Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
20th–21st century Quakers →
Priscilla Adams
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (a.k.a. Quakers) has been trying to accommodate the war tax resistance of one of its employees, Priscilla Adams.
They haven’t been withholding taxes from her paychecks and forwarding the money to the IRS, but have instead been putting the withheld money into an escrow account as the IRS’s legal case against them continued.
Since most conscientious objection arguments to the federal income tax have failed in the courts, they had to try something new and so they reached for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — a recent law that was designed for people whose long-standing religious beliefs conflict with federal law.
It’s been used, for instance, to defend religious practitioners whose peyote use conflicted with federal drug laws.
And the encouraging news that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has decided to refuse to comply with an IRS levy on the salary on one of the Meeting’s employees, war tax resister Priscilla Adams
Philadelphia, — Priscilla Adams says she does not mind paying taxes — she just does not want her money going to the military.
Because of that, Ms. Adams, a Quaker organizer, finds herself in a court battle with the Internal Revenue Service.
Ms. Adams, 50, has refused to pay at least some of her federal taxes for many years and owes the government more than $42,000 in back taxes, interest and fines.
She says she would rather her money went to further peaceful causes.
“They can do things like the checkoff for the presidential election campaign; they could easily do an accommodation for a peace-tax fund,” Ms. Adams said Wednesday from her house in Willingboro, N.J.
The I.R.S. stepped up the pressure in the dispute on when it sued her employer, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, for refusing to garnishee her wages.
The government wants to impose a 50 percent penalty, more than $21,000, against the society, a regional Quaker organization.
“That would be a hefty price for what we believe is right,” said Gretchen Castle, a leader with the group.
“I think that there are other ways the government can do it that are more friendly, more supportive of our faith.”
The government is seeking taxes and penalties ; after that period the Quakers began to withhold taxes from Ms. Adams’s paychecks — she earns about $32,000 a year — and put them in an escrow account to which the I.R.S. has access.
The Quakers say they do not want to help the tax agency collect the back taxes and penalties by garnisheeing additional wages.
Nationally, about 8,000 Americans withhold some or all of their federal income taxes because of their political beliefs, often because they oppose military spending, according to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
Ms. Adams is the only employee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting who does not pay income taxes, Ms. Castle said, although a few take other actions, like refusing to pay federal telephone taxes that go to the military.
Ms. Adams sued the government on religious freedom grounds in 1996, asking the I.R.S. to set up a fund for conscientious objectors and to excuse her tax fines and penalties because her beliefs provided “reasonable cause” for nonpayment.
The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected her arguments, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Peter Goldberger, a lawyer who represented Ms. Adams and now represents her employer, said Quaker leaders hoped to formulate a response to the lawsuit at their meeting.
Ms. Adams, who is married and has two children, said she might quit her job if the Quakers lose the case, rather than see most of her income go to the I.R.S.’s general fund.
For now, she lends the amount in dispute to charitable causes she supports.
She says she will not demand repayment unless the tax agency comes after her.
In the modern world, many governments have introduced income tax withholding
or “pay as you earn.” In such a scheme, it can be difficult for people to
resist paying income tax, as the tax has already been paid on their behalf by
their employers. In such cases, resisters need their employers to be willing
to go out on a limb and resist alongside them.
Today I’ll give some examples of employers who helped their employees resist
income tax withholding.
Quaker Meetings
Quaker Meetings (congregations and collections of congregations) have sometimes
supported the war tax resistance of their employees by not withholding taxes
from their paychecks.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Yearly
Meeting) has discerned and again affirms that conscientious objection to
paying taxes supporting military purposes is an appropriate and traditional
individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony. As a result, Yearly
Meeting has a religious duty to refrain from taking action that violates an
employee’s expression of conscience in such historic Friends testimonies. …
At the written request of an employee pursuant to this Policy, Yearly Meeting
will withhold from an employee’s gross salary or wages, but refuse to forward
to IRS,
amounts up to but not in excess of the military portion of the federal income
tax otherwise due on that employee’s pay. Yearly Meeting, in notifying
IRS
that it has not remitted a portion of withheld taxes, will disclose and advise
IRS of
its action, as described [below]…
Yearly Meeting will communicate at least annually with an appropriate office
or official of the
IRS to
explain that, pursuant to this Policy and Yearly Meeting’s core religious
principles, it has withheld the full amount of taxes, as indicated by form(s)
W-4, from the salaries of certain employees opposed to the payment of taxes
for military purposes. Yearly Meeting will further explain that, at the
request of each such employee, it has not remitted the portion of the amount
withheld which the employee has conscientiously refused to pay, that it has
identified the amounts not remitted in its records, and that the amounts not
remitted, plus interest, will be paid over to the Treasury of the United
States on behalf of the employees at such time as there is assurance that the
taxes will not be used for military purposes.
The Meeting was taken to court in
for failing to remit $11,224 in taxes
from resisting employees. More recently, the Meeting has been pursuing legal
arguments in support of its employee Priscilla Adams, who has been resisting
war taxes for years with the help of the Meeting. The Meeting was unable to
convince a court to order the
IRS to
respect its conscientious scruples, and the agency ordered to Meeting to
garnishee Adams’s salary. The Meeting has continued to refuse.
The London Yearly Meeting for a while withheld a portion of the
pay-as-you-earn withholding of some of its employees, hoping to make this a
test case that might legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
The courts rejected their arguments, and an appeal to the European Commission
of Human Rights also failed, and so the Meeting stopped trying to resist
military taxation and now gives war tax resistance only rhetorical support:
Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from
our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to
do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time
being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our
witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this.
However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the
PAYE [withholding]
system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for
military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual
taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This
involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.
American Friends Service Committee
During the Vietnam War, the American Friends Service Committee refused to
withhold taxes from those of its employees who were refusing to pay taxes.
Milton Mayer said, of the Committee’s action:
Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have
already had it bought for them by April 15. … A few religious
organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the
tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most
respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I
confess to being associated. … But the AFSC
has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a
test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious
citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of
Vietnam is a ditch.
The AFSC continues to support tax-resisting employees, and has had mixed luck defending itself in court.
According to the NWTRCC pamphlet on Organizational War Tax Resistance:
Employers or other entities which refuse to withhold from the assets of a war
tax resister on religious grounds actually have a chance of justifying their
actions in court thanks to a case involving
the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) and the
IRS. A
federal district court ruled that the
AFSC and
its employees had the First Amendment right not to be required to participate
in the withholding system, since the
IRS has
other methods of satisfying its objectives, such as levies. The decision was
overturned by the Supreme Court, but solely on procedural grounds. This
position is possibly strengthened by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
(RFRA), passed by Congress in .
The IRS
has more recently tried to send what are called “lock-in letters” to the
AFSC, demanding that they withhold taxes from their resisting employees at
the maximum rate permissible by law.
For a time (and this may still be the case), the AFSC policy was to obey
such withholding laws and orders, but to hold back a percentage of the
withheld taxes from the government, putting that percentage (a percentage they
deemed equal to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military)
into an escrow account.
According to a Treasury Inspector General
for Tax Administration report, many employers ignore these lock-in letters.
This takes some gumption. The way the law works, if an employer doesn’t comply
with the lock-in letter, the employer can become liable for the taxes
that the employee isn’t paying.
Mennonite General Assembly
In 1989, the Mennonite Church General Assembly adopted a resolution to
“support the Mennonite General Board in establishing a policy that federal
income taxes not be withheld from the wages of any of its employees who make
this request because of conscientious objection to the use of their taxes for
military purposes.”
The General Board, however, balked on establishing such a policy after
determining “there was not enough support… to ask church boards to engage in
civil disobedience.”
Restored Israel of Yahweh
The small Jehovah’s Witnesses spin-off group called the Restored Israel of
Yahweh practices war tax resistance. To help facilitate this, two of them, who
ran a construction business, agreed not to withhold taxes from those of their
employees who were also members of that denomination.
Those two, along with the company’s bookkeeper, were taken to court and
convicted of tax evasion charges, making them, according to one of their
lawyers, “the first pacifist tax resisters to be prosecuted and
jailed — possibly ever — for felony conspiracy to defraud the
U.S. and attempted
tax evasion, the most serious criminal charges in the Internal Revenue Code.”
War Resisters League & War Resisters International
In , Ralph DiGia, who was working for the War
Resisters League, asked them to stop withholding federal taxes from his
paycheck. The League agreed, and some other employees followed DiGia’s lead.
It had taken a lot of work to get the League to adopt a policy of tax refusal.
At first, they had refused, with a member of the League’s executive committee
saying “the life of the organization is at stake.” War tax resisters
responded, saying: “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a
warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance
now, when will they be ready?” Another group, the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, also refused to challenge the
IRS, and
some of its employees resigned over the issue.
War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, decided in
to hold back a percentage of
its employees’s taxes (equivalent, in its view, to the military percentage
of the British national budget). The organization takes the position that
conscientious objection to military taxation is an unrecognized human right,
but a human right all the same, and they intend to assert it.
Collective Impressions
American war tax resister Ed Guinan for a time ran a print shop called
“Collective Impressions.” “Most of the workers in the collective were rooted
in a Catholic tradition of pacifism,” said Guinan, and so,
the company paid its
employees’ withholding not to the Internal Revenue Service but directly to the
U.S. Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency.
The Agency returned the money, saying it could not accept it under such
circumstances, whereupon Collective Impressions put the money into an escrow
account from which it hoped to eventually be able to pay the money in a way
that wouldn’t violate the pacifist beliefs of its employees, and from where
it was eventually seized by the government.
Straight Lines, Ltd.
Martin Philips, director of the Welsh jewelry business “Straight Lines”
stopped paying the 13.6% pay-as-you-earn withholding to the government for his
employees — sending the money instead to the Overseas Development
Administration as a protest against government military spending.
The government took Straight Lines to court, and eventually seized money from
the company to cover the unpaid taxes.
Vivien Kellems
Soon after income tax withholding was introduced in the United States,
ornery industrialist Vivien Kellems decided she was not interested in being
the tax collector for her employees’ at the Kellems Cable Grip Manufacturing
Company:
The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What
do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss
three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he
shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both
fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on
either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it
and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the
right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely
filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in
his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people
and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the
miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots
and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in
Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax
collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon
every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right
here.
Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship.
Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other
duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do
not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select
a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free
American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.
To demonstrate that she wasn’t against her employees paying their taxes, but
only opposed to having to do it for them, she organized her employees once per
quarter and allowed them, on company time, to fill out their own tax returns
and to go down to the post office as a group to purchase money orders and file
their own taxes.
The government subjected Kellems to a public smear campaign (which included
intercepting and publicizing her love letters), and to legal action. The
government won the legal battle, fining Kellems $7,600, whereupon she resumed
withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.
George Fidenato
George Fidenato is Vivien Kellems reincarnated in today’s Italy.
he has been refusing to withhold
taxes from his six employees’ paychecks. “I do not want to be the tax
collector. I’m not a slave of the state, and wouldn’t want to work for it even
if you paid me!” As of this writing he is still pursuing legal appeals.
Indianapolis Baptist Temple
The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in
, when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the
church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent
in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of
religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s
thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in
, the
IRS
started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and
against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals,
finally getting turned down by the
U.S. Supreme Court
in , whereupon the government seized
and auctioned off church property and Dixon himself was fined.
“Texas housewives”
, a group of women the
press invariably referred to as the “Texas housewives” refused to withhold and
pay social security taxes on the wages of their household help. The women were
opposed to government-run social security, and to being enlisted as government
tax collectors. They claimed also to be supported in their stand by their
employees.
Money was eventually seized from their bank accounts to cover the taxes. They
also pursued court appeals to try to get the tax declared unconstitutional,
but in they lost their case and began paying
the taxes.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom
The National Insurance Act of required all
workers to pay a portion of their paycheck into a fund for government-run
health and unemployment benefits.
Members of the women’s suffrage movement saw this as another tax enacted
without their consent, another example of “taxation without representation,”
and another opportunity to resist.
Some members of suffrage groups were employers, and some suffrage groups had
paid employees. In the Women
Writers’ Suffrage League met to ask whether they “should, as a society, resist
the new insurance tax and refuse to insure their secretary, with her full
consent to their so doing?”
Kate Harvey refused to pay 5 shillings, 10 pence of tax for her gardener — for
which she was sentenced to two months in prison.
The Women’s Freedom League refused to pay the tax on their employees — “we
refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women
without the consent of women” — but the government seemed unwilling or unable
to do more than threaten the group.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a resurgence of war tax resistance news in the
Friends Journal in ,
including an interesting series of articles on the voluntary simplicity / low
income lifestyle as a tax resistance tactic, and the beginning chapters of
the tale of Quaker war tax resister Priscilla Adams.
A note in the issue plugged the
“Conscience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account”:
Established in by the Nonviolent Action
Community of Cascadia, the account allows war tax resisters to set aside
refused military taxes in a secure fund. Deposits may be retrieved at any
time (to replace assets seized by the
IRS,
for example), and interest from the account is used to promote war tax
resistance and support peace and social justice activism. Depositors’ funds
are reinvested in socially responsible institutions assisting low-income
communities and minorities. The CMTC Escrow Account is the largest and most
geographically diverse war tax redirection fund in the United States.
War tax resistance is an act of civil disobedience, and resisters potentially
face fines, levies, and seizure of assets. However, the escrow account itself
is a trust fund, and as such is confidential and entirely legal. Depositor
records are not available to the
IRS,
and individual deposits are considered to be anonymous portions of a larger
fund invested in fully insured institutions. Participants receive records of
their transactions, annual statements, and a free subscription to
NACC’s quarterly war tax resistance magazine.
(I wouldn’t rely on any of that as solid legal advice. My understanding is
that the
IRS
sometimes treats “warehouse banks” like these as illegal operations that they
can seize wholesale under the theory that they’re being operated for money
laundering or tax evasion purposes.)
In a letter in the issue, William Kriebel
called out Quakers on their careless or politically-correct use of of language;
in particular he claimed: “There are no ‘war taxes.’ All income tax money goes
into the treasury without earmarking for the military. Taxation is a legitimate
power of any government. Our points of protest really are the decisions
(budget-making, appropriation) to use money out of the common fund for military
purposes.”
An article on the Quaker Council for European Affairs in the same issue noted
in passing that “conscientious objection to war taxes” was one of the “studies
for publication” that the organization had produced. Another article in that
issue noted that the National Association of Evangelicals had endorsed the
Peace Tax Fund bill:
“At first this was just a lonely struggle for the peace churches,” said
Marian Franz, director of the campaign, “then we got the support of the
mainline churches, which represent over 12 million people. Now we have
support from more conservative religious organizations, who, until recently,
had seemed to be unlikely allies.” Marian attributes the recently attained,
broad base of support to a change in tactics from an issue of conscientious
objection to an issue of religious liberties. Marian explained that “having
this broad base of support means that members of Congress, even conservative
members, take the issue more seriously.”
On , there was a benefit premiere
showing of An Act of Conscience, a documentary on
the Kehler/Corner house seizure and subsequent occupation. There was some
tangential Quaker involvement in the benefit (it was sponsored by several
organizations, including a regional AFSC office, and some Massachusetts
Quakers took part in the occupation), and the benefit screening was covered
in a note in the issue.
In the lead editorial in the issue,
editor Vinton Deming paid tribute to Eleanor Webb:
Eleanor Webb, who died , was clerk
of the Journal board when I was appointed
editor-manager in .… It was Eleanor… who
stood firmly in support of staff who resisted paying the military portion of
their federal taxes.
One of the feature articles in the issue
was written by David R. Bassett and told his story as “The Founder of the
Peace Tax Fund Movement.” Excerpts:
marks the 25th year since the
introduction of the Peace Tax Fund Bill in the
U.S. Congress. I
have been involved in the initiation of this legislation, a laborer in the
centuries-long effort to establish on earth the type of peaceful world
envisioned by Jesus and George Fox. I firmly believe that, on some
significant day in the future, some nation will for the first time pass a
Peace Tax Fund Bill, thereby establishing legal recognition of the right of
conscientious objection to the payment of military taxes. Once this is
accomplished, other nations will follow suit. I consider this goal as one of
the crucial and route-determining “trail-signs” on the path to that time and
place where the world will realize that ahimsa (soulforce)
is the preferred way to resolve conflict and to govern communities, and where
conscientious objection to war and other forms of violence will be considered
the norm.
[My] orientation as a conscientious objector to war and of preventing
preventable suffering impelled Miyoko and me, beginning in
, to wrestle with the fact
that each year we were paying (through our federal taxes) to support the
Viemam War and the military system generally. In fact, some 50 percent of
those tax moneys went to support
U.S. military
systems! One of my most graphic memories of that time was, while working many
nights at Queens Hospital in Honolulu, hearing
U.S. Air Force jet
tankers, fully laden with jet fuel, flying over the heavily populated part of
Honolulu on their way to Indochina.
Conscientious objection to payment of military taxes
In , with the Vietnam War continuing, we
moved to Ann Arbor to work at the University of Michigan. We became members
of the Ann Arbor Meeting and found there a number of people who were actively
grappling with the issue of whether to continue to pay the military portion
of federal taxes for a war that we opposed. I came to realize that any
nation’s military programs are made possible the, monetary resources that, in
the analysis, are extracted from the nation’s citizens by taxation. It also
became clear to me that one who was conscientiously opposed to military
systems must not allow his or her funds to be used for this purpose.
Surveying the pervasive role of our military system not only in our foreign
policies, but in its effects on our economy, our environment, and on the
nation’s culture and spirit, I carne to feel that this issue was central to
our times. Conscientious objection to payment of military taxes is as
important to be established as was the ending of slavery and of apartheid and
the establishment of women’s right to vote. At the same time, I held then,
and still hold, the view that the federal government is capable of carrying
out many beneficial and constructive programs and that I am willing, indeed
obligated, to pay my full share of taxes to support those programs.
I came to know that it would not be enough simply to focus on reductions in
military spending by influencing legislators and electing new ones (though
this was obviously necessary). The challenge was to extend the right of
conscientious objection to war to include not only one’s physical body, but
also one’s economic resources. I knew further that there had been repeated
resistance in the
U.S. courts to
such change and concluded that, while civil disobedience in this area
(i.e., war tax resistance) would continue to be essential, the
principal focus of attention should be to change the tax laws.
During the year , there was for me
a struggle with my conscience, not in regard to what I believe on this issue
but whether to take some action and what that action should be. Should I live
below a taxable income level? move to Canada? engage in war tax resistance?
take our civil disobedience actions into the judicial system? or attempt to
change the federal tax laws? Miyoko and I knew that to embark on any of these
actions would require great amounts of time and energy; that each course
would require some changes and risks, not all of which we could anticipate at
the outset; and that none were assured of “success.” I knew that to commit
the time necessary to move this issue forward might conflict with my hopes of
making progress in academic medicine and in research into the causes of
atherosclerosis. We gradually came to the view that it seemed wisest to try
to resist paying the military portion of our taxes and to begin to
take steps to bring about legislative change.
It was the quiet voice of conscience that kept nagging me almost every day, as
I found one or another reason not to take some action. Finally, in the
, I phoned Professor
Joseph Sax at the University of Michigan Law School and outlined to him the
basic idea: the need to change the federal tax laws so as to have Congress
grant legal recognition to the right of conscientious objection to
the payment of military taxes, while enabling the taxpayer to pay the full
amount of his or her tax with assurance that those tax monies would
not be used for military expenditures. Professor Sax sketched out how this
might be accomplished. Over a period of eight to nine months, with the
assistance of Michael Hall, we began the process of drafting what became the
World Peace Tax Fund Bill.
Other Ann Arbor Friends, Joe and Fran Eliot and Bob and Margaret Blood, had
been considering drafting a bill. A brief written for them by Thomas Towe (a
Quaker law student) proved a helpful resource. It was not hard to draw
together a working committee of seven or eight people during
to work on
this legislation and to take the initial steps in deciding how to bring the
bill to Congress, how to publicize it, and how to raise funds. We were
encouraged when Ann Arbor’s Interfaith Council for Peace decided to support
the legislative effort and appointed two very effective members to meet with
us on a regular basis.
The World Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in the
U.S. Congress on
, with Representative Ronald
V. Dellums as the lead sponsor, with nine other cosponsors. The Peace Tax
Fund office moved from Ann Arbor to the Florida Avenue Meetinghouse in
Washington,
D.C., in
. The bill was first introduced in
the Senate in , with Senator Mark Hatfield
as its sponsor. In the bill was renamed the
U.S. Peace Tax
Fund Bill. A dedicated staff, led for the past 14 years by Marian Franz, has
coordinated the lobbying effort. The orientation and the gifts that she
brings to her work are evident in her book, Questions That Refuse To Go Away.
A sidebar noted resources available from the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and also made note of the international conferences at which similar plans proposed in other countries are discussed.
The same issue also contains Clare Hanrahan’s article “Wholesome Poverty: A Revolutionary Adventure.”
Unfortunately, in the archived PDF, some of the opening paragraph is obscured by an insert card.
The article appears to begin with Hanrahan saying that she initially adopted a lower-income simple-living lifestyle in order to resist war taxes, but then came to believe that frugality and thrift and anti-consumerism and simplicity had a larger role to play in the pursuit of “a just and sustainable global community.”
It continues:
When I must work for wages, I do so as an independent contractor so that I can maintain control over tax withholdings.
I redirect a fair percentage of cash wages and many hours of volunteer time to support life-affirming projects at home and abroad.
Self-employment suits my temperament and has enabled me to develop skills and to pursue interests I may never have had the time for in a conventional career.
I’ve tried to be resilient and open to any honest labor.
If I’m asked what I do for a living, each day I can provide a different answer.
One day I might be gathering and saving seeds for next year’s garden or harvesting wild herbs for a winter tea; another day might be spent in household repair, community organizing, or researching and writing a grant for a nonprofit organization.
I’ve learned the wisdom in giving due time each day to labor of the mind and of the body and to quiet reflection that feeds the spirit.
I value my free time and open schedule far more than any accumulation of cash or property, security, or prestige.
The freedom to choose how I will be with each moment is a gift and a challenge that I count as my greatest wealth.
Living on the edge, more or less, over the years I have honed the skills and nurtured an attitude of wholesome poverty.
Meeting basic needs without a substantial cash flow has been least stressful when I’ve lived within a stable community where interdependence and cooperative values are practiced.
But during my nomadic years I learned to trust in the kindness of strangers and the serendipity of life.
I came to value the gifts of the pilgrim spirit and to recognize the importance of the itinerant wayfarer in the lives of the comfortably settled.
I’ve lived and traveled aboard small sail boats, in a tipi, in rural cabins, and in derelict inner-city housing, trading cleanup and repair for rent.
I’ve made do in the back of an old school bus and afloat on a homemade houseboat on a Mississippi backwater.
I’ve worked in a cooperative shelter for displaced women and children, with room and board as compensation, and I’ve battered for home and garden space by exchanging pet and plant care.
My primary transportation is the slow way.
As a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a bus rider, I keep a less frantic pace, and the more personal contact with those I encounter enriches the journey.
I can borrow a car or catch a lift from a friend if necessary, and by paying my fair share of the cost, the cooperative way serves each of us.
Nutritious food is available in surprising abundance if one is willing to look to unconventional channels:
I’ve participated in grassroots distribution networks of urban gleanings, intercepting the produce, grains, and other surplus foods otherwise lost.
Best of all, I’ve learned to grow my own food in community gardens and backyard plots whenever I had the opportunity.
As a worker-member at the local coop I claimed a significant reduction on food purchases, and by eliminating meat from my diet, the cost of my sustenance is affordable and sustainable.
Insurance against old age, disability, accident, or disease has never been an affordable option, nor one in which I place my faith.
Catastrophic illness or accident or the incapacities of age could happen to anyone.
Yet time and again, I’ve been sustained through economic precarity with help that comes at just the right moment.
This has happened so often that I live with a trust that keeps fear at bay.
I have learned to lean into the present moment, focused on the work before me, while keeping a well-honed sense of the adventure of it all and a very real faith in the unfolding process.
The inherent goodness of the universe has been made visible through the most unlikely of allies, and the travelers I’ve met along the way have been the wisest of teachers.
Peace Pilgrim, writing in her pamphlet, Steps Toward Inner Peace, recalled a visit to a city that had been her home:
In the poorer sections I am tolerated.
In the wealthier sections some glances seem a bit startled, and some are disdainful.
On both sides of us as we walk are displayed the things that we can buy if we are willing to stay in the orderly lines, day after day, year after year…
Thousands of things are displayed — and yet the most valuable things are missing.
Freedom is not displayed, nor health, nor happiness, nor peace of mind.
To obtain these, my friends, you too may need to escape from the orderly lines and risk being looked upon disdainfully.
Stepping outside the tyranny of “orderly lines” and daring to risk the uncertainties of disaffiliation can make of our very lives a revolution.
The way to the just and sustainable global community that we seek will open before us as we walk.
Another article in the same issue took the “voluntary simplicity” idea and ran with it.
Starting with Jesus’s one-sentence summary of his teachings — love your neighbor as much as you love yourself — the authors took this to mean “taking our fair share of global resources and no more.”
This starts with refusing war taxes because militarism is directly destructive of “our global neighbors.”
But that’s just step one of a six-step process.
Step two would be to imagine the world’s resources shared equally, which, the authors assert, means “an annual ‘fair share’ of just over $3,000 per person.”
But because the world is not using its resources in an environmentally sustainable way, step #3 is to reduce this fair share some more, to a more sustainable level: $1,800 per person per year.
But since that much money would go further in a place like the United States, where it’s relatively easier to live off the cast-offs of the wealthy, level #4 “challenges us to live on even less than level three, since we have an easier time doing so in a society with a relatively affluent public infrastructure.”
We’re not done yet.
Level #5 considers the non-monetary wealth most Americans enjoy because of the relatively high levels of medical care and education they have had access to.
“With such advantages (and others), we ought to be able to live on less resources than folks who lack education and have chronic medical problems.”
Finally, level #6 is for those who are not hampered by disabilities, encouraging them to sacrifice yet more so as to leave more for those who have to struggle harder.
Challenging? Certainly.
Even the authors only seem to have made it half way to step #2, limiting their income as a couple to $12,000 a year.
Some other choices they made were to “keep the majority of our savings in the form of non-interest-bearing loans” so as to avoid the sin of usury, and to “give away each year an amount equal to what we spend on ourselves.”
(A letter-to-the-editor in the issue criticized this radical simplicity, saying it smacked of “intelligent, able-bodied adults who consciously decide to let others subsidize” the benefits of society.
In particular: “In reducing their income to avoid paying taxes to support the military, this couple also avoids paying taxes that support the other half of the federal budget.
So, there goes their support for many of the roads they use, for medical research they might avail themselves of through that subsidized doctor, for other federally supported scientific and social research, for national parks, and so forth.
The authors are obviously well educated.
Their education was probably supported by local, state, and federal subsidies.
One wonders if they are repaying society for the educational benefit they’ve received.”)
Another brief note in the issue reported on the results of a “penny poll” that had been “conducted by Christian Peacemaker Teams in Elkhart, Ind.” and had indicated that those polled implicitly supported huge reductions in military spending.
A letter-to-the-editor from Marjorie Schier and Suzanne Day of the “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting War Tax Concerns Support Committee” published in the issue summarized the war tax issue as they saw it:
Resisting taxes
When a draft call finds some conscientious objectors unable to participate in war, the government not only has provided them alternatives, but also has proceeded to draft others who will participate.
It is individual conscience that makes the difference, not how the government allocates the recruits.
Some Friends have been unable to enlist, and some cannot voluntarily send dollars in federal tax for military uses.
Interacting with the federal government through tax resistance as witness for peace is more than symbolic; it can be earnest, meaningful religious conscience in action.
However, it does not change how the government allocates its resources, and efforts to witness for changed priorities are also significant.
Many Friends and others work for passage of the Peace Tax Fund Bill by the U.S. Congress because it would not only provide a legal opportunity for pacifists to pay their full federal tax without supporting war, but also give the government an indication of the numbers of citizens exercising this option.
Yes, the federal tax on telephone service is refused by many pacifists (with
a note of explanation accompanying the refusal and redirection of the money
for constructive purposes) because that tax was specifically reinstated to
support the war in Vietnam. Federal bookkeeping does not distinguish certain
tax streams for specific purposes, and has not since John Woolman wrestled
with this same issue. Nevertheless, many Friends are prompted to take a stand
for peace via taxes and thereby find a forum for disclosing that witness with
meetings, governmental representatives, families, and neighbors.
An obituary notice for Abram Bresel Goldstein in that same issue noted that
“[t]hough he worked briefly for the Internal Revenue Service, Abram left that
position during the Korean War to avoid aiding the collection of taxes for
war.”
On , NWTRCC and
the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sponsored
a seminar on “Corporate Conscience and War Taxes” at the Moorestown, New
Jersey, Meeting (according to a calendar listing in the
issue).
Priscilla Adams
The war tax resistance of Quaker Priscilla Adams became a cause célèbre that
played out over in the
Friends Journal starting in
. I’ll break with my chronological examination of the Journal for a while to follow this thread.
The issue introduces Adams and her
legal case:
Priscilla Adams, a war tax resister and member of Haddonfield
(N.J.) Meeting, is
challenging the
IRS
in court under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Her case is the
first of its kind to test conscientious war tax resistance since the passage
of the RFRA in . Priscilla and her lawyer,
Peter Goldberger, will challenge two points covered by the act: the
government’s use of penalties against war tax resisters for their stands of
conscience; and the lack of a government accommodation for conscientious
objectors to paying for war (like a Peace Tax Fund). The RFRA states that in
conflicts between the government and religious freedom, the government must
show compelling state interest and then use the least restrictive means
necessary. In this case, Priscilla is challenging the government’s lack of
recognition of conscience in response to the
IRS
assessing her taxes and penalties. She and Peter are arguing that under RFRA,
the IRS
should waive penalties for religious war tax resisters as long as they
recognize other forms of reasonable cause for noncompliance with the tax law.
They also are stating that the RFRA requires the enactment of something like a
peace tax fund for religious war tax resisters who are willing to accept a
reasonable accommodation, such as earmarking tax monies for non-warlike
purposes in the federal government. The case has completed its earliest
procedural stages and will be heard in United States Tax Court. Though no
date has been set, lawyers expect a trial date
. Priscilla has participated in
several clearness committees and is receiving guidance and support from
Haddonfield Meeting, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee,
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s War Tax Concerns Support Committee, the
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and family and friends.
The issue gave an update:
Priscilla Adams… will appeal the court’s decision rejecting her right to
refuse to pay taxes. The case went before the Philadelphia Tax Court, where
Adams presented an extensive outline of Quaker history and beliefs related to
war tax objections. The court’s decision states, “Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of does not exempt Quaker
from federal income taxes, despite taxpayer’s religious opposition to
military expenditures.” , Rosa Packard of Purchase
(N.Y.) Meeting and
Gordon and Edith Browne of Plainfield
(Vt.) Meeting also have filed
complaints in federal district courts seeking to protect their conscientious
acts of war tax refusal.
The issue mentioned her appeal:
Tax resister Priscilla Lippincott Adams… faced the Federal Court of Appeals
on . Her case against the
IRS for
penalizing her for her religious objections to paying the military through
taxes was dismissed in … The court
had the choice of hearing oral arguments or making a decision based on the
written briefs. In a positive turn, the judges heard oral arguments. Adams
said her lawyer, Peter Goldberger, passionately presented her case, “just
like a lawyer on T.V.”
The three judges will now make a decision, a process that could take anywhere
from six weeks to six months.
From there, to the Supreme Court, according to a
press release that formed the
basis for a
Journal news brief:
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the
U.S. Supreme Court
in support of its member, Priscilla Adams… who petitioned the high court in
, following unsuccessful efforts
in lower courts to obtain government accommodation for her conscientious
objection to paying war taxes by allowing her to pay federal taxes without
paying for military expenditures. Her employer, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,
supports religious witness by not forwarding the military portion of a
conscientious objector’s taxes to the
IRS. A
Peace Tax Fund, where tax dollars of conscientious objectors would be directed
exclusively to nonmilitary programs, is one possible solution to the dilemma
for adherents to nonviolence; a bill to establish a Peace Tax Fund has been
introduced in every Congress .
…Lower courts addressed the issue of accommodating war tax resistance only by
declaring that the government has a compelling interest in collecting taxes;
the courts have not dealt with the arguments that accommodation of
conscientious objection would be possible within the context of mandatory
participation in taxation. The Supreme Court has not heard any case that
raises these religious liberty questions under the
law.
By then it was too late, though. The issue noted that Adams’s Supreme Court appeal had been turned down:
On , the
U.S. Supreme Court
declined to hear appeals by Gordon and Edith Browne and Priscilla Lippincott
Adams to lower-court rulings that allowed the Internal Revenue Service to
impose late fees and interest for their conscientious refusal to pay the
military portion of their federal tax. The issue in this case was not paying
the tax when forced to do so by the
IRS,
but whether a “religious hardship” existed that should enable them to pay
without any penalties and interest. The lower-court rulings reaffirmed a
statement of the Supreme Court in that “The
tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge [it]
because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious
belief.” The Justice Department lawyers said that “Voluntary compliance with
the tax laws is the least restrictive means of furthering the government’s
compelling interest in collecting taxes.”… “We’re very disappointed that the
Supreme Court will not be taking the opportunity to reinforce religious
freedom and freedom of conscience,” said Marian Franz, executive director of
the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. “Congress seems like the most
appropriate place where this human right can be protected.”
Adams wasn’t going to give up though. Whether or not the government was going
to deign to make her war tax resistance legal, she was going to resist, and
the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was willing to help her. From the
issue:
The United States Department of Justice, Tax Division, is suing Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting for refusing to forward wages of an employee to the Internal
Revenue Service. The employee, Priscilla Adams, resists paying taxes for war
and the military on the basis of religious conscience. The lawsuit, filed in
, is a move to attain funds from
PYM
as recompense for taxes owed by Priscilla Adams, plus a 50-percent penalty
for not garnishing her wages as instructed by the
IRS in
. If the
IRS
succeeds,
PYM
would owe approximately $60,000.
On ,
PYM’s
Interim Meeting decided to respond to the lawsuit and defend its position in
court.
PYM
stated that to garnish Priscilla Adams’s wages would infringe upon her
religious beliefs, and
PYM
should not “be required to act as a collection agent for the government when
doing so will require it to violate key tenets of the Quaker faith.”
Thomas Jeavons,
PYM
general secretary, commented in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “About 50 percent
of our taxes pay for weapons and warfare… We have long sought the creation of
a Peace Tax Fund, a government fund for nonmilitary use, where taxes of
[those who regard paying for war as a violation of religious conscience]
could go. Legislation for this has been in Congress for many years. It should
be passed now.”
The issue spelled out the
Meeting’s legal argument:
On , Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting filed its answer to a Justice Department lawsuit that asks a $20,000
penalty to be imposed on them and seeks to make them the collection agent for
the government. The yearly meeting’s response makes dear its intention to
stand by its essential religious principles, and publicly defend the free
exercise of religion on all possible grounds, including constitutional and
statutory religious freedom defenses. The
IRS
contends that
PYM
must garnish the salary of one of its employees and members who refuses — in
keeping with longstanding Quaker convictions — to pay taxes that support war
and preparations for war. While the
IRS
could easily take other courses to collect the back taxes it claims are due,
instead the federal government is trying to force a church to collect these
funds for it, an action that would require this Quaker organization to
violate its own essential religious convictions regarding freedom of
conscience.
PYM
has refused to do so. The answer to the suit says that the government “asks
the court to assist it in violating the most fundamental religious principles
of an established church… Although those principles and the yearly meeting’s
reasons for its actions have been painstakingly explained to the [government]…
the complaint purports to set forth the history of this matter without even
mentioning
PYM’s
efforts at communication and conciliation. Further, the complaint labels the
Yearly Meeting’s religiously mandated actions as a ‘failure’ to submit to
government coercion, and brands the [Quaker] theological scruples as
‘unreasonable’ and deserving of harsh penalties.” The news release from
PYM
adds, “Quakers have long been known for their religious pacifism, opposition
to war, and support of religious freedom and freedom of conscience.
PYM
regrets that being true to its faith has now brought us into conflict with
the government. The Quaker organization sees itself as defending freedom of
religion and freedom of conscience — and not just for itself, but for all
those who desire to be both good citizens and people of faith. While
PYM
regrets the need to resort to legal action, it looks forward to a full airing
of the issues involved in a public forum where both the sound reasons and
religious principles that guide this Quaker organization’s actions may be
upheld.
PYM’s
defense will rest on the constitutional right to freedom of religion
generally, and particularly as upheld and restated in the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of .”
The issue reported on how far
they’d gotten with that argument:
On , A federal judge ruled that
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting must comply with a levy on the wages of war tax
refuser Priscilla Adams, but rejected a 50 percent penalty desired by the
Internal Revenue Service.
U.S. District
Judge Stewart Dalzell agreed with the Quaker argument that complying with the
levy “substantially burdens its exercise of religion,” because, as
PYM
General Secretary Thomas Jeavons earlier testified, the organization
“considers it a sacred duty to support the conscientious actions of its
individual members, especially in such historic witnesses as the Peace
Testimony.” Judge Stewan Dalzell also agreed that the
PYM
defense “raised novel and important questions,” thus demonstrating in this
instance that the previous refusal of
PYM
to comply was not a frivolous activity. But he disagreed that the
IRS had
practical alternative means to collect taxes from Priscilla Adams. The
government should not be required “to engage in a time-consuming, and
possibly fruitless, scavenger hunt for other assets.” In
, the Third
U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals had already rejected Priscilla Adams’s claim that the government
could devise a means for earmarking taxes for nonmilitary expenditures,
stating that there were “particularly difficult problems with administration
should exceptions on religious grounds be carved out by the courts.”
That issue also noted:
Film students from Brooklyn Friends School are directing and producing a
video documentary about Quaker peace activist Priscilla Adams. The students
came to Friends Center in Philadelphia to interview her about how her
religious beliefs led her to refuse payment of taxes in order to avoid
contributing to military funding. The students also interviewed George Lakey,
head of Training for Change, and Gene Hillman, adult religious education
coordinator for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. This documentary film may be an
entry for Bridge Film Festival, which is open to middle and upper school
students at Quaker schools worldwide.
The issue noted that the film had
been made — a 16-minute short titled A Need to Witness. And hey, look — it’s on-line:
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance was largely found in infrequent mentions in the back pages of the Friends Journal in .
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal holds out the hope that the end of the dilemma of Quakers paying for war is just a quick law away
The issue noted a new information sheet that had been put together by “National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, New Call to Peacemaking, Church of the Brethren, Mennonite Central Committee, and the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting” called Stages of Conscientious Objection to Military Taxes that listed “five steps to ending one’s own contribution to the war machine.”
(Here is the edition of the sheet.)
That same issue included a review of a murder mystery, Quaker Testimony by Irene Allen, whose victim was “a young woman being evicted from her home for nonpayment of taxes.”
On , Quaker war tax resister Gordon Browne addressed a letter to the judge hearing his and his wife’s case in which they were encouraging the court to find that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act required the government to make concessions for religiously-motivated conscientious objectors to military taxation.
This letter, and an accompanying article by Browne, did not appear in the Journal until
After years as military tax refusers, during which we experienced the usual seizures of assets by the Internal Revenue Service, Edith Browne and I felt that the passage of the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act might provide us some relief.
Past court decisions had made clear that exemptions from such taxes on the grounds of conscientious objection to participation in war or in preparation for war would be denied.
The new act, however, suggested that we might be exempted from the interest and penalties routinely added to whatever the IRS claimed we owed.
We filed for refunds, therefore, for the interest and penalties for the years , and, when the refunds were denied, brought suit in Federal District Court in Vermont for their recovery.
Though we had filed our case independently of any others, we soon learned that Priscilla Adams in Pennsylvania and Rosa Packard in New York, both, like us, Quakers, had filed similar suits in their areas.
In responding to the three suits, the attorneys for the IRS linked them, responding, for example, to our suit by alleging to the court that we had followed a practice in our tax refusal which was Rosa Packard’s method, not ours.
The government moved for dismissal without a hearing, and our case was dismissed, as Priscilla Adams’ case had been earlier in Tax Court and as Rosa Packard’s was subsequently in District Court.
Feeling that we had not been heard, we have filed an appeal.
A relative novice in legal proceedings, I was struck by the fact that the legitimate requirement of objectivity in dealing with legal matters risks the depersonalization of the search for justice, which is, after all, about human beings, both as individuals and in community.
With our case decided in Vermont (the Appeals Court is in New York), I felt a strong need to write to our Vermont judge as a person.
I did so but have received no response.
For those who might be interested, I offer below what my letter said.
I omit the judge’s name and address, lest some generous Friends be tempted to write to him on our behalf.
I did not write with the purpose of applying political pressure but to try to establish a personal link.
Edith Browne and I are not familiar with legal practices, our present case asking the refund of penalties and interest charged by the Internal Revenue Service being the first case we have ever been involved in.
It is my understanding, however, that having accepted the government’s motion to dismiss our petition, you are no longer involved in the case, and it will not be improper for me to write to you about it.
Naturally, we were disappointed with your decision and are appealing it to another court, in part because we felt the decision distorted what we have done and said and partly because we feel certain that it was the intention of the authors of the First Amendment to the Constitution and of the recent Restoration of Religious Freedom Act to make room in our national community for views such as ours.
That certainty is a source of great pride to us.
We know that there are many places in the world where a claim such as ours not only would have no status but might place the claimants themselves in danger.
We have been in such places for varying lengths of time: in Greece under the fascist colonels; in Turkey when it was under martial law because of terrorist bombings; in Colombia when it was under martial law because of assassinations of members of the judiciary; in South Africa under apartheid, where even to visit our coreligionists in Soweto without government permission made us and our friends liable to arrest.
We are grateful for the individual freedoms we citizens of the United States enjoy.
To us, one of the most important of these is freedom of conscience, provided for in the “exercise” section of the First Amendment.
The founders of our nation knew about its need from painful experience in the religious wars and persecutions that were so often a curse in Europe.
Further, they had seen the effort to import such ills to the New World.
Four members of our own religious denomination, Quakers, were hanged on Boston Common and 14 more were waiting in prison for such treatment when Charles Ⅱ ordered the Puritan authorities to end such executions.
That did not prevent, however, their continuing to exile Quakers and others who held differing religious views from theirs or, in the case of many Quakers, to whip them out of the colony at the tail of a cart, or to bore hot irons through the tongues of those who had tried to preach in public, or to cut off their ears.
All of those things were done to Quakers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
That history is not pretty, but it made our forebears sensitive to the rights of conscience.
For more than 30 years, Edith and I, seeking to fulfill both our civic responsibilities and our understanding of God’s will for us, have paid our full tax, sending that part intended for the Department of Defense to life-affirming and life-supporting organizations.
We cannot in conscience pay for war or its preparation.
During that long period, the IRS has seized our assets to pay that part we sent elsewhere and imposed, in addition, interest and penalties.
This has meant that we annualy paid some of our taxes twice, once to life-supporting organizations and again to the IRS when our funds were seized.
We knew no way out of this situation, except to suffer it.
When the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act was passed we thought that, at last, we might be spared those penalties and that interest, which, to us, seemed to be saying, in denial of our finest American traditions of religious freedom, “Every conscience has its price.
How much is yours?”
In your opinion, you suggested, as Patrick Leahy has in correspondence with me when I have sought his help in providing legislative relief, that consideration of matters of conscience in regard to taxes would result in chaos.
We are not aware of chaos resulting from the legislative provisions for conscientious objectors to conscription of their bodies.
Wise legislators seemed to us to provide for conscientious objectors to conscription of their resources through the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act.
And if it is chaos we fear, what chaos is worse than that resulting from war?
I did not write this letter intending to argue our case, though I guess, perhaps, I have.
I really do mean to leave that to the lawyers.
Rather, I wrote to ask who will defend liberty of conscience if individuals like us and the courts do not.
There are always those among us who would impose their religious views on everyone else if they could, just as there are those who would insist that religion provides no legitimate exceptions in consideration of public policy.
It has been the genius of our system to try to provide a balance between those extremes that infringes on the freedoms of no one.
I enclose two [several] pages from the Book of Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.
It is the volume that describes the experience of Friends and the practices arising from those experiences to which most Friends subscribe.
I hope you will find them interesting and informative.
I particularly call your attention to the story of William Rotch of Nantucket.
Like him, if we are in error, we are to be pitied, but, also, like him, we can do no other than we are.
A history of the Atlanta, Georgia, Meeting during the Vietnam War that appeared in the issue mentioned that the Meeting had “refused to pay the ten percent war tax imposed on telephone bills.”
That issue also noted that the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund was still doggedly gnawing away at the federal bureaucracy, this time meeting “with tax policy officials at the Department of the Treasury” to try to persuade them that the law would be in their interests and that they should override IRS objections to the bill.
In the course of a book review in the same issue, Errol Hess remembered his “struggles with my own complicity in the [Vietnam] war by virtue of paying taxes that supported it; [and] my decision to go into the underground economy, to live cheaply, to refuse to comply with the IRS as I’d refused to comply with my draft board.”
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting met in .
A report in the Journal noted: “Frank and Elizabeth Massey’s testimony against war taxes led to an ‘opportunity’ on the doorstep of the yearly meeting office with an Internal Revenue Service agent, an explanation of its basis in faith.
We continue to struggle with how best to provide practical support to these leadings.”
The issue included this note about questionable tactics by IRS collection agents:
The Internal Revenue Service cashed a photocopy of a check from a Quaker war-tax resister.
Grace Montgomery of Stamford-Greenwich (Conn.) Meeting has tried to resolve this issue for several years.
Montgomery places the military portion of her federal income tax in a Friends escrow account.
The IRS then usually levies her bank account for the amount owed.
But in the IRS cashed a photocopy of Montgomery’s check to the escrow account.
Her bank accepted it even though it was not genuine and was made out to “The Religious Society of Friends.”
(From The Mennonite, )
An obituary notice for Richard M. Johnson in the same issue noted that “Dick found himself philosophically opposed to the idea of paying income and war taxes, and he and [his wife] Cynthia chose to resign their jobs and live out their lives on a nontaxable income as subsistence homesteaders.
They moved to Monroe, Maine, along with three of their four children, where they helped establish a community land trust.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In , it became increasingly clear that the Iraq War was a catastrophe inflicted by madmen who would stoop to any lie to satisfy their bloodlust, and held no limits sacred — not even those on torture.
How would those Quakers who were providing the funding for this disaster respond?
Sad to say, except from a couple of references to the Priscilla Adams legal case that I mentioned earlier (see ♇ ) only one issue of Friends Journal in all of — the issue — had anything even remotely substantial to say about war tax resistance.
An op-ed by John Calvi on page five urged Quakers to address the torture issue, and put it this way: “The spiritual consequences of torture are that you either are moved to act against it or you stifle and smolder.
For each of us who have paid for torture through our taxes, the dilemma is strong.”
Calvi didn’t recommend or even mention tax resistance, but I’m working with what I’ve got.
A page 32 note mentioned a “Peace Tax Return” being promoted by NWTRCC, saying that “Thousands of U.S. taxpayers opposed to the war in Iraq” could be expected to fill out this protest-return which “would be sent to the IRS or an elected official.”
The form included an option for people who were paying their taxes but wanted to do so under protest, and a second option for people who were refusing to pay some or all of their federal income taxes.
The note said that this tactic “is modeled on a return produced by Conscience: The Peace Tax Campaign in Britain, one of many groups around the world that are lobbying for legislation that will allow conscientious objectors to war to pay their taxes into a special fund that will not be used by the military.”
That’s it.
Sorry.
Fortunately this does seem to be the low point, and there is a steady trickle of war tax resistance mentions — nothing like the storm of — but at least a flicker of the old fire.
(, though, is looking a little sketchier… I’ve only seen one reference so far, and that one in an obituary.)
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.
We have reached the end of the NWTRCC national gathering, held this time at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana.
The bulk of ’s portion of the conference was largely a series of workshops on subjects like:
basic war tax resistance (what we call informally “WTR101”)
the peace tax fund campaign
military counter-recruitment and support for conscientious objectors
advanced war tax resistance
the history of Quaker war tax resistance
“economic disobedience”
the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and its alternatives: a case study in East Africa
war tax resistance questions & answers
conscientious objection to the military and taxes for the military
Some of these sessions ran at the same time, and for a couple of them (the WTR101 and history of Quaker war tax resistance) I was one of the presenters, so I only was able to take notes on one of the two “economic disobedience” sessions.
In that session, Erica Weiland began by summarizing my report on the Spanish “desobediencia integral” movement and then she brought us up to date with new developments.
These include the fair.coop “Earth cooperative for a fair economy” and its alternative currency, the “FairCoin,” which is somewhat Bitcoin-like but is explicitly designed to promote a certain sort of economic model.
(I’ve looked at some of the FairCoin outreach material, but whether from translation difficulties or my amateur economics knowledge, I can’t quite figure out what makes it tick.)
The war tax resistance movement in the United States has made some contact with this Spanish movement and we’ve started to explore situating our work in the terminology and framework of this “comprehensive disobedience” movement, which helps to connect our work with the emerging sharing economy movement, Occupy, the modern environmentalist movement, and things of that sort.
Erica was joined by Jim Stockwell, who gave us a more historical perspective of how this sort of thinking weaves into a long thread connecting decentralism, Georgism, cooperative villages, the thought of Ralph Borsodi, and other related ideas.
Erica added some insight from her research into the cooperative movement among African-Americans in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods.
Erica then introduced us to some of what the Strike Debt group have been doing lately.
This group grew out of Occupy and the Rolling Jubilee project.
One of the actions associated with this group was the purchase and retirement of a large amount of medical debt.
They then purchased and retired some student debt in the same way.
Debts like these are packaged into groups based on how likely the debts are to be recovered.
Those debts that are very unlikely to be recovered, often because the debtor is too poor to pay, can be purchased for pennies on the dollar.
By retiring these debts, the project can reduce the stress of collection agency harassment on such people.
They are also trying to unionize students who have debt to particularly exploitative colleges to encourage them to strike collectively for debt relief.
The Strike Debt Operations Manual was republished a while back with a new chapter on tax resistance, which was largely based on NWTRCC literature.
We brainstormed some ideas for trying to connect the U.S. war tax resistance movement with a movement for a larger grassroots economic transformation.
Some ideas we tossed around included:
the use of community development loan funds (such as Equity Trust) as investments for our alternative funds or as ways of shielding assets from the IRS in less-visible zero-interest loans
encouraging the various regional alternative funds to coordinate their grants so as to support projects that build new economic models in a more systematic and well-publicized way
creating an alternative fund that uses a different granting model — rather than giving grants annually at a particular time, give grants at irregular intervals in reaction to acute needs.
War tax resistance legal advisor Peter Goldberger
Yesterday, attorney Peter Goldberger, who has worked closely with the war tax resistance community for many years, brought us up to date on how the climate for pressing for the legal recognition of conscientious objection to military taxation in the courts has changed in recent years, particularly in the wake of the recent “Hobby Lobby” case.
When I read the “Hobby Lobby” ruling, I didn’t see much that seemed encouraging.
There were some hopeful-sounding parts of it, like this bit from the majority opinion’s summary:
The belief of the Hahns and Greens implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is immoral for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another.
It is not for this Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable.
But the justices were careful to remind war tax resisters that we’re out of luck if we think we can use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to assert the legal validity of our beliefs:
United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252, which upheld the payment of Social Security taxes despite an employer’s religious objection, is not analogous.
It turned primarily on the special problems associated with a national system of taxation; and if Lee were a RFRA case, the fundamental point would still be that there is no less restrictive alternative to the categorical requirement to pay taxes.
The “Hobby Lobby” opinion itself expands on this a bit:
Lee was a free-exercise, not a RFRA, case, but if the issue in Lee were analyzed under the RFRA framework, the fundamental point would be that there simply is no less restrictive alternative to the categorical requirement to pay taxes.
Because of the enormous variety of government expenditures funded by tax dollars, allowing tax-payers to withhold a portion of their tax obligations on religious ground would lead to chaos.
Recognizing exemptions from the contraceptive mandate is very different…
The “Hobby Lobby” dissent goes so far as to describe the opinion as one that grants new powers of legal conscientious objection to just about everybody except tax resisters:
In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.
If you hoped the dissenters might be more sympathetic to the use of the RFRA in war tax resistance cases, you won’t find much support for your hopes here.
The dissenters for the most part seemed inclined to generally weaken the reach of the RFRA.
But again, this was all just my first impression, and I’m not a lawyer.
Peter Goldberger is, and he’s worked in the area of conscientious objection and the free exercise clause for a long time, and he gave the “Hobby Lobby” decision a lot of thought and found some interesting angles.
For one thing, when the Supreme Court used conscientious objection to military taxation as a reductio in Lee and Hobby Lobby, it did so in cases that themselves did not concern conscientious objection to military taxation.
They assumed that the government could not accommodate the beliefs of such resisters without “chaos” breaking out — that it would be too onerous for the government to accommodate such objectors.
But there was nobody there to argue the objectors’ side and to present evidence that this was not necessarily true.
Perhaps in a more direct case, objectors might be able to present evidence that would convince the court to revise its point of view.
The Hobby Lobby case also seems like it might usefully expand the right of conscientious objectors to military service.
Previously the court had ruled that there was no constitutional right to conscientious objection, and so objectors enjoyed only those rights that Congress had chosen to grant them by statute.
The language of Hobby Lobby seems to suggest that now, the government will have to prove a fairly strictly-defined compelling government interest if it wants to restrict the rights of draftees or military personnel who are or who become conscientious objectors for religious reasons.
For example, Goldberger suggests, Congress has defined legal conscientious objection to military service so that it only applies to pacifists — that is, to people who object to all war.
It does not apply to religious objectors, for instance Catholics, who belong to a “just war” tradition which asks them to evaluate war by certain criteria and conscientiously object only to a subset of them.
Goldberger suggests that the new RFRA standard, as elaborated in Hobby Lobby, could invalidate this and force the government to accommodate more varieties of religious conscientious objection.
Goldberger thinks this might also be a good time for a challenge from someone of the variety of war tax resisters who resists by putting the amount of the tax into an escrow account and telling the IRS that it may seize the money if it wants to, but that the resister is unwilling to pay it voluntarily.
Since the IRS could accommodate the resister’s religiously-based conscientious objection, without undue difficulty for the government and without unleashing “chaos,” by simply seizing the money, perhaps the objector has a legal right not to be further penalized or subject to legal sanctions of other sorts for such a stand.
Finally, since Hobby Lobby (somewhat notoriously) decided that corporations can, under some circumstances, have some rights of their own under the RFRA, this may be a way to ask the Court to revisit a case similar to the Priscilla Adams case that it turned down on procedural grounds back in the day.
Adams was a Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (a Quaker corporation) employee and a war tax resister.
Her employer went to court to try to gain the right not to have to withhold taxes from her salary as this would force them to participate in violating her conscience.
Myself, I don’t see a lot of use in looking to the legal system for help, but I think this sort of thing is interesting and kind of fun to explore.
Philadelphia (AP) — A Quaker who refuses to pay part of her taxes in protest of the government’s military activities is standing fast despite a Supreme Court rejection of her appeal.
“I’m deeply saddened that they aren’t going to hear the case, but they needed to look at other ways that I could pay taxes without contributing to war efforts,” Priscilla Adams said after ’s court’s action.
“I will continue to refuse to pay until the government stops using my money for the purpose of killing people,” she said.
The nation’s highest court turned away appeals by Ms. Adams and two other members of the Religious Society of Friends who said the Internal Revenue Service violates their religious freedom by charging fees and interest for delays in paying the portion of their federal tax that funds the military.
Ms. Adams, of Burlington, N.J., owes the federal government thousands of dollars in back taxes and interest.
She withheld a portion of federal income taxes paid for five years in the 1980s and ’90s and was assessed late fees and interest.
Gordon and Edith Browne, Quakers who own homes in New Hampshire and Vermont, also refused to pay a portion of their taxes.
The Brownes sued the IRS in federal court in Vermont; Ms. Adams sued in U.S. Tax Court.
Both lawsuits unsuccessfully sought refunds for the fees and interest the Quakers were forced to pay.
Their appeals did not contest having to pay 100 percent of their tax bill when the IRS forces their hand.
Instead, the Quakers cited a “religious hardship” and argued they should be able to pay the back taxes without any penalties or interest.
The justices let stand rulings that had gone against the Quakers, allowing the IRS to impose late fees and interest in addition to back taxes.
Ms. Adams said she will not pay the taxes, even if her beliefs land her in prison.
“They could create a peaceful tax pool that would collect taxes that would only go to non-war activities, but they chose to not listen to reason,” she said.
Her resolve is not uncommon, according to Quakers and members of the War Resisters League, a New York-based pacifist group.
They say the rulings against Ms. Adams and the Brownes will do little to deter those who do not pay.
“If people hadn’t refused to respond to the draft, there wouldn’t be conscientious objection statutes like there are now,” said Ruth Benn, the league’s director.
“Someone has to have the courage to stand up for what they believe in.
Until that happens, there won’t be any opportunity for change.”
Peggy Morscheck, director of the Quaker Information Center in Philadelphia, said only a “very small” percentage of the nation’s 92,000 Quakers withhold portions of their taxes.
“There are many, many ways to act on the peace testimony, and a lot of folks do not feel they can bear witness to that testimony through war-tax resistance,” Morscheck said.
This is the forty-fourth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
we reach the mid-2000s and the start of the war on Iraq.
Once again Caesar asks for more money to provide more weapons — this time to
launch a war in Iraq. Even the Pope and nearly all the major Christian
denominations in the United States, not just those in the historic peace
church tradition, have said this is not a just war. We know 25 to 35 percent
of our tax money will go to support the machines of war that have taken the
lives of our friends. In the current hi-tech war-making, Caesar covets our
dollars more than our bodies.
We agonize in our consciences. If a man were to run into our house and demand
we give him a knife because he wants to go kill our neighbor, would we give it
to him? Of course not.
Is it different if it is Caesar who asks for that knife? What shall we give
Caesar? Anything Caesar asks for? Or only what belongs to Caesar? What does
belong to Caesar? We try to seek the mind of a compassionate Christ in this
dilemma. Within our souls we feel we cannot willfully put that knife into the
hands of those who will bring harm and death to friends — known and
unknown — around the world.
Once again we fill out our 1040 Tax Form correctly, but again we write a
letter to the Internal Revenue Service — and government officials — to explain
why we cannot pay some or all the military percentage of our income tax. We
explain that we direct our monies instead to our church’s relief and
development programs. Such efforts, we believe, build sustainable, peaceful
lives for people around the world and probably do more to engender good will
and security for Americans than any war. Under biblical principles and under
the principles of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals after World War Ⅱ we know
we cannot hide behind the inhumane orders of an official or even a government.
Each of us is ultimately responsible to God and our fellow human beings for
our actions.
The IRS
sends us notices of “unpaid taxes.” Eventually they may freeze our wages or
bank account in order to seize the money. (Under the “aiding and abetting”
considerations, it feels different to us whether the man seizes the knife from
our kitchen or we give it to him without protest.) Sometimes the
IRS has
not followed through. We especially salute our friends who live under the
taxable income level as a way of affirming life and walking lightly on the
earth.
When our international friends hear there are Christians who withhold even a
token amount of the “military tax” as a cry for peace, many of
them — including friends of other faiths — have expressed appreciation that
Christians here are ready to witness in this way for a God of peace.
The April issue of Mennonite Central Committee’s A Common
Place reported that ,
MCC
has given more than $4.5 million to Afghanistan relief. According to War
Resister’s League, the United States spent $46 million in one hour of the war
on Iraq — more than 10 times the amount
MCC
gave to rehabilitate Afghanistan. If for no other reason than Christian
stewardship, we should refuse to pay the 47 percent of federal income, estate
or gift taxes that fund the current and past military budget. Redirect them
instead to do what Jesus asked of us: Care for the enemy, teach our children,
heal the sick, lend to the needy without interest.
I urge all who work and pray for peace to support the passage of the Religious
Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act, a bill that would provide that the federal tax
payments of conscientious objectors to war be used only for nonmilitary
purposes. Until that bill is passed, I urge you to use all legal and ethical
ways to lower your taxable income and to consider redirecting the military
percentage of the tax money you owe. The Mennonite Church needs to become more
proactive, prophetic and pastoral as we address the consequences of the draft
of war taxes.
The
MCC
awarded Zachary Kurtz
top honors in a “Peace Oratorical Contest” for his speech on war tax
resistance, according to the edition.
The edition noted the ongoing
court battle between the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Quakers) and the
IRS.
“The Internal Revenue Service is threatening
PYM
with a penalty of more than $20,000 for refusing to garnish the wages of
employee and war-tax-resister Priscilla Adams.
PYM
has decided to challenge the
IRS on
all possible grounds, including constitutional and statutory religious
freedom…”
Timothy Godshall’s article on death & taxes
appeared in the edition. It
pointed out the grotesquely enormous
U.S. military
budget, and the sacrifices conscientious objectors are forced to make to
reduce their complicity with it, and used this as a launching pad to plug the
Peace Tax Fund bill.
Rex
J. Rempel and Lenae K. Nofziger wrote in to the
issue to say that because
“[r]oughly 53 percent of our current income taxes” will be spent “on soldiers,
weapons, and debt from prior wars” they had decided they would be “withholding
$53 from our payment due. Obviously this is a symbolic amount, but it is a step
toward fully following God’s call for us.”
After World War Ⅱ, a Jewish rabbi in Germany said what shocked him most was
not the terror of the Nazis but the silence of the good people in Germany.
Today what disturbs me more than the horrendous atrocities of presidents Bush,
Clinton and the
U.S. Empire for
many decades is how most
U.S. peace
activists, progressives, Quakers, Mennonites and members of Amnesty
International pay
U.S. federal income
tax for these atrocities: to rob, terrorize, blind, cripple, paralyze, make
homeless and murder our sisters and brothers worldwide. We get what we pay
for.
Nothing in life is more important than refusing to pay federal income tax for
war — no matter who is president. The best way to refuse to pay federal income
tax for war, with no fines and no threats from the
IRS,
is to live simply under the taxable level. The federal income taxable level
for for a single person who is under 65 and
not blind is $7,950. I lived on
$3,390 — less than half the federal income taxable level.
I have no right to pay tax to do to other people what I do not want them to do
to me. I have paid no federal income tax for 25 years. I pledge now, at age
58, to live simply, to own no car and to pay no federal income tax for war for
the rest of my life. This is nonviolent revolution.
There was a brief write-up
about the 10th International Conference on War Tax
Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns that happened in
, in the
edition.
H.A. Penner
wrote in to the edition to
explain his symbolic withholding formula:
To express my conscientious objection to war, I am withholding from my current
federal income tax payment an amount equal to one dime for every billion
dollars in the
U.S. military
budget. I am donating that amount — $78.30 — to the National Campaign for a
Peace Tax Fund to be used in the pursuit of peace.
For a time the Bixlers withheld the
U.S. telephone tax
but found that this decision resulted only in confused correspondence. Now
their deductions are sufficiently large to cut payment of federal taxes. “When
charitable donations go up,” says Sam, “taxes go down.” One time the
IRS
asked them to show receipts.
A letter-to-the-editor in the Catholic Worker promoted NWTRCC:
Ithaca, NY
Dear Catholic Worker Friends,
I hope this letter finds you in good spirits.
In these times of heightened and outrageous war fervor, it seems vital that we continue to do what we can to further the cause of peace.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) is currently conducting an outreach effort to promote the work that we do: serving as a clearinghouse for the conscientious war tax resistance movement in the US.
For those who are questioning their contribution to this government’s increasing militaristic emphasis, NWTRCC can extend a hand with a variety of resources and contacts.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee sees poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, economic exploitation, environmental destruction and the militarization of law enforcement as integrally linked with the militarism which we abhor.
Through the redirection of our tax dollars, National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee members contribute directly to the struggle for peace and justice for all.
For information, please contact us at NWTRCC, PO Box 6512, Ithaca, NY 14851.
In solidarity, David Meyers
Another article in that issue promoted the New York City People’s Life Fund for tax redirection:
NYC People’s Life Fund
As approaches, we are reminded of the crucial act of war tax resistance.
In , almost 50% of the US fiscal budget went to war tax and past military expenditures.
Today’s war tax resisters are people from all walks of life who have in common a deeply felt opposition to paying taxes in support of the military establishment.
The New York City People’s Life Fund (PLF) is the direct offspring of New York City War Tax Resistance.
Founded on , in direct response to escalating war spending and declining funds for social and economic problems, the fund redirects tax-resisted monies to assist people in need.
For more than two decades, the New York City People’s Life Fund has offered grants and loans to New York City-based groups such as Coalition for the Homeless, 4th Street Food Co-Op, John Heuss House, The Living Theater, Metropolitan Council on Housing, Theater for the New City, and Workers Defense League, Inc.
This spring, the New York City People’s Life Fund is proud to announce the upcoming publication of Why Just Survive? — Flourish! a New Yorker’s Guide to Jobs, Healthcare, Education, Alternate Living, and Leisure Time Activity.
Addressed particularly to New Yorkers, this useful sourcebook is designed to enrich the lives of its readers and promote change, leading toward an alternative and more communitarian approach to life.
For further information, please contact the New York City People’s Life Fund, or New York City War Tax Resistance, at 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012.
The following front-page article appeared in the issue of The Catholic Worker:
War Resisters and Taxes
By Ruth Benn and Ed Hedemann
What better time to be a war tax resister than now?
The horrifying death and destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, funded by US tax dollars at the shocking rate of $5–6 billion a month, demands the strongest protests.
Withholding money from the government will certainly get its attention, and the more people who do it publicly, the more war tax resistance will grow, bringing us back around to getting more of the government’s attention.
When Ed began his life of crime as a war tax resister during the Vietnam War, that was an equally critical time to resist.
Pictures of the war were on the news every night and hundreds of lives were lost — and reported to the public — on a daily basis.
We saw the body bags coming home and the Gold Star mothers protesting.
The draft was real, and for Ed, having refused induction into the military, the next sensible step was to refuse to pay for any of it.
As a student with not much in the way of income, a telephone had to be purchased so that war tax resistance could begin.
Telephone tax resistance among peace activists was well-known and thousands refused to pay.
In , the Johnson administration brought to Congress a bill to continue the excise tax at 10% (rather than phase it out as had been intended since the Korean War), prompting the famous quote from Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee: “it is Vietnam, and only the Vietnam operation, which makes this bill necessary.”
After the war in Indochina finally came to an end, many dropped out of the peace movement and stopped resisting war taxes, but others saw yet another equally important time to resist.
The Cold War was still in full swing.
The US and the Soviet Union were stockpiling bombs and challenging their best scientists to outdo each other with their destructive power and speed of delivery.
The threat of nuclear war was growing, and the whole ecosystem was endangered by the environmental destruction which is a side effect of building these horrific weapons.
At the time Ruth began resisting, President Jimmy Carter — who looks like a good guy by today’s standards — was bringing us draft registration and growing military budgets.
As before, the connection between knowing that you would refuse to be part of the military and knowing that your tax dollars pay for someone else to do it hit home.
Once again, it seemed like a good time to be a war tax resister.
With the Reagan era of , the military budget skyrocketed, and children in Latin America were living a nightmare as family members were killed in wars sponsored by the US.
We said to ourselves, “What better time to be a war tax resister?” Despite the “warm and fuzzy” legacy that Nancy Reagan wants to promote, US taxpayers are still stuck with huge debt from that era and the boondoggle of the Star Wars missile shield program.
George H.W. Bush brought us the first Gulf War and the focus on the Middle East reminded us that without US tax dollars, Israel could not support its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Then there was Kosovo, military aid to Colombia, and always the willing commitment by elected representatives to throw billions of US tax dollars at corporate contracts loaded with waste, mismanagement, and cost overruns.
All of this and, at the same time, a litany of needs around the world that could be solved with a serious commitment of money and human resources.
Who can look at the Sudan today and not be shamed — shamed — that the money and human energy devastating Iraq is not being used to help solve the crisis there instead?
During our combined 51 years of war tax resistance, we’ve openly refused somewhere around $97,000 in federal taxes.
That money has been rerouted to all kinds of non-governmental groups who try to ease the suffering caused by the military priorities of this country.
On one hand, our resistance adds up to one small part on a single cruise missile.
On the other hand, the government doesn’t like it, and they don’t want other people to get the idea that refusing to pay taxes is a way to demand change.
Why else would the IRS be the most feared agency in the federal system?
In addition, there is a personal satisfaction in giving to good causes, even if the amounts are not huge.
The risks and inconveniences of this resistance are real — ongoing collection efforts by the IRS made up mostly of piles of letters, levies that can lead to the loss of a job, and an occasional trip to court.
These days, the IRS puts most of its collection efforts against war tax resisters into sending letters demanding payment, and once in a while they’ll make bank account and salary levies.
But one group in New Jersey is headed to court for their refusal to pay.
The Restored Israel of Yahweh is a small religious community in southern New Jersey that has a long history of resistance to war taxes.
Their leader was arrested and jailed in for tax resistance, and the group has also supported military resisters over the years.
On , three members of the community were arrested by federal marshals and taken to US District Court in Camden, New Jersey.
They were charged with “conspiring to defraud the United States for the purpose of impeding, impairing, obstructing and defeating the lawful government functions of the IRS in ascertaining, computing, assessing, and collecting taxes; Tax Evasion; and failure to file Tax Returns.” The weight of these charges is unusual with war tax resistance, and the community seeks support in their efforts to resist government interference with their religious beliefs.
Quakers in Pennsylvania have also been in court recently.
One staff member, Priscilla Adams of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) is a longtime war tax resister, and the Meeting has tried to honor her resistance by not sending her withheld taxes to the IRS.
The money was placed in a bank account, available for the IRS to seize, but not paid over willingly.
The IRS sued last year, demanding that the Meeting hand over the money and asking a 50% penalty, all totaling about $60,000.
In , a judge ruled that PYM must pay the principle to the IRS, but not the penalty; the ruling indicated that the judge felt that the Religious Freedom Act had some validity and left the door open for PYM to find some other way to handle the withheld taxes that could stand up in court someday.
These more dramatic — though very rare — cases, while used by the IRS to keep up the fear, are also the ones that bring wider attention to war tax resistance.
Each time an article appears, more people call to ask how to resist, challenged by those who stand up for their convictions, despite the legal consequences.
The act of refusing to pay one’s income taxes for war is the simplest and easiest form of direct action against war: file your tax return (IRS form 1040), withhold some or all of the taxes due, and include a letter of explanation.
What would happen if every peace activist refused to send $1 owed to the IRS and enclosed a protest letter with their refusal?
Resisting a token amount is very low risk but forces the government to deal with the protest.
Since the election, calls and emails to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee indicate a growing interest in tax resistance and in making it visible.
Many people say that they would resist if they felt they were part of a campaign where the numbers could more easily be tallied.
War tax resistance can be a lonely affair at times, and everyone wants to know, “How many war tax resisters are there?” How many of you receiving this paper resist, but no one knows?
It’s time we all stepped up our vocal refusal to pay for war.
There have been plenty of reasons to resist over the last fifty years, but there’s no better time than now to stop paying for war and for the ongoing military spending that allows the government to wage it.
If we don’t do it, the era of endless war will certainly become a reality.
For more information and resources call the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee at 800‒269‒7464.
