Philadelphia — The monthly Quaker magazine
Friends Journal has agreed to pay $31,343 as a
settlement with the Internal Revenue Service for the war tax resistance by
its editor, Vinton Dening. That covers five years of taxes
(), $19,623, plus interest.
The IRS
had placed a levy on Dening’s salary, which the magazine’s board of managers
refused to pay. But the board finally agreed to the settlement when counsel
advised that it could not win a court case.
The board supports a bill before Congress that would provide a way for
individuals to direct their tax money to peaceful purposes.
Actually, it was Vinton Deming, with an “m”. He retired from his post
at Friends Journal in
. In he
explained his introduction to war tax resistance in this way:
When I attended Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the late 1960s I had no way of
knowing that my life would be changed as a result.… [T]he meeting was
wrestling with the question of draft resistance and was trying to prepare an
appropriate minute in support of young Friends faced with the draft. During
a difficult moment in this process 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 his support of him and his generation
(through 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.
In addition to refusing to withhold taxes from the salaries of tax resisting
employees (see The Picket
Line for ),
employers can also express their solidarity for such resisters by refusing to
comply with salary levies. Here are some examples:
The War Resisters League has a policy of not honoring
IRS
levies against their employees’ salaries. According to
NWTRCC’s guide to organizational war tax resistance, “though the
IRS
continues from time to time to send levies for other employees, they have
not been enforced, and there has been little interaction between the
IRS
and WRL
in recent years.”
Also according to
NWTRCC’s guide,
the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and the Friends Committee on
National Legislation have either resisted levies or established policies
to resist levies should they occur.
The “Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee,” which helped fuel the
anti-Vietnam War movement, refused to turn over to the
IRS
the paychecks of Eric Weinberger, a war tax resisting employee.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (of Quakers) has a strong and
well-thought-through policy on how to respond to
IRS
levies of the salaries of resisting employees. Excerpt:
If the conscientious, war-tax-resisting employee requests, in the event that
IRS
serves a levy on Yearly Meeting against the salary, wages or other employee
property alleged to be in the Meeting’s possession, Yearly Meeting will
follow the practice approved on and decline to submit to the levy. In refusing, the Meeting will
set forth its belief that military tax resistance is an appropriate
individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony and that Yearly Meeting
is led, consistent with its most fundamental beliefs, to resist government
efforts to coerce an employee against their conscience in such historic
Friends’ testimonies.
The New York Yearly Meeting (of Quakers) in
approved a statement in which they agreed
that the meeting would refuse to honor salary levies directed at employees
who were refusing taxes for conscientious reasons.
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends has a similar policy, and responded
to one levy by telling the
IRS:
“The levy would require the Yearly Meeting to act against our employees’
testimony and witness. The Yearly Meeting is not ready to take that
step.”
The Quaker magazine Friends Journal had a policy
against paying such levies, and initially refused to pay $31,343 in taxes,
penalties, and interest, from the salary of its editor, Vinton Deming. The
magazine eventually gave in when it became clear they could not win a legal
challenge to the levy.
The Christian activist group Sojourners has
a policy of refusing to comply with government levies of the salaries of
its employees who are war tax resisters. Sojourners managing director Joe
Roos says, “To date we have been threatened with levies, with the
confiscation of our property, with arrest and prison terms and, most
recently, with the money we refused to turn over being taken out of my
personal account since the
IRS
views me as a ‘responsible person.’ Despite all these threats, the only
action they have taken is to levy our corporate account, taking the amount
they say is still due plus interest, plus penalty.”
When some American Mennonite farmers resisted the Social Security /
Medicare tax, the
IRS
tried to seize the money owed to them by the Amish-run milk cooperatives
they worked through. According to Brad Igou, who documented such resistance
for the Amish Country News, most cooperative
officials refused to comply.
When the
IRS
ordered the First & Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven,
Connecticut, to turn over the salary of their war tax resisting minister,
Carl Lundborg, in , the congregation
voted unanimously to refuse.
The
IRS
tried also to get war tax resisting Catholic pastor Cosmas Raimondi’s
parish to turn over his salary to them in
, but the parish council refused, saying
that “[a]lthough we personally do not feel called to war tax resistance
for ourselves, we do support the right of Father Raimondi to make that
decision according to the dictates of his own conscience before God.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance was a frequent topic of discussion in the pages of the
Friends Journal in ,
with an increasing emphasis on how Meetings as a body could engage in war tax
resistance, and with at least one Meeting taking the step of recommending that
all of its members begin resisting war taxes.
“A tax resister at a vigil in Philadelphia,
”
The issue noted that “a growing
number of Friends bodies” were organizing demonstrations against war taxes around the country:
New Call to Peacemaking approved the idea in one of its workshops in
. The idea of a Good Friday witness was
the subject of an “Epistle to All Friends in America” in
from North Carolina Yearly Meeting
(Conservative). In , Baltimore Yearly
Meeting endorsed the idea and suggested it be broadened to include members of
other churches. Friends Coordinating Committee on Peace endorsed the idea at
its annual meeting in .
The form of witness can be decided independently in each local area.
Participants might gather together for worship followed by public witness.
This could include an offering of letters from individuals, an appeal for
support of the World Peace Tax Fund bill, a vigil at the local
IRS
office, collection of withheld funds from tax refusers to be presented to a
local organization,
etc.
Also:
An effort is underway to collect signatures and funds for an ad in several
newspapers and magazines opposing the payment of military taxes. For a copy
of the proposed ad send SASE to Don Groersma…
A later issue reproduced this “Epistle to All Friends in America” from the
North Carolina Yearly Meeting:
Dear Friends:
Recognizing the potential effectiveness of simultaneous corporate action in
speaking truth to power, North Carolina Conservative Friends urge all Friends
everywhere to join with members of the several yearly meetings, and of the
Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren — persons who, together with
Friends comprise the historic peace churches — in making a witness to
Internal Revenue Service on .
It is urged that all Friends everywhere who are called upon to remit income
taxes to the U.S.
Government, and who are prepared to file an income tax return, do so on that
date and incorporate with their tax returns any one of several forms of
protest. Some examples of such protest include, but are not limited to, the
following:
Enclosing a letter stating Friends’ beliefs about the making of war, and
expressing concern that a large proportion of one’s taxes will be so used
as to violate those beliefs.
Withholding a small, symbolic amount of money deemed by Internal Revenue
Service to be owed as a tax payment, as a gesture of protest of the
war-making portion of our national budget.
Withholding that proportion of the taxes one is called upon to pay which
would otherwise go toward the making of war and war preparations.
Making a public witness, singly or together with others, giving
expression in deed as well as word that Friends stand prepared as a body
of Bible-believing Christians to still take seriously our call to
peacemaking in our increasingly troubled and militarized world.
We commend this epistle to you in the name of our Saviour, who continues to
set before us his standard, and who calls us to be faithful even unto death,
as he was faithful even unto death upon the cross.
Yet more impressively, on , the
Minneapolis and Twin Cities Meetings approved a minute that asked “all members
of our meetings to practice some form of war tax resistance”! That minute was
excerpted in the issue:
…We are called to nonviolent protest in response to preparations for war. We
recognize lovingly that individuals must conscientiously weigh their own
commitment to these traditions in the light of their own personal situations
and obligations. Yet we are asking all members of our meetings to practice
some form of war tax resistance:
To withhold all or a portion of our federal income taxes that go to pay
for war, shifting these resources from preparation for war to the meeting
of human needs;
To aid and support others who refuse to pay war taxes for conscience
sake;
To make every effort to reduce our federal tax liability through
contributions to peace-oriented and life-affirming endeavors;
To reduce our affluence through less than full-time occupations or by
other means to diminish income to or below the level of tax liability,
releasing thereby also time and energy to devote to endeavors related to
domestic and international justice and peace, living simply so that
others in the world may simply live;
To support and seek passage in Congress of the legislation which would
establish the alternative World Peace Tax Fund for receipt of funds from
citizens who cannot in conscience aid in the preparations for modern
warfare; and
To include letters of protest with our income tax statements as well as
to inform the president and our senators and representatives that we can
no longer in conscience share complicity for the current preparations for
war.
Our government and others seem prepared to bring catastrophe to humanity and
nature through the use of devastating weaponry. We recognize that those who
for religious reasons refuse to pay taxes for war are committing acts of
civil disobedience. We, members of the Twin Cities and Minneapolis Friends
Meetings, affirm civil disobedience through war tax resistance to be one
appropriate witness to our religious precepts and to be an expression of deep
concern for our country’s future.
We ask all citizens of other faiths to consider carefully these conclusions
to which we have come and to act in the light of their own consciences.
an ad from the issue of
Friends Journal
David Zarembka, identified as the treasurer of the recently-formed National
War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, had an article in the
about the American cultural norm
in favor of violence and the lack of strong taboos against homicide in our
culture. He concluded:
Like the prophets of the Old Testament, we must realize that our whole world
view, the whole intent of our society, is based on a divine misordering of
our lives and society. We must stop. Each individual must stop joining the
military, must stop working for the military in any fashion, must stop owning
stock in corporations that profit from military contracts, and must stop
paying military taxes.
a Friends General Conference ad in the issue of Friends Journal promoted
interest-free loans to the Conference as a way to to keep assets secure
without gaining taxable interest income
One of three “burning concerns” addressed in Saturday sessions at the
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in
was “The Draft and War Tax Concerns: Toward a Corporate Testimony” — but a
report on the sessions in the issue
noted that “unity could not be achieved” on that point.
The General Board of Friends United Meeting endorsed the World Peace Tax Fund
legislation, according to a note in the issue. The Meeting “calls upon its members to take action in
support of the bill before Congress… The World Peace Tax Fund,
FUM notes,
would provide a legal way for individuals to redirect their taxes ‘to
nonmilitary, peaceful purposes.’ ”
That issue also mentioned that Rahway and Plainfield (New Jersey) Monthly
Meeting had sent out a war tax resistance information packet to all the
monthly meetings in the New York Yearly Meeting.
“Bill Strong, member of the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, donates war tax resisters’ money to
St. John’s Hospice of Men,
.”
War tax resistance came up at the London (England) Yearly Meeting in
, and some delegates from
Philadelphia noted that the debate seemed very similar to the one Philadelphia
Friends were having. Norma Jacob wrote:
One major preoccupation this year, both in Philadelphia and in London, is the
withholding of taxes. In both places serious reservations were expressed
about the wisdom or the expediency of this particular form of protest against
war, and the arguments are the same. There are, perhaps, some differences in
the law, which may alter the degree to which the employer, in this case
London Yearly Meeting, is to be held civilly responsible. But there was no
reluctance to give support to the Friends House staff members who object to
supporting the military through taxes, even among those who might find
themselves in serious legal trouble as a result of a stand of which they
personally might not approve.
The issue noted that Lorraine
Cleveland had redirected $400 of her taxes to her Meeting so that it could
purchase a copy of the film The Hundredth Monkey
which she hoped could be used to demonstrate that “we have the creativity and
power to change both ourselves and this world.”
At the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting in ,
among the minutes they approved was one “encouraging monthly meetings to
establish meetings for sufferings to aid war tax resisters.” The North Pacific
Yearly Meeting met at
and also took up the issue, though the description given in the
Journal is vague about what they actually decided to
do about it:
During sessions set aside for seasoned concerns, a minute on war tax
resistance was presented by University Friends Meeting
(Wash.). The minute was
introduced and accepted in the context of Friends tradition and the need for
a supportive statement as expressed by the many tax resisters in attendance.
When Friends Journal editor-manager Olcutt Sanders
died in , Vinton Deming took his place.
Deming was a war tax resister, and would later try to get the
Journal to support his resistance by not cooperating
with the
IRS’s
attempts to tax his salary.
The Pacific Yearly Meeting met in
and, among other things, “established a peace tax fund.” The Ohio Valley
Yearly Meeting met
and “approved minutes in support of the World Peace Tax Fund and of
conscientious war resisters.”
The issue included this note:
A War Tax Resistance Minute by Davis
(Calif.) Meeting states,
in part, “We, the members of Davis Friends Meeting, affirm civil disobedience
through war tax resistance to be one appropriate witness to our religious
precepts and to be an expression of deep concern for our country’s future… We
are asking all members of our meeting to practice at least one of the
following forms of tax resistance”: to aid and support others who refuse to
pay war taxes for conscience’s sake; to support the World Peace Tax Fund
legislation; to include letters of protest with our income tax returns as
well as to inform our legislators that we can no longer share complicity in
the current preparations for war; to reduce our affluence and diminish our
income to or below the level of tax liability by living simply; to contribute
to peace-oriented or life-affirming endeavors; and to withhold a portion of
our federal income taxes that go to pay for war, shifting these resources
from preparations for war to the meeting of human needs.
That issue also reprinted a minute from the Washington,
D.C.
Friends Meeting concerning the phone tax:
The U.S. excise
tax on telephones has always been associated with war. Throughout the period
of American military involvement in Indochina, congressional proponents of
this tax said that it was needed to pay for the costs of war.
After the withdrawal of American troops from Indochina, the excise was to be
eliminated. Over the years it was steadily decreased from ten percent to one
percent. In this tax was increased to three
percent.
Friends have a long-standing testimony against participation in war and
preparations for war. At present, the Congress has ignored the popular
mandate for a freeze on the deployment and testing of nuclear weapons, and
has continued to appropriate funds for new weapons systems. Our president has
ignored public opinion polls which show that the majority of people oppose
U.S. military
intervention in Central America, and has proceeded with plans to commit
U.S. forces in
that region. Registration for the draft has been reinstituted.
We strongly urge Friends to consider whether it is appropriate to continue
payment of this war tax on telephones.
In the same issue, Tim Deniger had a letter-to-the-editor about the World
Peace Tax Fund legislation. Although he acknowledged that the proposed law
“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” he had written a letter to a senator (Alfonse D’Amato of New York)
to urge him to support it. D’Amato wrote back to explain why he wouldn’t be,
saying in part:
[W]ithholding of tax dollars from the Department of Defense would simply be
an accounting illusion. Total defense spending would not decline. A larger
proportion of the tax dollars of other Americans would merely be used for
military programs. Most likely, it is the non-defense programs which would
end up being underfunded. Thus, despite its lofty intentions, the burden of
S. 880 would fall
most heavily upon the needy receiving benefits from a multiple of federal
social programs.
At the meeting of the Friends
World Committee for Consultation, Section of the Americas, “[r]epresentatives
approved a document outlining the implementation of a War Tax Resistance
Minute that the annual meeting approved [see
♇ 30 July 2013]. Positive responses and
cautionary notes from yearly meetings were considered when the war tax
subcommittee established policy for this FWCC corporate witness.”
The issue had a note about
Quaker Mark Judkins’s war tax protest:
…Mark brought $300 worth of food to the
IRS
center to pay for $78 worth of taxes. The food was not accepted as legal
tender. Police officers prevented the protesters from bringing the food into
the office. Mark announced that he would donate the food to the Milwaukee
Hunger Task Force’s food bank.
And the same issue noted:
War tax resisters in Ann Arbor,
Mich., are planning to run
ads in local and national newspapers and magazines listing the names and
addresses of signers of a statement setting forth their reasons for living in
volunteer poverty (below taxable income level) or refusing to pay some or all
income taxes or the federal excise tax on phones. Friends wishing to become
part of this project should write to War Tax Resistance National Ad Campaign…
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
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
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
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 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
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 .
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.
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.
The slowdown in mentions of war tax resistance in Brethren publications towards the end of the cold war accelerated further during the opening years of the Clinton presidency.
The issue of Messenger included a brief article about the war tax resistance of Brethren co-pastors Louise & Phil Rieman:
When rolls around, Louie and Phil Rieman plan to file their federal income tax just like everyone else.
But along with it, the co-pastors of the Ivester Church of the Brethren, in Grundy Center, Iowa, will enclose a letter.
It opens, “Dear Brothers and Sisters at the IRS: Once again we write to let you know that we are not paying the full, expected amount…”
Isn’t that being dishonest? No.
It’s not a criminal offense, the IRS says, as long as an accurate tax return is filed.
Of course, the IRS can and does come after the withheld amount.
And the withholders usually end up losing more money than if they had paid their taxes in full, on time.
Civil penalties, as large as $500, and interest charges are added when the IRS eventually collects unpaid taxes by seizing paychecks, bank accounts, or property.
In , IRS agents seized the Rieman family van.
It had an appraised value of $8,000, but the IRS auctioned it off for $3,900 and kept $3,000.
Why withhold taxes, in such a “losing” situation?
Louie and Phil are among a number of Brethren who believe so strongly that war is sin, that they choose this way of protesting the 50 percent of their tax money they figure goes for military use.
So they only pay 50 percent of what they owe and let the IRS come after the rest.
The Riemans consciously put the percentage that would have been used for the military into life-enhancing programs instead.
They have been doing this .
“Our main goal is not simply protesting war taxes,” explains Louie, “but living in spiritual and moral obedience to the teachings of Christ.”
It’s not a popular stance with the general public in this country.
Sneaking through every loophole one can find is the more acceptable way of withholding taxes.
But the Riemans feel led to make a costly statement against war.
“How can we pray for peace and pay for war?” asks Phil.
A good question, one that other Brethren have to wrestle with.
War tax resistance led to a settlement of $31,343 between the Quaker magazine Friends Journal and the IRS.
Editor Vinton Deming refused to pay taxes for , giving the money to peace organizations instead.
The IRS demanded a tax levy on Deming’s salary, which the Journal’s board of managers reluctantly paid on the advice that they could not win a case in court.
There were also a handful of mentions of the proposed federal “Peace Tax Fund” legislation, which had a well-attended House of Representatives committee hearing in .
A brief story about “Organic Gardening” in the issue made reference to the tax resistance of Arlene & Cliff Kindy:
“We live below the taxable income level,” says Arlene, “so that we don’t have to pay military taxes.” Taking their Christianity seriously has meant simplification on many different levels, including riding their bicycles instead of driving a car, and home-schooling their daughters.
There was a brief mention of the “Midwest War Tax Resistance Conference,” sponsored by the Iowa Peace Network, which had Church of the Brethren members in it, in the issue (source).
Another “New Call to Peacemaking” conference was held in , but from the report of it in the Messenger, war tax resistance was no longer the main attraction.
“Sabrina and David Falls, Quakers from Richmond, Ind., who spoke about their experiences in refusing to pay income tax designated for military use…” were among the speakers.
The issue profiled Anita & Rich Buckwalter, and noted (source):
For almost 30 years, the Buckwalters have made a protest against taxes going to military funding, withholding the part of their taxes they calculate would be spent by the military.
To those who question his patriotism, Rich responds, “I think I am being a patriot and a responsible citizen by calling the nation to its deeper responsibility.”
