point he ended the hearing and engaged in an extended discussion right in the courtroom of many of the peace issues I had raised.
It became a sort of teach-in on the subject of militarism and peaceful resistance.
Later both he and the young government attorney thanked me for what I shared and complimented me for effectively handling my own legal defense.
(I had elected not to be represented by counsel.)
Though the court eventually ruled against my arguments in the case — which did not surprise me — I feel that the whole experience of going to court was a positive one, as well as an educational experience for others.
And though I was ordered to pay the $500 or so owed in back taxes, I never did — and no further efforts were made to collect.
IRS has been more aggressive, however, in recent years.
Some funds have been seized from a bank account, an IRA was taken, and such efforts are continuing even as I write this article.
Most recently IRS has levied Friends Journal for the tax years for taxes, interest, and penalties totaling about $23,000.
I am grateful that the Journal’s board has declined to accept the levies on my salary… and that the board as a Quaker employer both corporately and as individual members supports my witness.
I don’t know what the future will bring, and frankly I try not to think about it too much.
In the past two years I have changed my approach some.
My wife and I have decided to file a joint return.
Beginning this past summer the Journal started to withhold a little money from my paychecks following my decision to complete the new W-4.
It seems appropriate just now that I devote my time to working on the earlier tax years and to finding ways to support others who are more actively resisting.
I try to stay open as well to seeking other approaches to resistance from year to year.
What are some things that I have learned from all this?
Perhaps I might share these thoughts:
Tax resistance is a very individual thing.
Each of us must find our own way and decide what works best for us.
Resist openly and joyfully, and seek opportunities to be in the company of others along the way.
When you go for an IRS audit, for instance, take some friends with you; when you go to court, make the courtroom a meeting for worship.
Don’t see IRS agents or government officials as the enemy.
Look for opportunities for friendliness, address individuals by name, be open and honest about what you intend to do.
The IRS will soon recognize that a conscientious tax refuser is different from a tax evader.
What might work one year may not the next.
Be flexible and remain open to trying different approaches.
Talking about money is hard, and it is discouraged in our society.
I remember how embarrassed the grownups in my family were when one of my children once asked at the dinner table, “How much money do you have, grandpa?”
Tax resistance helps us to remove some of these barriers, and this is good.
Sometimes our children can educate us, I should say, and provide simple insights to seemingly complex problems.
Just as I was challenged by a young Friend to consider tax resistance 20 years ago, an IRS agent was once set on his heels by my daughter.
During a lull in a long conversation about financial figures, Evelyn (only seven at the time) asked the agent, “Why do you make my daddy pay money for killing people?”
The poor man shuffled his papers, turned beet-red, cleared his throat, and ended the meeting.
There were several responses to the special issue on war tax resistance that were printed as letters-to-the-editor in the issue:
Jim Quigley wrote in to express his “admiration for the act of courage and faith represented by the war tax resisters.”
Karl E. Buff wanted to “encourage Vinton Deming to continue to resist” in the hopes that “[w]ithout easy access to huge sums of money our government would surely have to curtail its war-making propensities.”
He also put in a plug for the Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
Eddie Boudreau suggested that someone set up a “Conscience Fund” that people could contribute to and that would help defray the legal expenses of folks like Vinton Deming.
Susan B. Chambers wrote in about her technique, which was to consult with a tax expert in order to get into the “zero tax bracket” and to contribute 30% of her income to charity.
“I am pleased not to inconvenience my friends in taking this stand,” she wrote, in what I read as something of a rebuke to those resisters, like Deming, whose resistance becomes an agenda item for their employers (though she didn’t make this explicit).
Robin Greenler wrote to support the Journal’s resistance to helping the IRS collect from Deming.
“The decisions are neither easier nor less important on corporate levels than they are on a personal level.”
Ben Richmond wrote that, for him, the question of whether a tax resister would just end up paying more in the end (with penalties and interest added to the unpaid tax) was the one he found the most difficult.
“I have never found it satisfying to think that the point of the witness was simply to satisfy my personal need for moral purity.”
But he looked into the early Quaker resistance to mandatory tithes for the establishment church and found that Quakers were willing to suffer having property seized worth several times the resisted tithes rather than pay voluntarily.
He notes also that the Quakers eventually won that battle, which is to say there are no longer government-enforced tithes that everyone must pay to an established church.
So, Richmond wrote, “I do not resist military taxes in the expectation or hope that I will succeed in keeping particular dollars from the hands of the military.
But I do expect and hope that, insofar as my resistance is in obedience to the leadings of God, it will play its small part in breaking down the legitimacy of the warmaking machinery, as the early Friends broke down the legitimacy of taxation on behalf of the state church.
I believe that in the end, Christ’s way is not only right but effective, and will prevail.
Our sufferings are small in the overall scheme of things, so I don’t wish to be melodramatic.
But, it seems to me that we cannot afford to follow Jesus for the short haul because in the short run, all that appears is the cross (which, after all is simply shorthand for suffering at the hands of a pagan empire).
Yet, it is the cross which led to the resurrection.”
In , the Friends World Committee for Consultation held their annual meeting.
They decided to retire their “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns” and establish in its place a “Committee on Peace Concerns.”
On Brian Willson had been run over by a train while blockading the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station in protest against American wars in Central America.
A few days later, while recovering from his injuries, which included a fractured skull and the amputation of both of his lower legs, he issued a statement reasserting his continued commitment to nonviolent activism, which was reprinted in part in the issue, and which included this section:
If we want peace, we can have it, but we’re going to have to pay for it…
Our government can only continue its wars with the cooperation of our people, and that cooperation is with our taxes and with our bodies.
Our actions and expressions are what are needed, not our whispers and quiet dinner conversation.
In the issue, Jonathan Lutz gave an overview of the situation of Quakers in Scandinavia that included this parenthetical aside:
“(To my knowledge, only one Scandinavian Friend is a war-tax resister, but then, the very different political climate must be taken into account.)”
That issue also included this historical note, which it sourced to “the newsletter of Friends World Committee for Consultation, Section of the Americas”:
According to a Canadian publication, For Conscience Sake, Russia was the first nation to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
“In , thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill in Tamerfors, which is now in Finland.
James Finlayson, the manager, submitted a petition to the Czar signed by the employees from Britain, some of whom were members of the Society of Friends.
The petition asked for freedom of conscience and religion to practice their own religion, and for exemption from military service, war, church taxes, and the taking of oaths.”
The Czar agreed to free Quaker manufacturers from taxes and support of the military.
This is the closest I’ve been able to get to a citation for this claim, and as you see, it’s third-hand and doesn’t refer to an original source.
I have seen references to Finlayson’s getting a charter from the Czar to set up his mill that included some tax incentives, but I haven’t gotten any closer to finding a clear and authoritative indication that the Czar explicitly honored the conscientious objection to military taxation of Quakers at this mill.
A note in the issue read:
John Stoner, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee, U.S. Peace Section, writes:
“That little Scripture passage on rendering to God and Caesar has been misused for too long, giving people an excuse for going the wrong way on important questions of ultimate loyalty.”
So John has created a lovely poster with the following words on it:
“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.”
The posters are available for ten cents per copy (a real bargain, Friends, we can learn something from our Mennonite friends about good prices).
An excerpt from Pearl C. Ewald’s letter to the IRS was included in the issue.
Excerpt: “my conscience will no longer allow me to cooperate with any plans by our government to prepare weapons for mass annihilation.
I know that such weapons of war are under the condemnation of God.
Therefore, I am not sending in an income tax report.
I am prepared to accept the penalty for this action, and I will try to maintain a spirit of love and consideration toward you.”
illustration by Barbara Benton from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue brought an article by Eleanor Brooks Webb in which she described her family’s telephone tax resistance, and damned it with faint praise.
Excerpts:
, my husband and I have refused to pay the federal tax on our phone bill.
This is an unheroic and inconsistent witness to our conviction that participation in war is wrong and that paying for war preparations and for others’ participation is likewise wrong.
The singular virtue of this small witness is that it is something we can do.
…The payment of federal taxes was the place where other thinking people could not evade their own complicity.
We had long been convinced by such reasoning as Milton Mayer’s:
“If you want peace, why pay for war?”
But nonpayment of taxes was difficult.
My husband was the breadwinner, and his salary was subject to withholding; the Internal Revenue Service usually owed us money at the end of the income-tax year.
Nonpayment of tax was also illegal, and we’re very law-abiding people; we try to stay within the speed limit, and we calculate our income taxes scrupulously.
When I first heard of phone tax resistance, I thought it was a foolish idea.
The pennies of the phone tax were so trivial against the amount of the income tax!
But discussion in Congress about the re-imposition of the phone tax made it explicit that the reason for this “nuisance” tax was the cost of war — the war in Vietnam — and the tax was all tidily calculated for us on each phone bill.
The penalties for so trivial a flouting of the Internal Revenue Service would not likely be unendurable.
This was something we could do!
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The Webbs wrote a letter to the phone company with each bill (sending a copy to the IRS) explaining their resistance.
They tried to redirect the resisted taxes to the UN (but the UN turned down the donations), and then to the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
The phone company responded appropriately, by “notifying the Internal Revenue Service of what we are doing and giving us credit for the unpaid tax.”
In the early years of this saga, IRS made some effort to collect the unpaid tax.
We received notices of unpaid tax, and replied that we didn’t intend to pay it.
We received notices of intent to collect, and several times liens were issued against my husband’s salary (for sums along the order of $4.73).
We would get notices from the payroll supervisor that such a lien had been issued and they had no alternative but to pay it; and we would write back saying we were sorry they had been bothered with the matter, but we had no intention of paying the tax voluntarily, and we gave the reasons — it was another opportunity to say what our convictions were.
A number of times we received notices of tax due that we couldn’t reconcile with our carefully kept records, and we would write IRS to that effect and ask for an explanation of the assessment.
This often stopped them cold.
At least once when we were due an income tax refund, a few dollars were deducted from it for “other unpaid taxes,” or something like that, which we assumed was derived from the unpaid phone tax.
In the last few years we have heard nothing from IRS except an occasional, apparently random “notice of tax due,” which we wearily ignore.
She complained of the annoyance of all of the letter writing involved — “we have probably eight inches of file folders filled with telephone bills and carbon copies of letters.”
My husband and I aren’t consistent in our witness.
We haven’t made the effort to get our MCI [long distance] service arranged so that we have control of paying the tax (instead of American Express, through which we are billed).
I can’t handle any more letters!
But if this is all we have energy and grace to do, then I’m glad we’ve followed the leading this far.
The issue brought news of a new war tax resistance organization — “the Colorado War Tax Information Project” — associated with the Rocky Mountain Peace Center.
This project ran an alternative fund that redirected $3,500 in war taxes to social programs .
An obituary notice for Louise Benckenstein Griffiths in the same issue noted that she “refused to pay federal income tax toward American military efforts.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There were several references to tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , but many of them referred to some other time or country or religious denomination, and those that referred to American Quakers in the here-and-now lacked much urgency or enthusiasm.
Journal editor Vinton Deming marked the passing of Colin Bell in his opening editorial in the issue, and noted:
One spring at yearly meeting he spoke very movingly in support of young Friends faced with the draft.
He challenged some of us over draft age to consider that not only our young people were being drafted; our federal taxes were being conscripted for the war as well!
I visited him once at Davis House in Washington with a friend whose house was threatened with IRS seizure for unpaid war taxes.
Colin was keenly interested, shared a generous amount of time from his busy schedule, and was very supportive.
As we left he walked us to our car.
I still hear the cheerful sound of his words (and see the twinkle in his eye) as he leaned in the car window, shook our hands, and said, “Good bye, Friends.
Take care of your spirit!”
In a letter-to-the-editor in the issue, Carole Hope Depp split hairs over whether or not war tax resistance is civil disobedience — claiming that since the Constitution, the highest law in the land, protects freedom of religion, then a law that purports to force people to violate their religious scruples by paying for war must be void, and so those who resist it are not being disobedient at all.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
In the issue, Paul Zorn took issue with “some traditional Quaker attiudes and institutions,” including war tax resistance, as representing “an attitude that somehow Quakers are different from the bulk of society, and that much of our institutional effort should go to maintaining that difference… [and] that maintaining certain aspects of our uniqueness is more important than finding a larger consensus in society.”
Excerpt:
…Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is resisting an IRS levy on salaries of two employees to recover unpaid federal taxes because those funds would be used for military purposes.
The more I have talked with individuals and attended large and small groups, both in my monthly meeting and in the yearly meeting’s Representative Meeting, the more troubled I am with the policy, although I realize it has been fashioned with much care and concern for the Spirit over 15 years or more.
As I understand it, a tax refusal contest with the federal government usually ends with the government getting the money.
The main result of refusing taxes is to make a public witness, and to ease a conscience that is troubled by voluntarily supporting the military.
I am troubled that part of the public witness consists of breaking the law and attempting to justify it, especially when tax refusal is as likely to reduce funds for low-cost housing, etc., as it is to reduce funds for the military.
Regarding voluntary support of the military, I think it is part of the irony, tragedy, or reality of modern life that despite our best efforts, institutions to which we belong act on our behalf in ways that we consider wrong, evil, or disastrous.
At the present time, we cannot effectively separate ourselves from all such institutions, and we would lose some of our humanity if we did.
He suggested that Friends consider “rethinking how much corporate energy we should put into tax refusal as an aspect of our peace testimony” and instead “trying to deal directly with some of the major problems of society rather than trying to insulate ourselves from them.”
The issue also described the war tax resistance of Sharon Bienert, who wrote letters to the IRS, agitated for a legal peace tax fund, and meanwhile split her resisted taxes between a Quaker-run peace tax fund and an escrow account.
That issue also mentioned that war tax resistance was “strongly supported” by the Lafayette, Indiana, Mennonite Fellowship.
Fellowship member Ken Nagele redirected a military-percentage of his income taxes to a low-income loan program; Mary Ann Zoeller redirected hers to Amnesty International; other families have donated income to the church to keep their income low and resist taxes that way.
That issue also brought news of a peace tax fund legalization campaign in Australia which “would allow conscientious objectors to pay 10 percent of their income taxes into a fund to be used for nonmilitary purposes” but which had only gained the support of eight of the 76 Australian Senators thus far.
In the issue, Carolyn Stevens reviewed two books published by the Friends World Committee for Consultation’s Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns: Handbook on Military Taxes & Conscience and Fear God & Honor the Emperor which were collaborative efforts edited by Linda Coffin, Peter Goldberger, Robert Hull, and J.E. McNeil.
The first of these books concerned “the history of military tax refusal among Friends and biblical teachings on the subject[,]… personal stories of military tax resisters, one about international war tax refusal campaigns, and another that chronicles efforts to enact Peace Tax Fund legislation.
The book concludes with a series of study questions and a resource list.”
The second “tackles the difficult question of how religious employers may be called to corporate witness of military tax refusal, either organizationally or in support of staff members who are conscientious objectors.
There is a survey of minutes, resolutions, and guidelines adopted by church bodies, Quaker and otherwise.
A chapter on legalities, co-authored by Peter Goldberger and J.E. McNeil, calmly raises and responds to difficulties, real and imagined, that employers face when supporting a witness against military taxes.
Robert Hull’s chapter on discernment blends a secular management perspective with traditional religious concerns.”
Stevens was enthusiastic about the first book (a “high level of sincerity and scholarship [that] gives us wonderful assistance”), less so about the second, which she described as “awkward,” “clumsy,” and “defensive” though “rich in necessary information.”
The issue brought an update on Canadian war tax resister Jerilynn Prior’s test case in which she was trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation legalized under the freedom of conscience portion of the (relatively) new Canadian Constitution.
She wasn’t having any luck in the courts.
The article claimed that “[m]ore than 500 Canadians withhold the portion of their federal taxes that would otherwise go toward military expenditures.
Many instead allocate the money to Conscience Canada’s Peace Tax Fund.”
Beit Sahour
The story of the nonviolent tax resistance campaign against the Israeli military occupation of Palestine in Beit Sahour got some coverage in the Journal.
Editor Vinton Deming wrote an article for the issue that was hopefully subtitled: “Nonviolent strategies may help to bring an end to the Israeli occupation.”
It was based on his conversations with Mubarak Awad and Nancy Nye.
Awad founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in and published a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation.
“At first, people thought we were a bit crazy, that perhaps I had come back from my time in the U.S. with some strange notions.
We started with just five people.
We would sometimes go to a public place and carry a sign that said ‘Down With the Occupation,’ or, ‘Don’t Pay Taxes.’
People at first would laugh and make fun of us.”
The Center later advocated a set of tactics, including “a boycott among the Arab population of all Israeli-made products; refusal to pay taxes or to work for Israelis; insistence that all mail be addressed to people by using the Palestinian language, not Hebrew; and the initiation of many self-help projects.”
Beit Sahour was an example of where Palestinians decided to try out some of these ideas in service of the intifada.
“People there,” said Mubarak, “to show their support for the uprising, decided they would refuse to pay taxes to Israeli authorities — no taxes at all.
The Israelis wanted to punish them so they came and confiscated the ID cards of a number of the business men.”
So what was the community’s response?
“Well,” Mubarak continues, “without your ID card you are stuck, you cannot go any place.
When people in the village heard about this, they said, ‘If they are going to take the ID cards of these businessmen, we are going to turn in our ID cards too.’
And they did.
So the Israelis called a curfew in the village and they said, ‘Here, please take your ID cards;’ they gave them all back!”
And the news of this incident spread to other communities?
“Yes,” Mubarak says, “everybody began thinking it was a good idea to do it.
You say, ‘OK, I’m not going to hurt the Israelis, but this is what I’m going to do.’
And people will get together and say, ‘Let’s do it.’
Palestinians are what I would call ‘trial and error’ in their approach.
Like, if this works, well, we’ll try it and continue to do it; if it doesn’t, it’s all right, we’ll do something else!”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in tended to either look back fondly at resisters of the past, or to look forward to a time when a peace tax fund law would magically dispel the dilemma of praying for peace while paying for war.
Paul Zorn’s article from which cast a skeptical eye on the value of Quaker war tax resistance picked up some dissent in the issue.
An ad from the issue of Friends Journal:
“Why have people risked their jobs, their homes, their families, and even spent time in prison to take a stand for peace?
The Standing Up for Peace Contest invites young people, ages 15–23, to talk face-to-face with people who refused to fight in war, pay taxes for war, or build weapons for war.
To enter the contest, participants express their perceptions by writing something or creating a work of art or music.
The contest commemorates the 50th anniversary of the U.S. law that provided alternative service for Conscientious objectors…
The contest is sponsored by ten national peace organizations.”
Merrill Barnebey felt that Zorn “fails to fully grasp the significance and timeliness of tax resistance.
For one thing… Quakers who do not protest war taxes are establishing a credibility gap.”
He also felt that tax resistance helped to pressure Congress to pass the Peace Tax Fund bill.
Also in the issue, Elwood Cronk told a story of how a meeting that was involved “an ecumenical effort to establish a food cupboard” reacted with hostility to war tax resisters in their midst:
A couple, wishing to make a war tax witness to IRS, presented the meeting with a check for $100, the portion of tax they were withholding.
Their accompanying letter stated they felt this was an appropriate gift to the meeting, in view of federal budget cuts in social services.
They asked that the money be accepted as a start-up fund for the food cupboard.
…One person walked out, another questioned their motivation, and the meeting declined the check.
The one positive thing which did happen occurred the next Sunday.
A member of the adult class proposed that war taxes be discussed that day.
An obituary notice for Ronald E. Chinn in the issue noted that Chinn “helped found a university endowment fund for lectures on peace issues, using money withheld by Alaskan war tax resisters.”
an ad for the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund from the issue of Friends Journal
In the issue, Kenneth Miller wrote in to share the exciting news that, after persistent lobbying and lots of hard work, Peace Tax Fund bill supporters had managed to convince Nancy Pelosi to cosponsor the bill.
(Pelosi at the time was just starting her career as a U.S. Representative.
She became Speaker of the House in and is currently the Minority Leader there.
She is no longer a cosponsor of the present peace tax fund scheme.)
The issue announced a new edition of Conscience Canada’s book The First Freedom which “reviews the legal history of conscientious objection for taxpayers in Canada and provides an overview of new charter decisions and recent court cases.”
“Honoring employees’ requests not to withhold the military portion of their federal income tax is now the official policy of Baltimore Yearly Meeting,” began a short piece in the issue.
“In taking the action as requested by individual employees, the yearly meeting emphasized its history of supporting military tax resistance through urging passage of the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill, as well as supporting other religious organizations involved in military tax refusal.
In , the yearly meeting minuted that it ‘stands in loving support of those moved by conscience to witness against making payments for war and preparation for war, including those who refuse to pay military taxes voluntarily.’ ”
D.H. Rubenstein penned an op-ed piece for the issue in which he reviewed the difficulty that Friends and Friends Meetings had with the issue of war taxes, and held out hope that Congress would throw Quakers a rope by passing some sort of Peace Tax Fund plan.
Excerpts:
It is a perplexing problem to be a citizen of a country whose policies include militarism and war as a means of relating to other nations and at the same time be a member of a religious society whose traditions are contrary to such policy.
Conscientious objection to military service is now accepted.
But what about paying taxes to support war and militarism?
When Friends gather to consider this dilemma it is often expressed that each person must decide on the basis of the individual’s own leading how to resolve the claims of conscience between being a law-abiding citizen and a faithful Friend.
Rarely is unity achieved.
Another entanglement is the matter of Friends organizations and their involvement in the payment of war taxes.
One of the key questions is whether or not such organizations have a “corporate conscience” and a responsibility to act in accord with traditional Quaker witness and its historic peace testimony.
Relatively few individual Friends are prepared to refuse to pay war taxes — an illegal, punishable offense — and suffer the consequences of such refusal.
How could they, therefore, adopt a policy which would make the corporate body and its officers liable for such consequences?
In other words, is it fair for me to expect a higher order of morality from the corporate body than from its individual members?
(Please consider a slight digression.
Is it fair to assume that if a legal way of not paying war taxes existed we would take that option?
If the answer is yes, we should commit ourselves to the promotion and support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill… whose aim is to provide that specific option.)
Friends are staunch in their belief that that of God within each individual should be the guiding light by which life is lived.
Quaker experience, however, has verified the need for the admonition of Paul, who cautioned believers in Rome, “Do not be conformed to this world…” (Rom. 12:2).
The light of the Spirit is available to each one of us: its accessibility without distortion by our own willfulness or societal influences is a hazard we do not always recognize.
It is this of which Paul reminds us.
This is one of the reasons our corporate wisdom has established that although the Light is available to each of us, it is essential we gather together for communal seeking and sharing in order that our findings be validated in the group, which is less likely to be misled than the individual.
If we are unable to discern God’s leading, that is a very different matter than God saying no.
It means further seeking is required until clarity is achieved.
It does not mean no action is required.
We need to recognize that at present we are involved in actions which by implication indicate Friends support and believe in militarism and war.
This is what our present tax paying and tax collecting actions declare.
What do we believe?
Must our apparent schizophrenia on this subject be a permanent state, or can we thresh our way out of it?
The Peace Tax Fund would create a legal alternative.
The enactment of an economic conversion bill (several now in Congress) could provide for a specific application of CO tax funds to a basic civilian need and away from the military-industrial behemoth.
Our energies applied to the support and adoption of these two legislative proposals might supply some ameliorative therapy for our dilemma while we pursue some serious threshing.
That same issue included a profile of George & Lillian Willoughby that included a section on their tax resistance:
George Willoughby at a Tax Day demonstration in Philadelphia in
Working for Peace, not Paying for War
Another significant protest in the Willoughbys’ lives has been their ongoing tax resistance.
“I object to taxes that go completely out of my hands and have no connection to me — that are supporting things I cannot tolerate, such as bombs and nuclear energy,” Lillian says.
After years of refusal to pay their federal telephone tax, IRS officers seized the Willoughbys’ Volkswagen to collect the $100 they owed.
But the Willoughbys’ many friends raised more than a thousand dollars through a “peace bond” mailing so they could submit the winning bid and recover the car.
The extra funds were donated to the Philadelphia War Tax Resistance Fund.
“One IRS official complained,” George recalls, “ ‘Here we seize your car to raise money for IRS, and you are using it to raise money for your cause!’ ”
After that incident, there were no more seizures of automobiles of tax resisters in the Philadelphia area for the next nine years, the Willoughbys say.
Explaining their tax witness, Lillian notes, “Some sacrifice is involved, and not everyone can do it.”
For George, it is a matter of integrity and empowerment.
“Tax resistance is something I can do to withdraw support from the government,” he says.
“Why should I give them money to do evil things I wouldn’t do myself?”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance had largely retreated into the back pages of the Friends Journal by .
Why this should be, I don’t know.
Perhaps the winding down of the cold war made the issue seem less crucial, or perhaps the momentum from the Vietnam War era war tax resistance surge had finally sputtered to a halt, or maybe it was just a feeling that the issue had been discussed to an impasse and readers were fatigued and eager to move on to another topic, or it could be that the “peace tax fund” campaign had convinced people that the dilemma of Quakers paying for war would soon be a thing of the past.
The issue briefly noted the publication of a new NWTRCC practical war tax resistance pamphlet “on how to prevent withholding of tax from wages.”
Frances S. Eliot penned an article for the issue that described a tax day vigil in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
Holy Week at the IRS
During and since the Vietnam War, war tax dissidents in Ann Arbor, Michigan have held vigils on April 15 from 8 p.m. to midnight, with leaflets, posters, and banners, outside the main post office, which stayed open to postmark last-minute income tax returns.
The weather was frequently dark, cold, and sleeting; but through the years, public response became less hostile and more favorable.
We usually got a photo and brief paragraph in the local newspaper.
In , a small circle of us decided to upgrade our customary tax day witness.
We were inspired by the success of the War Resisters League in establishing the right to leaflet within New York City IRS offices; we were encouraged by growth of local peace groups and nonviolent direct actions; and the fact that Easter fell on , presented a symbolic opportunity we couldn’t resist.
The Lessons Learned:
Be persistent.
If a course of action seems right and necessary, expect aggravation and boredom along the way — but hang in there.
Document your communications and actions.
An accurate record is important.
Pay "courtesy calls" on your law enforcement agencies.
Inform them of your goals and plans.
Know that part of their job may be to dissuade you from actions they feel may cause trouble.
Check details of procedures, penalties, and possible legal expenses with a sympathetic lawyer.
When dealing with a bureaucratic system, avoid procedural errors.
Respond to all details, whether they make sense or not.
Don’t assume there is continuity of record keeping by the bureaucracy.
Send copies of whatever you need to refer to: previous correspondence, ordinances, regulations, recapitulation of phone conversations.
Our immediate goals were to provide taxpayers with information about the federal budget and its military portion, and to offer alternatives, all at a time and place that would permit genuine discussion of concerns.
We planned to distribute leaflets advocating the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill, which would establish conscientious objection for taxpayers.
We changed the location of our action from the post office, where we’d had official permission and friendly cooperation, to the Ann Arbor IRS office, located in a privately-owned office complex.
We had previously been excluded from this building, grounds, and parking lot by the building management.
We decided to offer information and to talk with taxpayers during business hours of Holy Week, and again on , the actual tax deadline.
Three tasks followed:
First, we needed to pursue the application-for-permit procedure required by the General Services Administration for activities in/on federal property.
Jurisdiction is fuzzy: is GSA, IRS, or the building management in charge?
The ensuing communication with the Detroit GSA and IRS offices unrolled like a script by Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka.
On the advice of a local ACLU lawyer, I kept detailed records.
Second, we tried to assess the possible risks and penalties of our witness, in case a permit were not granted.
Again, who was in charge — Ann Arbor city police? county sheriffs deputies? federal marshals?
Richard Cleaver, AFSC Peace Education secretary, gave us an evening of training in nonviolent civil disobedience.
Third, we recruited enough people to keep the leafleting going, two or three volunteers at a time, four hours a day, even if there were to be arrests.
(In such case our goals would expand from war-tax resistance to include First Amendment rights.)
, I dumped everything unnecessary from my purse and pockets, and caught the bus out to the IRS office.
I had barely spoken a few words and handed a Peace Tax Fund leaflet to a woman waiting to see an IRS consultant, when an IRS officer came out of an inner office and said we absolutely could not be permitted to distribute leaflets or initiate conversations with taxpayers in the reception area.
I explained that I’d been trying to get the necessary permit, had complied with all GSA requirements, responded to GSA’s objections, filed an amended application, and still had received no definitive response.
The officer, without comment, offered an attractive solution, which he had cleared with the building management:
So long as we did not obstruct or harass persons entering and leaving the IRS office, we could leaflet and converse with them in the corridor immediately outside the office door.
We accepted the offer.
During this busy tax season, a rack of the standard IRS forms had been moved into the corridor for the convenience of taxpayers who only needed to pick up forms.
The corridor area was thus functioning as a temporary extension of the IRS office and was a logical and appropriate place for us to offer additional information on where tax dollars go and what can be done about it.
In whatever way a deal had been made between IRS and the building management, it was a neat example of creative conflict resolution.
All of us were spared six days of possible arrests — which no one wanted — but which we were prepared for.
Holy Week, Easter, and Tax Day came and went.
We had lots of interesting conversations, plus some mutually respectful arguments, with taxpayers.
The Ann Arbor News carried a picture of the leafleting, and a good article on the Peace Tax Fund Bill.
Postscript:
That was then… this is now.
We have taken a few breaths of post-Cold War fresh air, only to be propelled into a hot war in the Middle East.
Opinions are increasingly polarized.
However, on the assumption that the local IRS and its building management will continue their spirit of cooperation, we will proceed with plans for a week-long witness for taxes for peace.
Stay tuned!
Another note in that issue announced an “Alternative Revenue Service organizing kit” put out jointly by NWTRCC, the War Resisters League, and the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, and designed to facilitate “immediate action to oppose the war machine that survives on our tax money.”
[The] kit provides a 1990 EZ Peace Income Tax Form, action ideas, an explanatory brochure, a camera-ready flyer and ads, background papers, and a resource list.
The EZ Peace Income Tax Form is a take-off on IRS’s 1040EZ form.
The alternative form begins with a section in which the taxpayer figures the amount of his or her taxes that will go toward military spending.
It then offers a choice of areas in which the money might be re-directed, such as education and culture, international conflict resolution, human resources, environment, or justice.
The form provides a space in which to choose an amount to withhold from the IRS, from $1 to the full amount of income taxes.
The forms are to be filled out and mailed to the IRS, with one’s income tax return, to Congressional representatives and senators, to organizers of the campaign, and to friends and neighbors.
A book review in the issue mentioned Milton Mayer’s war tax resistance:
Milton Mayer refused to kill and refused to pay others to do what he would not do himself.
He recognized the futility of withholding his taxes from war expenditures, but argued that “the inevitability of any evil is not the point.
The point is my subornation of it.”
Knowing that the government would ultimately force him to pay war taxes, Mayer defended his integrity:
“If a robber ties me up and robs me, I have not become a robber.”
That issue also announced that a “Peace Taxpayers Newsletter” was being published out of Nellysford, Virginia, covering “subjects of interest to war tax resisters and others concerned with the tax money that supports military efforts.
A recent issue describes how some people in Virginia are redirecting their federal taxes toward their local government to finance a much-needed waste management system.
The newsletter is available for no charge, although the group asks for donations to help cover postage.”
The issue announced a new pamphlet — Peace and Taxes… God and Country — written by Chel Avery for the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
“[It] has many helpful suggestions for the structure, content, and process of a clearness meeting for individuals considering war tax refusal.
The financial, legal, and emotional ramifications to the individual, the individual’s family, and meeting are discussed and listed for easy reference.”
And that’s about it for , except for some minor asides or references to activities of the war tax resistance movement scattered here and there.
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
By the coverage of American Quaker war tax resistance in the Friends Journal makes it seem pretty weak — not a lot of activity at all, and what there is of it is half-hearted symbolic measures or pathetic attempts to get Congress to pass a “Peace Tax Fund” scheme.
There was almost more news about war tax resistance in Canada than in the United States.
The issue made note of another lobby day for the Peace Tax Fund bill, and of a new “EZ Peace Form” that the “Alternative Revenue Service” was encouraging tax filers to fill out:
The Peace Form has a similar format as IRS forms, with a section for figuring one’s tax share, a section that shows the percentages going to various government programs, and a section in which one can indicate where to redirect one’s tax contribution.
Forms are to be returned to the Alternative Revenue Service so it can announce the number it receives and the amount of taxes redirected from financing war to providing for human needs.
Another note told readers how they could obtain transcripts of the Congressional hearing on the Peace Tax Fund bill, and noted: “The hearing was attended by several hundred Friends, Mennonites, Brethren, peace activists, and pacifists of all faiths.… The hearing received more than 2,300 letters of written testimony from people across the country, from which a selection is published in the transcript.
Some of the voices are from Friends Journal, Friends United Meeting, the American Friends Service Committee, a number of yearly meetings, and many other denominations and organizations.”
A letter from John K. Stoner of the “New Call to Peacemaking” in the issue asserted that “Some day in the future the true heroes of our time will be named.
They will be the people who refused to pay war taxes, who vigiled, prayed, and demonstrated in front of weapons plants, who resisted in whatever way they could the insidious, relentless pressure to conform to the mentality of deterrence, the idolatry of redemptive violence, the rule of the gun, and the economy of death.”
An article in that issue mentioned that the Congressional hearing concerning the Peace Tax Fund bill was the product of a great deal of work: “[T]o arrange for that hearing,” the article said, “FCNL lobbyists worked with the Peace Tax Fund Campaign for eight years!”
The issue included two articles on war tax resistance.
One by Robin Harper that I mentioned in an earlier Picket Line, and a second: “What Do We Owe Caesar?” by Marguerite Clark.
It gave a sort of fresh, starting-from-scratch overview of the war tax issue and at how Friends had tried to meet it, but was overwhelmingly pessimistic, asserting that there’s no satisfying way to practice war tax resistance because the government has the power to inevitably get its hands on the money eventually (Clark used the case of the Friends Journal capitulating and paying Vinton Deming’s taxes as a case in point).
She ended her piece by hoping Quakers would “take a stand” by supporting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a hopeful first step in legalizing conscientious objection to military taxation (that Act eventually passed but has so far been of no help at all in legalizing such conscientious objection).
A letter from Edwin A. Vail in response to Harper’s article trotted out the familiar argument that it’s wrong to withhold your taxes from the government on the grounds that the government might spend the money improperly for the same reason that it’s wrong to refuse to repay a debt because you think the person you owe money to might spend the money unwisely.
The issue brought news of a new group, calling itself “The Peace Taxpayers” —
The Peace Taxpayers are available as counselors for people wishing to experience “the joys of peace taxpaying.”
The organization works to change existing U.S. tax codes which force all income taxpayers to be supporters of war and preparations for war.
The counselors can help with questions about Internal Revenue Service regulations, how to redirect war taxes, and how to reduce taxable income.…
The Peace Taxpayers organization is accepting submissions for a new book, The Joy of Peace Taxpaying.
They are looking for writings of any style and length that describe paths taken and personal experiences of those who have acted on their opposition to paying for war.…
Michael Fogler and Ed Pearson were given as contact persons for the group.
“The Peace Taxpayers” was still somewhat active as late as , and I’ve seen references to it dating back as far as .
International news
An obituary notice for Albert E. Moorman in the issue mentioned that “[i]n he and his wife immigrated to Canada to free themselves from paying taxes to the United States government, whose foreign policy they had long been at odds with.”
A note in that issue also asserted that “It is possible to divert one’s military taxes to selected charitable donations in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, Canada.
Under recent Ontario law, donations to Conrad Grebel College, University of Waterloo Foundation for Peace Studies, qualify as ‘gifts to the crown.’ ” However, a letter-to-the-editor in the issue threw some cold water on that:
A news item in your issue gives the impression that directing military taxes to peace in Canada is possible and simple, by making donations to the Crown (all levels of government).
We wish it were so, but there is no provision in the Income Tax Act so far to exempt us from paying a proportion of our taxes to the military, as in the States.
We have been advocating making donations to charitable organizations, political parties, and to the Crown to reduce all taxes, including military taxes, but one would have to donate very large amounts to eliminate taxes altogether.
Most of us probably would not want to do so, as we benefit from medicare, pensions, social assistance, etc., all paid for with our taxes.
Ray Funk’s Private Member’s Bill was scheduled to be debated in the House of Commons on , but the government recessed the House on , and we are now headed for an election on .
Jean Chretian [sic.], the leader of the main opposition party, has suggested to us that we might be able to direct our war taxes to the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, which he intends to reestablish, if elected.
So we are hopeful that, in the next Parliament, some progress will be made.
Edith Adamson Conscience Canada, Inc.
Canadian war tax resister Jerilynn Prior, who had been pursuing a long and fruitless court battle to try to get conscientious objection to military taxation recognized as a right under the new Canadian Constitution, wrote a book about her stand — I Feel the Winds of God Today — that earned a brief review in the issue.
“The author describes the influences in her life that led her to become a war tax resister… she talks about the difficulties in the [legal] process and her disappointment at not receiving a hearing at court.
Interwoven with this is an account of her conscientious leadings regarding her career in medicine and her vocation as a mother.
She also refers to the troubles of Canadian Yearly Meeting in following requests of employees who with to become war tax resisters.”
The London Yearly Meeting, according to the issue, was spurred to “renewed action,” as the Journal called it, “in the form of a letter writing campaign, to express objection to paying taxes for military purposes.
A monthly letter to the Inland Revenue, expressing London Yearly Meeting’s position, is now being supported by an effort to reach the members of Parliament.
However, help is needed.
Friends are asked to use these monthly letters, and their law-quoting responses, to show the dilemma which arises when an employer with 300 years’ heritage of peace witness is required to collect and hand over money which pays, in part, for war and war preparations.”
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 were scattered mentions of war tax resistance in the
Friends Journal in .
an ad from the issue of
Friends Journal
Carole Depp noted in passing in a
issue that “[m]y husband chose to retire early two years ago so that we could
live on less than a taxable income in order to avoid paying for our
government’s violence and militarism.”
At a “Quaker Farmers Gathering” in ,
one participant addressed the question of “Quakerism and farming: How do they
come together in our lives?” with the answer “Farming is my way of tax
resisting. I paid only $36 in taxes last year.” (This according to a report on
the gathering in the issue.)
The issue had a couple of brief notes
about war tax resistance:
As the deadline for filing
U.S. income
taxes approaches, the Peace Taxpayers would like everyone to consider the
following no- or low-risk actions:
Living on less than a taxable income:
no income taxes will be used for paying for war, and moving toward
lower personal consumption practices has the additional advantage of
using less energy and limited resources.
Living on a non-taxable income:
a fortunate minority have sufficient capital to invest in non-taxable,
socially useful financial investments to avoid tax laws entirely, and
they can use their time, talent, and energy to serve others.
Contacting Congress:
taxpayers have the power of their vote and can write, call, or visit
their Congressional representatives until Congress changes the tax law
to conform with the Constitution.
Telephone tax:
redirecting the federal excise tax on communications is a popular,
easy, and low-risk way to put tax dollars to work for peace instead of
war.
Redirecting dollars from your federal income tax bill:
federal taxpayers have control over some or all of their income and can
choose to redirect a portion of their tax bill toward non-military,
life-affirming purposes. This method provides a wide range of choices
and can be best understood by contacting an experienced peace tax
counselor. The Peace Taxpayers can help devise individual peace
taxpaying programs.
Continuing education:
“The Peace Taxpayers organization maintains that the
U.S.
Congress has violated the highest laws of the United States by enacting
a tax code which makes all income taxpayers supporters of war and
preparations for war… Even though Congress has recognized the rights of
conscience and made alternative service provisions in military draft
law, it has not yet done so in the tax code. There is no logic in
allowing a person to proclaim peace and then force them to pay for war!
The Peace Taxpayers invite all to participate in its quest for paying
taxes for peace on Earth.” Taxpayers can participate in the ongoing
self-education and outreach programs of The Peace Taxpayers by
subscribing to the organization’s newsletter… or by becoming a
member.…
“Penny Rolls” [sic] are a way of involving the
U.S. public in
a consciousness-raising exercise on how tax dollars are spent, and how
taxpayers would like them spent. Typically, activists stand outside the
Post Office on Tax Day, and invite passers-by to take part in the poll.
The volunteers hand each person ten pennies, representing the tax dollar,
and ask them to distribute the pennies among several jars, each
representing an area of government spending. The activists then show them
how the government actually spends tax dollars (a pie chart is useful for
this). The activists keep records, and announce the results of the
“People’s Budget” after the poll.
The people’s priorities are
typically quite different from the government’s. Many people are amazed
to see just how big a portion of their hard-earned money goes to pay for
war, and how little for crucial areas like health, education, housing,
and jobs. That’s a good time to hand them a petition or letter to sign,
or suggest that they can take action in other ways.
In , Oliver Hydon was arrested in
one of those symbolic trespassing style civil disobedience actions in the
lobby of a military contractor. The court speech he gave in his defense
was later reprinted
in the Journal and included this remark:
[W]e are far from helpless. Mahatma Gandhi’s example of noncooperation is
open to us all. I am determined not to pay a cent to the Pentagon, and so I
refuse to pay any and all federal taxes, and give this money I owe directly
to the people who need it.
In the issue, Anne Morrison Welsh
penned a tribute to her husband Norman Morrison, who killed himself in a
protest against the Vietnam War in
(see ♇ ). She mentioned that before Morrison’s death, “[f]or several
years we had been withholding whatever ‘war tax’ we owed from our
IRS
returns.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was next to nothing in the Friends Journal in about war tax resistance, and what there was largely concerned the ongoing fools’ errand of trying to enact a “Peace Tax Fund” law.
In the issue, the Journal announced that the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund’s “10,000 letters” project had met its goal of “sending 10,000 letters to… congressional representatives in support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
According to the note:
The National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund… has over 5,000 members, including 50 national religious and peace organizations.
Nearly one-third of every federal income tax dollar is spent for military purposes.
An estimated 10 to 20 thousand taxpayers violate tax law each year, rather than violate their conscience.
Many more taxpayers violate the dictates of their conscience rather than face stiff penalties and fines from the IRS.
The Peace Tax Fund Bill amends the Internal Revenue Code so that a taxpayer, conscientiously opposed to participation in the military, can pay taxes in full and have the part of those taxes equal to the current military portion of the federal budget paid into a government trust fund for nonmilitary purposes.
The issue noted that the Campaign had launched a web site, and was also “collecting information regarding war tax resistance for distribution to the.public and members of Congress.
The organization is interested in stories about the impact of war tax resistance on individuals’ lives, reasons for becoming a war tax resister, experiences with the IRS, or any other aspect of war tax resistance.”
The issue noted the “international conference on peace tax campaigns and war tax resistance.”
And that, sad to say, is that.
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:
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance was largely found in infrequent mentions in the back pages of the Friends Journal in .
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal holds out the hope that the end of the dilemma of Quakers paying for war is just a quick law away
The issue noted a new information sheet that had been put together by “National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, New Call to Peacemaking, Church of the Brethren, Mennonite Central Committee, and the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting” called Stages of Conscientious Objection to Military Taxes that listed “five steps to ending one’s own contribution to the war machine.”
(Here is the edition of the sheet.)
That same issue included a review of a murder mystery, Quaker Testimony by Irene Allen, whose victim was “a young woman being evicted from her home for nonpayment of taxes.”
On , Quaker war tax resister Gordon Browne addressed a letter to the judge hearing his and his wife’s case in which they were encouraging the court to find that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act required the government to make concessions for religiously-motivated conscientious objectors to military taxation.
This letter, and an accompanying article by Browne, did not appear in the Journal until
After years as military tax refusers, during which we experienced the usual seizures of assets by the Internal Revenue Service, Edith Browne and I felt that the passage of the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act might provide us some relief.
Past court decisions had made clear that exemptions from such taxes on the grounds of conscientious objection to participation in war or in preparation for war would be denied.
The new act, however, suggested that we might be exempted from the interest and penalties routinely added to whatever the IRS claimed we owed.
We filed for refunds, therefore, for the interest and penalties for the years , and, when the refunds were denied, brought suit in Federal District Court in Vermont for their recovery.
Though we had filed our case independently of any others, we soon learned that Priscilla Adams in Pennsylvania and Rosa Packard in New York, both, like us, Quakers, had filed similar suits in their areas.
In responding to the three suits, the attorneys for the IRS linked them, responding, for example, to our suit by alleging to the court that we had followed a practice in our tax refusal which was Rosa Packard’s method, not ours.
The government moved for dismissal without a hearing, and our case was dismissed, as Priscilla Adams’ case had been earlier in Tax Court and as Rosa Packard’s was subsequently in District Court.
Feeling that we had not been heard, we have filed an appeal.
A relative novice in legal proceedings, I was struck by the fact that the legitimate requirement of objectivity in dealing with legal matters risks the depersonalization of the search for justice, which is, after all, about human beings, both as individuals and in community.
With our case decided in Vermont (the Appeals Court is in New York), I felt a strong need to write to our Vermont judge as a person.
I did so but have received no response.
For those who might be interested, I offer below what my letter said.
I omit the judge’s name and address, lest some generous Friends be tempted to write to him on our behalf.
I did not write with the purpose of applying political pressure but to try to establish a personal link.
Edith Browne and I are not familiar with legal practices, our present case asking the refund of penalties and interest charged by the Internal Revenue Service being the first case we have ever been involved in.
It is my understanding, however, that having accepted the government’s motion to dismiss our petition, you are no longer involved in the case, and it will not be improper for me to write to you about it.
Naturally, we were disappointed with your decision and are appealing it to another court, in part because we felt the decision distorted what we have done and said and partly because we feel certain that it was the intention of the authors of the First Amendment to the Constitution and of the recent Restoration of Religious Freedom Act to make room in our national community for views such as ours.
That certainty is a source of great pride to us.
We know that there are many places in the world where a claim such as ours not only would have no status but might place the claimants themselves in danger.
We have been in such places for varying lengths of time: in Greece under the fascist colonels; in Turkey when it was under martial law because of terrorist bombings; in Colombia when it was under martial law because of assassinations of members of the judiciary; in South Africa under apartheid, where even to visit our coreligionists in Soweto without government permission made us and our friends liable to arrest.
We are grateful for the individual freedoms we citizens of the United States enjoy.
To us, one of the most important of these is freedom of conscience, provided for in the “exercise” section of the First Amendment.
The founders of our nation knew about its need from painful experience in the religious wars and persecutions that were so often a curse in Europe.
Further, they had seen the effort to import such ills to the New World.
Four members of our own religious denomination, Quakers, were hanged on Boston Common and 14 more were waiting in prison for such treatment when Charles Ⅱ ordered the Puritan authorities to end such executions.
That did not prevent, however, their continuing to exile Quakers and others who held differing religious views from theirs or, in the case of many Quakers, to whip them out of the colony at the tail of a cart, or to bore hot irons through the tongues of those who had tried to preach in public, or to cut off their ears.
All of those things were done to Quakers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
That history is not pretty, but it made our forebears sensitive to the rights of conscience.
For more than 30 years, Edith and I, seeking to fulfill both our civic responsibilities and our understanding of God’s will for us, have paid our full tax, sending that part intended for the Department of Defense to life-affirming and life-supporting organizations.
We cannot in conscience pay for war or its preparation.
During that long period, the IRS has seized our assets to pay that part we sent elsewhere and imposed, in addition, interest and penalties.
This has meant that we annualy paid some of our taxes twice, once to life-supporting organizations and again to the IRS when our funds were seized.
We knew no way out of this situation, except to suffer it.
When the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act was passed we thought that, at last, we might be spared those penalties and that interest, which, to us, seemed to be saying, in denial of our finest American traditions of religious freedom, “Every conscience has its price.
How much is yours?”
In your opinion, you suggested, as Patrick Leahy has in correspondence with me when I have sought his help in providing legislative relief, that consideration of matters of conscience in regard to taxes would result in chaos.
We are not aware of chaos resulting from the legislative provisions for conscientious objectors to conscription of their bodies.
Wise legislators seemed to us to provide for conscientious objectors to conscription of their resources through the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act.
And if it is chaos we fear, what chaos is worse than that resulting from war?
I did not write this letter intending to argue our case, though I guess, perhaps, I have.
I really do mean to leave that to the lawyers.
Rather, I wrote to ask who will defend liberty of conscience if individuals like us and the courts do not.
There are always those among us who would impose their religious views on everyone else if they could, just as there are those who would insist that religion provides no legitimate exceptions in consideration of public policy.
It has been the genius of our system to try to provide a balance between those extremes that infringes on the freedoms of no one.
I enclose two [several] pages from the Book of Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.
It is the volume that describes the experience of Friends and the practices arising from those experiences to which most Friends subscribe.
I hope you will find them interesting and informative.
I particularly call your attention to the story of William Rotch of Nantucket.
Like him, if we are in error, we are to be pitied, but, also, like him, we can do no other than we are.
A history of the Atlanta, Georgia, Meeting during the Vietnam War that appeared in the issue mentioned that the Meeting had “refused to pay the ten percent war tax imposed on telephone bills.”
That issue also noted that the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund was still doggedly gnawing away at the federal bureaucracy, this time meeting “with tax policy officials at the Department of the Treasury” to try to persuade them that the law would be in their interests and that they should override IRS objections to the bill.
In the course of a book review in the same issue, Errol Hess remembered his “struggles with my own complicity in the [Vietnam] war by virtue of paying taxes that supported it; [and] my decision to go into the underground economy, to live cheaply, to refuse to comply with the IRS as I’d refused to comply with my draft board.”
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting met in .
A report in the Journal noted: “Frank and Elizabeth Massey’s testimony against war taxes led to an ‘opportunity’ on the doorstep of the yearly meeting office with an Internal Revenue Service agent, an explanation of its basis in faith.
We continue to struggle with how best to provide practical support to these leadings.”
The issue included this note about questionable tactics by IRS collection agents:
The Internal Revenue Service cashed a photocopy of a check from a Quaker war-tax resister.
Grace Montgomery of Stamford-Greenwich (Conn.) Meeting has tried to resolve this issue for several years.
Montgomery places the military portion of her federal income tax in a Friends escrow account.
The IRS then usually levies her bank account for the amount owed.
But in the IRS cashed a photocopy of Montgomery’s check to the escrow account.
Her bank accepted it even though it was not genuine and was made out to “The Religious Society of Friends.”
(From The Mennonite, )
An obituary notice for Richard M. Johnson in the same issue noted that “Dick found himself philosophically opposed to the idea of paying income and war taxes, and he and [his wife] Cynthia chose to resign their jobs and live out their lives on a nontaxable income as subsistence homesteaders.
They moved to Monroe, Maine, along with three of their four children, where they helped establish a community land trust.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In long-time Friends Journal editor (and war tax resister) Vinton Deming stepped down.
The amount of coverage of war tax resistance in the Journal had been declining throughout the decade, and was no exception to this trend.
A note in the issue read:
In signing A Call to Noncooperation with the War in Yugoslavia, 55 opponents of the conflict expressed a commitment to refuse to pay taxes for the war.
National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee in released the group’s declaration along with the list of signers.
On releasing the call, Bill Ramsey, a Friend from St. Louis, Mo., and a signer, said, “We oppose this diversion of public money [from the Social Security surplus] to a new war, but most urgently we are refusing to pay for war on Yugoslavia because it is killing people in Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro.
We are choosing to redirect our taxes to heal people.”
The issue included a letter-to-the-editor from Bill and Fran Taber announcing a particularly large war tax redirection:
A few weeks ago we received several phone calls from a Friend who, like us, has long been concerned about how to avoid paying taxes to support the military-industrial complex.
Our friend had recently been in touch with an Olney Friends School graduate who was excited about new governance arrangements being worked out to allow the official control of the school to pass from Ohio Yearly Meeting to a board composed of alumni and friends of Olney.
This enthusiasm and the school’s need for scholarship funds at this time of transition prompted our friend to ask us to be transmitters of an anonymous gift of $100,000 to the Friends of Olney, Inc., (the group responsible for the school beginning ).
Naturally we said we would be glad to do this.
We soon received an express package containing an anonymous $100,000 check from our friend’s financial agency as well as the friend’s letter explaining how this gift was a way of placing money in a worthy cause rather than allowing it to go for destructive purposes.
After we had passed the check and the letter on to the new board, our friend suggested and we agreed that the publication of the letter which accompanied the check would be a good way to continue the ongoing Quaker exercise on how to avoid complicity in war, as well as showing one way to put excess money to good use.
The letter follows.
Dear Friends of Olney —
In the spirit of Isaiah’s prophetic calling that would have us turn our swords into plowshares and in concert with Creation’s own declarations of God’s transforming power as recorded and envisioned in the Bible, I have been led to transfer to you these funds in the amount of $100,000, that they might serve to support your new tenure at Olney School.
It is my wish that this contribution be utilized to provide partial scholarship funding for ten or more students who might thereby be enabled to attend school there .
I offer this gift as one who has long wrestled with and refused payment of military taxes to our government, and has now resolved to cease paying such taxes in light of revelations through written and other sources that our nation has over many years been engaged in the development and testing of “doomsday weaponry” — acknowledged at a recent Pentagon news conference as likely to become a “growth industry.”
By way of sorting out my own personal response to such darkness, I have been endeavoring to turn my daily walk, personal and financial resources, and whatever presence and service I can offer, towards honoring that living Word which would have us dwell together in peace with all our neighbors and ourselves — “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit saith the Lord.”
And in this regard, I have become particularly concerned with some of the problems that our families and children are experiencing, living as we are under the shadow of an increasingly mesmerizing, materializing, and mortifying “high-tech” way of life, dominated and fueled by our nation’s military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower himself tried to forewarn us of more than 30 years ago.
It is my fervent prayer that we will all be moved by the Spirit and our own lives’ particular needs and concerns to invest ourselves in helping shepherd our young ones back into the fold of that “everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure” which David knew (Ⅱ Samuel 23:5) as his felt experience of God’s rainbow covenant (Gen. 9:12) “which I make between me and you and all living creatures that is with you for perpetual generations.”
Indeed, my own personal experience in recent years persuades me that as we covenant together to re-engage ourselves in more reverently-related interactive ways of living (as early Friends and many native cultures have and do) we will recover that love of life Way of experiential truth-seeking, together with our own “still small voice.”
And hopefully, as we become more attentive to and enlivened through this wider context of God’s creation “in which we live and move and have our being,” we shall realize all the blessings it holds for our own health, balanced living, and well-being.
So I have great respect and hope for your Friends of Olney group and the new course you are charting and pray it will prove an exciting and successful adventure in community learning for all involved.
May the Spirit bless and abide with you!
Yours in good faith,
A Friend
The issue noted:
Lake Erie Yearly Meeting minuted support for David and Miyoko Inouye Bassett as conscientious objectors to the payment of military taxes.
the Bassetts have refused to pay voluntarily the military portion of their federal taxes.
They have actively worked for U.S. Peace Tax Fund legislation, resubmitted this year, that would allow a person to pay full taxes but direct that none of the money be used for military purposes.
The couple worked for years as doctors in India with American Friends Service Committee.
Spencer Coxe attacked the Peace Tax Fund scheme in an op-ed in the issue:
The Peace Tax movement has dangerous implications
David Bassett’s article on the Peace Tax movement, which appeared a couple of years ago [see ♇ ] was of interest to me, for I had long been unclear (and uneasy) about the concept.
As a Friend and a pacifist with a lifelong affinity to dissent and lost causes, my heart sympathized with the movement, but my head warned me it was in error.
Even after reading David Bassett’s article, my head, which writes this essay, has prevailed.
The Peace Tax is meaningless in practical effect.
Congress determines; and will continue to determine, the military budget.
“Earmarking” one’s taxes for non-military purposes will have no influence whatsoever, except in the inconceivable event that so many subscribers signed up that there were not enough non-earmarked funds to satisfy what Congress considered military needs — at which point Congress would repeal the law.
A large number of subscribers would be required to reach this point.
A smaller number of determined lobbyists and agitators could persuade Congress to curb military expenditures, even though the protesters represented a minority of the electorate, just as the gun lobby is effective despite the rejection of its agenda by a majority.
A Peace Tax Fund is not only meaningless, but counterproductive and potentially dangerous.
It would ease the conscience of pacifists by creating the illusion that they are influencing policy, but it would deflect attention from meaningful and essential activity aimed at a) electing sympathetic members of Congress and a sympathetic President and b) lobbying, demonstrating and agitating to persuade the executive and legislative branches to reorder the national agenda.
The movement has dangerous implications.
It undermines representative democracy, the only viable system of government for a huge, diverse nation.
Policy-making is entrusted to democratically elected representatives who can be (but often aren’t) held accountable to the electorate.
On any issue, there are bound to be voters who disagree with a decision of Congress.
Our social contract requires us to accept — with rare exceptions to be discussed below — decisions we dislike.
To allow an end-run around this compact for one group invites other interests to demand equal treatment.
The lumber baron can forbid the use of his taxes to extend national parks.
Rightwing bigots will withhold their taxes from a school lunch program.
Permitting individuals to allocate their taxes as they see fit would probably result in a government agenda worse than what we have now, and it would ultimately lead to chaos.
For several reasons the Peace Tax movement will have symbolic significance of little or no value.
First, the movement will not generate publicity.
It is so low-key and so “legal” that it will be disregarded.
Second, unlike the tax-refuser, the peace-taxer courts no risk of prosecution or penalty.
His or her act will not be seen as brave or noteworthy; it will evoke no admiration, no controversy, no reflection (in fact, it will be invisible).
Third, since the earmarking will be sanctioned by statute, its use will cause the government no embarrassment and almost no inconvenience.
By legally sanctioning the earmarking, Congress is effectively removing the movement’s symbolic significance, and channeling a potentially effective resistance movement into a harmless backwater.
Each of us should, as a general rule, abide by decisions of Congress.
For today’s pacifist — as for last century’s abolitionist — the occasion will arise when an act of government is so repugnant to conscience that one must resort to civil disobedience.
This point is reached when in one’s estimation the issue of conscience transcends the demands that society lays upon us.
The Peace Tax movement boils down to a feel-good means of salving the conscience of those of us distressed by militarism.
It deflects us from hard work within the democratic process, and it absolves us from the penalties inflicted upon those who choose civil disobedience.
This long-overdue criticism of the Peace Tax Fund scheme would provoke a great deal of debate in the letters-to-the-editor column .
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
Conscientious objection laws discriminate in favor of members of historical “peace churches” which has the effect of adding a religious bias to the law.
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).
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
A new millennium is upon us, full of hope and… whoops, there goes a terrorist
attack and suddenly the
U.S. adopts
psychosis guanorrhea as its national pastime. How did the
Friends Journal’s coverage of war tax resistance
reflect this slide from hope to insanity in ?
An obituary notice for Marian Dockhorn in the
issue noted that among her many peace
and justice activities, “[d]uring
she was led to become a war tax refuser.”
The issue noted that “[t]he Internal
Revenue Service has placed a lien on the home of Jim Satterwhite and Olwen
Pritchard, at Bluffton College in Ohio, who have been withholding the military
portion of their federal taxes for the last few years. The Bluffton Worship
Group has agreed to act as an ad hoc committee to react if the
IRS
takes the extraordinary step of foreclosing on the house.”
An obituary notice for Mary Barclay Howarth in that issue described her this
way: “A lifelong tax resister, Mary believed in simple living as a tool to
promote world peace.”
A letter-to-the-editor from Kerttu Kay Barnett published in the
issue recommended fifteen things Friends
could do that might help them “to build a community and… integrate new
attenders into the life of the meeting” and suggested that readers try out a
few of them. Some of these were very simple and mundane (“Borrow a book from
the meeting library,” “Introduce yourself to somebody in the meeting you don’t
know well”) but #5 was “Declare yourself a conscientious objector to war
taxes, and mail that part of your taxes that go to support the military to an
escrow account.”
A report on the Britain Yearly Meeting, which was held
, included the vague note
that “[w]e renewed our commitment to further our corporate concern for the
right to conscientious objection to the payment of tax for military purposes
and for its diversion towards peaceful uses.”
The issue had a feature on Iraq and
on the sufferings of people there under the Hussein dictatorship and the
international sanctions against the country. The article mentioned the work of
Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness and mentioned her war tax resistance
in passing:
Kelly pays no taxes, not wanting to support weapons and prisons. She lives in
voluntary poverty, operating Voices in the Wilderness out of her elderly
father’s home in Chicago. She says the
IRS
agent who showed up to assess what could be seized in lieu of taxes, “looked
around and said, ‘You don’t really have anything, do you? I’m going to put
you down as uncollectible.’ ”
An obituary notice for William F. “Bill” Hayden in that issue said: “A
pacifist and antiwar activist, he vigorously protested the Vietnam War and
resisted certain taxes on the basis that they funded the military.”
An article by Chuck Hosking in the
issue challenged Quakers to radically reassess their lifestyles, as what
passes for normal in our culture is incredibly destructive.
And perhaps the most objectionable of all to Friends is the military role
that undergirds our privilege. There’s no need to acquiesce to the Pentagon’s
semantic ploy of defining its role as “service.” The only ones served by the
U.S. military are
the global elite and arms corporations. Once Friends are convinced that the
overriding purpose of
U.S. militarism is
to protect our privileged way of life, there will follow a strong impetus to
relinquish our wealth advantages, live on less than the taxable minimum (in
part, to avoid subsidizing the military in our name), and trust in the
peacemaking potential of global sharing.
In an article by Carol Urner in the
issue she recalled: “When [her husband Jack] retired he did not want to return
to the United States. he found the contrasts of unrestricted wealth and dire
poverty obscene, and he had never wanted to pay the taxes that supported the
U.S. military. We
agreed to stay in Lesotho and Southern Africa where both of us could continue
to be useful.”
An obituary notice for Mary Mikesell in that issue noted that “she became a
tax resister and in lieu of income tax, sent an equivalent amount, her own
alternative tax, to a private organization for relief work in Vietnam.”
That issue also noted that the Haverford, Pennsylvania, Meeting had decided
to rededicate itself to trying to get a Peace Tax Fund law passed:
“A Peace Tax Fund, which would allow people of conscience to pay the full
amount of their federal income taxes into a fund designated strictly for
nonmilitary purposes, would represent ‘alternative service’ for taxpayers and
their tax dollars,” the minute asserts. The meeting will work with other
faith-based communities and organizations to develop a stronger network
advocating for a Peace Tax Fund and work with legislators and other public
officials to cultivate their support for this initiative.
So in 2001 I count five references to recently-deceased Quaker war tax
resisters, two to living American Quaker war tax resisters, one to a Quaker
war tax resister outside the
U.S., and another
to an American war tax resister who isn’t a Quaker. Not a very encouraging
sign for the vigor of the practice in the American Society of Friends.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal were few and far between.
In the issue, Cliff Marrs (a British Quaker) gave his interpretation of the “Render Unto Caesar…” koan from the Bible, and in particular what guidance it offers to those war tax resisters who take advice from scripture.
His point-of-view:
The idea that Jesus was circumscribing a political realm that was Caesar’s domain, and a sacred realm that belonged to God, is anachronistic.
Jesus, and his Jewish listeners, “regarded God as the Creator, and the whole universe as God’s domain — including politics — and would not have distinguished between the political and the religious.”
The tax in question “functioned as a kind of rent that assumed that all land belonged ultimately to the Roman Empire,” while core Jewish scripture makes it clear that Israel belongs to God.
The fact that Jesus had to ask someone else for a coin to use to illustrate his point may be significant — perhaps he did not carry such a coin because its use of a graven image that represented a member of the Roman ruling class as a divinity was idolatrous, or perhaps he had rejected Roman money and so (by the logic of his epigram) its taxes as well.
Maybe he was suggesting that it’s not sufficient to refuse to pay Roman taxes, but you ought to reject Roman money as well: give it back to Caesar and be done with it.
Would Jesus, who cared for the poor, really promote a regressive poll tax?
Paul’s unmistakable pay-your-taxes command in Romans 13 isn’t necessarily an interpretation of Jesus’s instructions, or even good advice in general, but was just a pragmatic, common-sense instruction to Christians living in Rome.
Since Jesus was ultimately charged with promoting resistance to Roman taxes prior to his execution, this seems to indicate that at least some of his listeners interpreted his message that way.
In short, biblically-oriented tax resisters should not be frightened off by the “Render Unto Caesar…” episode, as its interpretation is not so simple as its vulgar usage may suggest.
An obituary notice for Edith Carlton Browne in the same issue noted that “[s]he and [her husband] Gordon became military tax resisters in , and she continued that witness throughout her life.”
Another obituary, for Lorraine Ketchum Cleveland, said that “[i]n she became a war-tax refuser in a case that eventually went to the Supreme Court (Cleveland, Cadwallader, and the AFSC vs. U.S.A.).
Lorraine continued throughout her life to deduct from her federal taxes that portion that would be used for war, and sent it to a worthy cause.”
The issue mentioned the tax resistance of Robert Purvis, who refused to pay his Pennsylvania state taxes in protest against the state’s denial of equal voting rights to black citizens around , and then refused to pay “that portion of his property tax that went to support the schools” in when his children were refused admission to the whites-only classrooms. Purvis wrote:
I have borne this outrage ever since the innovation upon the usual practice of admitting all the children of the township into the public schools, and at considerable expense, have been obliged to obtain the services of private teachers to instruct my children, while my school tax is greater, with a single exception, than that of any other citizen of the township.
It is true, (and the outrage is made but the more glaring and insulting): I was informed by a pious Quaker director, with sanctifying grace, imparting, doubtless, an unctuous glow to his saintly prejudices, that a school in the village of Mechanicsville was appropriated for “thine.”
The miserable shanty, with all its appurtenances, on the very line of the township, to which this benighted follower of George Fox alluded, is, as you know, the most flimsy and ridiculous sham which any tool of a skin-hating aristocracy have resorted to, to cover or protect his servility.
An article in the issue mentioned in passing that “Quakers withdrew almost as a single body from the Pennsylvania legislature in rather than vote taxes for war.”
An obituary notice for Wally Nelson (not, I believe, a Quaker, but the obituary says he “demonstrated the values and commitment of a Friend; by his loving manner and unwavering integrity, he shaped an ideal for Friends to aspire to”) mentions his war tax resistance activities:
In , he cofounded Peacemakers, a national organization dedicated to active nonviolence as a way of life.
In , he and his wife, Juanita Nelson, began their lifelong practice of refusing to pay taxes used for armaments and killing.… During , the couple was among the founders of the Valley Community Land Trust, Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters, and the Greenfield Farmers Market.
He was well known as a regular market vendor in downtown Greenfield and as a participant in the annual war tax protest in front of the Greenfield Post Office on tax day.
The issue noted that the Northern Yearly Meeting had “approved a minute expressing support for the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill and for those who are conscientiously opposed to war taxes.”
At this point, those Quakers who cannot pay for military and weapons are subject to great sacrifice.
Some have refused employment that would result in a taxable level of income.
Others have exposed themselves to confiscation of their homes and other possessions.
We seek a legal mechanism whereby we may pay taxes and be responsible citizens without funding human death and suffering.
We view adoption of [the Bill] as providing religious freedom to many of our Society currently suffering for their faithfulness to their Quaker beliefs.
Add that all up and we get:
one abstract discussion of whether war tax resistance conflicts with Jesus’s teachings
three mentions of American war tax resisters recently deceased
one mention of a tax resister from
one mention of American Quaker war tax resistance from
one contemporary American Quaker Meeting advocating the latest Peace Tax Fund scheme and alluding to the acts of contemporary Quaker war tax resisters
Which is to say: next to nothing about actual real-life American Quakers doing actual, honest-to-goodness war tax resistance in .
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
It is .
The insane bloodlust of the United States has led it to embark on the shameful and catastrophic Iraq War.
Surely there is no time like the present for American Quakers to recall their proud tradition of war tax resistance and refuse to fund the madness.
Let’s see if we can find any signs of this the Friends Journal.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal that can still be found in almost the same form in issues of the Journal today
A profile of Tom and Anne Moore in the issue quoted Tom as saying: “We have done things not for money but just because we thought they were important and useful.
We’re war tax resisters, for which we’ve had strong support from Quakers, as well as many of our friends and colleagues throughout the years.”
Notes in that issue also mentioned that the Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting had endorsed the latest Peace Tax Fund bill, as had the Green Party.
A later issue added the endorsement of the Illinois Yearly Meeting.
In each case, as was too frequently the case, the endorsement was in lieu of endorsing war tax resistance, not supplemental to it.
An article about the “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting women’s gathering” noted in passing that among the “urgent concerns about our world and culture[ w]e identified a web of violence, including payment for war through taxes.”
As the invasion of Iraq grew imminent, in the issue appeared the following desperate op-ed by Kent R. Larrabee:
A social movement that could abolish war
Our Peace Testimony stands out as central to our faith.
Simply stated, we commit ourselves to not participating in the taking of human life.
It seems impossible for Quakers and other peacemakers to uphold this commitment.
Nearly 50 percent of the money we give to the government through income taxes goes for the military: killing, destruction of homes, schools, businesses, and other sources of income.
We don’t follow what we believe.
How can we do that?
There is an answer.
In the early days of Quakerism, William Penn, a prominent Quaker whose father held a high military position, went to George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, and explained how impossible it was for him to give up wearing his sword.
When he asked, “What shall I do?”
George Fox answered, “Wear thy sword as long as thou canst.”
It is that simple.
Something inside of us may well be saying, “Pay your income tax as long as you can.”
It may not be very long if the Spirit is speaking to you and the message doesn’t go away.
My experience has been a challenging one.
I learned gradually about the power of nonviolent direct action and love as exhibited by Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and A.J. Muste.
In World War Ⅱ, I was taken from my job helping people in the slums to survive and put into prison for not cooperating with the military stand of our government.
Following the war, I was drawn into social welfare programs with the federal government and had to pay large amounts of income tax.
Gradually, it dawned on me that a large percentage of my tax money was going into the military budget.
First it was about 35 percent, but it kept climbing to nearly 50 percent.
I had worked to the top of the federal payroll and was getting a good salary.
I finally woke up!
I was blatantly contradicting all my belief in the power of love in human relations and the power of nonviolent direct action.
At the height of my career, I knew that if I was to have faith in the power of the teachings and the example of Jesus and other spiritual leaders, I would have to resign from my job, give up my retirement security, and find a way to live below the income tax level where one does not have to pay the tax.
I resigned my position in .
I have been living below the tax line ever since, though tempted by good job offers.
It hasn’t been easy by some standards, and I had a lot to learn about how to live simply, buying used clothing, doubling up in housing, and driving a 15-year-old car.
The result?
I felt a great relief.
I was no longer, indirectly, taking human lives.
My three children went to college and succeeded on their own.
I had the freedom to be more creative and effective in my social reform projects.
No salary needed.
At 84 years, I feel it is useless to spend a lot of energy worrying about how long I am going to live.
I just want to be doing what I love and feel led to do.
We have spent trillions preparing for possible or extended wars.
Many millions have been killed by war and organized violence.
Now, the very survival of our planet is at stake.
There is another way.
If 15 percent of our adult population openly took such a stand for peace and refused to pay income tax for the military, the masses could become convinced — and our planet could be radically changed.
Let us wait in deep silence until God speaks to us.
Then we will know what is right and we will be miraculously supported.
Peg Morton, in an article in the issue in which she explained her civil disobedience action against the School of the Americas, and why she would not be paying any fine assessed against her:
I am a war tax resister, not willing voluntarily to pay a fine to a government so deep in military slaughter and buildup.
I would be quite willing to donate the fine to a worthy, life-giving cause, such as Afghan relief.
I would be unwilling to promise not to cross the line again.
I am committed, in the best way I know how, to follow the leadings of the Spirit.
An obituary notice for Viola Evelyn Purvis in the issue said that “[h]er form of war tax protest was to live so simply she would not have to pay taxes.”
An Earlham School of Religion supplement dated that is included in the set of PDFs I’ve been reviewing profiles Wallace Collett as an exemplary donor to the School, and mentions that “[h]e also served as national clerk of the American Friends Service Committee, and has spoken widely about tax resistance as peace witness.”
Marilyn Roper penned a letter-to-the-editor about the war tax resistance of her and her husband Harrison that appeared in the issue.
Excerpts:
The main reason we left the Philadelphia area was to live in a less expensive part of the world, because we were quitting our jobs (Harry was a tenured associate professor at West Chester University, and I worked at the University Museum of University of Pennsylvania) so as not to have to pay for war and preparations for war.
The sale of our home in Haverford (part of the Quaker community around Haverford Meeting) and purchase of our very inexpensive home in the small town of Houlton allowed us to put the difference into federally tax-free municipal bonds.
Over time, we have been able to add to our holdings of municipal bonds.
Although the interest is very modest, the principal is secure as inheritance for our descendants.
For most of our years in Maine we have never had to pay a cent of income tax to the federal government, while at the same time we were helping to finance numerous life-enhancing state, city, and county projects such as schools, higher education, and better sewer systems. This year we had to pay $15 to the IRS, but with $3 apiece going to support presidential elections, that amount was reduced to $9. Because we did not have to write a big check to the IRS for April 15, we were able to contribute to Oxfam America, UNICEF, and other groups for relief in Iraq.
In other words, we have the opportunity to carry out our own foreign and domestic aid program in lieu of paying federal taxes.
We happily pay the state and local taxes that support our wonderful local school system and other worthy projects.
All the while, we have continued to be peace activists and sleep better at night.
For those who are troubled by Jesus’ words, “Render to Caesar…” (Mark 12: 13–17), please consider if you reread this passage the fact that there were several kinds of legal tender in Jesus’ day: Roman and Jewish coinage.
Why did Jesus ask that the Pharisees show him a coin instead of reaching into his own pocket?
Perhaps the whole point of this exercise was to find out what type of coinage the Pharisees were using.
He did find out, when they produced a coin with Caesar’s image as God on it rather than Jewish coinage.
This demonstrated to observers that these Pharisees had already “sold out” to Caesar.
So, he stated: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” i.e., the hypocritical Pharisees themselves.
Perhaps that is why all were amazed as Jesus turned the tables on them.
This year many people are feeling especially troubled about praying for peace, and paying for war.
Yet, many do not seem to be aware that in the U.S., income from most municipal bonds is free of federal taxes.
Harry and I wrote a handout flyer for consciousness-raising activities on April 15 about taxes and war.
Over 30 percent of federal tax money goes for war, or preparations for war.
We laud those who live under the taxable level.
Municipal bonds offer another option for those concerned about how their federal tax dollars are spent.
It is not too soon for those who have jobs to start putting any spare cash into tax-free municipal bonds so that down the road they will be able to support life-enhancing rather than life-destroying activities financially.
It is very legal.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In , Quaker Meetings were still wrestling with whether to go on the record in support of war tax resistance, and, if so, whether to do so in an explicit, uncompromising way, or one that played it safe and left a lot of wiggle room.
In an op-ed in the issue of the Friends Journal, Nadine Hoover urged Quaker Meetings to take a concrete stand opposing the payment of war taxes:
Should War Tax Resistance be a Corporate Testimony?
At New York Yearly Meeting in , I was given a message: The Spirit calls Friends to claim a corporate testimony against the payment of war taxes and participation in war in any form.
Of course, we have had a testimony against war since George Fox’s declaration to Charles Ⅱ in :
Our principle is, and our practices have always been, to seek peace, and ensue it, and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all.
All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever, and this is our testimony to the whole world.
Yet there is what British Friends in Quaker Faith and Practice call “Dilemmas of the Pacifist Stand” (24.21–24.26), which opens with a quote from Isaac Penington, :
I speak not against the magistrates or peoples defending themselves against foreign invasions; or making use of the sword to suppress the violent and evil-doers within our borders — for this the present estate of things may and doth require, and a great blessing will attend the sword where it is borne uprightly to that end and its use will be honourable — but yet there is a better state, which the Lord hath already brought some into, and which nations are to expect and to travel towards.
There is to be a time when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”
When the power of the Gospel spreads over the whole earth, thus shall it be throughout the earth, and, where the power of the Spirit takes hold of and overcomes any heart at present, thus will it be at present with that heart.
This blessed state, which shall be brought fotth [in society] at large in God’s season, must begin in the particulars [that is, in individuals].
New York Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice, under which I currently reside, advises (p. 60–61):
Friends are earnestly cautioned against the taking of arms against any person, since “all outward wars and strife and fighting with outward weapons” are contrary to our Christian testimony.
Friends should beware of supporting preparations for war even indirectly, and should examine in this light such matters as noncombatant military service, cooperation with conscription, employment or investment in war industries, and voluntary payment of war taxes.
When their actions are carefully considered, Friends must be prepared to accept the consequences of their convictions.
Friends are advised to maintain our testimony against war by endeavoring to exert an influence in favor of peaceful principles and the settlement of all differences by peaceful methods.
They should lend support to all that strengthens international friendship and understanding and give active help to movements that substitute cooperation and justice for force and intimidation.
NYYM
corporately advises against taking up arms against another person, yet more vaguely warns to “beware of” voluntary payment of war taxes.
The yearly meeting calls Friends to examine their own actions and “accept the consequences of their convictions” (emphasis is mine).
This is about individual conviction, not the corporate conviction we have against bearing of arms. We are squarely in the Penington tradition of advising Friends to testify against war by “endeavoring to exert an influence in favor of peaceful principles.”
We commit to the conversion of hearts and minds, one at a time, “seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all.”
Patience and persistence are employed in our participation with government.
As late as , it even seemed that our experiment would come to fruition.
Larry Apsey of New York Yearly Meeting called out, “the time is at hand.”
The Gandhian, civil rights, and women’s movements made it clear that patience and persistence were about to pay off; we were about to come into this blessed state, not just as a people, but as a nation.
What a far cry we are from that now!
Fruits of the Spirit are a significant test of discernment for Friends, a test that our path has failed.
We cannot put new wine into old wine flasks.
We cannot be in that blessed state and support a military for those who have not yet arrived.
We are called to choose, we are called to choose now, and we are called to choose as a people.
When we get quiet, every Friend I know says that payment of war taxes violates their conscience.
It’s been a long time since we acknowledged a new corporate testimony; this practice has fallen away.
So let us remember.
Friends experience a Living Presence among us and commit to being taught, guided, and shaped by the Living Spirit, placing great reliance on spiritual discernment.
Meeting for business was organized to test the spiritual discernment of its members, affirm or suggest further laboring, and support those suffering for conscience’ sake.
If a Friend’s testimony were affirmed, the question was, “Is this true for them alone, for others as well, or for all of us?”
If it were true for everyone, then it was a corporate testimony.
If we are quiet and ask the question, “Does the payment of war taxes violate my conscience?” and the response is yes for all of us, then, Friends, this is no longer a personal act of conscience but rather a corporate testimony of the meeting.
I am not suggesting we all do any particular thing.
I am asking a question of faith.
What we do about it will only be sought once we are clear on what we believe.
We may pay in protest, become vocal, or resist payment, but whatever we do, we do, not only as an individual, but also as a religious body.
The Spirit is calling us to unite in the Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace, and prosperity in the world through love, integrity, and compassionate justice among people and to acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
It will be a long, hard, humble road, but it is the only road that promises a future for humanity.
Life will go on with or without us.
Let us stand up for our children and grandchildren and say we chose peace.
The response to Hoover’s plea — at least from the record of it we have in the Journal — was muted.
There was a single letter-to-the-editor from William Ashworth (who describes himself as a former war tax refuser) in the issue that began: “Friend Nadine Hoover asks us if war tax resistance should be a corporate testimony among Friends.
The answer is ‘no.’ ” Ashworth argues that because taxes are mixed, and not specific war taxes, there’s no grounds for refusal to pay; furthermore if we did refuse to pay, Congress would probably cut beneficial spending before military spending; and in addition there’s the familiar slippery slope argument wherein other churches might apply the Quaker precedent to refuse to pay for “family planning, education, environmental protection, and a host of other government services that we value.”
A feature on Lillian Willoughby in the issue mentioned her war tax resistance as follows:
By the time of [the] Vietnam [war], Lillian, a lifelong tax resister, had become well acquainted with the Internal Revenue Service; she liked to speak of herself as “educating the IRS.”
In one celebrated incident, after the IRS seized the Willoughbys’ car, the couple raised sufficient funds to redeem it at auction.
Indeed, they raised much more than enough, and so they could claim their car and a refund as well.
Lillian had brought a cake and lemonade to the IRS offices on the day of the auction.
Once their bid had been declared the winner, she staged a party outside the auction room; one or two of the agents shared refreshments with [PDF cuts off here].
When she was summoned to trial, she and another Quaker wrote a letter to the judge advising him that they would not rise at a judge’s entrance, although they meant no disrespect.
The bailiff instructed everyone to remain seated when the court came into session and the judge seemed predisposed to leniency.
When he asked Lillian to account for her actions, she gave what had become her standard statement, that “we [the United States] should not be making war on people, and we [Lillian and like-minded taxpayers] should not have to pay for it.”
The judge levied a $250 fine; she announced that she had no intention of paying it; he gave her 30 days to think it over.
As George put it many years later, “She’s still thinking about it.”
The article ends with Willoughby, at 89, facing trial for a civil disobedience action in protest of the Iraq War and contemplating how she would confront the system: “One thing was certain, she told her family as they sat in daughter Anita’s New York apartment : she would not pay the fine.
None of them seemed surprised.”
A review of Robert Turner Shaping Silence: A Life in Clay in that issue calls it “the story of a conscientious objector, a tax resister, a generous donor of his time, skills, and possessions,” among other things.
An obituary notice for Susumu Ishitani in the same issue noted that “[i]n , Susumu introduced tax refusal into Japan, and was one of six plaintiffs who sued the Japanese government over the issue of military spending.… , he was a member of Citizens Group of Conscientious Military Tax Refusers, sometimes serving as clerk.”
The annual gathering of the Northern Yearly Meeting approved a minute giving its interpretation of the Peace Testimony, which included this statement:
We will continue to stand and work for peace and justice.
We will continue to support those who for conscience’ sake refuse to participate in the military.
We support those who, for conscience’ sake, refuse to pay taxes for war.
We support those who are involved in nonviolent peacemaking.
A minute approved in by the South Berkshire (Massachusetts) Meeting quoted from the New England Yearly Meeting’s “Advice on Peace and Reconciliation,” which said:
Friends are urged to support those who witness to their governments and take personal risks in the cause of peace, who choose not to participate in wars as soldiers nor to contribute to its preparedness with their taxes.
Though the context in which this was quoted did not concern taxes, but merely an expression of “appreciation” for those Canadian Quaker organizations who were helping Americans who had fled to Canada to avoid military service.
A retrospective on the Friends World Committee for Consultation’s Peace Conference the previous year — which had been entitled “Friends Peace Witness in a Time of Crisis” — mentioned “ ‘Conscience and War Tax Witness’ with Rosa Packard” in a long list of “Other workshops.”
The issue included a review of Henry Climbs a Mountain — a children’s story based on Henry David Thoreau’s night in jail for tax refusal.
That issue also included an article about Mary Stone McDowell, who is the only person I know of who was a war tax resister through both World Wars (she was fired from her job as a teacher in part because she would not participate in urging her students to buy “Thrift Stamps” — a sort of junior version of the Liberty Bonds the U.S. government was using to fund its participation in World War Ⅰ).
Unfortunately, the brief paragraph about her war tax resistance is cut off in the PDF in the archives, but it ends “…income taxes each year and, according to Vernon Martin [a conscientious objector McDowell had helped], the IRS dutifully ‘attached part of her pitifully small teacher’s pension, out of which she also gave to charity.’ ”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In , it became increasingly clear that the Iraq War was a catastrophe inflicted by madmen who would stoop to any lie to satisfy their bloodlust, and held no limits sacred — not even those on torture.
How would those Quakers who were providing the funding for this disaster respond?
Sad to say, except from a couple of references to the Priscilla Adams legal case that I mentioned earlier (see ♇ ) only one issue of Friends Journal in all of — the issue — had anything even remotely substantial to say about war tax resistance.
An op-ed by John Calvi on page five urged Quakers to address the torture issue, and put it this way: “The spiritual consequences of torture are that you either are moved to act against it or you stifle and smolder.
For each of us who have paid for torture through our taxes, the dilemma is strong.”
Calvi didn’t recommend or even mention tax resistance, but I’m working with what I’ve got.
A page 32 note mentioned a “Peace Tax Return” being promoted by NWTRCC, saying that “Thousands of U.S. taxpayers opposed to the war in Iraq” could be expected to fill out this protest-return which “would be sent to the IRS or an elected official.”
The form included an option for people who were paying their taxes but wanted to do so under protest, and a second option for people who were refusing to pay some or all of their federal income taxes.
The note said that this tactic “is modeled on a return produced by Conscience: The Peace Tax Campaign in Britain, one of many groups around the world that are lobbying for legislation that will allow conscientious objectors to war to pay their taxes into a special fund that will not be used by the military.”
That’s it.
Sorry.
Fortunately this does seem to be the low point, and there is a steady trickle of war tax resistance mentions — nothing like the storm of — but at least a flicker of the old fire.
(, though, is looking a little sketchier… I’ve only seen one reference so far, and that one in an obituary.)
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Some Quaker war tax resisters of the past and present made appearances in the Friends Journal in .
Another article on George and Lillian Willoughby, in the issue, mentioned how early American Quakers had been sensitive to the issue of war taxes:
In colonial America, tremendous pressure was exerted on Penn and other Quakers to support militias, to provision the British army, to pay taxes for unexplained uses that might well turn out to be military expeditions.
Governing a large colony (Pennsylvania) in which Quakers were a minority, and in which the majority wanted protection from Indian attacks, forced further compromises.
Only with the advent of John Woolman, who with others sent a letter to the Pennsylvania assembly concerning a royal levy, [a portion of the PDF is illegible at this point] -tion of Christ and Fox.
As reported by Peter Brock in his The Quaker Peace Testimony, , it states in part:
And being painfully apprehensive that the large sum granted by the… Assembly for the King’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony, we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directly by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.
Despite the influence of John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, Friends remained divided on the question of “rendering unto Caesar” that which “Caesar” claimed.
The Willoughbys, the article said, “have acted on their beliefs — through war tax refusal” and other means.
An obituary notice for Louis E. Jones in that issue noted that among the ways he “championed Friends causes” was by “for many years avoiding paying federal income tax, instead contributing to charitable causes.… He served as Downers Grove Meeting’s treasurer for many years, giving him the opportunity to witness against war taxes in the form of refusing war/excise tax for phone service.”
A retrospective on the life and work of the pacifist activist A.J. Muste in the issue noted:
Throughout , he often faced jail and prosecution for refusing to pay income taxes (he constantly followed the dictates of the Quaker John Woolman, who insisted that “The spirit of truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods, rather than pay actively”)…
That same issue also noted that the Quaker Council for European Affairs planned to “present a resolution, under Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights on Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, to the Council of Europe” that would enshrine a “right for individual taxpayers to direct a portion of their taxes away from military uses and towards peace-building, international development, and other alternatives to war.”
The note mentioned the difficulties with the resolution: “1) the state’s need to maintain a uniform tax system is deemed more important than designing a tax system through which some taxes are diverted for conscientious objection, and 2) in the absence of legislation that allows for the diversion of taxes away from military purposes, the courts have no power to rule in favor of peace tax protestors.”
That issue also noted that the American Friends Service Committee had nominated Ghassan Andoni for the Nobel Peace Prize, and mentioned that “[d]uring the First Intifada, , Andoni was an active participant in Beit Sahour’s tax resistance.”
An obituary for Glenn S. Mallison in the issue noted that “[d]uring the Vietnam War, he refused entry to IRS agents who confronted [his] family’s refusal to pay phone taxes.”
The issue reported that “New York Yearly Meeting approved a statement against paying for war.”:
The following minute was approved at their Spring Business Sessions on : “The Living Spirit works to give 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 witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.”
This statement reflects Quakers’ steadfast testimony that any participation in war, including payment of taxes for war, is a violation of our faith.
By compelling support of war-making through taxation, our government and political leaders have forced many people of faith to subordinate God’s Word to the dictates of the state.
The statement seeks to uphold a foundational principle of our nation that freedom to practice our religious faith is a matter of moral imperative, and is not dependent upon the grace of rights or privileges granted by the legislature.
For nearly 350 years, members of the Religious Society of Friends have upheld a testimony of peace and nonviolence that embodies the belief that God’s spirit, present in every person, empowers all of us to resolve disputes without resorting to the machinery of war.
Quakers, Mennonites, and people of other faiths came to the New World to escape persecutions in Europe for their religious convictions.
The work of these “peace churches” in the United States eventually led to the legal recognition of the right of all persons not to be forced into military service in violation of their conscience.
To date, however, the United States government has failed to respect the right of religious conscience, recognized by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, not to be compelled to support war through the collection of taxes.
The U.S. Congress has before it legislation introduced by Congressman John Lewis of Georgia and supported by 35 Representatives… (the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill”) that would provide conscientious objectors [subject] to military taxation with an option.
Individuals who establish a sincere religious objection would have their tax payments directed towards nonviolent and life-affirming means for protecting and promoting national security, consistent with their faith.
Until that time, many Quakers and others are being forced to choose between being faithful to their religious convictions and being in compliance with our federal tax laws.
“As a religious body, we cannot in good conscience support war, and we have borne that witness for over 350 years,” said Christopher Sarnmond, general secretary of New York Yearly Meeting.
“We are clear that violence only begets more violence, in a neverending cycle of horror that diminishes all humankind.
Being required to pay almost half our taxes to support war-making is a violation of our religious convictions, and we will be seeking ways to redress this, individually and corporately.”
In an op-ed in the issue, Stan Becker used his column inches to present the dilemma of Quakers paying for the Iraq War and other such militarism.
He asserted that “[V]ery few Friends have been able to conscientiously refuse to pay the military portion of their income tax and succeeded in doing so” because “[t]he Internal Revenue Service simply does what is necessary to get its monies.”
The option of “living below the taxable income level,” he insisted, “is nearly impossible as well.”
To the rescue is “the Peace Tax Fund legislation that would allow pacifists to have their taxes used only for nonmilitary purposes.”
Meanwhile, he suggested that Friends calculate how much of their time and money is going to pay for war and try to counterbalance this with some peace-minded donations.
Nadine Hoover had an article in the same issue in which she mentioned her frustrations at trying to forward the cause of war tax resistance in the New York Yearly Meeting:
In , a member of Peace Concerns Committee of New York Yearly Meeting approached me outside the auditorium at yearly meeting: “We were talking in committee today about how we are being prepared for something, something historic.
We don’t know what it is, but we feel ready!
We thought of asking people and your name came up.
What do you sense we are being prepared for?”
The answer was laid upon me in that instant.
I replied: “Don’t ask the question if you’re not prepared to yield.
Our dear Friend Sandra Cronk warned us of the dis-ease that settles in when we think we are ready but, when the Light comes, we refuse to yield.
You really do not want to know the answer.”
“Yes, yes!
We do.
We really do.
We’re ready.”
“Okay.”
I said, “It’s a corporate conviction against paying for war.”
He paled and said, “Oh, no.
That may be a bit too much.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.
You wanted an historic action that would not change your life.
Well, let me see…”
He smiled.
That was the end of that conversation…
But…
Seven years after that conversation, New York Yearly Meeting approved a statement of faith testifying to the Power of the Living Spirit and acknowledging that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
This statement not only reaffirms our Peace Testimony, but shifts from supporting or encouraging individual acts of conscience to claiming a corporate testimony laid upon all of us.
U.S. courts have rejected cases on war tax resistance saying they cannot accommodate individuals, but the courts may not say no so easily to an entire religious body.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
The few mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends
Journal in were mostly looks at
war tax resisters from Quaker history, though there was some mention of
Daniel Jenkins’s ongoing attempt to get the courts to discover a Constitutional
right to conscientious objection to military taxation.
The issue contained a
letter-to-the-editor from Perry Treadwell in which he chided Friends for
letting their peace testimony slacken. Excerpts:
I received another of those
IRS
letters that I have been getting off and on for the past 35 years. They tell
me to pay back taxes, penalties, and interest. It still gives me that slight
kick in the stomach. I sent back another letter informing them again that as
a member of the Religious Society of Friends my belief dictates that I cannot
pay for killing.…
Where is the passion of the
Friends to witness our Peace Testimony?
Recently a member of Atlanta
(Ga.) Meeting defended his
paying income taxes by using the same argument that Stan Becker proposes in
his Viewpoint in the October issue, "How Can We Work More for Peace Than for
War?" [see ♇
]: using money and/or
time commitment for peace purposes. How many cluster bombs have been bought
with their tax money? Each day I weep seeing the list in the
New York Times of those killed in Iraq,
particularly the 18–20-year-olds. I cannot describe the impact the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis we have slaughtered has on me.
What if 500 Friends withheld $10–$100 from their
tax returns? What if more did so
? Throw sand in the wheels of the
IRS.
Put our money where our collective mouths are when it comes to Peace Tax Fund
legislation. That might get Congressional attention.
What are we afraid of? War tax refusal is not to be feared. In fact, it has
opened up for me whole new opportunities for service and ministry.
The issue included Daniel Jenkins’s article “The Liberation of Nathan Swift,” which concerned the arrest of a Quaker in for his refusal to pay a militia exemption tax, and his subsequent release from jail when New York Governor William Seward intervened.
Seward later, in an address to the legislature, endorsed an amendment to the state Constitution that would release conscientious objectors from the militia exemption tax (Jenkins finds indications that a subsequent Constitutional Convention did in fact change the Constitution in this way).
Jenkins saw this story as inspiration for the movement advocating a Peace Tax Fund law, saying it showed that with persistent witness and lobbying, it is possible to get a government to make concessions to conscientious objectors to military taxes.
The author’s note mentioned that Jenkins had “taken a military tax objection case into the federal courts with the support of a clearness committee, financial assistance from Purchase Quarterly Meeting, and an amicus brief submitted by New York Yearly Meeting,” and that the article was a revised and expanded version of “an oral report presented by the Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation Sub-Committee of the Peace Concerns Committee at a yearly meeting session held in .”
A later update on Jenkins’s legal case noted that his appeal had been turned down by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals:
Jenkins… bore witness to the leading of his conscience that paying taxes for
war is wrong by withholding his payment of federal income tax and setting it
aside in escrow until the government agreed to use it only for nonmilitary
purposes. For this he had been penalized not only with the tax and ordinary
penalties and interest, but also with a $5,000 fine for bringing forth what
the government contended was a “frivolous” case. Lawyer Fred Dettmer, clerk
for the Witness Coordinating Committee of New York Yearly Meeting…, argued
the appeal.
Relying
on the First and Ninth Amendments to the
U.S. Constitution,
he argued that Jenkins wanted to pay his taxes but the government must
accommodate his conscientious insistence that his money not pay for military
expenditures. On , prior to
the argument of appeal, more than 30 Friends had gathered in the cafeteria of
the Federal Court House in Manhattan for a special meeting of worship. In
rejecting the appeal, Judge Jose A. Cabranes wrote that such religious
objections to military activity have previously been rejected and that
Jenkins’ appeal was no different, though it was “presented in unusual garb.”
The Witness Coordinating Committee is conferring on next steps, including
possibly appealing to the
U.S. Supreme Court.
(An update in the issue noted
that Jenkins was denied cert on his appeal to the Supreme Court on
. It said that Jenkins was
preparing an appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.)
Jenkins’s article was mentioned in the issue’s introductory editorial, where
editor Susan Corson-Finnerty wrote that “[t]he willingness of Quakers in that
period to risk the loss of their property and their freedom and to go to jail,
as Nathan Swift did, for the sake of their belief in nonviolence and their
faithfulness to that leading was remarkable.”
A historical overview of Carolina Quakers in the
issue noted:
Carolina Quakers as a rule stuck hard by the Peace Testimony; their refusal
to bear arms was honored to some degree, at least during more peaceful times.
As tensions rose between colonists and the Crown over exploitation of
resources and taxes, Quakers and other peace church people in the
Carolinas — Mennonites, Brethren, and Moravians — suffered
disproportionately. For instance, in they
were assessed a threefold amount for requisition of supplies for the army.
The Advice issued by Western Quarterly Meeting was to refuse compliance, and
many did so; many property seizures ensued. Others suffered also, as many
agents of the Colonial government were corrupt and were pocketing much of
their collections; seized property was often sold for small sums to friends
and relatives of these agents.
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.
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:
to develop a better theoretical understanding of pacifism and the failure
of violence, so as to share this vision more convincingly
to “explore, develop, and improve the many ways Friends can work towards
not paying for war” —
get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed
try new court challenges along the lines of Dan Jenkins’s
develop and use workshops and other outreach material
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.”
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
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a bit of an anti-war tax resistance backlash in the Friends Journal in .
In the issue, Peter Phillips came out against war tax resistance in a two-page article.
Here is a summary of his argument:
Friends’ advice against paying war taxes is sometimes incoherent.
The New York Yearly Meeting suggests that friends “examine… voluntary payment of war taxes” but taxes by definition aren’t voluntary.
The practice of some Quakers of refusing to pay but allowing the government to seize the amount by levy makes such war tax resistance “insignificant.”
What do people mean by “war taxes”?
If it’s the percentage of the revenue that goes to the Pentagon, even some of that money isn’t spent for war (for instance the Army Corps of Engineers work to rebuild hurricane-damaged New Orleans).
What about “reparations to Iraqis whose property is damaged” or “the Air Force’s remarkable mediation program that resolves employment and procurement disputes without litigation” — or, in the other direction, what about the Interstate Highway system, which was initially designed as a defense measure: is money raised for that, too, “war taxes”?
Is everyone on their own to decide what taxes are war taxes, or is there an authoritative answer, or is it okay to withhold symbolic amounts — what is the justification for withholding Elizabeth Boardman’s $10.40, an arbitrary amount that has nothing to do with war spending?
Withholding of taxes is not a good way of withholding funds from the war machine for the simple reason that the government won’t decide how to respond to a shortage of funds by respecting the reasons why the tax resister withheld them.
It is every bit as likely (perhaps more likely) to cut spending elsewhere.
“Should Head Start, research on solar energy, unemployment benefits, and support for healthcare all be underfunded in the exercise of our righteousness?
A consequence of my not joining the armed forces in was that someone else did who would not otherwise have had to.
People were hurt because I was not there to help.
This too is a consequence of conscientious objection.
Are those who advocate withholding part of their taxes prepared as well to live with the consequences of their actions?”
There is a Quaker ethic of trying to adapt to communal consensus that is expressed in many of its teachings, and the ethos of participating as equals in trying to probe a dilemma and adopt a communal consensus is one of the things Quakers have contributed to the American polis — war tax resistance turns its back on this with its ethos of individualism and rejection of the decisions of the community.
You will not be surprised to learn that Phillips’s article led to some exchanges in the letters-to-the-editor column in later issues.
Here is a summary of some of the back-and-forth:
Dennis P. Roberts thought the article was “the finest work on war taxes I have yet seen in the pages of your journal” and then told a half-remembered story about a terrible massacre in colonial Pennsylvania that could have been prevented but for the pacifism of the “strong Quaker elements within the settlement.”
— “I cannot say or recall with certainty whether this story is fact or fiction.
What does it matter?
Either way, an important lesson is drive home eloquently and powerfully: military preparations sometimes must be made.”
Robin Harper responded with some suggested guidelines for Quaker war tax resistance that he thought might meet some of Phillips’s criticisms (see ♇ for an excerpt from this letter).
David R. Bassett felt that Phillips had been too dismissive of war tax resistance in general after concentrating his criticism on a few specific arguments and methods he found to be weak or ineffective.
What about resisters who keep their income below the tax line?
Or people like Bassett who work in the judicial and legislative arenas to try to get something like conscientious objection to military taxation legalized?
Or folks who try to make sure their investments and purchases are clear of involvement in war?
Perry Treadwell compared Phillips’s “rationalizations” to “Friends’ historical resistance to confronting their complicity in enslavement,” and thought that just as a few Friends had to break from the pack and lead Quakers to an abolitionist stand, it will take Quakers speaking out against paying for war to make their “spiritual testimony” come to life.
Daniel Jenkins called Phillips’s argument “smooth and lawyerly” and “crafted… to lead to a foregone conclusion.”
He felt that Phillips gave short shrift to occasions when “conscience may sometimes transcend the constraints of conventionality and pressures of conformity.”
Naomi Paz Greenberg considered Phillips’s argument that by not serving or not paying taxes you are merely foisting the responsibility off on someone else to be flawed:
The moral consequence [of Phillips’s decision not to serve in the military] is not that other people were made to serve in his stead, as Phillips suggests.
The moral consequence of his not serving in war is simply that he did not violate his conscience by serving.
Others could have and did make their own choices, consulting conscience or not.
The moral consequences of not paying taxes for war are similarly direct.
She even suggested a more radical outlook toward taxes that I have rarely seen in Quaker circles:
Our taxes are compulsory, and in some sense they are the least desirable way to provide a constructive economic foundation for a compassionate society.
They presuppose that there is no Friendly nor Christian nor Jewish nor Hindu nor Muslim nor conscientious nor atheistic nor socialist love for one another and so we must be forced.
Paying taxes separates us from those with whom we might otherwise be in community, and with whom we might shake hands, share food, share laughter and tears.
Paying taxes for war separates us from many of them irrevocably.
Some Friends testify that we expect better of ourselves than that, because we know experimentally that God expects better of us.
Greenberg also felt that there was a big difference between the Quaker ethos of consensus and conformity when “recognizing the sense of the meeting” and trying to figure out how to confront “legislation written by lobbyists and summarized by Congressional interns in a process that has been compared to the making of sausage.”
An obituary notice for Kent Larrabee in the issue noted that “[f]or much of his life, Kent purposely lived below the poverty line in order to identify with the poor and to avoid payment of income taxes for war.”
In the issue, Arthur Waskow offered a reading of the “Render unto Caesar…” koan that puts it into a context of thousands of years of Rabbinical debate about the passage in Genesis that reads: “God created humankind in God’s own Image.”
He thought that Jesus had been intending to refer to this debate, and not intending to give any advice about taxes.
An obituary notice for Lillian Willoughby in the issue mentioned that “Lillian felt called to refuse to pay war taxes, and the IRS seized her car in .”
An obituary notice for Arthur Evans in the issue said that “[f]or 20 years, Arthur withheld the portion from his federal income tax that he believed went to war and weapons, and in , he was jailed for 90 days for refusing to turn over income records to the Internal Revenue Service.”
And an obituary notice for Merrill Hallowell Barnebey in the identified him as “a war tax resister.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Mentions of war tax resistance and differing approaches to the dilemma of paying war taxes continued to appear in some of the issues of the Friends Journal in .
The issue included a review of the book A Persistent Voice: Marian Franz and Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation.
It was a collection of essays by and about Franz and about Peace Tax Fund activism, with some supplemental material about the U.S. versions of Peace Tax Fund scheme legislation that Franz had championed.
The issue included Harrison & Marilyn Roper telling the story of their war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
In the contradiction of “praying for peace and paying for war” overwhelmed us.
We needed to try to live under the taxable level (supplemented by tax-free investments) so that we no longer would be supporting monetarily what we deplored spiritually.
In an open letter to fellow Friends at Haverford (Pa.) Meeting… we wrote:
Along with raising our family and “just living,” we have been trying in our own ways to contribute to a more just and peaceful society.
While doing this, we have both had jobs and paid federal taxes.
For the last three years we have not paid that portion of our federal income tax (approximately one-third) that goes to the Pentagon.
However, IRS has eventually taken the funds, with penalties and interest, by placing a lien on Harry’s salary at West Chester State College.
Thus, we are purchasers and part owners (along with you) of numerous H-bombs and other weapons of death.
We ask ourselves if the potential damage we are doing is not more than outweighing any benefits to society we might be making.
They wrote that they were hoping for the passage of Peace Tax Fund legislation with which they “could have continued in our present occupations and continued to pay our income taxes.”
But meanwhile, they decided to simplify their lives and reorient their finances with a goal to getting under the tax line.
They shared some of the details of how they went about this:
After our younger son had graduated from high school, we were able, at ages 49 and 47, to move to northern Maine and live a simpler life.
Louis Green… taught us what we needed to know about tax-free municipal bonds and helped us invest the cushion we received from selling our home in Haverford and buying a very low-cost one in Houlton, Maine.
Our older son was about to enter his senior year at University of Maine and we would be able to pay the much-reduced in-state tuition.
We… installed an on-grid photovoltaic electrical system and have solar pre-heating of hot water.
We also live within walking distance of stores, which reduces our need to travel and helps us live in an environmentally friendly manner.
Our home is heated by wood from dead and diseased trees that we harvest ourselves from our woodlot.
…a wonderful new life of volunteering, composing, conducting, and living closer to nature opened up.… Despite all the details of our peace witness through federal tax avoidance being aired on the front page of our Houlton paper soon after our arrival, in we were honored with the “Good Samaritans of Houlton” award for our volunteer work and in we each received a Paul Harris Award from the local Rotary Club for our peace efforts.…
For those who share our concern about not paying for war or preparations for war, tax-free municipal bonds are the legal tickets.
Those who purchase them are financing voter-approved and life-enhancing projects in our country such as better sewers, schools, and hospitals.
The modest interest on these state and/or municipal bonds is not taxable by the federal government.
We file a 1040 every year, but most years we owe nothing or very little.
If we think we may “go over,” we give more money away that year to tax-exempt organizations.…
Thanks to understanding parents, most of our inheritance has been in the form of tax-free municipal bonds.
When a bond comes due, we always reinvest the capital by purchasing another tax-free municipal bond at face value (i.e. at par) so that there is no capital gain when the bond comes due or is called.
Although we do not know how long we will live or what dire situations might eat up our principal, we do hope to be able to continue to live very simply on the interest from our tax-free municipal bonds and pass on some of the capital to our children and grandchildren… We really love the kind of life we’re living; we didn’t make this commitment in order to be miserable.
And we sleep better at night knowing that we are not paying for war as we pray for peace.
That issue also reprinted a “declaration of conscience” that came out of a group associated with the Quakers from the New York Yearly Meeting who had been working to try to get legal accommodation for conscientious objection to military spending.
Excerpts:
The government of the United States violates freedom of conscience rights by forcing us to pay for war.
…In paying federal income taxes we contribute personally and directly to such expenditure, in violation of our consciences.
We have responded in various ways.
Some of us have taken steps to reduce or eliminate our income tax liability.
Some have paid under protest.
Some have withheld all or part of the taxes due, redirecting the sums involved to nonviolent and humanitarian purposes, or have deposited the money in escrow for any nonmilitary governmental use.
Some have challenged federal agencies in the courts.
Some have petitioned and campaigned for legislative accommodation.
We stress that we are willing to contribute our full share to the expenses of civil society.
We simply seek to ensure that the taxes we pay are not used to finance warmaking or preparations for war.
As a result of this conscientious objection we have variously suffered financial hardships, administrative and court fines, garnishment of wages, seizures of bank accounts or other property, deductions from our social security pension payments, and even imprisonment.
However, the substance of our remonstrance is that we are all ultimately compelled to pay taxes used for military purposes, and that we have a continuing liability to do so in the future.
We have thus been obliged, and are being obliged, in direct violation of our consciences, to be complicit in the funding and waging of war.
…Written expressions of conscientious objection to military taxation are classified as “frivolous” by the government and subject to punitive fines amounting to thousands of dollars.
Our freedom of conscience claims have never been fully reviewed at any level of administrative or judicial consideration, nor are we aware of any case in which this has occurred.
Accompanying this was a sidebar from Elizabeth Boardman in which she shared “the following queries [which] are in use at local meetings in College Park Quartely Meeting:”
What deeply held spiritual values or concerns make the issue of war tax resistance difficult for me to consider?
How can we as Friends, regardless of our perspective, overcome our reticence to discuss the issues with one another?
What are the personal or family needs I would need to address before I could become a tax resister?
Do I feel a need to further engage the war machine by not paying my war taxes in some form, either fully or symbolically?
What are my major fears and joys about challenging the government in this way?
What are the personal or family needs I would need to address before I could become a tax resister?
How can I engage my beloved spiritual community in supporting me as I take my next step on this complex issue?
Naomi Paz Greenberg, in a letter-to-the-editor that responded to critics of war tax resistance whose writings had been published in earlier issues (I’ve included other excerpts from this letter in Picket Line entries covering those writings, on and ), wrote, in response to people who believe that “conscientious war tax resistance is borne to bring about consequences”:
I knew for all of my adult life that I should not be paying taxes for war, and for most of that time I knew that I did not have the courage to bear this witness.
The energy that supports my commitment now has little to do with consequences.
I am simply unable to cooperate in murder, in war crimes.
As soon as I was able to make that commitment, I began to understand that I will probably pay more rather than less as a consequence of my refusal to pay for war.
It matters very little to me whether the hundreds or the thousands of dollars that I may someday “owe” remain pure and pacifistic or not.
As a U.S. citizen I have been taught that this is a government of, by, and for the people, so in some sense every dollar in the government’s coffers is my responsibility and not one of those dollars should be spent to kill another human being.
This is what direct experience of God teaches me.
Paul Sheldon noted, in a letter-to-the-editor in the issue, that he had “made a donation to the non-partisan Disabled American Veterans organization” and included a letter in which he had “mentioned that this particular contribution was the redirection of war tax money that I had publicly refused to pay the U.S. government (as a pacifist tax resister).”
A letter-to-the-editor from Peg Morton in the issue forcefully encouraged Friends to resist their war taxes: “It is beyond a doubt, in my opinion, that it is time — now!
— to withdraw from paying the United States federal government the war taxes it demands… to voluntarily pay war taxes to our current federal government is an immoral act.… When policies and actions of a government become immoral, it becomes immoral to support them.”
An obituary notice for Gordon Mervin Browne in the issue noted that “they [Gordon and his wife Edith Carlton Browne] were military tax resisters in .”
A book review in the issue summarized the use of tax resistance in the First Intifada this way:
[Maxine] Kaufman-Lacusta [author of Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation] looks in depth at a tax strike in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour during the First Intifada (), a time of popular activism.
This strike was based on the fact that taxes collected by Israelis were not being used to serve the needs of the Palestinian population, but to finance the occupation itself.
Elias Rishmawi, a major player in Beit Sahour, said that the villagers “found out that Israel was profiting dramatically from occupying the Palestinian land — from direct taxes, indirect taxes, taxes on the workers inside Israel, taxes on imports, taxes on people leaving the country, using Palestinian land, using Palestinian resources.”
Palestinians viewed the strike, which they ended in , as a success because a strong and violent reaction from the Israeli government failed to suppress it.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In , most of the mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal were brief and retrospective.
The issue noted that Christopher Moore-Backman had lost a federal district court suit in which he had asserted “that the use of his federal income tax payments for military spending substantially burdened his religious exercise in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
An obituary notice for Alfred Frederick Andersen in the issue noted that “[h]e refused to pay federal income taxes for most of his adult life, and the family home was sold at auction by the IRS in .”
A review of a book on conscientious objectors of World War Ⅱ mentioned that, among the activities such conscientious objectors took after the war, “Stephen L. Angell, a Quaker CO and a social worker, started his own business during the Vietnam war to avoid paying taxes toward a war he could not morally support.”
And an obituary notice for Angell, in the issue said that “[i]n , to avoid paying taxes for the Vietnam War, he resigned from Nassau County Health and Welfare Council and formed a consulting organization that would pay him less than taxable wages.”
There were also some mentions of Robin Harper’s war tax resistance in that issue (I covered these in the Picket Line).
A retrospective on the lives of George & Lillian Willoughby in the issue remembered:
Lillian had always felt a deep calling to refuse to pay income taxes since such a large percentage went to war costs.
One day after lunch, George and some students and I [Lynne Shivers] were chatting under the trees.
Two IRS agents approached us and announced that they planned to confiscate the Willoughbys’ red Volkswagen Beetle.
We were stunned and said little.
A few minutes later, Lillian walked briskly toward all of us, carrying a briefcase with papers she needed as a dietary consultant.
She opened the car door and got in, saying, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have to get to work!”
And she drove away!
Friends bought the car when it was auctioned off and gave it back to the Willoughbys, but the IRS did not use an auction again in the Philadelphia region for the next 30 years.
The IRS called it “The Willoughby Principle.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There were a few scattered mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in .
A obituary notice for Kenneth Hilbert Champney in the issue noted:
He volunteered printing services for the Peacemakers, a group dedicated to nonviolence, to start a newsletter.
Ken believed in resisting the income tax in order to oppose military spending.
He withheld what he judged to be the military portion of the taxes on his employees, continuing this practice even under threat from the IRS.
He kept his own income low enough and his charitable contributions high enough to stay under the taxable limit year after year.
In later life, Ken devised an investment system that enabled him to avoid paying income taxes.
Kyle Chandler-Isacksen promoted war tax resistance in an article in the that asked the reader to imagine the taxpaying process as if it were more of a personal encounter with the government, or with its embodiment, “General Sam.”
The about-the-author note below the article read:
Kyle Chandler-Isacksen and his family have been war tax resistors for the past five years by living below the poverty line.
They are the founders of Be The Change Project, an urban homestead devoted to family learning and service in a low-income neighborhood in Reno, Nevada.
David and Jan Hartsough had a letter-to-the-editor in the issue (which I’ve already covered, in the Picket Line).
That issue also had brief review of a children’s book based on the tax resistance of American women’s suffrage activists Abby & Julia Smith.
Merry Stanford, in an article on the conscientious use of money, alluded to her war tax resistance:
By the time I was a young mother and attending Quaker meeting, my life had taken several surprising turns, and my resources were very scarce.
Living on a poverty income in order to resist paying war taxes, I didn’t consider myself someone who had much to share with others.
That issue also contained a review of the NWTRCC-produced documentary Death & Taxes.
Excerpts:
The film puts a human face on the subject, telling and showing the stories of those whose ultimate protest against war is their refusal to pay for it.
The resisters are sincere, some even joyful, and their clarity of conscience is inspiring.
They are folks with whom one would want to have more conversation, and the film will have its greatest use as a discussion starter for classes and study groups.
We live in an era when many taxpayers are objecting to the way their tax dollars are spent.
Some taxpayers object to paying for publicly funded health care, public universities, public employee pensions, prisons, research, foreign aid, or for social security.
How to sort out which public sector activities are moral and which are immoral is not a question the film does much to answer, however, I have no doubt that the people interviewed have given this subject thoughtful attention, but one needs to go beyond the film to probe more deeply.
Refusal to pay taxes is a rather blunt instrument, except in the few cases where a tax or surtax has been specifically put in place to pay for a military undertaking.
The film barely addresses this social complexity.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
We’re finally at the present day, having reviewed the arc in which coverage of
war tax resistance built from near-silence in to a near frenzy by the only to fade back to a low simmer by and then to the frankly moribund state where it is today.
I only reviewed this year’s issues up
, but the only reference to
war tax resistance I found in any of them was this one, from an obituary notice
for Jeremy Hardin Mott, which came in the
issue:
During this period [] he and Judy
[née Franks] lived below taxable income to avoid supporting
the military.
Here is a list of tax resisters mentioned in the Friends Journal, with links
(“♦”) to the Picket Line entries in which I covered
these mentions.
Earlier this year I went through all the back issues of Friends Journal to review how the practice of Quaker war tax resistance underwent a revival and then retreated again in the last half century or so.
We’re at the bottom of the retreat trough today.
There has been almost nothing about war tax resistance in the Journal this year.
The latest issue does have some mentions, but they’re pretty much all in the obituaries:
The obituary notice for Mary Caroline Mendenhall notes that she was part of the Fairhope single-tax corporation — a “cooperative community that hoped to address the challenges to conscience that came through the payment of taxes” — and that she was one of those Quakers who emigrated to the Monteverde settlement in Costa Rica after she “became uncomfortable with the draft and with paying taxes that contributed to militarism.”
The obituary notice for Edward Webster says that he and his wife Susan “stopped paying war taxes for a period [in ], started the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund as a place for war tax resisters to redirect a portion of their taxes to, and counter-recruited at high schools.”
Spanish war tax resister Paco Ortega has joined up with the Stop Evictions group from Granada’s 15M assembly and has expanded his war tax resistance so that now he also refuses to pay the portion of his taxes devoted to the state police and national guard, legislature, monarchy, prison, election and party financing, and interest on the debt — a bit over 31% of his tax bill.
He’s redirecting the resisted portion of his taxes to the Stop Evictions project.
The government of Thailand was contemplating a law that would have granted amnesty to politicians who had perpetrated a variety of crimes over the past decade.
The opposition called for general strikes and tax resistance, and the government abandoned the amnesty plan.
In Greece, the toll resisters depended less on destruction and more on mass action — mobbing the toll booths, lifting the gates, and waving the drivers through.
Some of these activists are being prosecuted now (with mixed success).
But yet more infuriating?
The country’s legislature has voted itself a new benefits package, and among those benefits: legislators don’t have to pay highway tolls!
I unfortunately released the book during a lull in the magazine’s interest in the topic of war tax resistance (which may correspond to a similar lull in the Society of Friends generally), and it looked for a long while as though they weren’t going to consider the book worthy of mention at all, so I’m pleased to know their readers will learn about it after all.
In other war tax resistance news:
War tax resisters Susan Cundiff and Peg Morton were on Jefferson Public Radio in Oregon to explain how and why people refuse to pay taxes for war.
You can hear a recording at this link.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the renaissance of Quaker war tax resistance during the Cold War.
Much of what I have assembled here comes from my close look at the archives of the Friends Journal, the only Quaker publication from this period I have reviewed thoroughly, and so whatever editorial biases that publication may have had may also bias my history of this phase.
There is a lot that happens in this short period of time, and in some places my narrative is going to be condensed into a bunch of bullet-point-like summaries of the rapid-fire events to try to keep up with it all.
The Renaissance ()
The modern war tax resistance movement began in the wake of World War Ⅱ in the United States.
There had been isolated war tax resisters here and there in other places in recent years, and there was a quiet war tax resistance tendency hiding under the surface of the Society of Friends, but things did not come out into the open in any organized and growing fashion until then.
Quakers were not in the forefront of this movement, but Quaker war tax resisters took courage from it, and it wasn’t long before they began trying to reestablish the war tax resistance traditions in the Society of Friends.
The earliest mention of this that I have found from this period concerns Franklin Zahn of the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who was distributing a leaflet on war tax resistance as early as .
A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year noted that the subject of war taxes had come up and had led to what sounds like a long and earnest discussion:
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 blinders put on during the Great Forgetting period were still evident.
An article in a issue of the Friends Journal described “refusal to pay taxes for support of war effort emerging as a new testimony” [my emphasis].
Another article from the same issue, titled “The Quaker Peace Testimony: Some Suggestions for Witness and Rededication” didn’t mention taxes at all.
By this time some Friends in Switzerland had been refusing to pay war taxes (I would guess, under the tutelage of Pierre Cérésole).
In some Quakers in the Pacific Yearly Meeting began to sketch out the initial drafts of a legislative “peace tax” proposal which they envisioned would be a way for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes into a fund that the government could only spend on non-military items.
The idea that there might be a legislative solution that could make tax-paying no longer an act of complicity with war would bob up throughout this period, until, by the end of it, the temptation of lobbying instead of committing to direct action would contribute to the eventual decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.
also, the Yellow Springs Monthly Meeting issued a statement of support for war tax resisters, the first example of new institutional support for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that I could find from the 20th century.
In there was a burst of excitement about war tax resistance in the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (yet a survey of 350 adults from that meeting found only two or three who were willing to consider actually becoming resisters; whereas almost half of those surveyed were totally unconcerned about their tax money going to the military).
A group of about twenty Quakers, organized by Clarence Pickett and Henry Cadbury, met at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to discuss war tax resistance, but they were unable to come up with a consensus statement.
Quaker war tax resister Arthur Evans was imprisoned for three months for his tax refusal.
In the Friends Journal ended what strikes me as a policy of editorial embarrassment about Quakers and war tax resistance by publishing its first article devoted to the practice, and one that also full-throatedly advocated it.
This started a debate in the letters-to-the-editor column and certainly caused more Quakers to confront the question, directly or indirectly.
By the tide was shifting rapidly.
Before this time, individual Quaker tax resisters are unusual enough to highlight individually as being on the cutting-edge; after this, Quaker war tax resistance becomes commonplace enough that individual resisters are exemplars of a larger trend.
In the New York Yearly Meeting promoted war tax resistance in an official statement, and promised financial assistance for any Quakers in the Meeting who might be forced to change jobs or to suffer other financial hardship for their stand.
The statement in part read:
We call upon Friends to examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.
That was the most concrete advocacy of war tax resistance by a Quaker institution in years.
Franklin Zahn wrote a booklet on Early Friends and War Taxes to reintroduce Quakers to their own history and to further banish the Great Forgetting.
The support from Quaker institutions and publications at this point is often noncommittal and is usually vague about exactly how to go about war tax resistance, which taxes to resist, and how to deal with government reprisals.
There is nothing like the specific, concrete discipline of earlier Quaker Meetings.
This means that Quaker war tax resisters from this period are largely making it up as they go along, conferring with each other informally and organizing, when they are organizing, in groups like Peacemakers, the War Resisters League, and the Committee for Non-Violent Action — that is to say, with non-Quaker groups.
(There was briefly something called the “Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes” run out of Quaker war tax resister Margaret G. Bowman’s home in , but I have not found much about it.)
Quakers were using a broad variety of tax resistance tactics.
Arthur Evans and Neil Haworth refused to pay some or all of their income taxes or to cooperate with an IRS summons for their financial records.
Johan Eliot redirected twice the amount of his taxes to the United Nations to promote international federalism as a world peace strategy.
Clarissa & Samuel Cooper lowered their family income below the tax line.
John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton took pay cuts that reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding was mandatory.
Lyle Snyder stopped withholding by declaring three million dependents on his W-4 forms.
Alfred & Connie Andersen stopped filing income tax returns.
Some Quakers fled to Canada as taxpatriates to join the draft evaders there.
Others deposited their taxes into escrow accounts and invited the IRS to seize the accounts while refusing to pay voluntarily.
Lloyd C. Shank advocated “the ‘sneaky’ way” of tax resistance — what many people would call tax evasion — saying “ ‘cheating’ is only an oppressive government’s name for a good man’s refusal to murder.”
Phone tax resistance was beginning to become widespread, and many Quaker meetings began resisting this tax on their office phones (one meeting was unable to reach consensus on resisting the phone tax and compromised by dropping its phone service entirely).
People too timid to resist, and meetings unable to reach consensus on resisting, might instead write their legislators to urge them to enact some form of legal conscientious objection to military taxation.
The most timid groups, like the American Friends Service Committee, urged people to pay taxes “under protest” or to match their war tax payments with additional payments to the AFSC.
Robert E. Dickinson had perhaps the most creative tactic of the bunch.
He designed and built a set of furniture for his home that was formed of interlocking sheets of plywood such that it could be quickly disassembled and hidden away.
He called this “my tax refusal furniture” and meant it to frustrate IRS attempts to seize furnishings from him for back taxes.
Two Quaker employees of two groups within the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked their employers to stop withholding income tax from their paychecks, and that Meeting tried to come up with a good policy to follow in such cases.
The fourth Friends World Conference was held in .
The “Protest and Direct Action group” there “called upon Friends in countries party to the [Vietnam] conflict to ‘go as far as conscience dictates in withholding support from their governments’ war-making machinery,’ first by direct communication with those against whom the protest is made, and then if necessary by public witness and individual action, including the possibility of refusal to pay taxes for war.”
U.S. President Johnson called for a 10% income tax surcharge explicitly to fund the Vietnam War.
This would be the first explicit “war tax” (other than, arguably, the phone tax) since World War Ⅱ, and its announcement prompted renewed interest in war tax resistance inside and outside the Society of Friends.
Quakers were, because of this tax, better-enabled to quote the discipline of early Quakers on refusal to pay explicit war taxes as a way of explaining their own stands.
In 203 delegates from “nineteen Yearly Meetings, eight Quaker colleges, fifteen Friends secondary schools, the American Friends Service Committee National Board and its twelve regional offices, and nine other peace or directly-related organizations” met in Richmond, Indiana, to draft a “Declaration on the Draft and Conscription.”
Part of this declaration mentioned the war tax concern:
We call on Friends everywhere to recognize the oppressive burden of militarism and conscription.
We acknowledge our complicity in these evils in ways sometimes silent and subtle, at times painfully apparent.
We are under obligation as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends to break the yoke of that complicity.
We also recognize that the problem of paying war taxes has intensified; this compels us to find realistic ways to refuse to pay these taxes.
After only of thaw, some seventy years of Great Forgetting have been melted away, and the Society of Friends has again reached a consensus that Quakers are compelled to refuse to pay war taxes.
President Johnson’s war surtax went into effect in , adding a 7.5% surtax to the income tax returns for , and 10% for (the tax would be extended at a reduced rate into and then abandoned).
Meetings all across the country were discussing and passing minutes on war tax resistance, though few would advocate it in specific and unreserved ways, most choosing instead to voice expressions of unspecified “approval and loving support” for Quakers who felt compelled to resist.
In , the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting passed a relatively strong minute stating:
Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practices of Friends…
We warmly approve of people following their conscience, and openly approve civil disobedience in this matter under Divine compulsion.
We ask all to consider carefully the implications of paying taxes that relate to war-making…
Specifically, we offer encouragement and support to people caught up in the problem of seizure, and of payment against their will.
The New York Yearly Meeting decided to begin resisting corporately by refusing to honor liens on the salaries of tax resisting employees (though it could not reach consensus on a refusal to withhold income tax from such employees), and, , by refusing to pay its own phone tax.
The American Friends Service Committee finally decided to do something concrete about the war tax question, but it was a little odd.
They withheld and paid taxes from a war tax resisting employee and then sued the government for a refund.
The strange structure of their process seems to have been a very deliberate way to structure a legal suit for maximum effectiveness, and it did (briefly) show some success.
A court ruled in , on First Amendment freedom-of-religion grounds, that the government could not force the organization to pay the taxes of an objecting employee — alas, the Supreme Court almost immediately, and overwhelmingly, overturned this.
Also in , Susumu Ishitani, a Japanese Quaker, formed a war tax resistance group in Japan — the first example I am aware of from Asia.
By , the Friends Journal’s coverage of war tax resistance is less occupied with advocacy, debate, and the presentation of individual exemplars, and is more concerned with the practical aspects of how Quakers are going about it.
The editorial stance shifts again, to one of more forthright advocacy.
It is assumed that Quakers want to avoid paying war taxes, and the question is how to do so well.
The ending of the U.S. war on Vietnam did not seem to slow the enthusiasm for war tax resistance.
In the Friends Journal devoted an issue to the subject for the first time.
In Robert Anthony began another attempt to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
It went nowhere, but notably, in a letter to the court, his monthly meeting wrote:
We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military.
If not exaggerated for effect, this statement would be among the strongest yet articulated by a Quaker institution in this renaissance period — not simply expressing support for war tax resisters, or encouraging Friends to consider resisting, but asserting that to practice the Quaker religion necessarily meant to refuse to pay war taxes.
In , Quakers met with their Brethren and Mennonite counterparts to draft a joint statement that encouraged war tax resistance — the “New Call to Peacemaking.”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked its ongoing representative meeting to draft some formal guidance for Quaker war tax resisters for how they should go about it, and to set up an alternative fund to hold and redirect resisted taxes.
(New England Yearly Meeting began its own alternative fund for resisted taxes .)
By this time war tax resistance is a core part of any discussion of the Quaker peace testimony, and there are increasing calls for Meetings to resist taxes as an institution.
In the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved a minute on war tax resistance that pulled its punches a bit:
Our strength and our security are derived from our belief in the reality of a loving God and the oneness of that of God in all people.
In order to say yes to this belief, we must seriously consider saying no to payment of war taxes.
This “seriously consider” compares poorly to discipline of times past (e.g. “a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony” [Ohio Yearly Meeting, 1819]).
It also, some Quakers point out, sometimes pales next to the more direct and certain advice from some meetings that young Quaker men resist the draft.
As more Quakers and Meetings feel the pressure to take a stand on war taxes, the more timid ones are increasingly desperate to find ways to do so without actually having to resist.
Silly ideas, like writing “not for military spending” in the memo field of their tax payment checks, and “peace tax fund” ideas proliferate.
By , Quakers in Canada and Australia are floating their own peace tax fund legislation ideas.
Meanwhile, Quakers in England seem to have gotten the tax resisting bug.
The Friends World Committee for Consultation and London Yearly Meeting stopped withholding income taxes from twenty-five war tax resisting employees in , putting the money in escrow.
(This resistance was short-lived; after losing a legal appeal in , they went back to withholding.)
In war tax resistance, according to Friends Journal reports, was a “major preoccupation” of the London Yearly Meeting, and a “burning concern” at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (where “unity could not be achieved”).
Lake Erie Yearly Meeting encouraged its Monthly Meetings “to establish meetings for sufferings to aid war tax resisters.”
Pacific Yearly Meeting started an alternative fund.
Smaller Monthly and Quarterly meetings around the country were beginning to take even stronger stands.
The Minneapolis and Twin Cities Meetings approved a minute that asked “all members of our meetings to practice some form of war tax resistance”!
The Davis (California) meeting passed a similar minute.
Monthly Meetings are assembling “clearness committees” to help each other find responses to the war tax problem that are appropriate to their conscientious “leadings.”
also, the Friends General Conference promoted the idea of Quakers giving interest-free loans to them, a thinly-veiled (not explicitly stated) way of hiding assets from IRS:
…Friends loan money to F.G.C. at no interest, which F.G.C. invests to earn income which is used to support the varied programs of the Conference, such as publications, religious education curricula, and the ongoing nurture program.
These loans provide regular dependable monthly income to the Conference, and reduce the interest income on which the lender must pay federal income taxes, while providing the lender with protection against unforeseen financial reversals.
F.G.C. will repay the principal amount within 30 days after receiving a written request from the lender.
All principal amounts are kept in insured investments.
In the Friends Journal, now edited by a war tax resister, devoted another issue to the subject.
Non-resisting Quakers were now very much on the defensive.
One complained that at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting , taxpaying Quakers like him “were compared to the Quaker slaveholders of , and not a dissenting voice was raised,” but even he had to acknowledge that war tax resistance was “in the mainstream of Quaker thought, and therefore entitled to support from Quaker bodies.”
The meeting itself though could only agree to issue another minute that would “not urge” Friends to resist, but would “give strong support” to those who did.
In , the Friends World Committee for Consultation held a war tax resistance conference in Washington, D.C., and formed a standing “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.”
, they held a conference for Quaker organizations that had war tax resisting employees.
The conference was attended by 35 people, including representatives from 21 such organizations.
They were united by an interest in supporting the war tax resistance of their employees in an open and honest fashion, in a way that included the redirection of the resisted taxes to beneficial causes, and that used the “clearness committee” process.
You definitely get the feeling that momentum is building and Quaker war tax resistance is having a vigorous revival.
Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that this is the high-water mark.
In surprisingly little time the tide will begin to recede.
But there is still some forward progress to be made.
In the London Yearly Meeting declared:
We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes…
We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.
The Friends United Meeting adopted a policy of not withholding taxes from resisting employees as well.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting soon followed suit, and refused to withhold federal taxes from three war tax resisters on the payroll (after a legal battle, they would pay “under duress” ).
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting also adopted such a policy, in .
In another conference for employers of tax resisting employees was held, this one expanded to include Mennonite and Church of the Brethren employers.
The Friends Journal got an IRS levy on the salary of its editor, and it devoted a third issue to the topic of war tax resistance.
Some Quakers begin using the tax resistance tactic in the service of other causes, such as opposition to capital punishment or nuclear power.
In an early sign of the receding of the war tax resistance tide, the Friends World Committee for Consultation retired its “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns” in favor of a “Committee on Peace Concerns.”
From here, sadly, it’s pretty much all downhill.
In the next and final segment of this series on the history of Quaker war tax resistance, I’ll try to describe and explore the second “forgetting.”
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the current period of Quaker war tax resistance — what I’m calling “the second forgetting.”
The Second Forgetting ()
After an enthusiasm for war tax resistance that had grown to a near-mania by there was an astonishing and swift drop in interest in the subject.
I can’t with any great confidence say why this might be, but here are some theories:
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting end of the Cold War made people more optimistic about the chances of avoiding nuclear war and ushering in a more peaceful international order.
Even hawkish politicians were crowing about the “peace dividend” that would come from reduced military spending as a result.
War tax resistance may have slackened because peace work in general was seen as less urgent.
The “peace tax fund” idea had gained traction in Quaker circles.
Some Quakers who were concerned about their taxes paying for war may have chosen to refrain from taking action in the hopes that such a law would eventually give them an easy-out, or in the misapprehension that the absence of such a law made the Quaker taxpayer’s dilemma really a problem for the legislature and not for the Quaker.
It may have been simple demographics:
Those Quakers who were so confident in their war tax resistance stand that they were willing to start resisting when very few Friends were, and who as a result were the leaders and pioneers of the war tax resistance Renaissance, were reaching the ends of their lives at this point.
The younger resisters who joined up during the Renaissance may have been less self-sustaining, less confident, and less persuasive — following a trend more than they were following a compelling conscientious leading.
(This was a worry among Friends as far back as , when John Churchman wrote “Such build on a sandy foundation who refuse paying that which is called the provincial or king’s tax, only because some others scruple paying it whom they esteem.”)
In the Friends Journal, feeling it had reached the end of its legal appeals, threw in the towel and paid the IRS levy on the salary of its editor, Vint Deming.
Two German Quakers were prosecuted for war tax resistance, and their court hearing was attended by some forty Quakers.
Meanwhile in the U.S., the “peace tax fund” legislation got its first and only congressional hearing.
Several Quakers attended and a few testified in favor of the bill.
In a stage dramatization based on the IRS seizure of the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner was part of the program at the Friends General Conference Gathering.
The Canada Yearly Meeting, after years of debate, adopted a policy of refusing to withhold taxes from the salary of war tax resisting employees.
In U.S. President Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which seemed to offer some hope for a new court challenge against the government’s insistence on taxing religious conscientious objectors to pay for military spending.
In Quaker Priscilla Adams began a case using this argument; Quakers Rosa Packard and Edith & Gordon Brown filed similar suits soon after.
These suits didn’t make any headway.
In , Adams filed a final appeal to the Supreme Court, with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting contributing a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf, but the Court turned down the case.
By this time, sad to say, a superstitious, blinkered, panglossian take on the “peace tax fund” has become the norm, and on the rare occasions when war taxes are even discussed (for example, in the Friends Journal), it is taken for granted that should Congress pass such a law, American Quakers will finally be freed from having to worry about paying for war (and implied, in the spirit of the “forgetting,” is the sentiment “and until then, well, what can we do?”).
Statements from Quaker meetings about war tax resistance are increasingly endorsing the “peace tax fund” idea not in addition to supporting war tax resistance, but in lieu of it.
As dawns, most of the mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal are found in the obituary column.
War tax resistance is presented as something that noble and honored Friends used to do; only rarely as something they are currently doing.
Nadine Hoover wrote an earnest plea for Quakers to adopt war tax resistance as a corporate testimony in , but it seems to have fallen with a thud and produced little effect or even debate.
In there were still some Quakers trying increasingly desperate legal arguments to try to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
Dan Jenkins tried a Ninth Amendment argument, which is the constitutional equivalent of a hail mary pass (the court would not only reject the case, but found it so far-fetched that they also upheld a frivolous filing penalty).
That case is notable, though, for the amount of support he got from the New York Yearly Meeting.
They used a clearness committee to help Jenkins work through his stand and his process.
The Purchase Quarterly Meeting provided some financial backing for his legal challenge.
The Yearly Meeting filed an amicus brief in the case.
Alas, this meeting too seems since to have been thoroughly infected by the magical thinking surrounding the “peace tax fund” idea, and the most active Friends there now sound almost as though they think of war tax resistance less as a logical expression of the peace testimony and more as a pressure tactic to use in the hopes of getting Congress to pass such legislation.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had held out as long as they felt able to in the Priscilla Adams case, finally writing a check to the IRS for the amount it demanded.
(They would continue to resist withholding and levies for years not covered by the exhausted legal suit.)
Martin Kelly, who would become the Friends Journal editor in , wrote bitterly of this in :
We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. …
When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee’s pay anyway.
There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn’t mind losing their liberty or property in service to the gospel.
Early Friends called our emulation of Christ’s sacrifice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire.
Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.
In the midst of this terrible decline, the Friends Journal devoted a fourth special issue to the problem of war taxes in .
One thing it shows is a divergence of tactics between Quakers in the New York Yearly Meeting (who were concentrating on legal challenges) and those in the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who were trying to spread the practice of war tax resistance by asking Quakers to take baby steps like refusing tiny symbolic amounts of tax or paying “under protest” (but who struggled even to meet these exceptionally modest goals).
In the Pacific Yearly Meeting did announce a policy pledging $100 in matching funds to any monthly meeting in its demesne that reimbursed war tax resisting Quakers for penalties & interest the IRS had been able to seize from them.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reaffirmed its policy of resisting withholding and levies on the salary of its war tax resisting employees.
But when it did so it noted that “very few Friends actively practice war tax resistance.”
, the Meeting would report that it no longer had any war tax resisting employees, and so its policy, while still in effect, had gone into suspended animation.
The Britain Yearly Meeting issued a booklet on The Quaker Peace Testimony in .
It mentions war tax resistance only once, in a list of historical examples of Quaker peace work, but does not allude to it as a current practice that is available to modern Quakers.
It encourages Friends with concerns about paying war taxes to get in contact with Conscience, a non-Quaker group, rather than suggesting that they get guidance from their own meetings or from Quaker traditions.
When British Quakers released the fifth edition of Quaker Faith and Practice in , it included some inspirational quotes from war tax resisting Quakers of yesteryear, and reaffirmed its statement on the subject from :
We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes…
We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.
But the fact that they reaffirmed this wording betrays that in , despite the “urgency,” the Meeting for Sufferings had not come up with a sufficient corporate response.
So that’s where we are today.
There are still Quaker war tax resisters, certainly, but there is no groundswell of Quaker war tax resistance, and the obituary column is still where you are most likely to find a mention of a Quaker war tax resister in the Friends Journal, which is an ominous sign.
The resurgence of war tax resistance during the Cold War perhaps would be better described as a fad than, as I hopefully did, as a renaissance.
But whether a renaissance or a fad, it represents hope that the current forgetting won’t be forever, but that Quakers may again reclaim their place at the head of the conscientious tax resistance movement.
When they do so, they will be able to draw on the experiences of Quakers from the previous eras in order to sharpen the persuasiveness of their messages and discover the best and most appropriate techniques.
And they will surely be led out of this wilderness by a few self-motivated Friends who kept the faith through the forgetting period.
NWTRCC has begun to assemble its list of Tax Day actions for .
Find out if anything is going on in your area, or let them know if you have anything planned.
There’s been a lot of buzz around the interwebs about a celebrity news report that actors Greg Wise and Emma Thompson have pledged to stop paying taxes until the U.K. government cracks down on big-business tax evaders and enablers like HSBC.
I saw the original report this story came from, and to me it just sounded like Wise was blowing off steam in a “why I oughta!” sort of way and the reporter, perhaps for effect, took it more seriously than that.
I haven’t seen anything from the couple since the story broke and got legs either confirming or denying the supposed pledge.
But it is getting people talking about the circumstances under which it is appropriate to cut the government off.
Here are a couple of excerpts that concern the unusually difficult path of this war tax resister:
Weekend 11
This weekend was the most boring of all the weekends.
My mind began to turn about all the loose ends in my life that have been unraveling since I began the peace witness.
The frayed edges are many and are getting more and more difficult to manage as time marches on.
I keep thinking of the central question in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22: “What does a sane man do in an insane society?”
My situation is becoming more insane by the day.
I made what seemed to be a sane response to violence, but the price is very high.
The sums I have been required to pay — restitution to the court, keeping current with taxes, paying child support, paying lawyers to manage this giant mess, and maintaining an apartment and staying current with business expenses — are completely unmanageable.
Weekend 18
…Back in when I was sentenced to the 26 weekends, I had to inform my employer — a company I do consulting work for — that I could no longer work on the weekends.
Since the information was public knowledge and there would be a good chance my war tax resistance would be known, I opted to tell them the truth.
They fired me.
I applied to the probation department this week to attend a speakers’ conference in Las Vegas to jump-start my speaking career.
I filled out all the forms and wrote a nice letter.
Request denied.
I got a call on from my probation officer.
She sounded like she wanted me to take this opportunity, but her hands were tied by the bureaucratic nightmare she works in.
“We got your request.
I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to deny it.”
Getting fired and losing the income from consulting was a big blow both financially and emotionally.
What it meant from a practical standpoint was clear.
I could not pay the tax bill for for New York State or federal income tax.
They’d set me up to fail.
As I sat in my office with a dead phone in my hand, I came to the sickening realization that the prison-industrial complex was not some abstract thing that affects other unfortunate people.
It was directly impacting my life.
I am now and — as far out as I can see — will be in a debt spiral to various agencies of government until the day I die.
In the article I describe two dramatic periods of waxing and waning of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends: one from the middle of the 18th century to the end of the 19th, and the second during the 20th century Cold War.
(For a look at some of my earlier attempts to assemble the research that went into these articles, see ♇ .)
The article also looks at a recent attempt by Quakers in the Pacific Yearly Meeting to reignite the practice, and a sidebar introduces Kyle & Katy Chandler-Isaksen, Quaker simple living champions and war tax resisters from Nevada.
Katy reflects on how war tax resistance and voluntary simplicity do and don’t harmonize with what she sees of current Quaker practices.
This is the thirty-second in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
In I felt the tide start to recede. The war
tax resisting faction had gotten thoroughly distracted by the promise of Peace
Tax Fund legislation, and the conservative taxpaying faction went back on the
offensive in favor of paying taxes without concern.
One of the symptoms of the decay of the war tax resistance position (that I’ve
also seen exhibited elsewhere) was the plea for new resisters to refuse to pay
some tiny, safe token amount of taxes in lieu of more firmly-motivated and
whole-hearted resistance. From the issue:
Christian Peacemaker Teams
(CPT)
is asking U.S.
taxpayers to deduct $3.03 from their federal taxes, as a symbol of their
objection to the $303 billion Defense budget.
CPT
would like congregations to collect withheld money and send it to become part
of the offering at the organization’s conference in Richmond.
Va. The offering will go to
school districts such as the one in Petersburg.
Va., which cannot afford to
buy textbooks.
“The Peace Tax bill is not going to be passed anytime soon,” says [Marian]
Franz frankly. “Not enough people have said they care — and that includes
Mennonites.
“I see a bitter irony in that,” she continues, “because if there were such a
fund, pacifist Christians would say that it was God’s will that they use its
provisions. Yet these same people are doing little to make this fund a
reality.”
The issue printed this
syndicated short news item:
Peace activist Randy Kehler has been jailed and his family’s house confiscated
because of his decade-long refusal to pay
U.S. taxes.
Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have withheld their federal taxes since the
late 1970s. Instead, they have sent their tax dollars to nonprofit
organizations that assist war victims and the poor.
The Internal Revenue Service laid claim to the couple’s house in Colrain,
Mass., to recoup some
$32,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties.
Discussion by a panel of war tax resisters highlighted a Lancaster,
Pa., meeting sponsored by
the group Taxes for Life. Some 20 people attended the meeting, which also
included a showing of the video Paying for Peace.
Taxes for Life urges individuals to withhold a small, symbolic amount from the
payment of their
U.S. income taxes
and to give the money instead to a local school project. More information is
available from Taxes for Life…
The statement on “Christian Conscience and Military Taxes” says that Illinois
Conference “will seek to support our members who feel a genuine call from God
to withhold payment of military taxes.”
The statement cites examples of this support as including prayer and personal
encouragement, finances, and witness to “political and social powers.”
The resolution also calls on Illinois congregations to contribute a minimum of
$5 per household to the Peace Tax Fund campaign.
The “Taxes for Peace” tax redirection fund gave its annual report and plea for
new funds in the issue:
The U.S. Peace
Section of Mennonite Central Committee
(MCC)
is inviting contributions for the Taxes for
Peace fund. Established in , the fund gives
people who withhold war taxes a way to give their money for peaceful purposes.
This year’s contributions will go to
MCC
U.S. peace
education projects. More information is available from
MCC
U.S. Peace Section…
John K. Stoner tried to blow on the fading coals in the
issue:
The voice of the victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of children, abused and traumatized by war, will not be still.
by John K. Stoner
Last Thursday my phone rang. The voice at the other end of the line asked for
John or Janet Stoner. “I’m John Stoner,” I replied. “Hello. I am Charles Price
of the Internal Revenue Service. I am calling about the letter you sent
indicating that you are withholding part of your income tax payment.”
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. By the sound of
Mark 13,
Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
“Why do they have to keep bringing up this business about taxes for war?”
someone asks after a congregational meeting. “Why doesn’t this war tax
question just go away?” asks another at a session on strategies to reduce the
military portion of the
U.S. budget.
The reason war keeps coming up and won’t go away is because the voice of the
victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of the children, abused and
traumatized by war, doesn’t go away.
Every discussion about peacemaking in these times must face the question of
how taxes are collected and spent.
Americans watched their tax dollars at work in Iraq. They killed between one
and two hundred thousand people in a month’s time. They left a nation of 17
million people strangled — its water polluted, its hospitals without
electricity, its homes dark, and its classrooms cold. Today malnutrition,
disease, and destitution are the continuing results of this man-made plague of
death and despair.
Since then, an international study team on the Gulf crisis found that the
mortality rate of children under five years of age was almost four times
greater then than before the Gulf War. More than 75 percent of Iraqi children
feel sad and unhappy, worry about the survival of their family. They are
haunted by the smell of gunfire, fuel from planes, fires, and burned flesh.
Taxes paid for all this. It is for those of us who are Christians, as
taxpayers, to sidestep our share of the responsibility. We can choose to “just
say no” (how simple that sounds when we prescribe it to someone else’s moral
choice and how difficult it sounds when it is ours).
Your $3.03 Taxes for Life equivalent can be sent to Christian
Peacemaker Teams…
CPT
also suggests you write a letter of witness to the
IRS with
copies to your representatives in Congress, your
pastor, and your local newspaper. Taxes for Life funds will
be used for education purposes.
I believe God is calling us to plead for the end of the
destructive social institution of war by
refusing to pay for it. We are called to this as clearly
and inescapably as our forebears were called to
abolish slavery. The question is not whether we can achieve that
goal in a year or decade. The question is whether that is our goal — and
whether the world knows that it is our goal. It was Jesus’ goal, and it should
be ours.
One way to enhance this witness is through a symbolic war tax refusal called
Taxes for Life. Sponsored by the Christian Peacemaker Team, this plan would
have taxpayers redirect an amount equivalent to one penny for every billion
dollar of the U.S.
military budget to education. For ,
this is $3.03.
If you do this, and the
IRS
calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law. Go
on to say that you are far more apprehensive about breaking God’s law. Tell
them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the victims of war, and that
you have decided that you will not take their blood upon your hands. Then
leave the outcome with God.
For U.S.
Mennonites, one way we can work at it at this time of year is to take yet
another look at the tax question. As John Stoner reminds us…, it is our taxes
that keep the military going, that make possible aggression and belligerence.
Because of this, some choose not to pay a part of their taxes as a protest.
Others consider that overreaction.
But let us not make that our battle. While we do, more people starve. Let us
rather join hands to find all the ways possible to address the huge military
expenditures of our country, and of the world.
Members of a Newton, Kan.,
group heard reports on the
U.S. Peace Tax Fund
bill in a meeting. The Peace Tax
Group also discussed ideas for creating a local alternative tax fund. Carla
Morton and Stan Bohn reported on their visits to Washington,
D.C., in
connection with a Congressional hearing on the tax fund bill. In addition,
group members talked about starting a local fund for such projects as
environmental protection, mental health care for veterans, and retraining of
military workers.
The following disheartening news was carried in the
issue:
Friends Journal, a Quaker monthly published in
Philadelphia, has agreed to pay $31,343 to the
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service.
The payment covers back taxes for the magazine’s editor, who had refused to
pay them because of religious objections to their use for military purposes.
The magazine’s board had refused
IRS
demands that it pay the taxes on behalf of the editor, Vinton Deming.
However, the Justice Department warned the board that it would face legal
action unless the matter was settled, and the magazine’s lawyer advised the
board that it could not win such a case in court.
Now that the pro-taxpaying conservatives were no longer on the defensive, they
apparently no longer felt the need to promote the Peace Tax Fund legislation as
an alternative to lawlessness for Mennonites concerned about their taxes paying
for war. Now they could attack the Peace Tax Fund as being also
scripturally unsound. Or so said
Ernest E. Mummau
in a letter to the editor
that evoked the usual Romans 13 / the government is divinely ordained to bear
the sword / Christians are told to pay taxes without complaint / the Church
should stay in its own domain and shouldn’t meddle with the state line of
argument to tell Mennonites to stop trying to tell the government what to do
with their taxes.
The fourth international conference on war tax resistance and peace tax
campaigns was held in Brussels in . The Gospel Herald article,
and especially the quotes from Peace Tax Fund activist Marian Franz, tried to
spin it as though it was more or less exclusively a Peace Tax Fund promoting
event, with very little mention of actual war tax resistance:
Conference participants came with at least one thing in common, [Marian] Franz
said: “We all find it a clear violation of conscience to pay the military
portion of our taxes; we seek statutory recognition of conscience against
paying for arms as an extension of the right to refuse to bear arms.”
The conference, which draws primarily European and North American
participants, has met every two years .
The gathering allows participants “to hear stories of resistance and to
compare our progress in gaining conscientious objection
(CO)
status to payment of military taxes within our respective countries,” Franz
said.
For instance, NCPTF
hopes to convince Congress members to pass a law permitting people
conscientiously opposed to war to have the military portion of their taxes
allocated to peacemaking.
“Most countries have a similar approach to war tax resisters,” Franz noted.
“The standard response of governments, when they do respond, is to add civil
penalties and collect the unpaid taxes forcibly. Imprisonment for war tax
resistance is rare.”
Court responses to these cases are usually predictable as well. “The issue
usually raises a ‘political’ question which the courts cannot address, or the
courts decide that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience or
religion do not outweigh the duty of the citizen to pay taxes,” she said.
[Franz said:] "Most European war tax resisters entered the scene in
. The presence of Cruise and Pershing
missiles woke them up. They suddenly realized that Europe had become a giant
football field on which the two superpowers could bounce their nuclear
weapons.”
This prompted another
letter to the editor,
this one from Russell J. Baer, which also used the Render-unto-Caesar / Romans
13 beef to complain about activists who have an issue with paying war taxes.
![American Quaker War Tax Resistance (Second Edition) [Edited by David M. Gross. Picket Line Press, 2011. 574 pages. $25/paperback; $7.99/eBook] Gross has made a serious business of investigating and writing about not only the history of war tax resistance, but also tactics that can be used today. In American Quaker War Tax Resistance, Gross uses historical documents to trace the development of war tax resistance among Quakers, and how it was viewed by their contemporaries outside the Society of Friends. He includes writing by famous Friends such as William Penn and John Woolman, as well as individuals less known such as Moses Brown. In a subsequent book, 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance, Gross lays out past campaigns to help war tax resisters of our own time choose from tactics that have already been used.](fjreview.png)
