Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
anti-abortion tax resistance →
Jerry DePyper
It’s seemed to me that there must be right-wing counterparts to left-wing war tax resisters out there, folks who refuse to pay taxes because they don’t want to support abortion and secular education and what have you.
But until I’d never actually seen a specimen in the wild.
Jerry DePyper appears to be such a creature.
On his blog, Dogpatch, Ergo Sum he discusses how he tried to promote the idea of a tax strike to anti-abortion groups and leaders like the American Life League and James Dobson, with no success, and eventually decided to go at it alone:
i began to seek ways to keep my own counsel, which is basically why for i have been living in the north woods, paying only local taxes, and more or less trying not to partake of the orgy of economic and political activity that comes with such a bloody price tag.
I am, in effect, on strike.
I know, i know — conventional wisdom dictates that we not seek “an idyllic retreat” but bravely stay in the fray and resist the evil while still maintaining our lives in the world.
Sounds fine.
Is that approach effective?
Honestly now, is it??
Through the teaching of John-Paul Ⅱ, i also came to realize that consumerism, along with materialism and hedonism, has been fueling the culture of death and its growth all along.
So a secondary motivation for me has been to reject the dogma of consumerism, and to try to live in a way that is as sustainable and non-consumeristic as possible.
It really isn’t all that difficult, once you start ignoring the cultural expectations that militate against such non-conformity.
After over 35 years, the weakness of the pro-life movement seems to be in our comfort level.
With few exceptions, pro-life warriors live a fairly comfortable life.
But comfortable warriors don’t fight very effectively.
Embarking upon a strike or tax resistance movement would dramatically elevate the risks and lower the comfort level.
It would require those involved to put their lives and their livelihoods on the line.
It would help us to embrace the term “Church Militant”, and truly view ourselves as soldiers in Christ’s army of love.
The strength of our pro-life witness is an important part of what’s at stake.
If we fight from a position of comfort, few will care.
Likewise, if we pray from a position of comfort, such prayer is cheap.
But if we risk our lives and livelihoods, people will notice, and many hearts will be moved.
Our words will be more convincing and our prayers more powerful if the cost is dear.
Jerry DePyper has been trying to introduce the tactic of conscientious tax resistance to the American anti-abortion movement, but hasn’t been able to make much headway.
In a new post he hears from anti-abortion movement leaders who explain their reluctance to join in such a campaign.
In part, it is out of fear of jeopardizing the non-profit status of their organizations.
The clear pattern in these honest comments meshes well with what I had already come to suspect.
…[P]eople might join if there were other people already doing it.
Both pro-life leaders say that no recognized pro-life leader would want to risk it because of the legal issues with IRS, and they don’t want to lose their tax exempt status.
So nobody wants to be first, and nobody but David Little and Jerry DePyper wants to publicly do anything until somebody else does it first: a classic Catch-22.
By prohibiting tax-exempt non-profits from engaging in political activity or confrontational activism, the government effectively buys the silence of such groups.
The current progressive fad of calling for the end of constitutional protection of the rights of all incorporated groups would, if successful, worsen this.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
First off, you may have heard some talk in the news about cuts to the Pentagon budget. You should be aware that it’s hooey. What the talk is really about is proposed reductions to the budget increases that the Pentagon had been hopefully anticipating. The Pentagon budget is still going up in both real and nominal dollars. This talk of “cuts” is like a sign in a store reading “25% Off our recently-doubled price!”
Richard Cebula and Edgar L. Feige have attempted to estimate the size of the underground economy in the United States. They estimate that 18–19% of legally-reportable income in the U.S. stays under-the-table, which translates to about half a trillion dollars in taxes each year that the IRS fails to collect. The IRS itself hasn’t attempted to measure this underground economy since .
The Greek “We Won’t Pay” movement, which is resisting the stealth tax the Greek government imposed in the form of sharply hiked utility rates, has notched up a victory in court, winning an injunction preventing the utility company from shutting off power to resisters who have refused to pay the extra amount in their bills.
Jerry DePyper has beefed up his Pro-life Strike Manifesto — which advocates tax resistance in the service of anti-abortion activism — since I last visited his site. It has a good overview of the whys and hows of tax resistance, with many parallels to the war tax resistance movement.
The IRS continues to get smacked around in the partisan arena, with the Republicans smelling blood and baring their teeth, and the Obama administration having no hesitation in throwing agency bureaucrats overboard to save their sinking ship.
The scandal’s momentum has caused reporters and others to dig deeper, to give credence and airtime to previously-neglected stories, and to instead overhype what in other seasons would be ignored.
An anti-abortion group released a recording of a conversation with an IRS agent in which the agent told them that they couldn’t be a tax-exempt organization if they “use your religious belief to tell other people you don’t have a belief” or “take all kinds of confrontation activities [sic] and also put something on a website and ask people to take action against the abortion clinic” or “go to the front of the abortion clinic and… come for protesting activity, and then go up to the woman and tell the woman they should not do that.”
“When you conduct religious activities,” the agent told the group, “meanwhile you have to respect other people’s beliefs, other people’s religion.
You cannot use any kind of, you know, confrontation way, or to, or against other groups or devalue other groups, other people’s beliefs. OK?”
In a letter to the group in response to their tax-exempt status application (they were applying for 501(c)3 which has stricter guidelines than the 501(c)4 groups that have been the main focus of the recent IRS scandal), the agent had asked the group to “assure:”
that the information you distribute or present to the public are not representing biased and unsupported opinions;
that the information presented or distributed are with sufficiently full and fair exposition of the pertinent facts as to permit an individual or the public to form an independent opinion or conclusion
The letter went on to claim that “Activities that are conducted to expose the racist agenda (as you claimed) of the abortion industry” were an example of activities that are “neither educational nor charitable in nature.”
The agent claimed that:
[A]n organization’s activities may not be considered serving educational purpose, if an organization carries out activities that aims to deny or reduce the rights of another segment of the community; that are designed to influence public opinion in favor of its advocated position; that may have adverse effect on the day to day operation of public health facilities that may be detrimental to the community as a whole; and that show a type of propaganda to defy other’s beliefs or viewpoints on the same matter.
A second letter contained more of the same, telling the group that because their educational material was “condemnatory and opinionated” and made claims with “no data source provided and no explanation given on how the conclusion is made” and included expressions that were “aimed to inflame the hostility to the community health clinic or family planning clinic which hold opposition position or practice on the issues of abortion,” and included “no intelligent discussion of the subject of abortions and no information presented to inform the public concerning alternatives to the present law and practice related to abortions,” that the group might not qualify for tax-exempt status.
(The IRS eventually backed down and granted the group tax-exempt status last month.)
The president of another anti-abortion group told Congressional investigators that an IRS agent had told them “that we needed to send in a letter with the entire board’s signatures stating that under penalty of perjury we would not picket/protest or organize groups to picket/protest outside of Planned Parenthood.
Upon receiving such a letter, she indicated that the IRS would allow our application to go through.”
Such restrictions on the attitudes the group must have or profess towards people with contrary beliefs, what sorts of arguments their outreach material must contain, and what activities it must refrain from engaging in, do not appear to have much support in the law.
But apparently IRS agents have come to believe that it is part of their mandate to police groups that are applying for tax-exempt status in this way.
Here’s an excerpt from the latest draft of my upcoming book on the tactics of successful tax resistance campaigns that speaks to this:
Troubles with Tax-Exempt Status
The legal conditions of tax-exempt, non-profit status in the United States
have proven to be a powerful way for the government to make activist groups
timid. Anti-abortion tax resister Jerry DePyper noted that this was a big
reason why he was making no headway in trying to get the tax resistance
tactic on the agenda of the large anti-abortion groups. He spoke with two
leaders in that movement and reported: “Both… say that no recognized pro-life
leader would want to risk it because of the legal issues with the
IRS,
and they don’t want to lose their tax-exempt status.”
Ruth Benn of NWTRCC
had a similar experience:
I was talking about a potential war tax resistance workshop with a group for
which I have great respect and who are very supportive of war tax
resistance. When I suggested a certain activity as part of the workshop, the
organizer hurriedly said, “Oh, no, we couldn’t sponsor that; we’re 501(c)3
[the section of the legal code that governs tax-exempt non-profits].”
For this and related reasons, some tax resisting groups, like Catholic Worker
and NWTRCC,
have never tried to apply for tax-exempt non-profit status. In 1972 the
IRS
told Catholic Worker that it owed some $300,000 in taxes and penalties
because of this. The tax agency eventually retreated, acknowledging that
Catholic Worker was a de facto non-profit charity, even if
it was never going to fill out the de jure paperwork. This
episode turned out to be a good propaganda opportunity for Catholic Worker.
The New York Times editorialized: “Surely the
IRS
must have genuine frauds to investigate. Surely there must be some worthwhile
work this agency could be doing instead of obstructing acts of corporal mercy
for the poor.” Dorothy Day added:
The New York Evening Post also editorialized on
our situation. The National Catholic Reporter
and the Commonweal editors also registered their
protest and other papers followed suit. Letters come in daily from our
friends, reassuring, comforting, indignant at the government, a few of them
indignant at us, that we cause them so much worry.…
…[T]he CW refuses to pay taxes, or to “structure itself ” so as to be
exempt from taxes. We are afraid of that word “structure.” We refuse to
become a “corporation.”… [W]e do not intend to “incorporate” the Catholic
Worker movement.
