Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
20th–21st century Quakers →
Lucy Perkins Carner
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
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.”
