Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
anti-abortion tax resistance →
David Little
When war tax resisters go into rhetorical battle, one of the mythical creatures they often encounter is the other-than-war tax resister.
The argument goes something like this: “If you think you shouldn’t have to pay taxes for the military because you have ethical qualms about war, do you think people with qualms about abortion and contraception should be able to stop paying taxes that might go toward these things?”
The list goes on from here, of course, to include anything that government funds that someone somewhere might have conscientious scruples against.
But it almost always starts with abortion — in part, probably because this is a textbook case of people having a conscientious, ethical, absolute, life-and-death sort of stand of a sort similar to that of the war tax resisters; and in part because (with many exceptions), the anti-war movement in which war tax resistance activists are often found tends to draw from a pro-choice crowd, and so this gives the argument its necessary dissonance.
The argument can go in a few directions from here.
An anarchist or minarchist would respond to the argument simply by agreeing that people in general should not be forced to participate in or pay for things that they find abhorrent.
This deflates the argument by admitting it, opening up a whole new can of worms, since anarchism/minarchism is more or less precisely the reductio ad absurdum the argument was aiming at in the first place.
A pro-life but politically statist war tax resister might agree that people should be able to opt out of paying for abortion, but might get tripped up further down the line: contraception? compulsory public education? social security? surely there’s something where they’ll draw the line.
And then the tax resister has to explain why some programs require the government to overrule individual conscience to force unwilling people to participate, while others must allow the conscience to trump the policy.
And such an argument seems futile at worst, and highly nuanced at best (at least I haven’t heard any good, pithy ones).
But a response I’ve heard that side-steps the argument with some success is this: we don’t really have to worry about this sort of thing, because war tax resistance is a special case.
We know this because there are plenty of war tax resisters right now whose consciences do not allow them to pay war taxes, but there aren’t any “public education tax resisters” or “social security tax resisters” or “abortion tax resisters” out there.
(This ignores the anarchist “all of the above tax resisters,” but they stand outside the argument anyway.)
And I’ve looked to see if there are any “abortion tax resisters” out there — it seemed like there had to be some, somewhere — but without much success.
It turns out I didn’t look hard enough.
In New Brunswick, Canada, a Catholic activist named David Little has refused to pay his federal taxes because taxpayer funds are used to pay for abortions.
He told the judge who heard his tax case (excerpts):
All Canadians are victimized by universally funded abortion murders, even those unaware or unconvinced of it being murder.… When we pay taxes of any kind, even inculpable small children buying a candy bar pay GST, unknowingly in support of abortion.…
I cannot be enticed or coerced by this government to believe that the benefits of worthy and virtuous expenditures to fund acts or legislation of true worthiness and virtue in benefit to all Canadians, can bribe or justify me to forget that a portion of every penny I voluntarily surrender to Revenue Canada is used in an act of pure murder, a true homicide in fact if not in law.
I cannot, must not, do evil to achieve a good end.
I have made it clear publicly for more than 20 years that I would rather suffer imprisonment than voluntarily surrender money to any person or institution who would use even the smallest portion of my money to perpetrate murder on any human being.
My religion as a Roman Catholic and my formed conscience tells me unequivocally that I would be in material and perhaps even formal cooperation with murder and as such would be personally complicit.
A judgment greater than that which men propose and prevail upon men, awaits us all.
I have compromised before on this most vital issue.
I have sent protest notes with my tax return, and still sent my money; I have withheld a token amount, ostensibly to forgo my financial participation in abortion, and still sent the remainder of my money.
Every dollar sent is tainted, first or last.
I have written countless letters to Revenue Canada and to politicians of all status and parties.
I have protested peacefully outside hospitals while abortions were being perpetrated; written countless letters to editors, voted solely for candidates who support human dignity and life; ran for Parliament myself, on a platform rooted in respect for human life and dignity; I have established several crisis pregnancy centres in Canada and the U.S. to help pregnant mothers with an alternative to abortion; yet the murders go on.
Not with my money, no more, no way.
I will go to jail first.
I said that in public more than 20 years ago.
(See attached news item) I am six months from my 60th birthday.
We have a 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, a 21-month-old daughter, Hannah and an infant, Myriam, just 2-months old, and a 13-year-old daughter, Jahradd.
My wife and I have decided that when they are old enough to ask, “did you do anything to stop the killing,” we want to be able to say in truth, “yes, we did all we could.”
The parallels to the reasoning of war tax resisters are striking.
I’m surprised I haven’t come across more cases like this (I did find one other, earlier this year).
Either for some reason tax resistance doesn’t get much traction in the pro life movement, or pro life tax resisters are quieter and don’t show up on my radar.
I learned about Little’s case because he was convicted on three charges of failure to pay taxes .
He has vowed not to pay either the taxes or the fine, and is facing a 66-day jail term.
Yet more bits and pieces from here and there:
At Animal Person, Mary Martin shares a poignant story about an ex-boyfriend who was a tax resister.
They broke up because she couldn’t see how her dreams of starting a family could mesh with his principles that put him in what she assumed was dangerous conflict with the state.
Martin wonders how to find that workable medium between quiet guilty compliance on one hand, and quixotic martyrdom on the other.
If you’re a Picket Line regular, you’ve probably read a thing or two about the “underground economy.”
But have you heard about the “underground government?”
According to Hans Sennholz, just as some people escape into the underground economy so as to have an income off-the-books, the government has been creating vast numbers of off-the-books government functions so as to evade budgetary restrictions and hide the true size of government and depth of government debt.
Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were examples of these — ostensibly private corporations, they could take on huge debts and liabilities without any nominal impact on the federal budget, at least until the recent judgment day.
David Little, one of the rare examples of an anti-abortion tax resister, is profiled in the Globe & Mail.
Excerpts:
“A portion of every cent I give them is going to kill babies. I don’t care
how infinitesimally small it is,” he said, as the conversation ranged from
biblical parables to speaking in tongues, from miracles to modern-day saints.
“When I finally took the decision to embrace courage and fight the federal
government, it was because I could no longer look myself in the mirror and
ask the question: Who am I to pray for life and pay for death?”
“This is an issue where I appear to be the sole person in the entire country
who’s decided that he will never co-operate for the filing of income tax, as
long as it is going to be used to kill innocent human beings.”
There would be widespread support among Catholics for his form of civil
disobedience, he believes, were not anti-abortion groups and the church
afraid of angering the government by advocating it.
Probably to nobody’s surprise, the rich dodge their taxes more than other folks.
This seems to be mostly a matter of opportunity: ordinary folks get most of their income from wages, the taxes on which are harder to escape, while rich folks get a lot of their lucre from capital gains and business income, where it’s easier to get creative.
Good luck with this one: An aide to the Governor of New York is in trouble for having not filed his taxes for years, to the extent that he’s now in the hole to the tune of about three hundred thousand dollars.
His attorney suggests that his client may be suffering from “non-filers syndrome.”
I hope its contagious.
Meanwhile, in Canada, anti-abortion tax resister David Little suffered a setback in his legal battle when the New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench denied his appeal of his convictions on tax charges.
Little represented himself in a Fredericton court on where he argued his conviction on three counts of not paying his income taxes should be overturned because it violates his religious beliefs under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In his two-and-a-half hour submission before Judge Hugh McLellan, Little included quotes from the Bible and his strong belief that abortion is “an abomination.”
Twice the judge interrupted, saying Little should stick to legal arguments, not moral, religious or political ones.
McLellan then ruled that despite Little’s intense beliefs, he did not show any legal error by the judge who convicted him and dismissed the appeal.
Little says he plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.
He’s been fighting his case in court, asserting that he has a right not to contribute to government spending for things that violate his religious beliefs.
He hasn’t been having much luck.
Most recently, the Court of Appeal of New Brunswick shot down his appeal, saying, basically, that democracy is all about a democratically-elected, representative government deciding how much of your money it wants to take and what it wants to spend it on, and individual conscience doesn’t enter in to it, and that’s a good thing.
The ruling has some weirdly-tortured political philosophy in it, such as this bit from the opening paragraph:
The fact that a person files a tax return and pays taxes does not connote an expression of support for any government policy or expenditure.
These obligatory acts are the annual price Canadians pay to ensure there is a continuing debate over the appropriateness of government policies and expenditures made in accordance with the existing law.
See, if Canadians didn’t pay their taxes, they wouldn’t be able to have a continuing debate over the appropriateness of government policies and expenditures.
You wouldn’t want that, would you?
The ruling is surprisingly full of poor arguments of this caliber, which is
odd, because the conclusion they come to is a sort of commonplace no-brainer
towards which (once you accept certain statist premises — ones that come with
the territory in state courts) there are straightforward and sound and
well-trodden arguments.
The meat of the issue is that same one that John Brown argued (see
The Picket Line for the
) — whether paying taxes to the government implicates you morally in the
government’s actions or its spending decisions. In this case, the court pretty
much denies that there’s anything worth arguing about — it doesn’t,
so taxpaying doesn’t have any freedom-of-conscience implications, so there.
Quoting a precedent: “The simple, if subjectively unpleasant, obligation to
pay taxes to a government some or all of whose views and programs one opposes
does not imply support of such views and programs or force the taxpayer to act
contrary to his or her personal beliefs and convictions; on the contrary, it
is an essential part of living in a democracy such as Canada.”
Little hopes to make a last appeal to the Supreme Court, but says he won’t pay
his taxes or fines in any case, and is prepared to go to jail for non-payment.
David Little, who has been resisting taxes in Canada in conscientious objection to the funding of abortion, was sentenced to 66 days in jail for refusing to pay the fines that came along with a failure to file conviction a few years ago.
Little had appealed his case unsuccessfully up the judicial ladder, with the Supreme Court turning down his last appeal in January.
“I don’t want to co-operate with an entity that takes my money and pays gynecological assassins to kill my brothers and sisters,” Little said.
“I’m prepared to die in jail, if necessary.
I can no longer cope with the hypocrisy of praying for life… and paying for death.”
He may indeed face more jail time, as he is under court order to file his tax returns and has insisted he will not do so.
