Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Mennonites / Amish →
Marian Franz
Much of the anti-war movement has lately turned away from marching and pleading with legislators and such and has decided to try to make the U.S. less eager to make war by exacerbating its “human resources” shortage.
I think this new focus shows promise.
It has a concrete, measurable goal that can be reached incrementally, results can potentially be seen both on a large scale and on a very human scale, and it is an actual, non-symbolic impediment to militarism, making it more difficult and more expensive.
There is a danger, though, that by focusing on encouraging desertion and conscientious objection within the military, and on discouraging recruiting, the anti-war movement will fall in to the easy habit of regarding its struggle as something that mostly involves other people — members of the military and potential recruits — changing their behavior.
One way to address this is to remind people that conscientious objection is for everyone.
A good example of this is provided by the Church of the Brethren Christian Citizenship Seminar, which was held in New York and Washington, D.C.:
Former conscientious objectors (COs) Enten Pfaltzgraff Eller and Clarence Quay shared the stories of their struggles, as did more more recent COs Andrew Engdahl and Anita Cole.
Eller and Quay each chose not to register and instead did alternative service, although Eller’s service came after a lengthy court case.
Engdahl and Cole arrived at their decisions after entering the military, and they asked for reclassification.
“When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,’ that has to be now, not later,” Eller said.
“You have to struggle with where God is calling you and how you’re going to follow.”…
Several speakers addressed a different form of conscientious objection, war tax resistance.
Phil and Louise Rieman of Indianapolis and Alice and Ron Martin-Adkins of Washington, D.C., explained why they had decided not to pay the portion of their taxes that support military operations — and the consequences that can come with that choice.
Marian Franz of the National Peace Tax Fund provided additional background on this form of witness.
“If we say that war is wrong, and we believe war is wrong, then why would we pay for it?” Louise Rieman said.
“It was more than I expected,” said Chrissy Sollenberger, a youth participant from Annville, Pa.
“I didn’t think there was so much about conscientious objection to talk about.
I just thought it was saying no to being drafted, but it’s so much more than that.…
It feels like we have more power now to make those choices.”
I wonder how many conscientious Christians who subconsciously wish they didn’t need to pay war taxes, are of the mind that they can’t resist payment of these military taxes until a bill is passed to make it legal?
I wonder if Congress ever passed a bill of this nature (including the special provisions granted conscientious objectors in WW Ⅱ), that was not in the self-interests of Congress itself?
I wonder whether the most effective way to get Congress to pass a bill would be, not to lobby Congress, but to generate a huge movement of conscientious objectors, i.e., military tax resisters — people who resist the payment of military taxes because they are persuaded that it is sinful to pay military taxes and that the faithful way to follow Jesus is to resist payment?
I wonder if Jesus ever, ever, had a vision of faithfulness and attempted to implement the vision by lobbying Rome (the Imperial Power) to get permission to do so?
I wonder why in all these many years Marian Franz and the people behind the Peace Tax Fund have insisted on doing things so “a**-backward” — so contrary to both efficiency and faithfulness — common sense and the way of Jesus?
I’m fresh back from the NWTRCC national conference, which was held in Eugene, Oregon, and hosted by the enthusiastic and welcoming Eugene “Taxes for Peace Not War” group.
I’ve got a binder full of handouts and hastily-scratched notes that I took whenever I found a spare moment.
Today I’ll share some of my impressions of the gathering and of the current state of the war tax resistance movement.
Frivolity
Many of the attendees were concerned about the IRS being more aggressive in sending out notices of “frivolous filing” penalties to resisters who send letters of protest that explain their refusal to pay along with their tax returns.
One couple who were first-time resisters and had only refused to pay a token $50 last year were assessed “frivolous filing” penalties of $5,000 — each, even though they had filed a single return jointly — though they had filled out their return accurately and completely.
The IRS also insists that once they have assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty, you must pay that penalty before you can appeal it!
The law seems pretty clear that the “frivolous filing” penalty is only meant to apply if the tax return is incomplete or incorrect, but the IRS seems to be applying it haphazardly — not only to people who file complete and accurate returns but who refuse to pay some portion, but even to people who file and pay every cent but who merely inclose a letter registering their protest or disapproval!
Meanwhile, other resisters — including one who files a return every year with her social security number at the top but with none of the other required information, and with the 1040 form over-written with a protest message in red ink — have never been assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty or even received a “frivolous filing” warning letter.
The coordinating committee discusses the RFPTFA on morning
The “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act”
For a more in-depth examination of my misgivings about the RFPTFA, see:
One item on the agenda was a request by the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund that NWTRCC formally “recommit to the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill and the efforts NCPTF is doing to get it passed in Congress.”
As I explained , I have serious misgivings about “peace tax fund” proposals in general, and think that the current incarnation of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act in particular would do more harm than good.
However, NWTRCC had endorsed a different version of this legislation years ago, and so many people expected this new call for an endorsement to be a no-brainer.
Much debate ensued.
Robert Randall pointed out that NWTRCC’s “Statement of Purpose” includes “support of the US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
He interpreted this as being a built-in endorsement of the latest act which would make the current debate moot.
However, no act by that name has been introduced recently — I think since — and in many important ways the current legislation does not resemble the version that NWTRCC endorsed back in the day.
I was a little worried that I would be the only one objecting to the endorsement and that this would put me outside of the general consensus of the group, but as it turns out there were many people present who expressed misgivings about peace tax fund legislation and who weren’t enthusiastic about endorsing it, and I heard more than one person express that this was a long-overdue debate.
Many of the Act’s supporters seem to have ideas of what the Act would accomplish that go way beyond the actual text of the legislation.
One said, for instance, that if the Act passed, it would effectively allow citizens to annually vote yea or nay on war or on whatever wars the government was engaged in at the time.
Some participants in the discussion were concerned that NWTRCC remain on good terms with NCPTF, in part so that we may be more influential as they recraft their strategy in the coming years.
One person said that because the Act is a long-shot to ever become law, it is best judged not by what its effects would be if it were enacted, but by what it symbolizes as a proposal that approximates the hopes of people who want legal recognition for conscientious objection to military taxation.
(Myself, I’m not sure I buy this argument, but in any case I think that the symbolism of the Act is ambiguous at best and may very well communicate a message that is, on the whole, harmful to the cause.)
The result of our discussion was that we decided to hold off on making a decision of whether or not to endorse until our meeting, at which time we will have more time to discuss the question and more time to study the points that are in debate.
A book of writings by and about Marian Franz and her work with the peace tax fund campaign is forthcoming, and will include a piece by Ruth Benn about the war tax resistance movement and its relationship with the peace tax fund campaign.
Election aftermath
There was varied reaction to the recent presidential election.
Many people were skeptical of the promise for meaningful change, and distrustful towards the Democratic party, and saw the election mostly in terms of whether it would anaesthetize progressive activists or whether it might be possible to reactivate the hopeful coalitions that helped to propel Obama into office once Hope turns to disappointment.
Others were very enthusiastic about the change and hoped that progressives and peace activists might finally be able to influence government policy.
One person went as far as to say that we’d “won” and would have to get used to being winners on the inside of the power structure instead of ignored pleaders outside of it.
Another hopefully imagined getting a group of progressive religious leaders to sit down with Obama and confront his faith with a challenge to go further than his public statements have so far suggested.
To me this all sounds like stuff of the same sort as gingerbread houses, flying carpets, and fairy godmothers, but I mention it here to show that some of the Hope bubble has infected even a skeptical group like NWTRCC.
There was much mention of “Camp Hope” — a vigil that will be held near Obama’s home in Chicago in up to inauguration day.
The goals of this vigil will be to encourage Obama to follow-through boldly on some of his more progressive campaign themes.
The demands of the vigil are meant to harmonize with, rather than to protest, the goals of the Obama campaigners, and will concentrate on actions that the new administration can take immediately via executive orders.
This is said to be partially based on a similar vigil that took place in the run-up to Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in that asked Carter to pardon Vietnam-era draft resisters and to cancel the B-1 bomber program, both of which Carter did.
A new war funding supplemental bill is expected to hit Congress in , and this will be an early test of what kind of Change we can expect from the new order, and what kind of power the current anti-war movement is capable of asserting.
The War Tax Boycott
’s war tax boycott campaign was well-received by some local war tax resistance groups, who found it a good focal point for their outreach efforts.
However, the number of people who participated in the boycott disappointed the hopes of those who initiated the campaign.
There was much discussion of whether we should continue the campaign into and if so in what fashion.
If we were to continue the campaign into — making the the climax of the campaign — this would give us little time to mount a serious outreach effort, and at the same time it would have to compete for attention with the actions of the opening months of the new Obama administration.
It might be hard to convince new resisters to join up if they’re still placing their hopes for peace with their rulers.
We eventually concluded that we would continue the campaign, but would concentrate this year on retrenching and consolidation rather than on a major outreach and publicity campaign, in preparation for a larger campaign when the inevitable Obama Disappointment sets in.
Meanwhile, local groups that find the campaign useful can continue to use it as before.
Rather than making April 15th the target date for beginning to resist, we may be better off doing what Code Pink did with its war tax resistance campaign and tell people that their resistance begins the moment they take their first affirmative step toward tax resistance, for instance by adjusting their W-4 withholding.
One person said that although she resisted taxes , she didn’t sign up for the boycott because she was only resisting a small amount and was redirecting that amount to local groups, and she had the impression that the boycott was mainly for people redirecting larger amounts to the two showcase charities highlighted by the boycott campaign.
Some people who did boycott outreach found that some folks were reluctant to sign on to the boycott for fear of the danger of being on some government list, and stressed that there should be a way for people to join the campaign anonymously.
Miscellany
Some local University of Oregon students dropped by the meeting and volunteered to create a redesigned mock-up of the nwtrcc.org web site that we could use if we’d like — a much-appreciated and spontaneous act of generosity.
NWTRCC will be trying to nurture a new regional gathering of war tax resisters — something along the lines of the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters that is coming up later .
To this end, it will be inviting groups that are interested in hosting such a gathering to submit proposals, and will select one of these proposals to support with some seed money and other assistance.
NWTRCC decided to commit to revitalize the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which seems to have run out of steam (appeals for funds go out very infrequently, and resisters are reimbursed only after long delay).
NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn is preparing a series of “Readings on Money.”
These include transcripts of some of the discussion on that subject at the Fall gathering in Las Vegas, Karen Marysdaughter’s essay on “The Influence of Money on Decisions to Engage in War Tax Resistance,” George Salzman’s “Inheritance and Social Responsibility,” a debate about the ethics of accepting interest on loans and bank deposits from Juanita Nelson and Bob Irwin, and a look at the intwined structure of government spending, national debt, the war machine, the federal reserve, and the income tax from Jay Sordean.
Kathy Kelly leads a workshop on “Honesty and Empathy: Questions for Collaborators”
Kathy Kelly led us through some role-playing exercises concerning collaboration and how to confront it, and shared some stories with us from her experiences with activism and humanitarian assistance.
Her public presentation at the University after the end of the NWTRCC conference session was well-appreciated by those who attended.
Kelly is an engaging speaker who relates interesting experiences vividly and well — with a great command of accents and the ability to invoke strong and varied emotions without making the audience feel like they’ve been strapped on a roller-coaster.
One of her themes: around the world, many people are forced to make great sacrifices because of the decisions our political leaders are making.
Meanwhile, what will raise us to make the sacrifices we need to make to make things right?
To those of us to whom much has been given, much will be expected in this regard.
We need to slow down and unflinchingly reassess our priorities.
“This is what grown-ups do.”
Mike Butler volunteered to bring NWTRCC into the MySpace / Facebook universe, so keep an eye out there.
Erica Weiland removes a pillar of militarism in Susan Quinlan’s workshop
Susan Quinlan demonstrated some of the techniques she uses in youth outreach to teach about the unbalanced government budget priorities and about how to build a better society by shifting your support from the pillars that support a system of injustice to the pillars that support the scaffolding of a better system.
I remember a couple of interesting stories of how people were introduced to war tax resistance.
One couple was working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Colombia and met some war tax resisters there and then took up war tax resistance on their return home.
Another new resister had been working for an alternative newspaper that received a grant from a war tax resisters’ tax-redirection alternative fund, and learned about war tax resistance that way.
Conference attendees review part of Steev Hise’s rough cut for Death and Taxes
Steev Hise’s war tax resistance video project continues, with a projected completion date around .
Conference attendees saw a preview of a portion of the film and seemed enthusiastic about it.
The next national meeting will be held this coming Spring (early ) somewhere in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. — details to be hashed out in the coming months.
The next national will be in Cleveland, Ohio around .
And with all that, I’m still leaving a lot out.
But for now, that’ll have to do.
This issue had come up at our last meeting in Eugene because the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund had asked us to formally endorse this legislation.
We were unable to reach consensus on the endorsement at that meeting and didn’t allot enough time to really discuss the matter in detail, so we planned to readdress the issue and devote more time to discussion this time around.
One of the arguments in favor of us endorsing the bill was that in the NWTRCC “Statement of Purpose” is a section that many people interpreted as a built-in endorsement of the bill.
That section reads:
NWTRCC’s goal is to maintain and build a national movement of conscientious objectors to military taxes by supporting, coordinating and publicizing the WTR actions of groups and individuals.
These actions include: war tax resistance, protest, and refusal; the redirection of military taxes to meet human needs; support of the US Peace Tax Fund Bill; and adjustment of lifestyle to avoid tax liability.
I’ve heard many perspectives about whether this section endorses the bill or merely indicates that support for it is one of many war tax resistance related activities that our affiliate groups engage in.
But in any case, the “US Peace Tax Fund Bill” doesn’t exist as an active piece of legislation anymore.
The currently-proposed legislation is substantially different in content and has a new name.
So this time around, in addition to debating the endorsement question, we were also trying to come up with a satisfactory way to remove or replace the anachronistic language from our statement of purpose.
On , we had a panel presentation on the bill followed by an open discussion.
Bethany Criss, the executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, presented the case for why we should endorse.
Ray Gingerich and I each gave statements opposing the endorsement.
Ruth Benn shared some of her insights from being exposed to the variety of international peace tax fund campaigns (some of which are promoting legislation that differs in important ways from the U.S. bill) and also recounted some of the history of the close working relationship of NWTRCC and NCPTF.
After these brief remarks from the panel, other attendees addressed the issue.
The following summary is based on notes I was taking at the time, so is only as good as my attention and note-taking were — caveat emptor:
Bethany Criss started out by noting the similarity between legalized conscientious objection to military service and conscientious objection to military taxation.
She also tried to assuage concerns that the “Religious Freedom” part of the bill’s title meant that the provisions of the bill would not be available to non-religious objectors.
She said that she felt confident that Congress would not raid the peace tax fund to pay for military expenses because the RFPTFA would represent a contract between us and Congress and that we could hold them accountable if they were to violate it.
She acknowledged that the bill was imperfect and would not accomplish as much as many people would like, but hoped that we would see it as an initial step in an incremental process.
I went next.
Here’s more-or-less the argument I gave against endorsement:
War Tax Resisters and Peace Tax Fund advocates agree that the belligerent militarism of the United States is a grave problem, that individuals must act to oppose it, and that our tax dollars are an important way in which we can move from complicity to opposition.
Because of this, we’re natural allies and have much in common.
The RFPTFA currently being pushed by the NCPTF has some significant problems. So much so that although our groups have much in common in our outlook and our interests, I think it would be a mistake for NWTRCC to endorse the RFPTFA.
Indeed, the problems with the bill are so significant that if the bill ever looked as though it might pass, we would be wiser to actively oppose the bill than to endorse it.
The main problems with the bill are two: 1) it’s no good, and 2) it’s bad.
That is, not only would it not deliver any meaningful benefits, but it would have harmful effects that would be damaging to the war tax resistance movement and dangerous to individual war tax resisters.
The reason why I say the bill is no good is this.
If the bill passes, it would give Congress more taxpayer money to spend and would allow Congress to spend as much money as it likes on war and armaments.
Every dollar paid into the “Peace Tax Fund” would increase taxpayer spending on the military.
This sounds like exactly the opposite of what the NCPTF intends, which may be true.
But sometimes good intentions lead to counterproductive laws and policies.
If you read the NCPTF literature, you’ll see that they admit that the bill would increase government revenue without decreasing how much Congress could spend on war:
So Congress would have more taxpayer money than before and could spend as much as it wants on war.
Why on earth would we want this?
Well, we’re supposed to want this because at least our money wouldn’t be spent on war.
But this is just an illusion.
The basic problem has to do with displacement.
If you pay into the Peace Tax Fund and Congress can only spend “your” money on something nice like the National Park Service, Congress can just take some other money that it had been planning to spend on the Park Service and divert it to the Pentagon.
So Congress spends just like it always has, with a little more taxpayer money than it would have had otherwise, but the people who pay into the Peace Tax Fund falsely believe that they aren’t responsible for the results of that increased spending.
It would be as though I were to pour a cup of sand into a mug full of hot coffee and then claim that I wasn’t responsible for the spillover since my sand sank to the bottom of the mug and it was only someone else’s coffee that spilled over the top.
So that’s why the RFPTFA isn’t any good.
Now here’s why it’s bad.
First: it constructs an illusion through which people can be induced to pay for war and militarism while believing that they are not.
The war tax resistance movement should be working hard to tear down illusions like this, not build up new ones.
Second: it would divide the war tax resistance movement between those people who maintain their testimony against paying for war and those who take advantage of the false moral cover of the RFPTFA.
This would also give the IRS fewer targets to pursue, and make the remaining war tax resisters more likely to be targeted by enforcement actions.
If the war tax resistance movement ever does become a powerful force for social change, you can bet that the government will consider passing such a bill — not as a concession to our movement but as a divide-and-conquer technique against it.
Third: it would give a persuasive rhetorical tool to people who oppose war tax resisters.
They would say that war tax resisters should just pay into the Peace Tax Fund like good, law-abiding, conscientious people.
Imagine what the IRS would say to resisters: “We gave you the ‘Peace Tax Fund’ you wanted — now you’ve got no more excuses not to pay up.”
Those three things are harmful effects the bill would have if it ever became law.
I don’t think this is likely, but there’s a fourth reason not to endorse the bill that doesn’t depend on whether or not it is successful in becoming law: advocacy of such a bill sends the message that the war tax resistance movement is naïve and that our conscientious scruples are superficial.
It tells people that war tax resisters:
are not particularly conscientious at all, but can be easily bought-off by symbolic concessions and simple sleight-of-hand
are conscientious enough to check a box on a form, but not conscientious enough to follow through on the ramifications of our actions
are willing enough to fund war if you can give us a way to deny that we’re doing it
would rather have a certificate from the government recognizing our officially certified conscientiousness than to actually be conscientious
These flaws have been pointed out before, and frequently PTF promoters have responded with an argument along these lines: Sure the RFPTFA won’t reduce military spending and it has at best an ambiguous effect on taxpayer complicity, but it has strong symbolic power: it’s a way to get conscientious objection to military taxation officially recognized, to get a foot in the door, to be able to take a census of conscientious objectors every April 15th, to propagandize for peace with every 1040 booklet, and so forth.
These benefits are not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons, but even if you were to acknowledge them — are they sufficient to justify putting any more energy into a 38-year-old campaign that has gone nowhere at all, currently in support of a piece of legislation that, even as watered down as it is, hasn’t had as much as a committee hearing in over a decade?
I feel strongly about this, and I have not pulled my punches.
Some of you may think I’m being uncharitable and unfair.
I’ll end on this note: I think the advocates of the RFPTFA have their hearts in the right place.
They are temperamentally our allies and I hope they continue to think of themselves that way.
I think that to the extent that we agree, we should continue to work closely and warmly together, and to the extent that we disagree we can agree to disagree.
After me, Ray Gingerich spoke, giving what I interpreted as a Thoreauvian argument against the peace tax fund idea: we shouldn’t wait to act conscientiously until the government gives us its permission to do so.
In addition, he feels from his work in trying to reintroduce war tax resistance into the Mennonite churches that the peace tax fund is an obstacle to this — it creates an excuse that people use: they say they’ll resist taxes but only when there’s a peace tax fund that allows them to do it legally.
After these prepared remarks from the panel, and Ruth’s discussion which I mentioned above, we heard from the other attendees.
Before Eugene, I thought of myself as a real outlier in my skepticism about the peace tax fund bill.
Most of what I heard about the bill in war tax resistance circles was positive, and the way people spoke about it made it seem like NWTRCC enthusiasm for the peace tax fund was a foregone conclusion if not a tautological one.
In Eugene I was pleasantly surprised to see that a few other people shared my misgivings about the bill, though I still felt like we were the minority.
In Harrisonburg last Saturday, though, it was clear that the tide had shifted dramatically.
Even with the executive director of the NCPTF there to pitch the bill, most people had little praise for it, and even the ones who were peace tax fund supporters in the abstract expressed that we probably shouldn’t endorse this version.
Gary Erb noted that most of those present probably wouldn’t qualify as conscientious objectors under the bill’s restrictive language, and so wouldn’t be able to legally avail themselves of the RFPTFA even if they cared to.
He also felt the bill would have a divide-and-conquer effect against the WTR movement, and recommended against endorsement.
Geov Parrish felt that the RFPTFA hadn’t a chance of becoming law, so it should be best seen as an educational vehicle.
That being the case, it was a poor idea to have watered it down so much in an attempt to make it palatable enough to pass through Congress.
Also, he noted that he feels excluded from the RFPTFA and its promotional materials because he is not a Christian.
Joffre Stewart said that as an anarchist resister, begging the state for exemptions and favors isn’t his style.
He thinks that conscientious objection to military service was mostly enacted for the state’s benefit, not for the benefit of the COs, and he thinks the same would be true of legalized conscientious objection to military taxation.
From this, he draws the conclusion that the reason we don’t have legal conscientious objection to military taxation is that war tax resisters have not yet become sufficiently inconvenient to the government.
Daniel Woodham thought that though the RFPTFA wasn’t perfect, it might make for a good first step, and once it was enacted we could work to amend it or correct its faults over time.
Bethany Criss said that in her view the “laundry list” of items in the section (§3b) of the bill that defines spending that falls under the “military purpose” category shouldn’t be seen as excluding other spending from that category, but only as examples of spending that fall under that category.
In her view, once the bill passes, a next step will be to ensure that the “military purpose” definition is interpreted inclusively so that it covers all the stuff we’re worried about.
Greg Reagle gave us some perspective on the reasoning behind watering down the bill to permit Congress to spend the money in the RFPTF on anything in the budget other than things in the military purpose category (previous incarnations of the bill had specified more precisely where that money would go).
He said that potential supporters in Congress had balked at having their spending decisions micromanaged by legislation, and so the changes had been made to mollify them.
Erica Weiland wanted to emphasize the positive working relationship between NWTRCC and NCPTF, though she too was opposed to endorsing the bill.
As an anarchist she doesn’t much favor trying to solve problems via legislation, but as an activist she tries to inspire well-intentioned people to be more active in ways that seem most appropriate to them, so she wants to encourage PTF promoters to keep doing their thing.
Robert Randall said he was impressed at the high plane on which the discussion was taking place.
He thought that the results of passing the RFPTFA might not be all that important, but that there might be some benefits to be had from the campaign to pass the bill anyway.
Pam Allee felt that the bill would help to emphasize that “we are the government” and so we can take control of the budget and change spending priorities so as to emphasize things like education, seat belt law enforcement, and other liberal priorities.
She was concerned that the RFPTFA seemed to lack grassroots support.
Larry Bassett paused to wonder whether it was really appropriate to the mission of a group like NWTRCC to be endorsing legislation or the individual projects of the affiliate groups.
Jim Stockwell felt that there might be a contradiction in that for many WTRs, the fact that tax resistance is illegal civil disobedience is an essential part of their WTR, and so legal conscientious objection would not be helpful to them.
He hoped our two groups would continue to work together.
Hiro (whose last name I didn’t catch, and whose first name I may be misspelling) encouraged us to patiently work at incremental approaches and not reject RFPTFA just because it wasn’t everything we wanted.
That said, she also worried that the government would spend the “peace” tax fund on things based on its warped definition of peacemaking work.
She envisioned Blackwater contractors doing their institution-building mopping-up exercises in Iraq (where she is from) and calling it “peacemaking” activities deserving of RFPTFA funding.
Tim Godshall tried to give us some perspective, noting that WTRs are one of the best arguments for the PTF (that is, the existence of WTRs demonstrates that many citizens have a strong conscientious objection that their government needs to accommodate), and also that although the RFPTFA might not have any effect on the military budget, the same could be said of WTRs. He believes that the RFPTFA is one part of a larger campaign to pressure the government to change its spending priorities.
Peter Smith disagreed with the suggestion that if the RFPTFA were to pass it would divide the WTR movement.
He agreed that we should not endorse the legislation, but hoped we would continue to support the PTF campaigners.
Ray Gingerich responded to a comment from Joffre Stewart by insisting that he was not an anarchist and indeed believed that a strong, active government (for example, one capable of implementing single-payer universal health care) was not incompatible with pacifism.
He plugged nonviolent conflict resolution strategies of the The Unconquerable World / A Force More Powerful school.
He also suggested that Marian Franz (the long-time National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund executive director) had been used by people and institutions who wanted to delay their confrontation with taxpayer complicity by putting it off until some distant future in which conscientious objection to military taxation was a legalized option.
Joffre Stewart noted that the U.S. government had no qualms about raiding the Social Security “trust fund” to pay for its military spending, and that it had stacked its “U.S. Institute of Peace” with CIA folk committed to the government’s violent foreign policy.
He therefore sees no reason to trust the government to administer a “peace tax fund.”
Bethany Criss told us that not only is she committed to seeing the RFPTFA enacted into law, but that she is also a war tax resister and has been since .
She said that although there is an associated “Peace Tax Foundation” with an educational mission, there should be no doubt that the Campaign’s goal is to get the legislation passed into law.
She thinks that the bill will be beneficial to war tax resisters and the war tax resistance movement by making WTR more visible.
She says that if the bill were enacted, it would not take away the opportunity to resist or say no; that resisters could continue to resist as before if they wished.
The goal is to bring more people in to a war tax resistance mindset.
She notes that part of the reason the bill was watered down is that their campaign doesn’t yet have enough supporters to bring enough pressure to bear on the legislators; this is another reason why she’d like our support.
Finally, Bill Ramsey felt that we might be better off not concentrating on the (unlikely) endorsement and instead trying to work on ways the two groups can work better together.
was an open-ended discussion without any decisions to be made on either the endorsement or the statement of purpose wording; on , our “business meeting,” we addressed those decisions.
A number of people who could not come to the meeting sent along their opinions about the RFPTFA, and printouts of these were made available to attendees of the business meeting before we took up the issue.
These were on the whole much more positive about the Act and more in favor of endorsement than the attendees had been, with one person recommending endorsement, another recommending “NWTRCC continuing its endorsement” of the bill (though we had a hard time determining which if any version of the bill our group had originally endorsed), and another conveying the results of a discussion about the issue held by Sonoma County Taxes for Peace which led to that group deciding to strongly support NWTRCC endorsing the bill.
Predictably, we did not reach consensus at the business meeting on to endorse the RFPTFA.
I counted about a half-dozen people in favor of endorsement, maybe half again as many against it.
Unfortunately, although a non-endorsement was pretty clearly the inevitable conclusion, it took a while to get there, and we weren’t able to devote as much time as we needed to the stickier question of the Statement of Purpose and its anachronistic reference to the “US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
The upshot of that discussion was that there were two replacement phrases with a large amount of support:
“…support of peace tax fund legislation…”
“…support of legislation that would legalize conscientious objection to military taxation…”
While there was broad support for both, neither was able to rally a consensus around it.
My proposal to simply scrap the old anachronistic wording for now and perhaps come up with a replacement at a later date also failed to attract consensus support — with many people feeling that by rejecting the endorsement and also eliminating mention of the PTF from our Statement of Purpose it would look too much like we’d conducted a wholesale purge of PTF sympathy from the group.
So when it came down to it, the Statement of Purpose ended up the same way it began in this area: it continues to pledge our support for supporters of the long-gone “US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
This is a little ridiculous, but seems mostly harmless.
There’s a new issue out of NWTRCC’s newsletter, More Than a Paycheck.
This one includes:
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
Here’s a piece from the New York Times that mostly concerns the efforts of the promoters of “Peace Tax Fund” legislation in the United States but also touches on American war tax resisters:
War Resisters: ‘We Won’t Go’ to ‘We Won’t Pay’
You could hardly find a more problematic time for pacifists who do not want their taxes spent on the military.
But the recent wave of patriotic fervor has only reinvigorated the efforts of one tiny, determined group.
“On , I was told I should lay low for a while,” said Marian Franz, executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
“Now I have been told this is the time.
As the war grows, so does the antiwar movement.”
For more than three decades, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund has petitioned the federal government for a way to earmark the tax revenues that would go to the military — usually around 50 percent — for nonmilitary purposes, like education or health care.
Like conscientious objectors who in the past were offered an alternative to military service, these resisters say the First Amendment protects their ethical or religious objections to paying for war with their taxes.
Like other groups that have struggled to reconcile the obligations of citizenship with antiwar beliefs, the campaign has had a marked increase in inquiries from the public over the last year.
At the Center on Conscience and War, a Washington-based national nonprofit group that works for the rights of conscientious objectors, phone calls quadrupled right after and are now about 4,000 a month, double the usual number, said J. E. McNeil, the center’s executive director.
Mary Loehr, the coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, an organization based in Ithaca, N.Y., that links 50 groups opposing war or weapons, has also seen a surge in interest.
“Starting , we have had a call a day from people asking for information, and our busy season is usually January through April,” she said.
“I would get 70-year-old women from the Midwest saying: ‘I don’t want to pay for this. Will it hurt my Social Security?’ ”
The debate over whether it is justifiable to withhold tax money from the military was waged on religious, philosophical and legal grounds even before supporters managed to have a bill on the matter introduced in Congress.
Derrick Bell, a visiting professor at the New York University Law School and an expert on constitutional issues, says the law doesn’t allow people to pick and choose where their tax money goes, as if they were at a buffet.
“When particular groups try to exempt themselves from having their tax money support a particular government activity, there is no legal precedent for that,” he said.
Professor Bell said the prevailing standard was that the “free exercise” of religion clause in the First Amendment was violated only if a law was shown to be irrational or unreasonable, or that someone suffered some special harm from it.
He noted, too, that even the right to be a conscientious objector to military service was established by statute and theoretically could be overturned by Congress.
“There is nothing written in stone,” Professor Bell said.
“Even the ‘free exercise’ clause has been variously interpreted.”
Opponents of the tax initiative commonly cite the fear that exempting some taxpayers for their religious beliefs would open a floodgate of claims from others objecting to federal support for everything from the arts to AIDS research.
Last year, for instance, a bill was introduced in the Illinois Legislature that would allow taxpayers who are against the death penalty to have the portion of their taxes that finances executions go to schools.
The bill, which never had any significant support, was killed.
But advocates counter that pacifism, often grounded in religious belief, is in a category by itself.
“Whenever you come up with a new issue, you hear ‘slippery slope,’ ‘Pandora’s box,’ ” said Ms. McNeil of the Center on Conscience and War, who is also a lawyer.
“There is no floodgate.
A minuscule amount of taxpayer money goes to pay for abortion or the death penalty, and other issues are political, not religious.”
In the United States, there has been a long religious and ethical tradition of opposition to war.
During the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes because he opposed slavery and the military.
The Mennonites, the Quakers and the members of the Church of the Brethren, who belong to what are known as historic peace churches because of their pacifist tradition, all refused to take part in the American Revolution.
They laid the foundation for the creation in of the Selective Service Alternative Service Program for conscientious objectors, which started with World War Ⅱ.
Until then, there was no legal recognition for conscientious objection.
During World War Ⅰ, 17 soldiers who were conscientious objectors even received death sentences in a military court, although none were carried out.
In the United States Supreme Court ruled that the criteria for conscientious objection could be broadened to include men who were not members of any religious denomination and in to include those who did not profess belief in a Supreme Being but had ethical or moral convictions against war.
Ms. Loehr, 44, who has been a war tax resister for 22 years, estimates that about 5,000 people around the country currently withhold taxes because of their objections to war and military spending.
Some tax resisters purposely keep their earnings too low to be taxed, she said, while some are self-employed and refuse to pay estimated tax; and some claim an abundance of tax exemptions so their employers cannot take the money from their paychecks.
The Rev. Michael J. Baxter, national secretary for the Catholic Peace Fellowship in South Bend, Ind., and a professor of theology at Notre Dame University, predicts resistance will rise.
“I think as the U.S. gets ready to go to war in Iraq, there will be more tax resisters,” he said.
“Sometimes during war, the place that good Christians belong is in jail.”
His group has already begun advising conscientious objectors in case the draft is revived, he said.
In June, to put a human face on their ideals, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund put together a 15-page booklet featuring the smiling images and often sad tales of tax resisters across the country.
Some of the resisters profiled donate the taxes that they estimate would go to the military to other causes.
Others have been imprisoned or lost their assets because of tax evasion.
They say they have reached their convictions about the immorality of war through their religious beliefs or the influence of thinkers like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As pacifists and pastors in the Church of the Brethren, Phil and Louise Baldwin Rieman argue that contributing funds to war is the same as killing.
For 30 years they have given about 60 percent of their taxes to civil rights and peace programs, despite Internal Revenue Service threats of liens against their bank accounts, wage-garnishment letters sent to churches where they worked and government seizure of their family van.
“We will look back on war someday like we did on slavery,” said Mr. Rieman, who lives in Indianapolis.
A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he completed two years of alternative service.
“It feels lonely sometimes, but mostly it feels frustrating,” said Mrs. Rieman, 56, describing the couple’s long odyssey.
“We can’t buy a house, we can’t buy a car.
We don’t enjoy the feeling of religious freedom they say we enjoy in this country.”
Stanley M. Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, said many religious traditions had a history of resistance to laws they considered immoral, those statutes supporting slavery being prime examples.
Even the way that the standards for conscientious objection have changed, from requiring membership in a pacifist church to simply allowing the adherence to certain ethics, shows a government grappling with what constitutes religion, Professor Hauerwas said.
Is it ethics, beliefs, membership?
The Peace Tax Fund bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code, setting up a nonmilitary fund to which pacifists could contribute the tax money that would otherwise go to the military.
Introduced in by Representative Ron Dellums, Democrat of California, it has been reintroduced every year since and had 35 supporters in the House of Representatives during Congress’s last session.
“ changed the equation once again,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York, a two-time co-sponsor of the bill who no longer supports it.
“A case could be made that if every American decided they didn’t like certain policies and decided to withhold taxes, it would be a problem.
It wreaks havoc with government.”
But Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the bill’s current sponsor and a veteran of the civil rights movement, said should not make a difference in supporting the rights of conscientious objectors.
Other groups may have their own objections to the way federal taxes are spent, he said, but his philosophy was “you try to take the ones that have the largest meaning to the largest number of individuals.”
“We will put on a whole new effort when we come back to Congress,” said Mr. Lewis, an ordained Baptist minister.
“Look at the military budget.
We have enough bombs, we have enough missiles, we have enough guns.”
Eleven demonstrators gathered outside the Federal Building, 600 E Cherry St., to protest the use of tax dollars for military spending.
George Mummert, a spokesman for the demonstrators, said they represent no organization.
“We’re just a gathering of concerned citizens who have an objection to our tax dollars going toward war and its preparation and not to peace.”
The protest came on the final day to file income-tax returns.
Mummert said the protesters received mainly positive response from passers-by.
In addition to passing out literature and holding signs, the group planned to deliver a giant postcard bearing supporters’ signatures to Rep. Harold Volkmer’s office.
Most of the demonstrators were “people of faith,” according to Mummert, although they are not affiliated with any particular denomination or church.
“It’s hypocritical for us to pray for peace and pay for war,” Mummert said.
He cited statistics stating that 64 percent of the federal income tax revenue goes toward current military expenses and debts from past wars.
All the protesters were what Mummert called “hard core war tax resisters.”
They do not file federal income tax returns, he said.
Mummert, a conscientious objector in , said other tax resisters pay half their tax, some pay all but $1, while still others refuse to pay their telephone excise tax.
From The Washington Post, :
Tax Resisters Refuse to Fuel War Machine
by Colman McCarthy
Well-deserved acclaim has been given to sociologist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen for his recent book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
It details the complicity of German citizens during the political reign of the Nazis when much of the public accepted the intellectual arguments for the mass murder of Jews.
“Hundreds of thousands of Germans contributed to the genocide and the still larger system of subjugation that was the vast concentration camp system,” writes Goldhagen.
He states that “the moral bankruptcy of the German churches, Protestant and Catholic” was “extensive and abject.”
Religious leaders “were men of God second and Germans first.”
They blessed state violence.
As the main military force that defeated the Nazis, the United States has been able to position itself on the moral high ground and, with furrowed brow, ponder in astonishment why so few Germans protested their government’s well-organized barbarity.
If a cold eye is to be cast on Germany’s behavior a half-century ago, why not a condemning word and a protesting stance of resistance against the violent policies of the U.S. government in ?
What violence?
Congress lavishes the Pentagon with $700 million a day, a sum nearly equal to the military budgets of all other nations combined and 17 times more than the combined budgets of the six nations the Pentagon claims are threats.
Also each day, about 38,000 children are dying throughout the world of hunger-related diseases, according to Oxfam International.
The United States is the planet’s largest arms merchant, with Commerce and State Department officials roaming the world on trade missions to hustle more customers for the U.S. weapons industry.
Client states include such habitual violators of human rights as Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
, uncountable dictators to whom the United States has supplied weapons turned them on their own people.
, the annual arms bazaar — the “Contingency and Operational Procurement Exhibition” — is scheduled at the Sheraton-Washington Hotel.
This is the mercantile occasion when the newest wares of death are displayed.
The Peace Action Education Fund is organizing a protest.
Differences between Germany’s military machine 60 years ago and America’s today are obvious.
Less so are the similarities.
Germany had a complicit clergy, as does the United States today.
America’s church leaders offer a biblical argument: Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s. Dorothy Day had an answer for that: After you give to God, there should be nothing left over for Caesar.
The second similarity is how rarely dissent is voiced by ordinary Americans.
Normalcy prevails, as if it were rational to have a proposed military budget $20 billion larger than in , at the peak of the Cold War.
Not all Americans fall into line.
This month in more than 50 cities, such groups as Veterans for Peace, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the War Resisters League have been organizing programs and demonstrations for tax resistance.
Last year, according to the National War Tax Resisters Coordinating Committee, about 20,000 patriots who value their government but not its warrior spirit refused to channel money to the Pentagon through the IRS They are back this year, again finding it both illogical and immoral to work for peace while paying for war or war preparation.
The IRS labels them tax cheats, which is incorrect.
They are happy to pay taxes when the money is for social programs that enhance life, not for the world’s most effective killing machine.
Those with religious ties argue persuasively that providing money for military people to kill violates the teachings of the world’s religions.
For Marian Franz of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, a Washington nonprofit group, conscientious tax resistance is a religious liberties issue.
She has allies in Congress, including Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.) and Rep. Andrew Jacobs Jr. (D-Ind).
Each recently introduced legislation — the U.S. Peace Tax Fund bill — that would provide legal protection for citizens who want their taxes to be diverted from the Pentagon maw.
The legislation is not likely to pass in this or the next millennium.
Its value may be for historians, ones who will ask how and why so many ordinary Americans in the said or did nothing about their government squandering its wealth on militarism.
In this current darkness, a few lights shine.
Honorable dissent may be only flickering, but it is still a flame.
McCarthy seems to have had a soft spot for war tax resisters.
He penned another op-ed on the subject in :
Washington — Whether a taxpayer obeys or violates his or her conscience on April 15 is no concern to the Internal Revenue Service.
It wants dollars, not qualms. But at tax time, conscience is an issue to a fair number of citizens whose religion, ethics, or value system holds that cooperation with war or war preparation is not moral.
They see no consistency of conscience in working 364 days of the year opposing policies that make the United States the earth’s most militarized nation while, on the 365th day, paying taxes that overflow the government’s war trough.
Tax money has paid for all seven of America’s declared wars and all of its 137 “presidential actions,” the latest of which are Grenada, Libya, and Nicaragua.
Citizens helped provide the Pentagon with nearly two trillion dollars under the Reagan administration, including a doubling of money for nuclear weapons and the beginning of a space battlefield.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, an East Patchoque, N.Y., group estimates that between 10,000 and 20,000 people will be sitting out for reasons of conscience.
The estimate is probably low.
This isn’t a group much given to self-generated publicity or issuing press releases every time Caspar Weinberger emits another war whoop.
Street theater is rare, although a few war tax protesters will put up a picket line in front of the IRS offices in Washington.
More important than the precise number of resisters is the growth of lawyers or counselors assisting them: More than 120 are now at work, up from 55 in .
Strength is seen in another figure: a 400 percent increase — from 45 to 180 — in for national and local groups working on war tax resistance.
Kathy Levine of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee reports that the people saying yes to their consciences and no to the IRS form a diverse group: “During Vietnam, it was mostly ‘the peaceniks’ who protested this way.
They were against just the Vietnam War.
Today there are people from all kinds of political and philosophical positions who are refusing to pay their taxes.
Some are opposed to the development of nuclear weapons.
Some have religious convictions who feel they must obey God’s law before a civil law.
And many in the middle class are sickened and fed up with the amount of money going to the military.”
Groups like the War Resisters League and the Friends Committee on National Legislation calculate that 55 percent of the tax dollar goes for military or military-related purposes.
The federal tax law lacks a provision for pacifists or others who want no part of the government’s violent solutions to conflicts.
After that, though, good news and bad news emerges.
The good news is that no conscientious tax resister has been jailed for .
For the IRS, the strain in dogging tax cheats and willful evaders, and prosecuting them if they are caught, is too great for it to be coming down hard on the noncriminal resisters.
The bad news is that the IRS, through the “frivolous return” penalty that was added to the tax code in , has increased enforcement powers to make it easier for the government to get not only the money that wasn’t paid by April 15 but also a larger amount from penalties Bank accounts and personal assets can be attached.
Without a meticulous plan of resistance before a decision is made and the services of a skilled tax lawyer after, a conscientious resister can end up paying the IRS more than if he had not protested at all.
In a few days, a solution that would satisfy both the resisters and the government will be proposed in Congress: the Peace Tax Fund bill.
With some 55 House sponsors and four in the Senate when offered in the last session, the legislation would amend the tax code.
Citizens opposed in conscience to participating in any way in military solutions would be allowed to redirect their taxes to non-military purposes.
These tax resisters aren’t out to deny money to the government.
They seek only to deny it to that part of government that wants money for military violence, which is morally unacceptable.
Marian Franz, the director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and who has been working for this law for , says that “during the Vietnam era 15 percent of all draftees were recognized as conscientious objectors.
If that same percentage of taxpayers diverted their tax payments to the Peace Tax Fund, this trust fund for peace projects would receive about $2 billion each year.
These funds would have an impact on the way the world would think about, and moves to resolve, international conflict.”
A dreamer?
Yes, gloriously.
But not a dangerous dreamer.
The planet-threatening menaces are those who keep on dreaming — especially around April 15 — that more money for more militarism is the way to peace.
All that group proves is that well-funded dreams become expensive nightmares.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
The question of how Quaker meetings and other organizations ought to respond to the tug-of-war between the IRS and their war tax resisting employees was among the major concerns of Quakers in , as can be seen in the pages of the Friends Journal.
The IRS has long been trigger-happy with its “frivolous filing” penalty.
According to the issue:
Adding “signed involuntarily under penalty of statutory punishment” to the IRS form 1040 will no longer bring a fine for a “frivolous” return.
In a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in Montana, a district court ruled that Donna Todd of Billings, Mont., was protected by the First Amendment when she typed the above on her 1040 form.
The IRS is appealing the ruling; meanwhile, it has told its agents to refrain from imposing the frivolous-return penalty against taxpayers who editorialize on their return.
The agency didn’t seem to want to learn its lesson, and was still overapplying this penalty until very recently.
See The Picket Line for for another example of the agency being forced to back down on this issue.
A profile of Barbara Reynolds appeared in the issue, penned by her daughter, Jessica Shaver.
It focused on her war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
My mother is hardly your stereotypical tax evader.
At 70, she lives on Social Security, and her sole assets are a small apartment in downtown Long Beach, California, a beat-up Chevette (bright green), an electronic typewriter, and a six-toed cat named Marmalade.
But she has been a deliberate and most determined resister of taxes .
After years of courteous correspondence, responding to explanations of her position with repeated warnings marked “Past Due. Final Notice,” the IRS quietly closed in.
One day recently, her checking account balance was $131.14.
The next day it was zero.
She tried to make an electronic withdrawal from her savings account, which had held $799.
A message on the screen reported, “Funds not available.”
She was left with $3.06 in cash.
Only days before, Long Beach City College had voted her Senior Citizen of the Year.
At a luncheon in her honor, her efforts on behalf of Indochinese refugees were lauded, and she received a pen set inscribed “Barbara Reynolds, Woman of Peace.”
, she had dinner with Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, the Japanese government having paid her way to Hiroshima for the 40th anniversary of the first atomic bomb used on people.
Because of her many years of service to the survivors — entirely voluntary — she was the first woman granted honorary citizenship in that city.
A few months earlier, members of the War Resisters League named her their Person of the Year.
In , she was selected as one of 14 “Wonder Women” — women more than 40 years old recognized by the Wonder Woman Foundation for outstanding contributions to society.
The foundation flew her to New York for a press conference with Bill Moyers.
Polly Bergen introduced her and presented her award for “striving for peace and equality.”
So why is a little old white-haired “woman of peace” withholding taxes from the United States government?
It is precisely as a woman of peace that she withholds taxes.
She believes her stand on taxes to be consistent with her commitment to a world without war.
She doesn’t want her taxes, in whole or in part, to go for defense.
She has been up front with the IRS about her motives.
In one of her letters, she wrote, “Having spent 18 years in Hiroshima working with victims of our atomic bombs, I can only say that never, so far as it is in my power, will any portion of my income go to the government as long as it continues to base its economy and its foreign policy upon the development, stockpiling, and deployment of nuclear weapons and missile systems.”
For her, the honorable way to avoid paying taxes is to avoid owing them.
So she studiously attempts to keep her income below the minimum taxable level and gives generously to deductible causes.
In , however, Mum had to sell the old family homestead in Ohio.
In spite of her best intentions, the house had appreciated in value, and she wasn’t eligible for the one-time capital gains exemption.
She was appalled to find that she owed the government $1,189.
She paid the money but she didn’t pay it to the IRS.
She sent $667 to the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account and $522 to Friends United Meeting Peace Tax Fund.
CMTC calls itself “a mechanism to accept payments in anticipation of legislative action” now pending to create a federal Peace Tax Fund.
The FUM Peace Tax Fund is for members who wish their taxes to be used for life-affirming activities.
When and if such a federal fund is created, both accounts will have all individual deposits transferred to it.
In the meantime, because of penalties, she still owes more than $400.
It will be interesting to see how the IRS claims its remaining debts.
Maybe they’ll garnishee the six-toed cat.
A postscript noted: “[Reynolds] has received notice that the IRS has placed a lien on her property for $162.79 in taxes owed for and has seized $100.83 from her checking account. ”
In the issue was a fantasy by Charles R. Sides that imagined a more “user friendly” personal computer.
Excerpt:
I chose the Home Accountant which neatly arranges my expenses and income in spreadsheet form.
After booting the program I began to record my written checks.
A major expense for the month of April is my reconciliation of the past year’s taxes and the quarterly payment for the next year.
When I entered the check number, it responded correctly and asked to whom it was paid.
I entered IRS.
Next question was the amount.
I entered.
At prompting to enter my message the Corona suddenly asked, “Do you know what portion of your taxes goes to the defense department?”
“Have you contacted your congressperson concerning the World Peace Tax Fund?”
“Have you considered withholding your taxes as a protest against the administration’s military position?”
Unable to answer in good conscience, I exited the program.
Was this “user Friendly” computer going to continue its assault on my conscience?
I hadn’t counted on that possibility.
The “War Tax Concerns Committee” of New England Yearly Meeting — Cushman Anthony, Elizabeth Boardman, Alan Eccleston, Finley Perry, and George Watson — published a statement in the same issue:
New England Yearly Meeting, through various minutes, has declared that refusal to pay all or part of one’s income tax is an appropriate way to refuse to participate in war making, for those who feel led to engage in such a witness.
A number of members of the yearly meeting who have felt so called have been offered guidance and support through the Peace and Social Concerns Committee, the Committee on Sufferings, and the NEYM War Tax Alternatives Fund.
War tax resistance is usually an individual witness rising out of the Peace Testimony.
However, if one of our members who wishes to make this witness is also an employee of the yearly meeting, some additional considerations come into play.
The question presently facing us was raised by the Personnel Committee:
Should NEYM refuse to act as the federal government’s agent in collecting — by withholding and paying over to the IRS — taxes of an employee who refuses on the basis of conscience to pay war taxes?
The problem is not new.
Action has already been taken by other organizations, including Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, London Yearly Meeting, American Friends Service Committee, and the General Conference Mennonite Church.
Each of these organizations has wrestled with it for a number of years, and after careful consideration, each refused to withhold taxes.
Nobody yet knows the full consequences of any of these decisions.
There are difficult questions involving individual conscience on both sides.
We note some of the concerns and reasoning of the Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting in taking this step.
Some Friends saw the Society as having become a little too comfortable in its peace testimony and saw in this witness a gesture to all peace loving people.
It was noted that since Quakers are people who put principles into practice, the yearly meeting as an employer of conscientious objectors should assist them in their witness.
On the other hand, concerns were raised that should a witness be made, there would be criticism that “it was neither logical to juggle with the mathematics of tax monies, nor moral to opt out of the give and take of a democratic society.”
Another observation was that Friends “from John Woolman to draft resisters had been careful to place no one but themselves at risk,” whereas this refusal to withhold would place the yearly meeting itself at risk.
In a letter to the Board of Inland Revenue (), the clerk of the Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting noted, “The name Meeting for Sufferings derives from when Friends met to give support to those of their members who suffered in diverse ways for conscience’s sake and that at various times the Society of Friends corporately has recognized a religious obligation to stand with individuals whose commitment of conscience may not currently be recognized by the laws of this country.”
In deciding this question for ourselves as a yearly meeting, there is a case for joining the witness as an employer by refusing to withhold income tax money or refusing to forward withheld money to the IRS; and there is a case for continuing to withhold and to forward money to the IRS as required by law.
The Case for Continuing to Withhold as Required by Law
The United States has one of the most effective tax systems in the world.
Its success rests on the voluntary compliance of U.S. citizens.
Undermining this system by noncompliance with the law does great harm to the system.
Refusing to pay withheld taxes to the government would put us in opposition to the Internal Revenue System.
Our real dispute, however, is with the Department of Defense.
Consequently, this effort misdirects our energy and our witness away from that portion of governmental power which we would choose to oppose.
Failing to pay all of the tax money would not directly reduce the war making budget.
By legal process, the IRS would almost certainly collect the money plus penalties.
Even if it did not, the military would get its full appropriation anyway and would be unaffected by the witness.
This action could well jeopardize some assets of the yearly meeting, the standing of the yearly meeting as a taxdeductible organization, and the officers of the yearly meeting.
Since some members of NEYM are not in agreement with the war tax objection position, they should not be asked to put themselves and the yearly meeting in jeopardy for a cause in which they do not believe.
The yearly meeting is supporting and should continue to support individual war tax witness actions.
If the yearly meeting does not join the witness as employer, its employees will not be placed in any worse position than Quakers employed elsewhere.
A number of members of the yearly meeting feel required by their consciences to pay all the taxes which they owe to the federal government.
A decision by the yearly meeting to refuse to pay employees’ withheld taxes would violate the consciences of these Friends.
The Case for Joining the Witness as Employer
We live in a world where there are in excess of 15 million deaths a year by starvation (41,000 a day) while $660 billion goes to military expenditures.
It is estimated that just $60 billion, or less than 10 percent of all military expenditures, would eliminate starvation on this planet.
Purchasing weapons of war not only increases the likelihood of killing, it causes thousands of deaths each day by depriving people of the sustenance needed for their survival.
As a religious organization in a country that is one of the leaders in the arms race, we have a clear responsibility to address this issue.
Joining a witness as employer gives the yearly meeting an opportunity to take concrete action as a religious body on this critical problem.
Taking this position is not a threat to the voluntary tax system, since it is an open and honest witness, and tends to encourage others to be open and honest in their dealings with the IRS.
It is the creeping tendency to be dishonest in declaring one’s financial situation that threatens to undercut our tax system.
If this witness is viewed as a threat to the voluntary tax system, there is a remedy at hand — passage of the World Peace Tax Fund Act in the U.S. Congress.
New England Yearly Meeting’s action would work towards passage of that act, which would benefit individuals in the Society of Friends, as well as our country as a whole.
Friends’ testimony on peace is one of our central experiences of truth.
The weight of this issue in our world calls us to act with clarity and resolve, regardless of risk and possible complications.
The fact that the tax may be collected does not diminish the value of this conscientious objection to war.
Taking this action as a yearly meeting gives us an opportunity to define the differences between our beliefs and those of the U.S. culture in general.
This could then strengthen the resolve in individual Friends to speak out and take action in regard to our war making society.
Other Quaker organizations have already begun this witness, and our standing with them adds our testimony to theirs.
This amplifies the message to the world of Friends regarding war and peace, and at the same time will contribute to the unification of Friends.
We urge all Friends to weigh these considerations prayerfully and to seek clarity on how the yearly meeting should respond if one of its employees requests that it support him or her by refusing to pay withheld taxes to the government.
As an example of Friends weighing such considerations, the same issue reported on a meeting of 35 people from 21 Friends organizations at the Pendle Hill center “to discuss their responsibilities when employees are conscientious objectors to the payment of war taxes.”
Excerpts:
Wallace Collett, clerk of the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns which organized the conference, noted that this may be the first time so many Quaker organizations have come together to deal with the issue of how individual conscience flows into our corporate organizations.
In a talk formed by images of “Stones and the Builder” drawn from 1 Peter 2, Kara Cole, Administrative Secretary of Friends United Meeting, noted that Scripture shows how the lonely and isolated find themselves formed into a community which is the temple of God.
The issues for the conference revolved around choices, risk, and obedience, as they relate to appropriate use of our taxes.
Kara pointed out that when we choose Jesus, we choose to be with one who was alone in prayer, who was misunderstood, who was the living stone rejected by people.
However, we also find that we become living stones.
Not only can we find the temple in one another, we also find one another in the temple.
This image set the tone for the remainder of the conference, as participants sought ways to allow our institutions to be incarnated as communities under the influence of religious concern.
Representatives from the Friends Journal, the Friends World Committee for Consultation, Friends United Meeting, London Yearly Meeting, the American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and other Quaker organizations and groups were able to share firsthand experience with ways Quaker employers have responded to staff members’ conscientious objection to payment of war taxes.
A panel of three lawyers presented a particularly helpful analysis of the legal situation.
These materials and some queries and advices that emerged from small group discussions will be revised and made available by the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.
While participants struggled with complex technical issues associated with war tax resistance, there seemed to be agreement that Quaker institutions have a corporate responsibility to assist their employees in responding as openly and honestly as possible.
Employers were admonished to develop policies to clarify the situation for the employees.
Employees and employers were urged to work together to avoid any form of tax evasion.
Employers need to develop policies so that their employees are not put in the position of having to commit fraud to gain control of income that would be subject to withholding.
Employees need to practice full disclosure of their actual tax liability and redirect refused taxes to constructive programs.
Individuals were urged to seek clearness with their faith community (monthly meeting or church) before engaging in this witness.
A letter received from Marion Franz, Executive Director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, told Friends of the importance of corporate witness on war taxes.
She finds that most Congressional staffers — who are rarely asked to consider rights of individual conscience — sit up and take notice when informed that the issue is not just of concern to some individuals, but that organizations have begun to take stands in cooperation with their employees.
Bob Hull, of the Mennonite General Conference, reported that New Call to Peacemaking has tentative plans to hold a conference on war tax concerns for Mennonite, Brethren, and Quaker employers in .
This conference, somewhat delayed, was announced in the issue:
The Challenge to church organizations from employees requesting their federal taxes not be withheld will be the topic of a conference jointly sponsored in by New Call to Peacemaking and the Quaker War Tax Concerns Committee.
A note in the back of the issue said:
Conscientious tax resisters who are forthright in their dealings with the IRS are unlikely to face a criminal penalty, according to Peter Goldberger in War Tax Concerns: Options and Consequences.
This booklet offers the layperson an overview of the IRS tax collection process for those who may be considering war tax resistance…
A second note concerned the booklet Taxes and Idolatry which concerned “the forgotten biblical witness in which taxation is seen as an affront to God.”
The issue included an article that noted in passing that at the London Yearly Meeting “[i]n recent years… two clerks were threatened with imprisonment on the issue of whether the yearly meeting should withhold for taxation purposes a part of employees’ pay.”
That issue also announced an “seminar/lobbying day” on behalf of the Peace Tax Fund, and an “National War Tax Resistance Action Conference” — which is to say, a NWTRCC gathering.
A letter from Geoff Tischbein in the issue is a good and rare example of the fourth variety of war tax resister I mentioned in my typology of the American war tax resistance movement back in .
Tischbein takes issue with the assertion in the article from the War Tax Concerns Committee of New England Yearly Meeting that their real dispute is with the Department of Defense, not the IRS.
As a war tax resister, I’ve often struggled with this question, and for myself, I do not feel that my dispute is with either.
Most immediately, my dispute is with the U.S. Congress and its refusal to grant conscientious objectors to military taxes the same right of conscience granted to conscientious objectors to military service.
The legal arguments are manifold and include, among others, free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment and international law which involves Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution and the Nuremberg principles.
Indeed, much of the thinking and correspondence of the founding fathers indicates that freedom of conscience was a principle they strongly believed in, but one they did not specifically list in the Constitution.
I suppose, if I were to follow the thread of responsibility to the spool, it would ultimately lead to the entire population of the United States that, in some macabre contortion of expediency, has put the welfare of the state above the rights of the individual, more closely a description of communism than of Western-style democracy.
Ultimately, I feel that war tax resistance is a religious issue and no governmental power has any authority in the case; it is strictly a personal concern to be resolved, individually, with God.
Thus our goal, as I see it, is to convince Congress of the religious nature of this issue.
The “Sufferings” column in that issue concerned Jerilynn C. Prior:
[Prior], a member of Vancouver (Canada) Meeting who paid into Conscience Canada’s Peace Trust Fund that portion of her Canadian federal income taxes which goes for military purposes, has had her appeal to the Tax Court of Canada rejected.
In , Revenue Canada assessed the amount of tax that Jerilynn had withheld from her income tax.
She appealed the assessment, but was denied the appeal.
The forthcoming hearing will be in Vancouver; the case will eventually go to a Federal Court of Appeal and then to the Supreme Court of Canada as a test case of the Charter of Rights provisions for freedom of conscience and religion.
Legal costs will probably exceed $100,000. Donations, payable to the Peace Tax Legal Fund, may be sent to The Society for Charter Clarification…
Prior’s case got a more in-depth look in the issue.
Excerpts:
Jerilynn Prior, a member of Vancouver (B.C.) Meeting, will be the first person to claim in court that the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides the right not to pay for war, and she is prepared to follow this claim through the courts to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Her first war tax resistance was in with refusal to pay the 10 percent telephone tax which was reimposed specifically to support the Vietnam war.
Throughout the time she had an income in the United States she withheld various kinds of taxes and put the money into recognized charities when there was no peace trust fund.
She became a Quaker in Cambridge (Mass.) Meeting in .…
She went to Canada in and became a Canadian citizen in .
Beginning in (which was the year the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted) she consistently refused to pay the government that portion of her federal income tax which would otherwise be spent for war purposes.
She paid this money into Conscience Canada’s Peace Tax Fund.
Her decision to withhold the portion of her income tax which would otherwise be spent for war purposes and to deposit it in a Peace Tax Fund was made from a deep-felt conviction that war is wrong.
Her appeal in the tax court in against a ministerial decision that she should be assessed the amount she deducted in was pursued with the same spiritually-based conviction.
And when the tax court ruled against her, her decision to take the case through the federal court system was with the conviction that she could not honestly teach peace to her children while paying for war.
She feels that to have a strong belief and not to act on it is hypocrisy.
She insists that her action is not a political one and maintains she is not trying to change the government or the Income Tax Act.
She affirms the government of Canada and is proud to be in that country.
She does not wish to change government policy on taxation but merely wants a way in which to pay taxes and at the same time uphold her conscience and religious beliefs.
When asked if the government could assure her that none of her tax money would go to military purposes, would she pay the full amount of tax to the government, she replied, “I certainly would.”
Jerilynn has specifically asked that these legal proceedings not be referred to as “her test case,” for her action is being upheld by many others and is taken on behalf of all.…
A great deal of media attention was aroused when the decision by the tax court judge was made public.
No doubt an even greater media coverage will be given to the next court decision.
Such publicity gives to those who disagree an opportunity to voice their opinions, to hear responses, and to give the subject more thought.
When it increases public awareness of the urgent need for nonviolent solutions to disagreements, that is, in itself, an accomplishment.
We hope that the final Supreme Court decision will be affirmative and will set the stage for other equally sincere efforts in Canada, and perhaps elsewhere, toward a more peaceful world.
Prior’s Federal Court appeal was denied in and the Supreme Court declined to take up her case in .
She appealed further, to the UN Human Rights Committee, but they too refused to hear her appeal.
Another article in the issue concerned the Norway Yearly Meeting. Excerpt:
A growing feeling of guilty conscience among members led to drafting a letter to members of the government and various peace groups about the peace tax issue.
The meeting asked that ways be found to direct tax money from those who wish to humanitarian, ecological, or promoting peace instead of to the defense budget.
Leah B. Felton had a letter-to-the-editor printed in the issue that covered little new ground, and discussed war taxes (though not war tax resistance) and promoted the Peace Tax Fund as if nobody had ever heard of these things before.
It’s notable perhaps only for the opening phrase: “No doubt the overwhelming majority of Friends pay income tax…”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a great deal about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , in part because of the occupation of the Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner home which the IRS was trying to auction off, and in part because of the IRS suit against the Journal to try to force it to pay its editor’s resisted taxes, and in part because of the Peace Tax Fund bill’s first congressional hearing.
A note in the issue pointed out that politicians were playing a name game that had apparently fooled some Quakers into thinking that the telephone excise tax had been transformed into something benign:
The telephone tax continues as a source of money for military expenditure, contrary to recent confusion about its status.
The tax, which was due to expire in , was extended under the Act for Better Child Care.
Those who proposed the act were searching for a way to finance their new program and seized upon the telephone tax as their “new” source of money.
However, the phone tax revenues continue to go into the General Fund, as always, and are not earmarked for the child care programs. More than 50 percent of the General Fund is used for military expenditure.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee recommends that conscientious resistance to the telephone tax continue, as it can have a powerful impact if enough people are involved.
an ad for NWTRCC in the issue of Friends Journal
That issue also had a follow-up on the “Alternative Revenue Service” protest:
In , the Alternative Revenue Service reports that individuals redirected $104,740 of their federal income taxes away from the military to areas of human need.
The total includes $12,898 redirected through the ARS, $38,416 redirected by Alternative Funds, and $53,426 that individuals redirected to social action and relief programs. The Alternative Revenue Service campaign is designed to educate taxpayers about how their federal income tax dollars are used.
The service provides the EZ Peace Form, which participants can use in registering their opposition to military spending at the time they file their taxes.
The service reports that 70,000 EZ Peace Forms were distributed nationwide last year.
This year’s form is simplified, with clearer instructions.
The issue brought the news that the Peace Tax Fund promoters had finally managed to get a Congressional Committee hearing for their bill, which was scheduled for .
“The hearing will be informational to determine the need for such legislation, not a preparation for floor action.
The need is assessed from the testimony of both individuals and religious bodies.
The hearing will support the bill by providing a permanent public record, by lending it legitimacy, by possibly attracting more serious consideration from prospective cosponsors, and by providing a record of congressional scrutiny.
The hearing will be brief, not lending itself to extended exchanges.
However, written testimony can be added and will become part of the official record.”
A follow-up in described the latest Peace Tax Fund bill as one that “would amend the Internal Revenue Code to permit qualified conscientious objectors to have part of their federal taxes — that part equal to the military portion of the federal budget — to be paid into a fund for peace-related projects.”
It encouraged readers to submit “written testimony for the official hearing record,” to publicize and perhaps attend the hearing, to contact Congressional representatives and encourage them to attend and to support the bill, and to donate money to the cause.
The issue described how the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures went — “the first actual hearing held since a Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in Congress .”
Excerpts:
“If we give the right to a person to withhold their body from a war as a conscientious objector, that person should be able to withhold his money as well.”
So spoke Sen. Mark Hatfield in his lead-off testimony…
…Several hundred spectators from across the country packed the hearing room.
Many attended as concerned individual taxpayers.
Others came as members of religious denominations and peace groups long associated with the Peace Tax Campaign.
Three chartered buses, one from Lancaster, Pa., two others from Philadelphia, swelled the numbers by some 150 supporters.
When the last of them filed in from a late-arriving bus to find all spectator seats occupied, Chairman Charles Rangel stopped the hearings momentarily, inviting standing-room only observers to move forward and to occupy empty seats normally reserved for officials and the press.
Many did so.
Veterans of peace demonstrations, several parents holding small children, young bearded men in simple dress, older couples from the peace churches created a colorful patchwork as they mixed with congressional aides, heads of foundations, and Capitol bureaucrats in business suits.
…Over 2,300 letters in support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill were bound in large volumes and set on a front table to be presented to the committee.
From 50–100 such letters a day continued to arrive as of the time of the hearing.
Following the introductory testimony of Mark Hatfield, lead sponsor of the bill (S.689) in the Senate, there were also presentations by four members of Congress: Andy Jacobs (lead sponsor of the bill in the House), Nancy Pelosi, and John Conyers.…
…[A] panel of religious leaders testified.
One, Thomas Gumbleton, Roman Catholic bishop from Detroit, and past president of Pax Christi, pointed out that two of the first leaders of the church, John and Peter, said that sometimes it is necessary to obey God before obeying the law.
How much better it would be, Gumbleton said, for COs to be able to pay all their taxes, knowing their money would be used for life-affirming purposes.
William Davidson, retired Episcopal bishop of western Kansas, a CO in World War Ⅱ, has actively opposed war .
“Having lived past draft age, I have been saddened and conflicted each year having to pay taxes to support war,” he said.
The Episcopal Peace Fellowship has consistently supported war tax resistance as a religious witness.
John A. Lapp, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pa., spoke on behalf of the three historic peace churches (Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren).
The issue of war-related taxes is one of religious freedom, Lapp said.
“Many of us feel the pain of having our religious institutions serve as tax collectors for war.”
During committee questioning, Representative Jacobs asked Rabbi [Phil] Bentley [with the Jewish Peace Fellowship], “Is [passage of this bill] going to give rise to requests for similar legislation from people who don’t want their money going for a golf course?”
…[Friends Journal] editor-manager Vint Deming, associate editor Melissa Elliott, typesetter Susan Jordhamo, and board members Robert Sutton and Sam Legg joined several hundred other citizens in packing the hearing room…
The hearing was informational, to give legislators material to use in future considerations, rather than to schedule the bill for action.
As such, it gave supporters a chance to formally present the case, get testimony in the written record, and show the depth and breadth of people’s interest in the bill.
The pace of this legislative process is frustratingly slow, but, for many of us, the hearing was a heartening experience.
There, we heard people testify in a formal legislative setting to our most deeply held beliefs.
One activist-participant said, “All my life I’ve been on the side that opposes government decisions.
It was a weird experience to see all those peace movement people in the same room with legislators.
I’ve never seen anything like that before, nor ever imagined it.
It gave me a different vision of what might be possible.”
The Peace Tax Fund Bill has come a long way , with many technical refinements, and it has a long way to go in gathering widespread support.
On we witnessed one small step in validation, acknowledgment of our beliefs, and moving the dream closer to reality.
Perhaps one day we will look back, as do those who watched the process of legalizing conscientious objection, and be glad we were involved in making it legal to follow our beliefs with our money-as well as with our bodies.
“This is not a political issue, but a moral issue of conscience,” responded Bentley…
Jacobs, in response, thanked the Rabbi and others of religious conscience who had testified.
“I am a sponsor of this bill,” he said, “but I am not a pacifist.”
He called to mind one of his favorite movies, Friendly Persuasion, and the lines spoken toward the end of the film: “It’s good to know that somebody is holding out for a better way of settling things!”
Terrill Hyde, tax legislative counsel for the Department of the Treasury, presented the Bush Administration position opposing the PTF.
She mentioned “problems of complexity, confusion, and increased administrative burden,” sure to arise if the bill were passed.
There would be no deterrent either, she said, to restrain taxpayers from inappropriately claiming CO status.
If taxpayers were allowed to designate the uses for which their tax dollars were spent, “our entire budgetary process would be undermined.”
There would likely be loss of revenue to needed federal programs.
Others, however, presented differing views.
Several speakers argued that there would likely be substantial increases in revenue as a direct result of the bill.
Many who currently refuse to pay a portion or all of their taxes would gladly pay.
Also, large costs resulting from IRS efforts to collect from tax resisters would be avoided.
Answering the criticism of how the act might increase paperwork and administrative costs, several people testified to the simple nature of the bill and of the tax filing process.
As to IRS claims that the bill raises possible legal questions, a panel of two law specialists responded.
Mark Tushnet, professor of law at Georgetown University, said, “A nation that wants to protect the religious freedom of its citizens can reasonably be expected to enact legislation to enable the freedom to be expressed.”
It seems perfectly appropriate, he concluded, that such legislation be enacted.
“It is needed in addition to the Religious Freedom Act.”
Philadelphia, Pa., attorney and war tax specialist Peter Goldberger agreed.
“Legislation of this kind has a noble history in our country,” and he quoted from a letter from then-President George Washington to Philadelphia Quakers.
The nation’s laws, Washington wrote, must always be “extensively accommodated” in cases of individual conscience.
Alan Eccleston, a Quaker and an organizational development consultant from Hadley, Massachusetts, told about how, in his own tax witness, he has endured penalties, punishments, and the threat of losing his home.
The IRS has a lien on his house right now.
“Conscience must be taken into account.
Spiritual values are real.
They are not to be treated as incidental or expendable to fit the needs of the state.
This is what the First Amendment is all about.”
Ruth Flower, legislative secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation, emphasized that the Peace Tax Fund Act would not offer an escape to those who do not wish to pay their taxes, because they would have to pay the same amount either way.
It would, however, provide a legal way out of violating one’s religious beliefs in order to comply with the laws of the land.
Her point was born out by Patricia Washburn, who gave perhaps the most moving testimony of the hearing.
She talked about the challenge presented to each of us, and to her personally, in Micah 6:8: “…what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love constantly, and to walk humbly with your God?” Walking humbly requires us to acknowledge the seeds of violence in our own hearts, rather than projecting them onto someone else.
“Loving constantly” can be a discouraging and difficult task, especially in today’s climate of distrust and alienation.
“I am not opposed to paying taxes, but I find no alternative form of tax payment… Thus, I see no current alternative to withholding the military portion of my taxes… I pray that my witness is done in love and that it will help to build a bridge across the chasm of violence and fear.”
After the hearing and following the press conference, [Marian] Franz [executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund] gave a brief workshop on lobbying for the bill.
She pointed out that the testimony would now be entered in written record and could be referred to in the future.
She added, “the fact that we got a hearing is absolutely amazing.”
Many other pieces of legislation have not yet been so lucky, and the demand is great.
“If all members of the committee had been present, they all would have been deeply moved, and we would be a lot further down the road.”
Franz encouraged people, when lobbying, to talk in terms of conscience, as defined by Pope John ⅩⅩⅢ, who said, “Deep inside, each one of us finds a law that we did not put there.
It tells us to do this and shun that.”
That is what puts the issue of paying taxes for war in the arena of religious decisions and touches on every individual’s right to follow their faith — whether they are housewives, bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, or politicians.
That is why it is important to keep trying to open doors and ears and minds.
Marian Franz has a suggestion for how to approach people: “Talk to aides and legislators as though you’re sharing something personally.
You will often find that when you are talking about conscience, people are moved deeply.”
The issue also plugged “Good Use: Songs of Peace, Tax & Conscience” — “a tape of War Tax Resister Songs, featuring Charlie King, Luci Murphy, Geof Morgan, Lifeline, and others.
It was produced by Don Walsh, who donates the royalties.”
The lead editorial (by Vinton Deming) in the issue concerned the ongoing Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner case:
Finding Affinity
Randy Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have been tax resisters .
They have given the tax money instead to a variety of groups doing constructive community work.
the IRS has been trying to sell their house in Colrain, Mass., in an effort to collect $25,896 in back taxes — but it hasn’t been easy.
First of all, there’s been a growing tax resistance movement there in Franklin County.
Bob Bady and Pat Morse, for instance, had their house seized and auctioned in .
(They still live in the house, however, and the buyer hasn’t taken possession.)
Shelburn Falls dentist Tom Wilson had his dental license revoked when he refused to cooperate with IRS.
(He continues his practice, however; even the local sheriff remains one of his regular patients).
So when the word got out that IRS planned to auction Betsy and Randy’s house, supporters in large numbers turned up on the announced day to oppose the sale.
There were lots of signed bids (such as an offer to clean the teeth of an IRS agent, others pledging to do community work or to be peace activists for life) — but no cash buyers came forward.
Not a one.
So, in , IRS upped the ante.
Betsy, Randy, and daughter Lillian, 12, were given an eviction notice.
When Randy decided to stay, he was held in contempt and tossed in the county jail for 6 months.
This didn’t go unnoticed by friends and neighbors, however.
A sign-up sheet got circulated, and volunteers committed themselves to stay in the house around the clock.
There’s been a continuous presence there .
Groups from as far away as Washington, D.C., have signed up to come and help out.
In , members of Mount Toby (Mass.) Meeting formed such an affinity group for a week.
Meanwhile, Randy stays in jail and makes the most of his time there.
He has made friends with many of the prisoners, has organized a chess tournament, and does what he can to interpret his tax witness.
Allan Eccleston, member of Mount Toby Meeting, has been approved as the meeting’s official minister and visits Randy twice a week.
So what’s next?
IRS has scheduled another auction, this time out of the area in Springfield, Mass. — in the hope, it seems, of attracting a buyer for the house, someone who doesn’t know about this whole chain of events.
Randy will not be there to talk about it, but lots of his friends will.
Even if the house is sold, the issue will be far from over.
The house is part of a land trust (Randy and Betsy own the house but not the land on which it stands) — and there’s the likelihood of a continuing nonviolent presence in the house to welcome any potential new buyer.
How might Friends respond?
I asked this question in of Francis Crowe, long-time head of the American Friends Service Committee office in western Massachusetts and a supporter of Randy and Betsy.
She suggests:
Form an affinity group to help sustain the presence in the house.
(To be scheduled, contact Traprock Peace Center…
Funds are also needed to support the action (checks made out to “War Tax Refusers Support Committee”…).
Letters to the editor on the subject of taxes and militarism are always helpful.
More sponsors are needed in Congress for the Peace Tax Fund bill.…
At a rally in support of Betsy and Randy, Juanita Nelson — who, with husband Wally, has been a tax refuser for decades and is known to many Friends — offered these words by Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has Genius, Power, and Magic in it.”
Good advice as another tax season is upon us, when many of us seek to find our way on this difficult question of taxes for war.
In a later issue, David Zarembka reported in a letter-to-the-editor about how the occupation / blockade of the Kehler/Corner home was proceeding:
On , federal marshalls arrested seven members of the Flowing River Affinity Group who were occupying the Kehler/Corner home and removed the furniture into storage.
At , the IRS sold the house to the highest bidder in an auction for $5,400. The seven affinity group members were released from jail later in the afternoon.
So was Randy, who had served two months of his sentence.
Do not think, however, that Betsy and Randy have lost their home in an exotic cause!
As soon as the federal marshalls left the house, an affinity group reoccupied it, and other groups, including one from Washington, D.C., of which I am a member, have continued to occupy the house on a 24-hour basis.
Affinity groups, which occupy the home for a week each, have been organizing , but new ones are still being formed…
The “buyers,” a young couple with a two-month-old son, have visited the house several times but have not as yet forced the issue.
They are consulting with their lawyers.
Betsy and Randy have become members of the Colrain Neighbors Affinity Group, which will occupy the home for the week beginning .
They and their twelve-year-old daughter, Lillian, will move back into their home when they can comfortably live there once again.
I would hope that this action would lead Friends to consider how their cooperation with the federal tax collection process — even those who are symbolic tax resisters or those who force the IRS to take their taxes from them — allows the present military system to thrive.
A report in that issue on the Canadian Yearly Meeting that had taken place noted that:
Canadian Yearly Meeting, in its role of employer, was asked to refuse to remit that portion of its employees’ taxes that will be used to support the military.
Concern was expressed by the yearly meeting’s trustees, who would bear the legal results of such actions.
Although the yearly meeting came close to supporting a minute for this action, it agreed to seek clearness with the trustees and monthly meetings and return to this issue next year.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue was largely devoted to war tax resistance.
It began with an editorial from Vinton Deming concerning his war tax resistance and the response of his employer, the Journal.
Excerpt:
From the outset, I knew it wasn’t a very practical thing to do.
The government was too powerful, and all the tax laws were against me.
I’d just end up paying much more in the end, so why not choose a better way to work for peace?
A good letter to my congressman, for instance, or a tax vigil at the federal building on Apri1 15.
But this was in .
Our war in Vietnam was just over, but the Cold War continued.
As the Reagan years unfolded, with still larger military expenditures and big cuts in domestic programs, I became even more clear: I must resist as fully as possible the payment of taxes for war.
The Journal board was always supportive of my witness.
It refused twice to honor IRS levies on my wages.
In doing so, Friends openly accepted the possibility of being taken to court one day and fined severely.
The board wrote to IRS: “Our position of noncompliance to the requests of the Internal Revenue Service is not an easy one.
We do not question the laws of the land lightly, but do so under the weight of a genuine religious and moral concern.”
Well, as they say, “What goes ’round comes ’round.”
, Friends Journal was told by the U.S. Justice Department to pay up or we’d be taken to court.…
I am grateful for the steadfastness of the Journal’s board of managers.
, it has been faithful to the Quaker peace testimony.
The road has been an uncertain and confusing one at many points, but Friends have shown courage in continuing.
In my own personal war tax journey, these words by John Stoner have served to guide: “We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.”
Sam Legg, clerk of the Friends Journal Board of Managers, gave his take on the Deming situation and on why the Journal had decided to throw in the towel and pay the IRS’s demands.
Excerpts:
… Vinton refused to pay any federal taxes.
Each tax year he sent a blank 1040 along with a letter to the president explaining his opposition to war and his unwillingness as a Friend to pay for it.
Since there was no Peace Tax Fund, Vinton reasoned, he would instead contribute the money to worthwhile projects and see that it was used for peaceful purposes.
In , the IRS served a levy on Friends Journal for $22,714.16, Vinton’s taxes for the period, plus interest and penalties.
The IRS asked Friends Journal to withhold part of Vinton’s salary each month, but the Journal Board refused, writing that “We… are in support of Vinton Deming’s conscientious witness.”
In , Friends Journal received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice reminding us of the levy on Vinton’s salary and asking us to try to “resolve this matter short of litigation.”
That is, to pay the original assessed amount plus interest and a possible 50 percent penalty on the total.
We were given until to respond.
If we were to continue refusing to honor the levy, an immediate court action would follow.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision, Smith vs. Oregon, as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the American Friends Service Committee have learned, teaches us that there is no way we could win such a case in court, nor could our assets be protected from seizure.
More troubling, this seizure could make others who are not involved in our decision, undergo unwelcome investigation.
Finally, a court case offers IRS the opportunity to set a legal precedent requiring the payment of the 50 percent penalty (which a sympathetic judge excused in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting case last year).
We fear that the inevitable negative decision could establish that precedent and thereby restrict other individuals’ or groups’ religious freedom.
And so, most reluctantly, the Friends Journal Board has agreed to negotiate with IRS and to pay the least amount IRS will accept ($31,300) as settlement of this claim.
Our painful recognition of failure is heavy upon us.
We have to accept that our witness in its present form can no longer serve a useful purpose.
We can hope Vinton’s action and our support will have brought the issue of tax refusal to the attention of others, thereby becoming a part of the tradition of citizen pressure that in the long run eliminates or diminishes social evils such as slavery and war.
Our protest is on record.
What we will do now is support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of … which aims to reestablish the first amendment religious rights lost in the Smith vs. Oregon decision.
We also urge support for the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill… which makes the same witness, but provides money to finance peace-enhancing projects.
(Needless to say, if there had been a Peace Tax Fund in , Vinton’s taxes would have been paid gladly, and there would have been no need for an IRS levy.)
We ask all those who share our concerns to join in these legal approaches to the continuing effort to convince ourselves and others of the futility of armed conflict and the necessity of finding other means to resolve human disputes.
The immediate financial challenge to the Journal is a very real one.
In a year in which we already face a substantial budget deficit, the payment of such a large lump sum adds an enormous burden.
Vinton has engaged to repay the Journal through payroll deductions over time.
We have been heartened as well, as word of our tax witness spreads, to receive gifts of support from our readers.
One contributor writes: “I hope everyone at the Friends Journal can be made aware of Friends’ approval of [your] Board action.
To help this happen, I encourage the Journal to go as public with the story as is consistent with respect for Vint’s privacy and the Journal’s limited resources.
I am convinced that other Friends will wish to help financially when so informed.”
For such words, and unexpected gifts, we are most grateful.
Readers wrote in with their feedback about the Journal’s decision, and some of their letters were printed in the issue:
Duane Magill wrote to “applaud” and “sympathize” with the Journal’s stand.
“As a war tax resister myself for the past quarter of a century, I have had some brushes with the IRS myself and know what it is like.
I also appreciate your giving publicity to the subject.
I know that not many Quakers take this position, and giving the matter this extensive coverage just might encourage more to take this stand.”
Yvonne Boeger wrote in on behalf of the Live Oak (Texas) Meeting to say that the meeting had recently “discussed the importance of war tax resistance as a means of witnessing to Friends’ long-standing opposition to all forms of war and violence” and that the Meeting was supportive of the Journal’s (and Deming’s) action.
“We send the enclosed check as a token of our support and solidarity in Friends’ resistance to war.
Thank you for the example you have set for us all.”
Lillian and George Willoughby wrote to express gratitude for the Journal’s “courage in standing in support of Vint Deming.”
They wrote: “Most important is the example of a Quaker religious employer providing support to staff who endeavor to live according to Friends’ teachings.
The Journal has run considerable risk and incurred heavy expenses.
We enclose our check as a demonstration of our support.
We think that many other Friends will want to help carry the financial burden of this witness.”
An editorial note in the letters column expressed “thanks to all those who have sent checks!” and a later editorial note (in the issue) said that they had received “$8,000 from individuals and meetings, $7,000 from a Sufferings Fund of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,” and almost $4,000 from Deming himself.
Mennonite war tax resister (and, according to his author bio, “itinerant prophet and spiritual retreat leader”) John K. Stoner wrote about the call he got from an IRS employee.
Excerpts:
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said “no” to paying the full amount of our income tax.
The man could not understand why anyone would invite the collection pressures of the IRS upon themselves by withholding some taxes.
But by the time the conversation was over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was, for us, a matter of faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9 kind of experience of being called before the authorities, “before governors and kings,” because of Jesus, as a testimony to them.
By the sound of Mark 13, Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
Mark 13 is a good text to remember when everybody around you is quoting Romans 13.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams organization is promoting symbolic war tax refusal as a way to make a clear witness in the matter of war taxes.
Taxes for Life is a plan to have taxpayers redirect to education an amount equivalent to 1 penny for every billion dollars in the military budget.
For tax year this is $3.03, which can be mailed to Christian Peacemaker Teams… Listen to your conscience when you pay your taxes.
Write a letter of witness to the IRS, with copies to Congress and your local newspaper.
Redirect some taxes to education through CPT.
If the IRS calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law and that you do not enjoy being harassed by the collectors of blood money.
Go on to say that you are far more apprehensive, however, about breaking God’s law.
Tell them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the bulldozed mass graves of Iraqi conscripts, fathers and husbands, and the nightmares of their children.
Explain that you are really afraid to harden you heart to the cry of the victims and that you have decided you will not take their blood upon your hands.
When Randy Kehler was thrown in prison on contempt of court charges for refusing to vacate the home that had been seized by the IRS, he prepared a statement that he hoped to read.
The court denied him permission to address it.
The Journal printed the statement he’d hoped to have made, which is a good thing: it would be a shame if such an articulate statement was left to sit unread in a file folder somewhere.
My refusal to give up our home is not an act of contempt or defiance of your court order.
I regard it as an act of conscience and also an act of citizenship.
The two go hand in hand.
The first obligation of responsible citizenship, I believe, is obedience to one’s conscience.
Obedience to one’s government and to its laws is very important, but it must come second.
Otherwise there is no check on immoral actions by governments, which are bound to occur in any society whenever power is abused.
I want to assure you, however, that I am not someone who treats the law lightly.
Even when a particular law seems at first to have no clear purpose or justification, I try to give it — that is, give those who created and approved it — the benefit of the doubt.
In an ideal sense, I see law as the codification of those rules and procedures by which the members or citizens of a community, be it local or global, have agreed to live.
A decent respect for one’s community requires a decent respect for its laws.
At their best, such laws express the conscience of the community, causing conscience and law to coincide.
The international treaties and agreements that my wife, Betsy, and I cited in the legal documents recently submitted to, and rejected by, this court are wonderful examples of the coincidence of law and conscience.
These agreements, each one signed by our government, include the United Nations Charter, which outlaws war and the use of military force as methods of resolving conflicts among nations; the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use or threatened use of weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians and poison the environment; and the Nuremberg Principles, which forbid individual citizens from participating in or collaborating with clearly defined “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against peace,” even when refusal to participate or collaborate means disobeying the laws of one’s government.
These international accords — which, as you know, our Constitution requires us to regard as “the Supreme Law of the Land” — are at least as much affirmation of conscience, rooted in universal moral standards, as they are statements of law.
Betsy and I regret that you chose to deny our request for a trial, which would have allowed us to argue the relevance of these international laws before a jury of our peers.
Even in the absence of such laws, however, I believe that citizens would still have an affirmative obligation to follow their conscience and refuse to engage in or support immoral acts by governments.
It is not true, as is commonly thought, that if large numbers of people put conscience ahead of the law and decided for themselves which acts of government were immoral, civilized society would break down into violence and chaos — that is, greater violence and chaos than there is now.
In fact, the opposite would likely occur.
There would likely be greater compliance with those laws that are fundamentally just and reasonable — in other words, most laws — and there would be greater public pressure to abolish or reform those laws (and policies) that are unjust or unreasonable.
There would be exceptions for the worse, of course.
In the name of conscience, certain individuals would, no doubt, do some terrible things and cause much injury and death, which happens now.
On balance, however, the historical record is clear: from the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade, to Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s Holocaust, the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and our own devastation of Vietnam and Iraq, far more killing and suffering, has resulted from people following “legal” orders and obeying the law than from people refusing to do so in obedience to conscience.
My own refusal to kill (which led me to spend nearly two years in federal prison rather than cooperate with the Vietnam draft), Betsy’s and my refusal to pay federal taxes used for killing (which caused the IRS to seize our home), and now our refusal to turn over our home in lieu of taxes, are all acts of conscience.
It has not been easy for us to deliberately violate the law in these instances, and in so doing incur the anxiety and disapproval of some of our friends and family, as well as the scorn and censure of many members of the community.
We are painfully aware that even though we do pay our town and state taxes, and even though we have given away to the poor and to the victims of our war-making in other countries every cent that we have withheld from the federal government, nevertheless we are still regarded by some as irresponsible and not contributing our fair share.
These are times, however, when all of us are confronted with difficult choices.
Betsy and I, and many others like us, feel we must choose between knowingly and willingly paying for war and killing, and openly and nonviolently breaking the law with respect to federal taxes.
Our consciences compel us to choose the latter.
For me, the issue is larger than simply the taking of another human life, or even the instance of a particular war in which many lives are lost.
I have increasingly come to see the larger issue as war itself.
Whereas there has always been a moral imperative to end war and refrain from killing, today the imperative is much greater.
Today the logic of peace, the logic of nonviolence, is also the logic of survival.
It is impossible to dis-invent today’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and so-called conventional weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, we have no alternative but to effectively abolish war.
This is the one essential adaptation the human species must make — and, I firmly believe, can make — if life as we know it is to continue.
War today is the scourge of the planet.
It is tragic enough that war is daily claiming the lives of people, maiming more, leaving orphans and widows, and destroying homes, schools, and hospitals — to say nothing of the irreplaceable treasures of human civilization destroyed in Baghdad last year and in Dubrovnik over the past several months.
What makes war today even more tragic, more horrible, are the incalculable economic, social, and environmental costs that go along with it.
Instead of using our human and material resources to produce food, medicine, housing, schools, and other desperately needed commodities, the world’s nations, led by our own, are annually spending trillions of dollars to purchase more and more weapons of even greater destructive capability.
The hundreds of millions of children, women, and men whose lives are ravaged by poverty, hunger, and homelessness — around the world and here in the States — are as much victims of our addiction to war and militarism as are those who are hit directly by the bullets and bombs.
While the awful gap between the rich minority and the poor majority of the world’s people grows wider and wider, war’s assault on the earth — the earth that sustains us all — becomes more savage and less reversible with each new armed conflict.
The severe and longterm ecological damage to the Persian Gulf region that resulted from only a few weeks of war last year is just the tip of the iceberg.
The cumulative impact of the many smaller, less publicized wars elsewhere around the globe is no less severe and, ultimately, no less threatening to the well-being of people everywhere, including the United States.
Furthermore, here at home, where ecological damage to our own environment is proceeding at a frightening pace, the single largest polluter by far, producing more toxic and radioactive waste than any other single entity, is the U.S. military.
I am not at all suggesting that our country bears sole responsibility for the global state of affairs.
But we bear a good deal of it, and therefore any steps we take to move away from war will have great influence upon other countries around the world.
Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had the most powerful armed forces in the world, the most sophisticated weaponry, and by far the largest number of military bases outside our own borders.
Since World War Ⅱ, we have used our military might to bomb, invade, or otherwise intervene in more countries around the world than any other nation.
We were the first to develop the atomic bomb, and we are the only nation ever to use it.
For years we have led the Soviets in atomic test explosions, and we ani continuing these tests even though Soviet testing has stopped.
In addition, we have long been the world’s largest arms merchant, today supplying 40 percent of the entire overseas arms market.
We have been told that all of this is necessary for our security, but the opposite is true.
This military colossus we have created has greatly undermined our security — by creating more enemies than it destroys, by wasting our precious resources and poisoning our environment, by degrading our democracy with “national security” secrecy, covert actions, and official lying, and by undercutting our highest Judeo-Christian values with the insidious doctrine of “might makes right.”
Betsy’s and my actions that have brought us to court are testament to our belief that there is another way for us to live in the world, and another way for us to resolve our conflicts with our fellow human beings.
It is a way that is rooted in the best of our values: the values of generosity and justice, of human dignity and equality, of compassion and mutual respect.
The seeds of this alternative way — the way of nonviolence that Dr. Martin Luther King tried to teach us — already exist within our society, and within each person.
We have only to honor and nurture those seeds, individually and collectively.
This is a prescription based not on wishful idealism, but on practical necessity.
It is our only real hope for survival.
The transformation required cannot be accomplished without our accepting some measure of personal responsibility for the mess we are in.
It would be futile to expect our government, or any other, to initiate it.
In any event, we cannot afford to wait.
The transformation must begin with us.
Because we profess to be a self-governing people, it is all the more our responsibility.
We can exercise this responsibility by means of the choices each of us is called upon to make.
For example, we can choose to speak out publicly against governmental practices and priorities that we know to be wrong.
Many of us can also choose not to hand over to the federal government some part of our tax money — instead redistribute it to those in need, until such time as those in need become our government’s first priority.
And each of us can choose to continue leading lives based on materialism, consumerism, and environmental exploitation, or we can find ways of living based on simplicity, sharing, and respect for the Earth.
The choices we make as individuals will determine the choices we make as a nation.
This is, no doubt, a dangerous and ominous time to be alive in the world.
Yet it is also a very exciting time to be alive.
People all over the world, despite the opposition of their governments, are taking initiative to bring about momentous and long overdue changes.
These winds of change are sweeping the planet, and they are not likely to stop at our borders.
If the people of Prague and Moscow can overthrow Soviet communism and bring about democracy and human rights; if the people of Soweto and Johannesburg can abolish South African apartheid and establish an egalitarian, multi-racial society; then, I feel sure, it is equally possible for us to dismantle U.S. militarism and replace it with attitudes and institutions of nonviolence.
It is my great hope, my silent prayer, that Betsy’s and my struggle to see that the fruits of our labor are used for nurturing and healing, rather than for killing and war, will somehow contribute to that process.
Following this, Christopher L. King had a piece promoting the Peace Tax Fund.
He described it as the brainchild of David Bassett, who some twenty years before had come up with the idea of allowing taxpayers to perform “alternative service” money the way conscientiously objecting draftees could with their labor.
King wrote that he was surprised to find little awareness of the bill in Quaker circles and described some of the work that he and his comrades were doing for the bill.
Those of us who meet each month and a quiet group of supporters in the surrounding communities believe in our consciences that war and militarism are wrong.
We don’t believe they should be the major tools of our foreign policy.
We sympathize with citizens like Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner of Colrain, Massachusetts, who have chosen to pay no taxes because they are pacifists.
We empathize with those brave souls who choose alternative lifestyles so they can keep their income below taxable levels.
It often means their children must learn to sacrifice at an early age.
It means stepping out of the mainstream culture.
Most of us don’t want to change our lifestyles radically or go to jail for our beliefs.
Some might argue that if we are true to our faith, we have no other choice.
On the other hand, there is a need to resist the fundamental tyranny that requires that we must become rebels if we wish to stand firmly for peace.
King’s article was pretty vague on the mechanics of what the Peace Tax Fund bill would actually accomplish, and it was written as if there were no reason why a conscientious objector to paying to war might not find it a satisfactory solution.
The issue included a brief review of the video Paying for Peace: War Tax Resistance in the United States, which was produced by Carol Coney.
Excerpt:
Among those interviewed are Brian Willson, a war tax resister and Vietnam veteran who in was run over by a train while blocking munitions shipments at the Concord naval weapons plant in California.
Also interviewed is Maurice McCrackin, a minister who was sentenced to jail for war tax resistance in ; Ernest and Marion Bromley, who have lived under the taxable income level to avoid paying taxes for military purposes; and Juanita Nelson, an early civil rights organizer who was the first woman to spend a night in jail for war tax resistance.
The issue included an op-ed from Allan Kohrman suggesting Quakers ought to be more patriotic, perhaps singing “God Bless America” during their Sunday meetings, and in particular should rethink their permissive attitude toward civil disobedience and war tax resistance.
“Many Friends seem to define civil disobedience as breaking any law they feel is morally wrong.
Some will not pay war taxes, testifying that God has called them to resist.
I would argue that paying taxes is a basic responsibility of citizenship, a function of my almost mystical relationship to my country.
God calls me to pay my taxes much as God calls others to resist them.”
That’s what “an almost mystical relationship to my country” will get you, I guess.
Another note in that issue concerned two Quakers in Germany — Christa & Klausmart Voigt — who had been prosecuted for war tax resistance.
“About 40 Friends from all over Germany attended the hearing, which was overseen by five judges.”
Klausmart had “placed his money in an account for a peace tax initiative,” and at press time they were still awaiting the court’s decision.
There was another note about the Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund in the issue, which described it this way: “When a request for assistance comes in, the committee that oversees the fund takes it under consideration, then notifies people who have agreed to participate of the amount each would need to contribute to cover the tax resister’s penalty and interest debt.
Contributions are not used to cover the tax liability itself.
The fund is administered in cooperation with the North Manchester (Ind.) Fellowship of Reconciliation.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
American Quaker war tax resistance reemerged in the Friends Journal in , with some real live resisters telling their stories and sharing the processes by which they had developed their methods of resistance.
The issue had several mentions of war tax resistance.
Editor Vinton Deming’s lead editorial concerned his annual confrontation of the “agonizing question” of what to do at tax-filing time.
Excerpt:
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
For many years I sought ways to protest.
I started by submitting a letter with my 1040 objecting to the large sums going to the Pentagon and the neglect of other needed programs. No one responded.
At other times I requested a refund so I might send a sum to a human service program not being adequately funded.
Nice idea, I thought, but IRS didn’t think so.
One year they told me the request was “frivolous,” and they tried to penalize me for asking.
My lawyer got them to drop the matter.
Then about 15 years ago I stopped filing a tax return altogether, choosing instead to write a letter to the president explaining why I was not willing as a Friend to pay for things like B-1 bombers, cruise missiles, or Star Wars.
The latter approach clearly got the attention of IRS officials.
Suddenly I was “playing in the big leagues.”
The government took me to court on two occasions and threatened to do the same to my present employer unless my back taxes, interest, and penalties were paid at once [see ♇ ].
Reluctantly, and after much soul searching, the Journal agreed to pay.
I released them to do so, being convinced we had resisted as long as we could and had explored all legal means.
Friends rallied to support us with financial gifts to help pay the large debt.
In I made my last monthly payment to the Journal.
I continue to struggle with IRS on this matter, which dates back to my tax resistance of .
The government disagreed with our math for what we believed was actually owed in back taxes.
My lawyer is maneuvering to try to prevent IRS from seizing my Individual Retirement Account, an argument to be decided by a judge later this year.
In more recent tax years I have filed and paid, trying to claim as many exemptions as possible and to limit the government’s take.
I have lobbied for the Peace Tax Fund Bill and supported others who are resisting.
David Shen also wrote of his war tax resistance in that issue.
Excerpts:
For 12 years, I have withheld a portion of my income tax from IRS.
I refuse to give money to the military to kill people.
There is too much need around us.
For the last three years, I have given this portion to My Brothers’ House, a homeless shelter my Quaker meeting supports in the inner city of Philadelphia.
Each year at tax time, I sigh deeply.
I know IRS may punish me.
And I know I stand on the side of life.
For these 12 years, IRS and I have been corresponding politely.
They send me notices; I write back.
Since I received notices of intent to levy and since they have not levied, I assume I have been lost in their millions of files.
I was surprised, then, when my college employer received the levy on my salary.
My first talks with IRS, lawyers, and F/friends left me feeling depressed and helpless.
IRS would get what they thought was theirs.
Then God intervened.
Inadvertently, my lawyer angered me.
In my anger, I took a position of reducing my wages to a level IRS could not levy.
(By law IRS must leave me a wage to live on.)
I had not considered it before, since doing so would cost me $2,200 — more than the levy’s $1,200.
I think Shen is being too modest here in giving God the credit for a bold decision that came direct from Shen.
I approached the college dean, my superior.
“Reduce my wages,” I said, “so IRS cannot satisfy its levy.”
But the dean shocked me.
Her superior, the vice president, would not allow me to reduce my wages.
I had to quit or pay the levy.
That sounds very familiar.
When I first started resisting, I went in to the human resources department of my employer to ask if reducing my salary below the tax line was an option.
They told me it was out of the question.
My response was to resign and become an independent contractor.
Shen took a different tack:
After a conversation with one of my students, I decided to continue teaching and pay the levy.
I would, however, also continue learning about love and Truth.
Could I reach administrators, I wondered, if I used Gandhi’s principle of selfsuffering?
I would direct suffering to me, and not to the college, by teaching at reduced income rather than quitting and leaving the college with 80 angry students.
I met with the administrator who wrote my paycheck, the department chair, the dean again, and then the vice-president.
Three respected my position (the vicepresident didn’t reveal his stand).
The payroll administrator blurted out, “Isn’t there a legal way you can do this (pay income tax without paying the military)?”
When I met with the president of the college, six weeks had passed and the levy was almost fully paid.
He was busy.
He startled me by agreeing with my right to take my position, and he would seek how I could do so at the college.
Two weeks later, he informed me he could not find a legal way to accommodate me.
I, though, was thrilled.
In our two conversations, the president and I connected.
We talked about my tax situation for 20 minutes and unexpectedly talked about his and my family for 90 minutes.
He was late for one of his appointments.
As I waved goodbye, he asked, “Stop in for coffee again, will you?”
What did I learn?
I am poorer by $1,200, but I am richer in intangible ways.
I feel in the flow of God’s will for me and feel connected to people — F/friends who support me and opponents who respect me.
I am invigorated and happy
It must be comforting to feel that “God’s will” is responsible for all the difficult and fuzzy decisions you make.
Whether you zig or you zag, whether things turn out well or ill, God’s in charge and if you’re willing to give Him all the credit, He’ll be glad to take all the blame.
The same issue published part of an interview that Susan Van Haitsma conducted with Paula Rogge .
Excerpts:
What were the motivating factors in your decision to become a tax
resister?
Deciding to refuse to pay taxes for war was a slow, gradual process for
me… As I grew older and attended Illinois Yearly Meeting, I heard more about tax resistance.
I met two men who had served time in prison for refusing to pay war taxes or resisting cooperation with the Internal Revenue Service.
I saw them as very committed people with a lot of integrity, and I could see that the yearly meeting supported them.
So, at some level I felt that tax resistance was the logical extension of my pacifist views, and I knew there was a community of support for tax resistance among the Friends and the wider peace community as well.…
How did you go about your tax resistance?
That first year, I think I owed one dollar.
I refused to pay the dollar
and sent a letter to the IRS explaining my position.
The next year, I increased the number of withholding allowances on my W-4 form so that I owed the IRS at the end of the year instead of vice-versa.
I began by refusing to pay 40–50 percent of my federal tax money because at the time, that was the approximate percentage being used to fund current and past wars.
Then, over time, I realized that of the 50–60 percent I was paying, 40–50 percent was still being used for military purposes, so I stopped paying the whole kit and caboodle.
I stopped paying all taxes because I had no control whatsoever over how the money was being spent.
In the last several years I’ve also stopped paying social security taxes because the government borrows from those funds to help cover the deficit, indirectly financing the defense system.
So, it’s been a gradual process of taking my tax resistance further and further.
I’ve always filed, and the IRS and I have always agreed about how much I’ve owed (now over $60,000 including penalties and interest).
At this point, I don’t feel led to stop filing.
For myself, I feel better being open about it, but I realize many tax resisters don’t file, and I respect their reasons for going that route.
Have you redirected your tax money?
The first couple of years that I did tax resistance, I put the money
aside in a bank account, assuming it would be seized.
It wasn’t seized right away, however, and I’m afraid the money was spent without having been donated as it should have.
But I learned, and since then I’ve made sure the amount of money owed in taxes and social security is donated every year to charitable groups.
I’ve had a lot of fun giving this money away.
Sometimes when I have sent the contribution, I have included a note explaining that the donation represents refused war taxes, and I have received supportive notes in return.
It’s a very empowering feeling to know that my money is doing some good.
Have there been special ways in which you would say your life has been
affected positively by your practice of tax resistance?
When I finished my residency, I worked in a migrant clinic for two years
in the Rio Grande Valley in Harlingen, Texas: a very conservative community.
The second year I was there, I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper explaining that I was a war tax resister and why.
The newspaper editor phoned me to make sure I really wanted the letter printed!
I said yes, and they did print it.
I was afraid of the response I might get from the community, but I felt it was important to be public about my stance.
After the letter was printed, the other doctors in Harlingen actually became much friendlier and began to take a certain interest in me.
I don’t think any of them agreed with the tax resistance, but they seemed to respect my position.
Several nurses and a nuclear medicine technician I hadn’t known before introduced themselves and expressed their support of my war tax resistance.
I didn’t get any negative reactions.
In , I began a medical family practice in Austin, Texas, along with another doctor.
The first year into the practice, the IRS sent notice that my wages would be garnisheed.
I asked that my salary be lowered to $100 per week, as that is the amount exempt from levy.
In order to supplement this reduced income, I began to work moonlighting jobs in various agencies: the city Health Department, Planned Parenthood, and the State Commission for the Blind, for example.
I had to find new moonlighting jobs every two years or so because that was about the length of time it usually took the IRS to catch up and begin attaching wages again.
Something good happened as a result of this.
I’ve had to explain to all potential employers that at some point the IRS would begin to levy my wages and when that happened, I would no longer be able to work for them.
When I explained this to the Texas Commission for the Blind during my interview, for example, they were quite taken aback, and I thought I probably wouldn’t get the job.
But, a few weeks later, they did hire me!
The woman who hired me said she understood why I was doing tax resistance and that she agreed with my convictions.
I came to feel a real sense of support and community there.
In , the
IRS
seized your automobile.
Could you describe what happened?
Well, some time before the car was seized, an
IRS
agent, accompanied by a law officer, came to our clinic to pay me a visit.
I could tell they were nervous and even a bit hostile.
But as we sat and talked, and I explained why I simply could not pay for war, I could see them both soften a little.
Toward the end of the interview, the officer began asking questions about our practice and commented that it was unusual for us to be located in such a poor neighborhood.
As they were leaving, I complemented the officer on his cowboy boots — he had on some kind of exotic boots — and I think he was tickled pink that I had noticed them.
He told me where he had gotten them.
It was kind of a humorous exchange and I felt very good about that.
We had related as people.
I figured that since my wages had become uncollectible and I had no bank account, eventually my car would be seized.
But even so, the morning it happened, it came as a bit of a shock.
My IRS agent came to the bouse and, poor woman, she was just shivering in her shoes, she looked so nervous.
She placed a sticker on the car and then asked if she could use my phone to call the tow truck!
I decided that they were going to tow it one way or another, so I invited her in to use the phone.
I had a sick patient in the emergency room at the time, so I took a taxi to the hospital right away.
Having a patient to worry about took my mind off the car long enough to ease my worry about the situation.
Then friends came forward and loaned me their cars without my having to ask.
A month following the seizure, the car was auctioned.
About 20–30 Quakers and other friends came and protested the auction, asking potential buyers not to bid on the car.
At least one potential buyer was convinced to refrain from bidding, but a used car dealer did, in the end, buy the car.
A week following the auction, a doctor I had once worked with phoned and said that he wanted to buy the car back from the car dealer and donate it anonymously to our practice.
That was such a wonderful surprise.
I was very moved because I respected him very much as a doctor.
I talked the offer over with friends.
Though I didn’t want the money going, even indirectly, to the IRS, I did want this doctor to have an opportunity to support the whole cause of war tax resistance, and this was his way of contributing.
I decided to accept the car.
It came back with new tires, looking much cleaner than it had before it was seized!
A friend of the doctor had also done a tune-up on it — and it was great.
I think the best part of this story is that when I tell it, people chuckle.
You see, it’s such a good example of how limited the power of the IRS is in the face of creative resistance.
It’s also an example of how our needs are often met in unexpected ways when we take a stand for peace.
I think these three experiences in particular — the return of my car, receiving the job at the Commission for the Blind, and the reaction to the letter in Harlingen paper — were all occasions when I felt that speaking out for truth actually opened doors and tore down barriers between other people and me.
When I was willing to take a stand for what I felt was right, I discovered a community of support I hadn’t realized existed.
Perry Treadwell also wrote about his war tax resistance in that issue.
Excerpts:
Today I received another one of those white envelopes from the Internal Revenue Service — the ones that tell me I failed to pay $35 in or $106 in and now I owe a lot more in penalties and interest.
I file them away with the other ones from .
But this time their arrival reminded me of an anniversary of sorts.
It has been .
I refused to pay for people to kill other people.
I resigned my tenured university position [see ♇ ] and drastically simplified my lifestyle so the fruits of my labors would not be used for war.
I still get that little twist in the stomach when those IRS letters come.
Sometimes the IRS actually raids a bank account or Individual Retirement Account.
However, I know that Friends are there should I ever need their support in not cooperating with a government whose only answer to conflict is violence.
I have been able to simplify my life to a point where I am below the taxable level.
Friends’ support has helped.
The richness of my life is proportional to my friendships.
That is what I have learned in , and that is what I pass on to others.
The issue had an obituary notice for Jane Palmer which noted that she “chose to live in accordance with the Quaker peace testimony and purposefully limited her income to avoid paying taxes that supported war efforts,” and one for Mildred Teusler Ringwalt which mentioned “her refusal to pay the portion of her income taxes she believed supported such [war] efforts.”
One of the events at the Friends General Conference Gathering in — the “Henry J. Cadbury Event, sponsored by Friends Journal” — was “an original production in story and song about the war tax witness of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner from Colrain, Massachusetts.
The stage performance won a favorable review from those who crowded the auditorium (despite the heat and lack of air conditioning!).
A video of the show was made and will be available at a later date.”
At the Illinois Yearly Meeting in (according to a Journal article ), “Sebrina Tingley explained not just the nuts and bolts of war tax resistance but also the spiritual call to do so” and “Bill Ramsey (American Friends Service Committee) told of his personal experiences involving war tax resistance.”
The lead editorial of the issue was all about the Peace Tax Fund Bill and an effort to get 10,000 people to write letters to Congress supporting it.
“The Peace Tax Fund Bill,” according to one supporter’s letter, “when it becomes law, will give us our religious liberty.
We’ll be able to pay our taxes in good conscience since we’ll be allowed to pay for peaceful projects rather than for war.”
Two letters-to-the-editor in the issue reacted to that project: one, by Marge Schier, thanking the Journal for aiding the cause — “We’re even more sure now that we can do it!”
— and the other, by Elizabeth Campuzano, giving the gist of the letter she had sent: “I told them that I voluntarily live below the federal poverty limit in order to avoid paying income taxes for war.
I told them that if this bill passes, I will raise my income in order to pay for education, road and bridge repairs, anti-monopoly enforcement, etc.” She added: “I think this is one of the greatest things FJ has ever done!”
International news
“a Spanish war resistance sticker: peace (paz) and bread (pan), not bombs”
A report about the previous year’s Canadian Yearly Meeting in the issue mentioned that “[t]he ad hoc committee on war tax concerns has found a method which potentially will allow Canadian Yearly Meeting to redirect the military portion of employees’ income tax remittances to the federal government’s Debt Service and Reduction Fund.
This is not an entirely satisfactory solution, but perhaps a first step.”
’s Canadian Yearly Meeting (according to a story in the issue) “reached joyful unity in a decision as an employer to stop remitting to Revenue Canada the military portion of taxes for those employees who request it.”
This decision follows several years of study, prayerful consideration, and the attempt during for use of legal means of expressing our conscientious objection to paying for the military.
The remittance will instead be paid into Conscience Canada, with consideration given to establishing in the future a specific trust fund.
The Fifth International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns was held in Spain in and was covered in the Journal in a report by Steve Gulick.
Excerpt:
About 70 activists from all over Europe and a number of other parts of the world gathered in Hondarribia, Spain, , to charge our batteries, to compare conditions in our various countries, to get to know each other, and to carry on business.
It was inspiring to meet, get to know, and work with war tax resisters and peace campaigners from all over Europe and from the United States, Canada, Peru, Iraq, and Palestine.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee raised money to make it possible for the Palestinian, Elias Rishmawi from Beit Sahour, West Bank, to attend.
The Iraqi and the Peruvian attenders are currently living in Europe.
One problem with the gathering — similar to the War Resisters International gathering that I attended in — was the difficulty of getting a diverse attendance.
Folks from India were unable to attend, for example, in part because of the distance.
I attended as a delegate from the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Other attenders from the United States were David Bassett and Marian Franz (National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund), Susan Quinlan and Larry Rosenwald (National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee), Cynthia Johnson (Women Strike for Peace), and Gerri Michalska (Pax Christi) — which gave some of us from the U.S. movement the opportunity to get to know each other.
The conference issued a number of public documents — the most important being the bylaw of a new non-governmental organization which will have consultative powers with both the UN and the European parliament: Conscience and Peace Tax International.
The role/goal of the organization will be to espouse the cause of those who take stands of conscience in relation to military expenditures — and also military service and issues of conscience and civil and human rights more generally.
A report back from the Germany Yearly Meeting mentioned war tax resistance matter-of-factly:
In our commitments to projects such as “alternatives to violence,” civilian peace service, war tax refusal, and in our decision to give financial support to the setting up of a Quaker Center in Moscow, Russia, we express that we not only ask ourselves “how do we see God?” but also “how do we do God?”…
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a resurgence of war tax resistance news in the
Friends Journal in ,
including an interesting series of articles on the voluntary simplicity / low
income lifestyle as a tax resistance tactic, and the beginning chapters of
the tale of Quaker war tax resister Priscilla Adams.
A note in the issue plugged the
“Conscience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account”:
Established in by the Nonviolent Action
Community of Cascadia, the account allows war tax resisters to set aside
refused military taxes in a secure fund. Deposits may be retrieved at any
time (to replace assets seized by the
IRS,
for example), and interest from the account is used to promote war tax
resistance and support peace and social justice activism. Depositors’ funds
are reinvested in socially responsible institutions assisting low-income
communities and minorities. The CMTC Escrow Account is the largest and most
geographically diverse war tax redirection fund in the United States.
War tax resistance is an act of civil disobedience, and resisters potentially
face fines, levies, and seizure of assets. However, the escrow account itself
is a trust fund, and as such is confidential and entirely legal. Depositor
records are not available to the
IRS,
and individual deposits are considered to be anonymous portions of a larger
fund invested in fully insured institutions. Participants receive records of
their transactions, annual statements, and a free subscription to
NACC’s quarterly war tax resistance magazine.
(I wouldn’t rely on any of that as solid legal advice. My understanding is
that the
IRS
sometimes treats “warehouse banks” like these as illegal operations that they
can seize wholesale under the theory that they’re being operated for money
laundering or tax evasion purposes.)
In a letter in the issue, William Kriebel
called out Quakers on their careless or politically-correct use of of language;
in particular he claimed: “There are no ‘war taxes.’ All income tax money goes
into the treasury without earmarking for the military. Taxation is a legitimate
power of any government. Our points of protest really are the decisions
(budget-making, appropriation) to use money out of the common fund for military
purposes.”
An article on the Quaker Council for European Affairs in the same issue noted
in passing that “conscientious objection to war taxes” was one of the “studies
for publication” that the organization had produced. Another article in that
issue noted that the National Association of Evangelicals had endorsed the
Peace Tax Fund bill:
“At first this was just a lonely struggle for the peace churches,” said
Marian Franz, director of the campaign, “then we got the support of the
mainline churches, which represent over 12 million people. Now we have
support from more conservative religious organizations, who, until recently,
had seemed to be unlikely allies.” Marian attributes the recently attained,
broad base of support to a change in tactics from an issue of conscientious
objection to an issue of religious liberties. Marian explained that “having
this broad base of support means that members of Congress, even conservative
members, take the issue more seriously.”
On , there was a benefit premiere
showing of An Act of Conscience, a documentary on
the Kehler/Corner house seizure and subsequent occupation. There was some
tangential Quaker involvement in the benefit (it was sponsored by several
organizations, including a regional AFSC office, and some Massachusetts
Quakers took part in the occupation), and the benefit screening was covered
in a note in the issue.
In the lead editorial in the issue,
editor Vinton Deming paid tribute to Eleanor Webb:
Eleanor Webb, who died , was clerk
of the Journal board when I was appointed
editor-manager in .… It was Eleanor… who
stood firmly in support of staff who resisted paying the military portion of
their federal taxes.
One of the feature articles in the issue
was written by David R. Bassett and told his story as “The Founder of the
Peace Tax Fund Movement.” Excerpts:
marks the 25th year since the
introduction of the Peace Tax Fund Bill in the
U.S. Congress. I
have been involved in the initiation of this legislation, a laborer in the
centuries-long effort to establish on earth the type of peaceful world
envisioned by Jesus and George Fox. I firmly believe that, on some
significant day in the future, some nation will for the first time pass a
Peace Tax Fund Bill, thereby establishing legal recognition of the right of
conscientious objection to the payment of military taxes. Once this is
accomplished, other nations will follow suit. I consider this goal as one of
the crucial and route-determining “trail-signs” on the path to that time and
place where the world will realize that ahimsa (soulforce)
is the preferred way to resolve conflict and to govern communities, and where
conscientious objection to war and other forms of violence will be considered
the norm.
[My] orientation as a conscientious objector to war and of preventing
preventable suffering impelled Miyoko and me, beginning in
, to wrestle with the fact
that each year we were paying (through our federal taxes) to support the
Viemam War and the military system generally. In fact, some 50 percent of
those tax moneys went to support
U.S. military
systems! One of my most graphic memories of that time was, while working many
nights at Queens Hospital in Honolulu, hearing
U.S. Air Force jet
tankers, fully laden with jet fuel, flying over the heavily populated part of
Honolulu on their way to Indochina.
Conscientious objection to payment of military taxes
In , with the Vietnam War continuing, we
moved to Ann Arbor to work at the University of Michigan. We became members
of the Ann Arbor Meeting and found there a number of people who were actively
grappling with the issue of whether to continue to pay the military portion
of federal taxes for a war that we opposed. I came to realize that any
nation’s military programs are made possible the, monetary resources that, in
the analysis, are extracted from the nation’s citizens by taxation. It also
became clear to me that one who was conscientiously opposed to military
systems must not allow his or her funds to be used for this purpose.
Surveying the pervasive role of our military system not only in our foreign
policies, but in its effects on our economy, our environment, and on the
nation’s culture and spirit, I carne to feel that this issue was central to
our times. Conscientious objection to payment of military taxes is as
important to be established as was the ending of slavery and of apartheid and
the establishment of women’s right to vote. At the same time, I held then,
and still hold, the view that the federal government is capable of carrying
out many beneficial and constructive programs and that I am willing, indeed
obligated, to pay my full share of taxes to support those programs.
I came to know that it would not be enough simply to focus on reductions in
military spending by influencing legislators and electing new ones (though
this was obviously necessary). The challenge was to extend the right of
conscientious objection to war to include not only one’s physical body, but
also one’s economic resources. I knew further that there had been repeated
resistance in the
U.S. courts to
such change and concluded that, while civil disobedience in this area
(i.e., war tax resistance) would continue to be essential, the
principal focus of attention should be to change the tax laws.
During the year , there was for me
a struggle with my conscience, not in regard to what I believe on this issue
but whether to take some action and what that action should be. Should I live
below a taxable income level? move to Canada? engage in war tax resistance?
take our civil disobedience actions into the judicial system? or attempt to
change the federal tax laws? Miyoko and I knew that to embark on any of these
actions would require great amounts of time and energy; that each course
would require some changes and risks, not all of which we could anticipate at
the outset; and that none were assured of “success.” I knew that to commit
the time necessary to move this issue forward might conflict with my hopes of
making progress in academic medicine and in research into the causes of
atherosclerosis. We gradually came to the view that it seemed wisest to try
to resist paying the military portion of our taxes and to begin to
take steps to bring about legislative change.
It was the quiet voice of conscience that kept nagging me almost every day, as
I found one or another reason not to take some action. Finally, in the
, I phoned Professor
Joseph Sax at the University of Michigan Law School and outlined to him the
basic idea: the need to change the federal tax laws so as to have Congress
grant legal recognition to the right of conscientious objection to
the payment of military taxes, while enabling the taxpayer to pay the full
amount of his or her tax with assurance that those tax monies would
not be used for military expenditures. Professor Sax sketched out how this
might be accomplished. Over a period of eight to nine months, with the
assistance of Michael Hall, we began the process of drafting what became the
World Peace Tax Fund Bill.
Other Ann Arbor Friends, Joe and Fran Eliot and Bob and Margaret Blood, had
been considering drafting a bill. A brief written for them by Thomas Towe (a
Quaker law student) proved a helpful resource. It was not hard to draw
together a working committee of seven or eight people during
to work on
this legislation and to take the initial steps in deciding how to bring the
bill to Congress, how to publicize it, and how to raise funds. We were
encouraged when Ann Arbor’s Interfaith Council for Peace decided to support
the legislative effort and appointed two very effective members to meet with
us on a regular basis.
The World Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in the
U.S. Congress on
, with Representative Ronald
V. Dellums as the lead sponsor, with nine other cosponsors. The Peace Tax
Fund office moved from Ann Arbor to the Florida Avenue Meetinghouse in
Washington,
D.C., in
. The bill was first introduced in
the Senate in , with Senator Mark Hatfield
as its sponsor. In the bill was renamed the
U.S. Peace Tax
Fund Bill. A dedicated staff, led for the past 14 years by Marian Franz, has
coordinated the lobbying effort. The orientation and the gifts that she
brings to her work are evident in her book, Questions That Refuse To Go Away.
A sidebar noted resources available from the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and also made note of the international conferences at which similar plans proposed in other countries are discussed.
The same issue also contains Clare Hanrahan’s article “Wholesome Poverty: A Revolutionary Adventure.”
Unfortunately, in the archived PDF, some of the opening paragraph is obscured by an insert card.
The article appears to begin with Hanrahan saying that she initially adopted a lower-income simple-living lifestyle in order to resist war taxes, but then came to believe that frugality and thrift and anti-consumerism and simplicity had a larger role to play in the pursuit of “a just and sustainable global community.”
It continues:
When I must work for wages, I do so as an independent contractor so that I can maintain control over tax withholdings.
I redirect a fair percentage of cash wages and many hours of volunteer time to support life-affirming projects at home and abroad.
Self-employment suits my temperament and has enabled me to develop skills and to pursue interests I may never have had the time for in a conventional career.
I’ve tried to be resilient and open to any honest labor.
If I’m asked what I do for a living, each day I can provide a different answer.
One day I might be gathering and saving seeds for next year’s garden or harvesting wild herbs for a winter tea; another day might be spent in household repair, community organizing, or researching and writing a grant for a nonprofit organization.
I’ve learned the wisdom in giving due time each day to labor of the mind and of the body and to quiet reflection that feeds the spirit.
I value my free time and open schedule far more than any accumulation of cash or property, security, or prestige.
The freedom to choose how I will be with each moment is a gift and a challenge that I count as my greatest wealth.
Living on the edge, more or less, over the years I have honed the skills and nurtured an attitude of wholesome poverty.
Meeting basic needs without a substantial cash flow has been least stressful when I’ve lived within a stable community where interdependence and cooperative values are practiced.
But during my nomadic years I learned to trust in the kindness of strangers and the serendipity of life.
I came to value the gifts of the pilgrim spirit and to recognize the importance of the itinerant wayfarer in the lives of the comfortably settled.
I’ve lived and traveled aboard small sail boats, in a tipi, in rural cabins, and in derelict inner-city housing, trading cleanup and repair for rent.
I’ve made do in the back of an old school bus and afloat on a homemade houseboat on a Mississippi backwater.
I’ve worked in a cooperative shelter for displaced women and children, with room and board as compensation, and I’ve battered for home and garden space by exchanging pet and plant care.
My primary transportation is the slow way.
As a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a bus rider, I keep a less frantic pace, and the more personal contact with those I encounter enriches the journey.
I can borrow a car or catch a lift from a friend if necessary, and by paying my fair share of the cost, the cooperative way serves each of us.
Nutritious food is available in surprising abundance if one is willing to look to unconventional channels:
I’ve participated in grassroots distribution networks of urban gleanings, intercepting the produce, grains, and other surplus foods otherwise lost.
Best of all, I’ve learned to grow my own food in community gardens and backyard plots whenever I had the opportunity.
As a worker-member at the local coop I claimed a significant reduction on food purchases, and by eliminating meat from my diet, the cost of my sustenance is affordable and sustainable.
Insurance against old age, disability, accident, or disease has never been an affordable option, nor one in which I place my faith.
Catastrophic illness or accident or the incapacities of age could happen to anyone.
Yet time and again, I’ve been sustained through economic precarity with help that comes at just the right moment.
This has happened so often that I live with a trust that keeps fear at bay.
I have learned to lean into the present moment, focused on the work before me, while keeping a well-honed sense of the adventure of it all and a very real faith in the unfolding process.
The inherent goodness of the universe has been made visible through the most unlikely of allies, and the travelers I’ve met along the way have been the wisest of teachers.
Peace Pilgrim, writing in her pamphlet, Steps Toward Inner Peace, recalled a visit to a city that had been her home:
In the poorer sections I am tolerated.
In the wealthier sections some glances seem a bit startled, and some are disdainful.
On both sides of us as we walk are displayed the things that we can buy if we are willing to stay in the orderly lines, day after day, year after year…
Thousands of things are displayed — and yet the most valuable things are missing.
Freedom is not displayed, nor health, nor happiness, nor peace of mind.
To obtain these, my friends, you too may need to escape from the orderly lines and risk being looked upon disdainfully.
Stepping outside the tyranny of “orderly lines” and daring to risk the uncertainties of disaffiliation can make of our very lives a revolution.
The way to the just and sustainable global community that we seek will open before us as we walk.
Another article in the same issue took the “voluntary simplicity” idea and ran with it.
Starting with Jesus’s one-sentence summary of his teachings — love your neighbor as much as you love yourself — the authors took this to mean “taking our fair share of global resources and no more.”
This starts with refusing war taxes because militarism is directly destructive of “our global neighbors.”
But that’s just step one of a six-step process.
Step two would be to imagine the world’s resources shared equally, which, the authors assert, means “an annual ‘fair share’ of just over $3,000 per person.”
But because the world is not using its resources in an environmentally sustainable way, step #3 is to reduce this fair share some more, to a more sustainable level: $1,800 per person per year.
But since that much money would go further in a place like the United States, where it’s relatively easier to live off the cast-offs of the wealthy, level #4 “challenges us to live on even less than level three, since we have an easier time doing so in a society with a relatively affluent public infrastructure.”
We’re not done yet.
Level #5 considers the non-monetary wealth most Americans enjoy because of the relatively high levels of medical care and education they have had access to.
“With such advantages (and others), we ought to be able to live on less resources than folks who lack education and have chronic medical problems.”
Finally, level #6 is for those who are not hampered by disabilities, encouraging them to sacrifice yet more so as to leave more for those who have to struggle harder.
Challenging? Certainly.
Even the authors only seem to have made it half way to step #2, limiting their income as a couple to $12,000 a year.
Some other choices they made were to “keep the majority of our savings in the form of non-interest-bearing loans” so as to avoid the sin of usury, and to “give away each year an amount equal to what we spend on ourselves.”
(A letter-to-the-editor in the issue criticized this radical simplicity, saying it smacked of “intelligent, able-bodied adults who consciously decide to let others subsidize” the benefits of society.
In particular: “In reducing their income to avoid paying taxes to support the military, this couple also avoids paying taxes that support the other half of the federal budget.
So, there goes their support for many of the roads they use, for medical research they might avail themselves of through that subsidized doctor, for other federally supported scientific and social research, for national parks, and so forth.
The authors are obviously well educated.
Their education was probably supported by local, state, and federal subsidies.
One wonders if they are repaying society for the educational benefit they’ve received.”)
Another brief note in the issue reported on the results of a “penny poll” that had been “conducted by Christian Peacemaker Teams in Elkhart, Ind.” and had indicated that those polled implicitly supported huge reductions in military spending.
A letter-to-the-editor from Marjorie Schier and Suzanne Day of the “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting War Tax Concerns Support Committee” published in the issue summarized the war tax issue as they saw it:
Resisting taxes
When a draft call finds some conscientious objectors unable to participate in war, the government not only has provided them alternatives, but also has proceeded to draft others who will participate.
It is individual conscience that makes the difference, not how the government allocates the recruits.
Some Friends have been unable to enlist, and some cannot voluntarily send dollars in federal tax for military uses.
Interacting with the federal government through tax resistance as witness for peace is more than symbolic; it can be earnest, meaningful religious conscience in action.
However, it does not change how the government allocates its resources, and efforts to witness for changed priorities are also significant.
Many Friends and others work for passage of the Peace Tax Fund Bill by the U.S. Congress because it would not only provide a legal opportunity for pacifists to pay their full federal tax without supporting war, but also give the government an indication of the numbers of citizens exercising this option.
Yes, the federal tax on telephone service is refused by many pacifists (with
a note of explanation accompanying the refusal and redirection of the money
for constructive purposes) because that tax was specifically reinstated to
support the war in Vietnam. Federal bookkeeping does not distinguish certain
tax streams for specific purposes, and has not since John Woolman wrestled
with this same issue. Nevertheless, many Friends are prompted to take a stand
for peace via taxes and thereby find a forum for disclosing that witness with
meetings, governmental representatives, families, and neighbors.
An obituary notice for Abram Bresel Goldstein in that same issue noted that
“[t]hough he worked briefly for the Internal Revenue Service, Abram left that
position during the Korean War to avoid aiding the collection of taxes for
war.”
On , NWTRCC and
the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sponsored
a seminar on “Corporate Conscience and War Taxes” at the Moorestown, New
Jersey, Meeting (according to a calendar listing in the
issue).
Priscilla Adams
The war tax resistance of Quaker Priscilla Adams became a cause célèbre that
played out over in the
Friends Journal starting in
. I’ll break with my chronological examination of the Journal for a while to follow this thread.
The issue introduces Adams and her
legal case:
Priscilla Adams, a war tax resister and member of Haddonfield
(N.J.) Meeting, is
challenging the
IRS
in court under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Her case is the
first of its kind to test conscientious war tax resistance since the passage
of the RFRA in . Priscilla and her lawyer,
Peter Goldberger, will challenge two points covered by the act: the
government’s use of penalties against war tax resisters for their stands of
conscience; and the lack of a government accommodation for conscientious
objectors to paying for war (like a Peace Tax Fund). The RFRA states that in
conflicts between the government and religious freedom, the government must
show compelling state interest and then use the least restrictive means
necessary. In this case, Priscilla is challenging the government’s lack of
recognition of conscience in response to the
IRS
assessing her taxes and penalties. She and Peter are arguing that under RFRA,
the IRS
should waive penalties for religious war tax resisters as long as they
recognize other forms of reasonable cause for noncompliance with the tax law.
They also are stating that the RFRA requires the enactment of something like a
peace tax fund for religious war tax resisters who are willing to accept a
reasonable accommodation, such as earmarking tax monies for non-warlike
purposes in the federal government. The case has completed its earliest
procedural stages and will be heard in United States Tax Court. Though no
date has been set, lawyers expect a trial date
. Priscilla has participated in
several clearness committees and is receiving guidance and support from
Haddonfield Meeting, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee,
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s War Tax Concerns Support Committee, the
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and family and friends.
The issue gave an update:
Priscilla Adams… will appeal the court’s decision rejecting her right to
refuse to pay taxes. The case went before the Philadelphia Tax Court, where
Adams presented an extensive outline of Quaker history and beliefs related to
war tax objections. The court’s decision states, “Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of does not exempt Quaker
from federal income taxes, despite taxpayer’s religious opposition to
military expenditures.” , Rosa Packard of Purchase
(N.Y.) Meeting and
Gordon and Edith Browne of Plainfield
(Vt.) Meeting also have filed
complaints in federal district courts seeking to protect their conscientious
acts of war tax refusal.
The issue mentioned her appeal:
Tax resister Priscilla Lippincott Adams… faced the Federal Court of Appeals
on . Her case against the
IRS for
penalizing her for her religious objections to paying the military through
taxes was dismissed in … The court
had the choice of hearing oral arguments or making a decision based on the
written briefs. In a positive turn, the judges heard oral arguments. Adams
said her lawyer, Peter Goldberger, passionately presented her case, “just
like a lawyer on T.V.”
The three judges will now make a decision, a process that could take anywhere
from six weeks to six months.
From there, to the Supreme Court, according to a
press release that formed the
basis for a
Journal news brief:
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the
U.S. Supreme Court
in support of its member, Priscilla Adams… who petitioned the high court in
, following unsuccessful efforts
in lower courts to obtain government accommodation for her conscientious
objection to paying war taxes by allowing her to pay federal taxes without
paying for military expenditures. Her employer, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,
supports religious witness by not forwarding the military portion of a
conscientious objector’s taxes to the
IRS. A
Peace Tax Fund, where tax dollars of conscientious objectors would be directed
exclusively to nonmilitary programs, is one possible solution to the dilemma
for adherents to nonviolence; a bill to establish a Peace Tax Fund has been
introduced in every Congress .
…Lower courts addressed the issue of accommodating war tax resistance only by
declaring that the government has a compelling interest in collecting taxes;
the courts have not dealt with the arguments that accommodation of
conscientious objection would be possible within the context of mandatory
participation in taxation. The Supreme Court has not heard any case that
raises these religious liberty questions under the
law.
By then it was too late, though. The issue noted that Adams’s Supreme Court appeal had been turned down:
On , the
U.S. Supreme Court
declined to hear appeals by Gordon and Edith Browne and Priscilla Lippincott
Adams to lower-court rulings that allowed the Internal Revenue Service to
impose late fees and interest for their conscientious refusal to pay the
military portion of their federal tax. The issue in this case was not paying
the tax when forced to do so by the
IRS,
but whether a “religious hardship” existed that should enable them to pay
without any penalties and interest. The lower-court rulings reaffirmed a
statement of the Supreme Court in that “The
tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge [it]
because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious
belief.” The Justice Department lawyers said that “Voluntary compliance with
the tax laws is the least restrictive means of furthering the government’s
compelling interest in collecting taxes.”… “We’re very disappointed that the
Supreme Court will not be taking the opportunity to reinforce religious
freedom and freedom of conscience,” said Marian Franz, executive director of
the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. “Congress seems like the most
appropriate place where this human right can be protected.”
Adams wasn’t going to give up though. Whether or not the government was going
to deign to make her war tax resistance legal, she was going to resist, and
the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was willing to help her. From the
issue:
The United States Department of Justice, Tax Division, is suing Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting for refusing to forward wages of an employee to the Internal
Revenue Service. The employee, Priscilla Adams, resists paying taxes for war
and the military on the basis of religious conscience. The lawsuit, filed in
, is a move to attain funds from
PYM
as recompense for taxes owed by Priscilla Adams, plus a 50-percent penalty
for not garnishing her wages as instructed by the
IRS in
. If the
IRS
succeeds,
PYM
would owe approximately $60,000.
On ,
PYM’s
Interim Meeting decided to respond to the lawsuit and defend its position in
court.
PYM
stated that to garnish Priscilla Adams’s wages would infringe upon her
religious beliefs, and
PYM
should not “be required to act as a collection agent for the government when
doing so will require it to violate key tenets of the Quaker faith.”
Thomas Jeavons,
PYM
general secretary, commented in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “About 50 percent
of our taxes pay for weapons and warfare… We have long sought the creation of
a Peace Tax Fund, a government fund for nonmilitary use, where taxes of
[those who regard paying for war as a violation of religious conscience]
could go. Legislation for this has been in Congress for many years. It should
be passed now.”
The issue spelled out the
Meeting’s legal argument:
On , Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting filed its answer to a Justice Department lawsuit that asks a $20,000
penalty to be imposed on them and seeks to make them the collection agent for
the government. The yearly meeting’s response makes dear its intention to
stand by its essential religious principles, and publicly defend the free
exercise of religion on all possible grounds, including constitutional and
statutory religious freedom defenses. The
IRS
contends that
PYM
must garnish the salary of one of its employees and members who refuses — in
keeping with longstanding Quaker convictions — to pay taxes that support war
and preparations for war. While the
IRS
could easily take other courses to collect the back taxes it claims are due,
instead the federal government is trying to force a church to collect these
funds for it, an action that would require this Quaker organization to
violate its own essential religious convictions regarding freedom of
conscience.
PYM
has refused to do so. The answer to the suit says that the government “asks
the court to assist it in violating the most fundamental religious principles
of an established church… Although those principles and the yearly meeting’s
reasons for its actions have been painstakingly explained to the [government]…
the complaint purports to set forth the history of this matter without even
mentioning
PYM’s
efforts at communication and conciliation. Further, the complaint labels the
Yearly Meeting’s religiously mandated actions as a ‘failure’ to submit to
government coercion, and brands the [Quaker] theological scruples as
‘unreasonable’ and deserving of harsh penalties.” The news release from
PYM
adds, “Quakers have long been known for their religious pacifism, opposition
to war, and support of religious freedom and freedom of conscience.
PYM
regrets that being true to its faith has now brought us into conflict with
the government. The Quaker organization sees itself as defending freedom of
religion and freedom of conscience — and not just for itself, but for all
those who desire to be both good citizens and people of faith. While
PYM
regrets the need to resort to legal action, it looks forward to a full airing
of the issues involved in a public forum where both the sound reasons and
religious principles that guide this Quaker organization’s actions may be
upheld.
PYM’s
defense will rest on the constitutional right to freedom of religion
generally, and particularly as upheld and restated in the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of .”
The issue reported on how far
they’d gotten with that argument:
On , A federal judge ruled that
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting must comply with a levy on the wages of war tax
refuser Priscilla Adams, but rejected a 50 percent penalty desired by the
Internal Revenue Service.
U.S. District
Judge Stewart Dalzell agreed with the Quaker argument that complying with the
levy “substantially burdens its exercise of religion,” because, as
PYM
General Secretary Thomas Jeavons earlier testified, the organization
“considers it a sacred duty to support the conscientious actions of its
individual members, especially in such historic witnesses as the Peace
Testimony.” Judge Stewan Dalzell also agreed that the
PYM
defense “raised novel and important questions,” thus demonstrating in this
instance that the previous refusal of
PYM
to comply was not a frivolous activity. But he disagreed that the
IRS had
practical alternative means to collect taxes from Priscilla Adams. The
government should not be required “to engage in a time-consuming, and
possibly fruitless, scavenger hunt for other assets.” In
, the Third
U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals had already rejected Priscilla Adams’s claim that the government
could devise a means for earmarking taxes for nonmilitary expenditures,
stating that there were “particularly difficult problems with administration
should exceptions on religious grounds be carved out by the courts.”
That issue also noted:
Film students from Brooklyn Friends School are directing and producing a
video documentary about Quaker peace activist Priscilla Adams. The students
came to Friends Center in Philadelphia to interview her about how her
religious beliefs led her to refuse payment of taxes in order to avoid
contributing to military funding. The students also interviewed George Lakey,
head of Training for Change, and Gene Hillman, adult religious education
coordinator for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. This documentary film may be an
entry for Bridge Film Festival, which is open to middle and upper school
students at Quaker schools worldwide.
The issue noted that the film had
been made — a 16-minute short titled A Need to Witness. And hey, look — it’s on-line:
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Mentions of war tax resistance and differing approaches to the dilemma of paying war taxes continued to appear in some of the issues of the Friends Journal in .
The issue included a review of the book A Persistent Voice: Marian Franz and Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation.
It was a collection of essays by and about Franz and about Peace Tax Fund activism, with some supplemental material about the U.S. versions of Peace Tax Fund scheme legislation that Franz had championed.
The issue included Harrison & Marilyn Roper telling the story of their war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
In the contradiction of “praying for peace and paying for war” overwhelmed us.
We needed to try to live under the taxable level (supplemented by tax-free investments) so that we no longer would be supporting monetarily what we deplored spiritually.
In an open letter to fellow Friends at Haverford (Pa.) Meeting… we wrote:
Along with raising our family and “just living,” we have been trying in our own ways to contribute to a more just and peaceful society.
While doing this, we have both had jobs and paid federal taxes.
For the last three years we have not paid that portion of our federal income tax (approximately one-third) that goes to the Pentagon.
However, IRS has eventually taken the funds, with penalties and interest, by placing a lien on Harry’s salary at West Chester State College.
Thus, we are purchasers and part owners (along with you) of numerous H-bombs and other weapons of death.
We ask ourselves if the potential damage we are doing is not more than outweighing any benefits to society we might be making.
They wrote that they were hoping for the passage of Peace Tax Fund legislation with which they “could have continued in our present occupations and continued to pay our income taxes.”
But meanwhile, they decided to simplify their lives and reorient their finances with a goal to getting under the tax line.
They shared some of the details of how they went about this:
After our younger son had graduated from high school, we were able, at ages 49 and 47, to move to northern Maine and live a simpler life.
Louis Green… taught us what we needed to know about tax-free municipal bonds and helped us invest the cushion we received from selling our home in Haverford and buying a very low-cost one in Houlton, Maine.
Our older son was about to enter his senior year at University of Maine and we would be able to pay the much-reduced in-state tuition.
We… installed an on-grid photovoltaic electrical system and have solar pre-heating of hot water.
We also live within walking distance of stores, which reduces our need to travel and helps us live in an environmentally friendly manner.
Our home is heated by wood from dead and diseased trees that we harvest ourselves from our woodlot.
…a wonderful new life of volunteering, composing, conducting, and living closer to nature opened up.… Despite all the details of our peace witness through federal tax avoidance being aired on the front page of our Houlton paper soon after our arrival, in we were honored with the “Good Samaritans of Houlton” award for our volunteer work and in we each received a Paul Harris Award from the local Rotary Club for our peace efforts.…
For those who share our concern about not paying for war or preparations for war, tax-free municipal bonds are the legal tickets.
Those who purchase them are financing voter-approved and life-enhancing projects in our country such as better sewers, schools, and hospitals.
The modest interest on these state and/or municipal bonds is not taxable by the federal government.
We file a 1040 every year, but most years we owe nothing or very little.
If we think we may “go over,” we give more money away that year to tax-exempt organizations.…
Thanks to understanding parents, most of our inheritance has been in the form of tax-free municipal bonds.
When a bond comes due, we always reinvest the capital by purchasing another tax-free municipal bond at face value (i.e. at par) so that there is no capital gain when the bond comes due or is called.
Although we do not know how long we will live or what dire situations might eat up our principal, we do hope to be able to continue to live very simply on the interest from our tax-free municipal bonds and pass on some of the capital to our children and grandchildren… We really love the kind of life we’re living; we didn’t make this commitment in order to be miserable.
And we sleep better at night knowing that we are not paying for war as we pray for peace.
That issue also reprinted a “declaration of conscience” that came out of a group associated with the Quakers from the New York Yearly Meeting who had been working to try to get legal accommodation for conscientious objection to military spending.
Excerpts:
The government of the United States violates freedom of conscience rights by forcing us to pay for war.
…In paying federal income taxes we contribute personally and directly to such expenditure, in violation of our consciences.
We have responded in various ways.
Some of us have taken steps to reduce or eliminate our income tax liability.
Some have paid under protest.
Some have withheld all or part of the taxes due, redirecting the sums involved to nonviolent and humanitarian purposes, or have deposited the money in escrow for any nonmilitary governmental use.
Some have challenged federal agencies in the courts.
Some have petitioned and campaigned for legislative accommodation.
We stress that we are willing to contribute our full share to the expenses of civil society.
We simply seek to ensure that the taxes we pay are not used to finance warmaking or preparations for war.
As a result of this conscientious objection we have variously suffered financial hardships, administrative and court fines, garnishment of wages, seizures of bank accounts or other property, deductions from our social security pension payments, and even imprisonment.
However, the substance of our remonstrance is that we are all ultimately compelled to pay taxes used for military purposes, and that we have a continuing liability to do so in the future.
We have thus been obliged, and are being obliged, in direct violation of our consciences, to be complicit in the funding and waging of war.
…Written expressions of conscientious objection to military taxation are classified as “frivolous” by the government and subject to punitive fines amounting to thousands of dollars.
Our freedom of conscience claims have never been fully reviewed at any level of administrative or judicial consideration, nor are we aware of any case in which this has occurred.
Accompanying this was a sidebar from Elizabeth Boardman in which she shared “the following queries [which] are in use at local meetings in College Park Quartely Meeting:”
What deeply held spiritual values or concerns make the issue of war tax resistance difficult for me to consider?
How can we as Friends, regardless of our perspective, overcome our reticence to discuss the issues with one another?
What are the personal or family needs I would need to address before I could become a tax resister?
Do I feel a need to further engage the war machine by not paying my war taxes in some form, either fully or symbolically?
What are my major fears and joys about challenging the government in this way?
What are the personal or family needs I would need to address before I could become a tax resister?
How can I engage my beloved spiritual community in supporting me as I take my next step on this complex issue?
Naomi Paz Greenberg, in a letter-to-the-editor that responded to critics of war tax resistance whose writings had been published in earlier issues (I’ve included other excerpts from this letter in Picket Line entries covering those writings, on and ), wrote, in response to people who believe that “conscientious war tax resistance is borne to bring about consequences”:
I knew for all of my adult life that I should not be paying taxes for war, and for most of that time I knew that I did not have the courage to bear this witness.
The energy that supports my commitment now has little to do with consequences.
I am simply unable to cooperate in murder, in war crimes.
As soon as I was able to make that commitment, I began to understand that I will probably pay more rather than less as a consequence of my refusal to pay for war.
It matters very little to me whether the hundreds or the thousands of dollars that I may someday “owe” remain pure and pacifistic or not.
As a U.S. citizen I have been taught that this is a government of, by, and for the people, so in some sense every dollar in the government’s coffers is my responsibility and not one of those dollars should be spent to kill another human being.
This is what direct experience of God teaches me.
Paul Sheldon noted, in a letter-to-the-editor in the issue, that he had “made a donation to the non-partisan Disabled American Veterans organization” and included a letter in which he had “mentioned that this particular contribution was the redirection of war tax money that I had publicly refused to pay the U.S. government (as a pacifist tax resister).”
A letter-to-the-editor from Peg Morton in the issue forcefully encouraged Friends to resist their war taxes: “It is beyond a doubt, in my opinion, that it is time — now!
— to withdraw from paying the United States federal government the war taxes it demands… to voluntarily pay war taxes to our current federal government is an immoral act.… When policies and actions of a government become immoral, it becomes immoral to support them.”
An obituary notice for Gordon Mervin Browne in the issue noted that “they [Gordon and his wife Edith Carlton Browne] were military tax resisters in .”
A book review in the issue summarized the use of tax resistance in the First Intifada this way:
[Maxine] Kaufman-Lacusta [author of Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation] looks in depth at a tax strike in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour during the First Intifada (), a time of popular activism.
This strike was based on the fact that taxes collected by Israelis were not being used to serve the needs of the Palestinian population, but to finance the occupation itself.
Elias Rishmawi, a major player in Beit Sahour, said that the villagers “found out that Israel was profiting dramatically from occupying the Palestinian land — from direct taxes, indirect taxes, taxes on the workers inside Israel, taxes on imports, taxes on people leaving the country, using Palestinian land, using Palestinian resources.”
Palestinians viewed the strike, which they ended in , as a success because a strong and violent reaction from the Israeli government failed to suppress it.
This is the thirty-third in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we continue through the middle-1980s.
War tax resistance grew to be a front-and-center concern of the General Conference Mennonite Church in the 1970s, but by the mid-1980s interest in the topic began to suddenly decline.
I noticed a similar thing when I looked at how war tax resistance rose and fell in the Society of Friends.
Perhaps the topic had been talked-out and people felt there was little more to add to the arguments that had already been made: everybody had the chance to learn about the issue and take their stand, and there wasn’t much left to talk about.
Or perhaps the topic had left the pages of The Mennonite for other publications — like God and Caesar (a specialty publication for war tax resisters put out by a Mennonite group), or the newsletter of the recently-founded National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
The energy Mennonites were putting into the fools’ errand of World Peace Tax Fund legislation was certainly a distraction.
Certainly there were Mennonites who would have contemplated conscientious war tax resistance or argued for it, but who were instead content to lobby Congress to give them a box to check.
John R. Dyck wrote in with concern about this lapse of interest:
Thank you for picking up this important issue [military taxes] again (see issue) at a time when many of our people hoped it was a thing of the past.
Must we look to other denominations or people than our own to take a bolder leadership position when it comes to dealing with governments?
We have almost fallen asleep in the quietness and relative peace in our country, and the fairly consistent drop of dollars into our coffers has been an effective tranquilizer.
One of the articles in that issue was Edith Adamson (of Conscience Canada) and Marian Franz (of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund) promoting the Peace Tax Fund law idea.
Such a law, they said “would remove the agonizing dilemma that forces conscientious objectors to either disregard their deepest beliefs or disobey the laws of their country.”
They claimed the proposed law would “rechannel[] some tax dollars away from the military and into human needs programs,” and would raise awareness of “nations’ misplaced priorities.”
The Tax Court of Canada, in a recent 28-page ruling, held that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not permit taxpayers to withhold the “military portion” of their taxes.
Jerilyn Prior, a Vancouver physician of Quaker faith who brought the case, had withheld 10.5 percent of her taxes and sent them instead to a peace fund.
The court concluded, “Even if the assessment were objectively and in reality an infringement upon the appellant’s freedom of conscience and religion… the Canadian tax system… would be a reasonable limit which must be imposed in a free and democratic society…”
taxes for peace fund
Titus and Linda Peachey are directing a Pennsylvania project supported by Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Peace Section.
Taxes for Peace is for those wishing to designate a portion of their tax dollars for a peaceful purpose.
The section is also offering a packet of information about military tax opposition.
This year’s Taxes for Peace fund supports the Lancaster County Peacework Alternatives Project, addressing peace and militarism issues in Lancaster County, where 50 companies held prime military contracts worth $150 million with U.S. military agencies in .
The Peacheys hope to raise public awareness of the nature and extent of militarism in the Lancaster area and to work with local churches and groups about the theological and ethical questions of militarism.
They also want to help defense employees deal with the ethical dilemmas posed by defense-related jobs and begin a dialogue with managers of local military-related industries.
Peace Section hopes that this one-year pilot project will serve as a model and inspiration for other peace groups interested in initiating similar projects in their communities.
In more than 40 people contributed $4,645.85 to the Taxes for Peace fund.
This money was forwarded to a project in Guatemala that aided victims of violence.
European Mennonites: “as important as conscription”
Tubingen, West Germany (MCC)—
Green party parliamentarian Petra Kelly called on governments to heed the example of Christian communities and churches during the opening address at the First International Conference of Military Tax Resisters and Peace Tax Campaigns held here .
In particular she lauded the decision of the General Conference Mennonite Church not to force its employees to pay war taxes against their conscience.
Over 80 people representing most Western European countries, Australia, Japan, Canada and the United States attended.
Most of those at the conference were tax resisters.
Some redirect the military part of their income tax to peace-making purposes, others live below a taxable income level, and others symbolically withhold some of their taxes.
In West Germany and the Netherlands, for example, many take a first step by redirecting 5.72 German marks or Dutch guilders as a sign of their opposition to the deployment of the 572 U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles in Western Europe.
They believe that the conscription of their money is as important as the conscription of young men in preparing for and fighting war.
Several participants shared their experiences with tax resistance.
Arthur Windsor, a white-haired and mild-mannered Quaker from Gloucester, England, told how he could not reconcile his faith in Christ with paying tax monies that built nuclear and traditional weapons for oppressive Third World regimes.
He smiled when he remembered the remark of the constable who came to take him to jail, “The law is not the same as justice.”
Work groups met on to discuss “Law and Conscience,” “Symbolic Actions and Publicity” and “International Cooperation.”
Susumu Ishitiani, a Quaker from Japan, preached the final sermon in the Stepahanus Church, which hosted the conference.
Sponsors of the event included the German Mennonite Peace Committee, the German Quaker Peace Committee and the German Branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Mennonite participants included Marian Franz, executive director of the U.S.-based National Campaign for a World Peace Tax fund, Wolfgang Krauss of the German Mennonite Peace Committee and Andre Gingerich of Mennonite Central Committee in West Germany.
In there had been something of a purge of gay Mennonites from leadership positions, after a resolution at the Saskatoon conference unambiguously condemned homosexuality.
Robert Hull wondered why Mennonite institutions were being so selective about which sins they were going to condemn in this manner:
I… pointed out that the GC triennial sessions at Fresno, Calif. in declared that “all war and all that contributes to war is a sin.”
Yet some GC congregations accept as members people who have served in the military and not publicly repented, who work in defense industries, who pay federal taxes.
A new video program on war tax resistance is available for free loan from the Mennonite Central Committee Resource Library… War Tax Resistance Seminar includes a lecture and panel discussion presented in in Lancaster County, Pa.
The General Assembly of the Mennonite Church (confusingly not the General Conference Mennonite Church) took place in .
According to The Mennonite:
“Nearly all 260 delegates representing 22 conferences in the United States and Canada encouraged the church’s governing body to find a way for church institutions to respond to the consciences of employees who object to paying that portion of their taxes destined for military use, even if such action involves civil disobedience.”
Marian Franz wrote in the edition that in her experience war tax resistance and work on peace tax fund lobbying was a good form of outreach for the anti-war message.
Excerpts:
In the national capitals.
When you in the local areas and we in Washington and Ottawa continue to press the issue of conscience, our single acts have widespread reverberations.
Often members of government and their legislative assistants feel compelled to examine their consciences.
In my experience, as we explain why people cannot pay the military portion of their taxes, the member of government or the aide feels compelled to explain why their conscience does not agree with ours (something we did not come there to ask) or to admit that our witness has caused them to listen to their conscience in a new way.
Among religious bodies.
The fact that a sincere expression of conscientious conviction is infectious is demonstrated by the burgeoning examples of conscientious statements among religious bodies.
In North America a new “peace church” is emerging that spans virtually every denomination, confession and constituency.
Most of the major church bodies and bishops’ conferences have made statements, many surprisingly forceful, against nuclear weapons and the spiraling arms race.
At the congregational and parish level, Bible study, prayer and discussion around the nuclear question is occurring across Canada and the United States.
Old distinctions between pacifists and just-war proponents are breaking down.
The threat of nuclear war has raised, for an increasing number of Christians, a crisis of conscience.
At the corporate level.
Until now in our history, conscientious objection was considered only an individual matter.
Conscientious objection to paying taxes for military force was a matter between the individual and God, the individual and conscience, the individual and the courts, the individual and revenue collection agencies.
Now another dimension has been added to the picture.
It is called corporate military tax resistance.
Even in the face of large maximum penalties ($25,000 fine for each person and/or 10 years in prison), religious bodies are beginning to ask if they as corporate entities can any longer in good conscience withhold taxes from the salaries of those employees who ask for reasons of conscience that they not be withheld.
To date such corporate action has been taken only by small groups in historic peace churches (e.g. the General Conference Mennonite Church; Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a six-state region of Quakers; and the Friends World Committee on Consultation).
But that action is now under consideration by some of the largest denominations.
When we mention such corporate actions and considerations in Congressional offices, new interest is sparked.
Conscientious objection as a matter of individual conscience is one thing, but when it occurs on a corporate level it draws a different quality of attention.
At an international level.
The Canadian and U.S. Peace Tax Fund efforts are a small campaign as lobbies go.
Yet small seeds continue to sprout and blossom.
The exact wording of the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill now appears in legislation introduced in the parliaments of several nations.
How could David Bassett, a Quaker physician from Ann Arbor, Mich., who drafted the U.S. peace tax legislation with law faculty, have dreamed that one day he would attend an international conference of peace tax campaigns?
After five years as executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund in the United States, I was thrilled to attend the first international conference of peace tax campaigns and war tax resisters in Tubingen .
One hundred participants from 15 countries gathered for the conference.
They came together at the invitation of five German groups, including the Deutsches Mennonitisches Friedens Komitee (German Mennonite Peace Committee).
In workshops, panel discussions, and plenary sessions many participants expressed openly and in moving ways the Christian basis for their beliefs and actions.
While the religious and political backgrounds of the participants varied, there was little diversity in their conviction of conscience.
All found it a clear violation of conscience to pay the military portion of their taxes.
All saw the connection between the 4 million people who starve each year and swollen military budgets.
All noted that what the world spends in just 10 days for military expenditures could not only feed all the hungry on earth for a year but also provide them with clean water, housing and education.
Even the setting for the conference was a reminder of why we had gathered.
From the Tubingen church where we met, we could see a hospital for brain-damaged people from World War Ⅱ, now under conversion into a training center for the triage method of treating the victims of the next war.
I was struck by how many of the participants had known the trauma of war firsthand.
The majority were Europeans and had lived under bombs and/or had grown up with family members missing because of World War Ⅱ.
Antje Spannenberg was one of the generation of children who had plagued their parents with the question, “How could you have allowed Hitler to come into and remain in power?
Why didn’t you stop him?”
Now Antje’s children are asking her, “How can you allow a world full of weapons so dreadful and dangerous?”
Ursula Windsor, a refugee from Nazi Germany now living in England and married to Britisher Arthur Windsor, admits, “I know if enough of us had resisted we could have stopped Hitler.
For some it would not have been difficult; for others, a great sacrifice.
Whether simple or difficult, there came a time when it was too late.”
Ursula knew that truth from experience.
“I have watched my favorite possessions being taken out of my home as the British Inland Revenue Service claimed them in lieu of taxes we have not paid because we believe that Jesus forbids us to pay for war.”
Her husband, Arthur, went to prison for three weeks.
On the day of Arthur’s release he was met at the prison gate by a member of the British Parliament who escorted him to the British House of Commons.
With Arthur in the gallery, the member of Parliament introduced the British Peace Tax Fund into Parliament.
On that day, for the first time, it received 10 minutes of official debate.
She also briefly profiled conference attendees Wolfgang Krauss of West Germany and Susumu Ishitani of Japan.
Military tax resistance.
Are there conscientious objectors to taxes for military purposes in other countries, and do some refuse to pay the military portion of their taxes to their governments?
Yes.
Some withhold all, some the military portion and some a symbolic portion from their taxes.
For some these actions are a political strategy; for many they are based on religious commitment.
Reports from the various countries echoed a refrain.
In the Netherlands 5.72 guilders is a symbolic amount withheld by many.
In Germany 5.72 Deutsche Marks is a symbolic amount.
The number represents the 572 Pershing Ⅱ and cruise missiles on European soil and expresses abhorrence for the fact that they shorten the nuclear fuse to six minutes.
Legislative efforts.
Has any country succeeded in passing peace tax legislation that would make it legal to have the military portion of their citizens’ taxes go into a separate fund?
Not yet.
Countries working for legislation are the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Finland, Australia and the United States.
Switzerland and Spain have no organized effort for legal recognition of conscientious objection to military taxes.
France has a fund in which tax-resisted dollars are collected, as does Italy.
The Peace Tax campaigns of Canada and Japan, rather than promoting peace tax legislation, are challenging their governments in the courts based on constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience (Canada) and constitutional stipulations that not more than 1 percent of the gross national product be used for military force (Japan).
Other judicial efforts.
Attempts to establish through the courts the legal right to redirect taxes from military purposes have been pursued in many countries.
Except in Italy, these efforts have been without success.
The standard response of governments to non-payment of the military portion of taxes (if they respond at all) includes trials, confiscation of property, fines and interest fees, and — in rare instances — prison.
The standard response of the courts to tax resisters who are brought to trial is that the issues raised present a “political question” that the courts cannot address or that constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience and/or religion do not outweigh the duty of a citizen to pay taxes.
The greatest success and surprise story was that de facto recognition of conscientious objection to military taxes exists in Italy.
Fifty war tax resisters have been prosecuted in six legal cases and have been acquitted in every case.
They based their case on the fact that freedom of conscience is guaranteed in the Italian constitution.
Participants from Italy reported at Tubingen that four years ago they knew of only 20 who did not pay the military portion of their taxes for reasons of conscience.
That number is now 3,500 and growing.
War tax resisters are no longer prosecuted in Italy.
I listened with anticipation to the featured speaker, Petra Kelly, founder of the Green party, and member of the West German Bundestag (Parliament).
Referring to the Hitler years, she said, “Because we can recall the painful experiences of fascism in this country, especially when it comes to military violence, we cannot retreat into obedience by our citizens in relation to the state.
In the domain of conscience there is a higher duty.
The special status of human conscience and the fundamental right not to kill is set apart from other issues.
Therefore governments should make allowance for tax redirection that they would make in no other cases.”
Then came the surprise.
Kelly said that in searching for signs of some way out of the dark morass of military expenditures, she finds an example in the Mennonites.
She said, “An example for me is the [General Conference] Mennonite Church.
A group of members decided the following:
‘The employees of the church administration are given the power to be true to the high demands of Christ’s Law of Love, in that they can resist withholding taxes from employees that have requested it and therefore open up the possibility to resist for reasons of conscience to pay for the preparation of war.’ ”
She continued, “This example should give us all courage, but it is also a clear signal of that which happens in many Christian churches and can give us hope.”
I thought back to the long struggle of conscience that culminated in the conference decision cited by Kelly.
At the time we were not thinking of what the rest of the world would think of us, but only whether our action was consistent with obedience to Christ.
I certainly did not expect to hear it quoted three years later by a member of a foreign parliament, at a conference of 15 countries.
Conscience is contagious.
This is the thirty-fourth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we enter the late 1980s.
The edition again announced the “Taxes for Peace” fund that had been established by the MCC Peace Section (U.S.) to coordinate war tax redirection.
In the fund would be redirecting taxes to “the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund… [which] seeks to enact the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill… to give those conscientiously opposed to war a way to pay 100 percent of their taxes, with the military percentage going to a separate fund for peace-enhancing programs.”
In about $4,000 was contributed to the U.S. Peace Section Taxes for Peace fund.
Those monies helped support the Lancaster County Peacework Alternatives project.
In other years peace-related projects in places such as Laos and Guatemala have received funds.
MCC U.S. Peace Section is also offering an information packet on military tax opposition that contains varying theological positions on the war tax issue, and materials about tax laws and legal concerns for the tax resister.
The General Board of Friends United Meeting has adopted a policy of not withholding the federal withholding tax of employees who are conscientious objectors to paying taxes used for military purposes.
The General Conference Mennonite Church adopted a similar policy in .
On the current staff, said general secretary Steven Main, are three conscientious objectors to paying war taxes.
The policy requires employees who want to participate in the witness of military tax refusal to first go through a “clearness process” with their Meeting or church community.
I was a conscientious objector to war in World War Ⅰ.
So I reported this to the military camp office, informing them I could not participate in regular military training.
I asked them to assign me to service in a base hospital designed for overseas patients.
They respected my claim of conscience and gave me an opportunity to serve face and stomach victims of war.
Later… they handed me an “honorable discharge” card.
I still have this card.
Can you now extend to me, as a person of 92 years, and to my spouse, the same sensitive respect for our claims of conscience?
We love our country and we respect our government.
And we do not hesitate to pay taxes for orderly affairs and services of government.
But we have become deeply troubled over the vastly disproportionate part of our federal income tax being allocated to the building up of a military force and arsenal.
This is entirely out of proportion to the huge debt and the staggering needs among the poor, the sick, the aged and the unemployed.
Our conscience can no longer endure this.
So we have decided to withhold 37 percent of federal income tax liability (namely, the 37 percent used in the present military build-up program).
We want to send this as a donation to the Commission on Home Ministries… [which reaches out] to the poor, the unemployed, the underprivileged and the many people hurt and adrift by wars…
In World War Ⅰ the government recognized my concern of conscience.
Can you grant us this kind of courtesy for our older years?
Six Mennonite pastors who have refused to pay some or all of their military taxes were interviewed in the issue of ACTS (Another Church Tries Something), published by the Commission on Home Ministries.
Donald Kaufman of Bethel College Church, North Newton, Kan., John Gaeddert of First Church, Halstead, Kan., S. Roy Kaufman of Science Ridge Church, Sterling, Ill., Ronald Krehbiel of Salem Church, Freeman, S.D., Mark Weidner of First Church, Bluffton, Ohio, and Dorothy Nickel Friesen of Manhattan (Kan.) Fellowship told of how they decided to resist war taxes, how they involved church members in the decision and how their action has affected others.
The New Call to Peacemaking initiative and the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns sponsored a gathering of leaders from the traditional peace churches in to discuss what to do about the dilemma of such churches withholding taxes for the government from the salaries of their employees who wanted to resist paying war taxes.
Paul Schrag wrote up an article on the meeting that was reprinted in the edition of The Mennonite.
Excerpts:
The question of how church organizations can help their employees follow their consciences — and how to deal with the risks involved for both employees and employers — were the issues that the 36 Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers struggled with.
The church leaders, organizational representatives and lawyers affirmed their support for individual military tax resisters and for efforts to seek a legislative solution by working toward passage of the U.S. Peace Tax Fund bill in Congress.
They agreed to organize a peace church leadership group to go to Washington sometime in the future to support the peace tax bill and to express concerns about tax withholding.
They also agreed to help each other by filing friend-of-the-court briefs if tax resisters are prosecuted and by sharing the cost of tax resistance penalties.
“You may think the world will little note nor long remember what has happened here,” said Marian Franz, director of the U.S. Peace Tax Fund.
“But I regard it as a historic meeting.
“The decision to end the human race does not belong to Caesar.
Therefore, tax dollars that wrestle that decision out of the hands of God do not either.”
Participants in the meeting included both military tax resisters and people who would not engage in tax resistance themselves but support those who do.
People from churches that have policies of breaking the law by not withholding the federal taxes of employees who oppose paying military taxes shared their experiences with people from churches considering adopting such a policy.
The General Conference Mennonite Church and two Quaker groups are in the first category.
The Mennonite Church is in the second.
MC leaders, including moderator James Lapp and moderator-elect George Brunk Ⅲ, came to the meeting to explore church policy options on military tax withholding.
MC general assembly delegates asked the church to develop a policy recommendation on the issue for consideration at Normal .
“This roots us in a larger movement,” Lapp said of the meeting.
“It gives us ideas and handles about how other people have addressed it.
We don’t have to start from ground zero.”
The MC General Board plans to formulate questions about tax withholding for congregations to discuss.
It will prepare a recommendation next year based on congregations’ responses.
Robert Hull, GC secretary for peace and justice, said it was frustrating that many members of historic peace churches are not willing to witness against financial participation in preparing for war, although they are opposed to physical participation in war.
Some said it was disappointing that so many people are unwilling to follow their consciences until the government, through the Peace Tax Fund, might allow them to do so legally.
One quoted Gandhi: “We have stooped so low that we fancy it our duty to do whatever the law requires.”
“Do we want our righteousness without a price?” asked Ray Gingerich, a professor at Eastern Mennonite College, Harrisonburg, Va.
When a church or organization decides to honor employees’ requests not to withhold their federal income tax, it assumes serious risks.
Any “responsible person” who willfully fails to withhold an employee’s taxes theoretically could be punished with a prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
An organization could be fined $500,000.
But such penalties have never been imposed on legitimate religious organizations, nor are they likely to be, said two lawyers at the meeting.
The usual Internal Revenue Service response to war tax resistance is to take the amount of tax owed, plus a 5 percent penalty and interest, from the employee’s bank account.
The IRS has not taken even this action against the four GC employees who are not having their taxes withheld.
All GC personnel who could be subject to penalties have agreed to accept the risk.
The Friends World Committee for Consultation, which has had a non-withholding policy , has had tax money seized, plus interest and penalties, from its resisters’ bank accounts.
The Friends United Meeting adopted a non-withholding policy .
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends will decide in whether it should have such a policy.
Charles Boyer of the Church of the Brethren said he would use the input from the meeting to work toward helping develop a denominational policy on tax resistance.
An even more basic issue than war tax resistance arose concerning tax-withholding laws.
Some compared the church’s tax-collecting role to that of the biblical publicans.
“I have a growing dis-ease that the church is a tax collector for the government, regardless of what the money is used for,” said Vern Preheim, GC general secretary.
Participants made suggestions for improvements on a draft of “A Manual on Military Tax Withholding for Religious Employers,” written by Hull, Linda Coffin of the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns and lawyers Peter Goldberger and J.E. McNeil, who both gave legal advice at the meeting.
The manual is expected to be available later this year.
That book’s availability would be announced in the edition.
Another concern I have with promotion of the Peace Tax Fund law is that in order to tempt legislators to support it, there is a tendency to defang war tax objection and make it less threatening to the government.
Take for example this description of Marian Franz’s testimony before a House committee reviewing the tax code:
“Franz said that the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill would alleviate a persistent burden on the IRS and permit these citizens [conscientious objectors] to pay their full share of tax without violation of religious conscience.”
All we want to do is pay our taxes and not cause any trouble for the IRS — is that really the best way to speak truth to power and challenge militarism?
The Internal Revenue Service filed two suits against a Quaker group in Pennsylvania because the organization refused to attach the wages of two employees who have withheld part of their income taxes as a conscientious protest against military spending, Religious News Service reported.
The lawsuits against the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends seek $16,836 in connection with federal taxes not paid by William V. Grassie and David A. Falls.
The Quakers sent a letter to the IRS saying neither Grassie nor Falls is “a tax evader but a conscientious taxpayer who is conscientiously refusing payment of the military portion of his taxes.”
This is the thirty-fifth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we finish off the 1980s.
The issue announced that a new poster was available from the MCC:
Seattle Mennonite Church established a Northwest Peace Fund in to receive donations and recoverable deposits from people withholding a portion of their federal income taxes or phone taxes because of the large military buildup in the United States.
Anyone who wishes to may donate to the fund so that the resulting interest can be used for local peace activities.
Interest from the Northwest Peace Fund has been used to support peace-related projects in the Puget Sound area, such as the Emergency Feeding Program and the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP).
While the Seattle Mennonite Church’s Northwest Peace Fund will accept deposits and contributions from outside the Northwest, we strongly encourage each Mennonite congregation to establish its own peace fund.
We approved these seven operating guidelines:
This fund will be called the Northwest Peace Fund.
It will be a non-profit investment fund that will generate income.
This income will be distributed for peace and social concerns projects in the Pacific Northwest.
The peace fund will be administered by three peace fund representatives selected by the peace and social concerns committee of the Seattle Mennonite Church initially for one-, two-, and three-year terms, and for two- year terms thereafter.
Current peace fund representatives are Charles Lord, Bob Hamilton and David Ortman.
Money may be deposited into the fund through a peace fund representative either on a donation or recoverable-deposit basis:
(a) Donations will be retained to generate income for the fund,
(b) Recoverable deposits may be placed in the peace fund for a period of up to five years.
During this time period such funds may be returned to the depositor within 30 days upon written request of the fund’s address, given below.
Recoverable deposits will be used to generate income during the time these funds remain available.
After a period of five years, if not reclaimed, such deposits will revert to the status of donations.
The fund will operate on a fiscal year ending on May 31.
One meeting of the peace fund representatives will be held each April to prepare an annual report, copies of which will be available upon request.
At this meeting the peace fund representatives are also authorized to distribute up to all income generated from the fund to peace and social concern projects in the Pacific Northwest.
Any disbursement must have prior approval of the Seattle Mennonite Church advisory council.
The peace fund is authorized to budget up to 10 percent of any income generated by the fund to cover costs of advertising the fund to attract additional deposits and to provide copies of the annual report.
Any peace fund representative is authorized to withdraw within 30 days any recoverable deposit to a depositor upon a written request by the depositor.
In the event of the dissolution of the peace fund, all funds will be transferred to another peace fund escrow account and the depositors notified.
The mailing address of the fund will be…
Peace Tax Fund campaign director Marian Franz also wrote in with a brief note in which she suggested war tax resisters prompt their Congressional representatives to become Peace Tax Fund law supporters:
Sometimes the sequence goes like this (and I wish it would more often):
Carl Lundberg, a United Methodist pastor from New Haven, Conn., refuses to pay the military portion of his taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service comes to garnishee the wages.
The congregation has a meeting.
The vote is unanimous.
The answer is, No, they will not cooperate with the IRS because they will not be tax collectors, because they will not violate the pastor’s right to his own views of conscience and living by those, etc.
Then in the same year the U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Lowell Weicker, becomes a co-sponsor of the Peace Tax Fund Bill.
Is there a connection?
I think there is and that more will be coming.
That is because I am a person of hope.
Another invitation for war tax resisters to redirect their taxes through the MCC U.S. Peace Section’s “Taxes for Peace” fund appeared in the edition.
This time the funds were to be disbursed to both the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and to the Christian Peacemaker Teams program.
The note said about $4,000 had been donated to the fund .
The Commission on Home Ministries is interested in hearing from Mennonites who have placed some of their resisted military taxes into alternative peace funds.
Information on recent judicial decisions affecting such peace funds is available from the General Conference Peace and Justice office…
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner’s Colrain, Mass., home is scheduled to go on the auction block any day.
The Internal Revenue Service seized their house for non-payment of $20,000 in taxes and $6,000 in fines and fees.
The couple has been withholding their federal taxes for 12 years, donating the money to a shelter for homeless women and children, a veteran’s outreach center, and a local peace group.
Kehler says they are willing to risk the consequences “because we can’t not do it.”
While the IRS is looking for a buyer, many local realtors will not touch the sale of the house because of strong community sentiment in favor of the couple’s decision.
After 7½ years of litigation, 27 hearings, and with a case file that grew two inches thick, the Tokyo District Court has ruled against a taxpayers’ organization that sought to end the Japanese government’s collection of income taxes for military purposes.
The case had its origin after the bank accounts of Akiteru Nakagawa and Mennonite minister Michio Ohno were attached by the government and the telephone of Yoshinori Tan was seized, in each instance due to their non-payment of taxes.
The Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church voted to combine into a single organization at their joint conference in .
This, I hope, will simplify things for me at least, as it’s been difficult to keep track of the subtle differences in names between the two organizations and their subcommittees.
Also at that conference:
The Mennonite Church narrowly (59 percent) approved a resolution calling for its General Board to take four steps on military tax-withholding.
It will establish a policy of not withholding (U.S.) federal income taxes from wages of any of its employees who make this request because of conscientious objection to war.
The resolution supports “other church boards and agencies that may adopt similar policies,” giving direction, not a mandate.
The General Conference took a similar action in in Bethlehem, Pa., but with a stronger vote, 71 percent.
The edition included an editorial by Muriel T. Stackely that brought readers up to speed on the history of the withholding debate.
Excerpt:
Our conference [the General Conference Mennonite Church] now does not withhold federal tax from those employees requesting this.
“We immediately notified the Internal Revenue Service,” says conference treasurer Ted Stuckey, “explaining our actions, being open, concealing nothing.
That was .
We still have not heard any more from the IRS — after getting its initial response, which told us that this was illegal.
We answered that we knew it was illegal but that it was in response to the action taken by the delegate body.”
Currently three employees of our conference offices in Newton, Kan., are requesting that tax not be withheld.
They are treated as self-employed people.
They say, observes Ted, that they have appreciated the opportunity to witness in this way.
The amounts not paid to IRS have been symbolic rather than comprehensive.
One expression of our commitment to non-violence has been war tax resistance.
Thus we and our friends found that our commitment to practice war tax resistance encouraged our commitment to a simple lifestyle.
We have defined war tax resistance as filing our taxes, but refusing to pay 50 percent of what is owed because that is the portion of U.S. income tax that goes toward military spending.
Fifty percent is a conservative estimate because parts of the U.S. military budget are hidden or secret.
We have learned that if we own a car, even one that is six years old, the IRS will sell it at a public auction to collect back taxes.
It became obvious that consumerism and war tax resistance are incompatible.
As a result several of our friends have made a conscious decision to do job-sharing or half-time employment.
It has worked out that between couples both parents can act equally as care-takers for the children while also having employment, which is psychologically rewarding and complementary to their vision of participating in God’s reign on earth.
Our choice of war tax resistance as a way of reducing our participation in the U.S. war machine has made a simple lifestyle almost mandatory because it has led us to lower our tax liability and lower our material consumption.
Another editorial by Muriel T. Stackely, this one in the edition, complained that “the 7,000 brochures about the Peace Tax Fund distributed at our triennial session in Normal, Ill., among 8,000 Mennonites netted one, one new membership for this campaign that says to the U.S. government, I want my tax dollars to be used to promote life, not death; peace, not war.”
War Resisters League is initiating organizing for major Tax Day demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco on .
Based on the theme “Alternative Revenue Service,” the actions will emphasize the U.S. government’s militaristic spending priorities and will feature a 1040 EZ Peace tax form and the distribution of redirected tax dollars to peace and social justice programs.
WRL is inviting other tax resistance and peace groups to join in planning the actions.
For more information contact Ruth Benn, War Resisters League…
This is the eighteenth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was
reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
The returned us to the new
war tax resistance movement in Japan:
Conscientious Objection to Military Tax, a Japanese war tax-resistance
organization, has published five issues of a four-page publication called
Plowshare.
The latest issue includes an account of Ishihara Shoichi of Shimizu City, a
newspaper dealer who withheld the 6.39 percent of the tax for his shop that
would have gone for military expense in the national budget. While he was
appealing to the tax tribunal, saying that the levying of military tax was
unconstitutional, his bank account was seized. This was the first legal action
against any of the dozen people who have withheld their tax money.
The periodical also includes a report of a speech by Professor Kobayashi Naoki
of Tokyo University, in which he says that “military forces do not defend the
land or the people. What the former Imperial Army really shielded was a
handful of military executives and the imperial family. The present
Self-Defense Forces are deficient for a nuclear warfare or even a conventional
war.”
Another article by Otomo Michio attacks poverty as one of the reasons people
enlist in the military.
Other information includes a guide for filing tax returns and publication
notice of an 80-page booklet “A Shoot of the Olive” on the history of tax
resistance, philosophical and biblical questions, how to file tax returns, and
how to appeal.
The publication, in Japanese with an English summary, is available from Michio
Ohno, 2‒35‒18 Asahigaoka, Hino, Tokyo 191, Japan.
A compilation of Mennonite responses to world hunger, printed in the
issue, included
this one:
“Enclosed find a check for $40 for world hunger. Rather than paying income
taxes, we are sending this check so that we may help to build peace and
support causes that help our troubled world.” (A letter from Colorado to
MCC)
A packet of resources on war taxes has been published by the Commission on
Home Ministries of the General Conference Mennonite Church. The majority of
articles in the packet are speeches given at the inter-Mennonite and Brethren
in Christ war tax conference… in Kitchener, Ontario. Also included are a
report of legal research by Ruth Stoltzfus on institutional withholding of the
portion of income taxes going for war purposes, brochures explaining the World
Peace Tax Fund Act now before the
U.S. Congress, and
statements about war taxes adopted by the Mennonite Central Committee Peace
Section and the Church of the Brethren annual conference. The packet is
available for $1.50 from the Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section…
In the issue
Sem and Mabel Sutter
shared the letter they sent when they paid their taxes under protest.
More than 150 persons from Iowa peace churches met on
at William Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, to consider the theme
“Peacemaking: Living Heritage and Living Challenge.” The main purpose of the
conference, sponsored by Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren, was
to introduce materials and ideas that congregations could use in promoting
peace.
Donald D. Kaufman, of Newton,
Kan., gave the keynote address:
“Our Taxes Buy Wars? The Peace Church Heritage.” He traced the history of the
three denominations’ struggles over whether Christians can pay for war when
they refuse to participate in it.
Some early church leaders in America advocated not offending the government,
and thus paying all taxes. In others groups, especially among Friends, members
were disciplined for supporting war in any way. The decision not to support
war was not easy, and it was often accompanied by persecution.
[Disciples] will stand up for the rights of all people. My father and others
have refused to pay war taxes, willing to pay a fine instead when
IRS came
to collect.
A television segment about Mennonites hit British television, and the
issue
described it this way:
The Mennonite segment begins in Europe with episodes from Martyrs
Mirror, then switches to modern Mennonite events… [such as] a Sunday
school debate on church-state issues with such topics as war taxes, Vietnam,
and growing up as a conscientious objector in a public school.
The delegates took action on two statements presented by the Bishop Board, one
on “Funeral Practices” and another on “The Christian Conscience and Tax
Dollars.”
More controversial was the statement on taxes which included two proposals: 1)
increased giving to the church with the resultant increased tax deductions; 2)
seeking an alternative tax provision similar to alternative military service.
The second statement included a reference to the World Peace Tax Fund, which
made some persons uncomfortable and so this was eliminated from the text. The
statement was passed with some negative votes. In addition to those who felt
the statement went too far were several who thought it was simply not radical
enough in dealing with the “problem of wealth.” “It amazes me,” said one,
“that though we can make money, we have trouble getting rid of it.”
Paying war taxes seems to be a problem for some. In Romans 13, after giving
some of the duties of the “powers that be” including the use of the sword, it
follows, “for this cause pay ye tribute.” To be consistent, those that
withhold war taxes must withhold all other taxes, including local, that are
not spent right. I do not believe at any time we have to break one Scripture
to keep another one.
The war tax issue generated the most lively discussion. Cornelia Lehn, a
Foundation Series writer, gently forced the issue when she asked headquarters
not to withhold that portion of income tax she felt helps the government
prepare for war. An amendment to the resolution, “A call for congregational
study on civil disobedience and war tax issues,” would have permitted
headquarters to honor her request. But the conference turned down the
amendment 1,190 to 336. The issue will continue under study for the next 18
months.
Phil M. Shenk, student at Eastern Mennonite College, has been awarded first
prize in the C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical contest with an oratorical essay
entitled “The World Peace Tax Fund and Faithfulness.” He challenges the fund
as a means of faithfulness. He says the fund would not reduce the military
budget and may lull the consciences of nonresistant persons. … The C. Henry
Smith Trust, named for a leader of another generation, makes prize money
available, and the Peace Section of
MCC
arranges for the judging of entries.
Shenk’s essay was reprinted in the issue (it is given there in roughly the same form as it appeared in The Mennonite — see ♇ 28 July 2018 for the text).
Elmer Borntrager threw some cold water on things in an off-handed way when
he wrote
in the issue:
In answer to a question regarding the paying of taxes, Jesus said to the
Pharisees, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caeser’s; and
unto God the things that are God’s”… There have been some questions raised as
to the propriety of paying war taxes by those of us who do not believe in war.
I suppose there is no easy answer to this question, but it seems the majority
of the people of the non-resistant faith quite literally pay all the taxes
required by Caesar.…
This is the twenty-sixth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
The debate about whether or not to pay war taxes, and about whether Mennonite
institutions should be more accommodating of the requests of their employees
not to have war taxes deducted from their salaries, continued in
, and edged ever closer to the Mennonite
Church itself.
For over ten years I have openly withheld a portion of my federal income taxes
because I’m a conscientious objector to participation in war. This action has
sometimes resulted in face-to-face conversations with Internal Revenue Service
representatives. I have on several occasions written to legislators on issues
of peace and justice or facilitated similar communication by our congregation.
As I see that Christians have contributed to the injustices, my faith compels
me to speak. There are many professing Christians who are in public office who
make government policy. There are many professing Christians whose votes
helped to put them into office and whose tax dollars by the millions pay for
the administration of their policies. Because of this I want to invite my
Christian brothers and sisters to let the Prince of Peace train their
consciences and to take these trained consciences to work whether in the
private or public sector.
The board discussed a request by several staff members that
MCC
not withhold their income taxes, to allow them to withhold a portion of their
taxes as a protest of the dollars used for military purposes.
They agreed that the executive committee should appoint a task group to
consult broadly within the
MCC
constituency to review historical positions on this matter, to examine
alternative responses, and to bring a recommendation to the executive
committee and annual meeting on alternative courses of action.
This approach “moves from a simple decision of whether
MCC
should withhold taxes to stepping back and reflecting on the overall situation
before recommending any one solution for the
MCC
board to accept or reject,” it was said.
Members noted that the Mennonite Church and the Conference of Mennonites in
Canada are studying this issue, that the General Conference Mennonite Church
has completed such a study, and that efforts will be made to learn from those
studies.
John and Sandy Drescher Lehman: war tax resisters who work for
MBM
Friday evening — Case Study 3: Conscientious objection to
military taxes — a case presentation, by John and Sandra Drescher Lehman and
Paul Gingrich. — A panel— James R. Hess, Stephen Dintaman, and Bob
Detweiler.
The other case was conscientious objection to military taxes. John and Sandy
Drescher Lehman of Richmond,
Va., told how they followed
their conscience and decided a few years ago to withhold the part of their
income taxes that they figure goes for the military.
The complication now, though, is that they have become employees of Mennonite
Board of Missions in their role as codirectors of the Richmond Discipleship
Voluntary Service program. “What should an institution do when its employees
ask that we stop withholding taxes from their paychecks?” asked
MBM
president Paul Gingrich.
A panel of four attempted to answer the question, including Robert Hull, a
soldier-turned-tax-resister who is peace and justice secretary of the General
Conference Mennonite Church. He explained how his denomination, with the
instruction of its members, is now breaking the law by not withholding taxes
from the paychecks of seven of its employees who have requested that.
The tensest moment of the conference came when James Hess, a Lancaster
Conference bishop who served on the war taxes panel, was asked whether he
would have paid all his taxes in Nazi Germany even though some of it went to
kill six million Jews. He hinted that the Jews may have brought judgment on
themselves for their crucifixion of Jesus. This caused a minor uproar and led
to a public apology the next morning by Hess. He said that his statement was
speculative, trying to defend the sovereignty of God, and quoted from Jacques
Ellul that everything man does is within the global plan of God.
Energetic war tax resistance foe D.R. Yoder couldn’t stand to see his position
dragged through the mud like this, so he responded in
a letter to the editor:
I would not in any way seek to defend the position reportedly taken by James
Hess during the recent Conversations on Faith Ⅱ linking the Jewish Holocaust
with Christ’s crucifixion… Such notions are the misguided, though not
necessarily unnatural, projections of his fundamentalism.
It is hardly fair, however, that the person who posed what seems the quite
irresponsible as well as irrelevant question which provoked Hess’s intemperate
response is not also identified in the report. For this questioner should be
asked whether he/she paid (or would have paid) taxes to the United States or
Canada during World War Ⅱ.
If the questioner would not have paid, given the assumptions of tax resistance
theory, would not he/she also have been guilty of contributing to the
prolongation of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and others, just as he/she
charges a taxpaying German citizen Hess would have been?
If, on the other hand, the questioner would have paid his/her federal taxes,
again given the assumptions of tax resistant theory, wouldn’t that be
embracing the “just” war position? For how else is the “financing” of one set
of military activity, but refusing to “finance” another, to be interpreted?
We Mennonites are already rushing pell-mell along the broad way, having
sanctified “just” resistance, “just” legal suits, “just” civil disruption, and
even the “just” destruction of public and private property. It doesn’t take a
very astute reading of the winds a-blowing to expect conferences in the very
near future to consider the inherent “justice” of “defensive” wars and of wars
of “liberation.”
War tax resisters Ray and Wilma Gingerich shared their letter to the
IRS
in the issue:
Here are excerpts of a letter we sent to our regional Internal Revenue Service
officer recently. An ongoing conviction of ours is that our most significant
witness in the political-ethical arena is to the church itself. This is a
matter of policy in our local “Christians for Peace” organization. Whenever we
plan an “action,” we do it deliberately with the church “looking over our
shoulders.”
Dear Mr. Smith:
According to your records we now owe the
IRS
$1491.92 in accumulated taxes, interest, and penalties for the fiscal years
of . What you fail to
recognize is:
That the monies withheld represent the military portion of our income
taxes. (We have not withheld veterans’ benefits.)
That the amounts withheld have already been paid to church institutions
engaged in nonviolent justice-and-peace activities. (We are not seeking
to evade carrying our fair share of the public burden for a peaceable and
life-giving society.)
That we are acting out of our religious convictions fostered in the
tradition of the historic peace witness of the Mennonite Church.
You are asking us to do what in good faith we cannot do — to violate our
consciences and our understanding of obedience to Jesus Christ by paying for
murder.
I, Wilma, am a nurse dedicated to making lives whole, not to destroying them.
I find preparation to kill and destroy abhorrent and inconsistent with what
my whole life as a mother, as a nurse, as a human being, as a follower of
Jesus Christ is about.
I, Ray, am a professor of church history and ethics. In my teaching and in
everyday life I seek to underscore that if we are to become persons and
create communities of noble character and life-giving quality, we must live
lives consistent with our beliefs.
To you as a law-enforcer, and to our congressmen and senators as law-makers,
we ask: What is being done to our people and to our nation by enforcing the
practice of violence upon those whose conscience and religious convictions
are opposed to violence? Why do you insist that pacifist citizens act
contrary to their conscience by coercing them to pay for weapons of death?
Would it not be a healthier, stronger nation if these people were granted
freedom of religion and allowed to practice economic nonviolence by
channeling their funds into constructive, nonviolent, humanitarian aid?
To Mennonites war is murder. For Mennonites, and for all Christians who take
seriously the lordship of Jesus in their daily living, there is no government
that can override the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. For Mennonites,
therefore, and for all pacifist Christians, the payment of military taxes has
always posed a dilemma. Some, psychically numbed by continued
rationalization, comply with the state’s demands for death money. Others
choose the way of noncompliance, following the example of Jesus Christ that
leads to persecution — military tax penalties, confiscation of property, and
imprisonment.
Finally, Mr. Smith, allow us to address you personally. What role will you
have in all of this? All of us are in the system. And all of us are morally
obligated to say “no” to death and “yes” to life. You undoubtedly have
thought about these questions many times. We would count it a privilege to
meet with you to discuss these grave matters in a more personal way.
There were some letters to the editor
in response to this wave of articles on the topic. Joe Cross wrote that he was
generally against war tax resistance, but didn’t say anything particularly
notable. Curt Ashburn didn’t care for the put-down of taxpayers in the
Gingeriches’ letter (“psychically numbed by continued rationalization”) and
felt that they should keep such “witness” in the family rather than dragging
IRS
agents into it. He also asked if the Gingeriches refused to pay taxes to
support state-funded abortion, police violence, capital punishment, and so
forth or if they thought war was somehow special?
Exploring new territory in religious opposition to nuclear arms, a number of
major religious denominations have begun to contemplate whether they should
throw their support behind the growing movement to resist payment of taxes in
protest of the arms race. While increasing numbers of individuals within the
churches have joined the ranks of “war tax” resisters, only a handful of
denominations have encouraged or lent support to such resistance. However, as
peace activists within the churches have demanded tougher antiwar stands at
the highest church levels, denominations have begun to wrestle with the
biblical, theological, and historical questions raised by war tax resistance.
The churches are using the examination as a basis for deciding whether to
take, as corporate bodies, any of a variety of actions — both legal and
illegal — in support of the movement. What is moving churches is the growing
realization that they have been “praying for peace while paying for war,” said
Marian Franz, a Mennonite who is executive director of the Washington-based
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. “For many people, the arms race has
just gone too far. And they’re saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m involved in it.’ ” While
several mainline denominations have begun to study the issue, the strongest
support for war tax resistance has come from the historic peace churches,
particularly Quaker and Mennonite bodies. In an unprecedented move, the
60,000-member General Conference Mennonite Church voted, in
, not to withhold federal taxes
from the paychecks of employees who are tax refusers. This is punishable by
fines and imprisonment.
Seminars on singleness and sexuality, marriage and sexuality, and silent
devotions were also well attended, indicating a rising concern among
Mennonites for personal growth and self-understanding. On the other hand,
seminars on such topics as war taxes, Central America, and church-state
relations received relatively less attention.
I heard that the conference moderator gave only six minutes of floor time to
deal with the question of the church withholding federal income tax from the
paychecks of church workers who conscientiously resist war taxes.
Perhaps to some, war tax resistance is more personally uncomfortable than
homosexuality! Remember that for any government to exploit and massacre, two
things are required from the majority of its citizens — silence and paying
taxes.
The Rhodes family (left to right): Carmen, Leanna, Rebekah, Philip, James,
Anita, Candice, and Martin.
Praying for peace while paying for war? It’s an irony that Ray and Wilma
Gingerich and James and Leanna Rhodes of the Harrisonburg, Virginia, area
refuse to accept.
Ray and Wilma are in their early 50s. He teaches theology and ethics at
Eastern Mennonite College; she is completing a master’s degree in community
health nursing at the University of Virginia and works part time at Virginia
Mennonite Home. Their four sons of college age or older no longer live at
home. One might think it’s time to slow down, settle in, go with the flow.
Not so. The Gingerichs are wrestling with an issue they believe is
increasingly urgent for Christians — how to respond to the fact that over 50
percent of all income tax monies go to pay for past and present wars and to
prepare for future wars. As one response, they began in
to withhold the portion of their federal
income tax that pays for war.
“We deduct an estimated amount for veterans’ benefits, then send a check for
the amount we are withholding to Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section or
some other church agency,” Ray explained. “We don’t try to hide anything. The
Internal Revenue Service receives a letter that outlines our position along
with a photocopy of the check being sent to the church agency.”
For the past three years, the couple has also withheld the federal excise tax
from their monthly telephone statement. This tax began during the Vietnam War
as a “quick source of revenue” for that conflict, Ray pointed out.
Slightly different tack.
Several miles southwest of Gingerich’s Harrisonburg home, in the rolling
countryside of western Rockingham County near Dayton, James and Leanna Rhodes
are taking a slightly different tack to the military tax issue.
The couple, in their mid-30s, is making a conscious effort to live at a
nontaxable income level. For them, it means trying to raise their family of
six children on $12,000–$13,000 a year.
It’s easier said than done, the couple admitted, but several things are in
their favor.
The family rents the large frame house where they’re living. They care for
dairy heifers and beef cattle for their landlord. The old station wagon they
drive is registered in Leanna’s mother’s name so the
IRS
can’t put a lien on it.
James works for his brother in a new and used farm machinery business. Leanna,
a nurse, works on and off for Homecall, a local home health care agency.
The family has no accessible bank account or other personal property that the
government could claim to satisfy unpaid military taxes. This leaves the
IRS
only one option — to go after Rhodeses themselves.
Rhodeses have refused to pay the portion of their federal income tax for
military purposes for three years in which they earned slightly over their
nontaxable limit. They have been audited and warned of collection procedures,
but nothing has come of it.
Like Gingerichs, Rhodeses refuse to pay the federal excise tax portion of
their monthly phone bill.
Acquiring peace convictions.
The families didn’t acquire their peace convictions overnight or in isolation.
Gingerichs point to a stint of mission work in Luxembourg,
, as a time when they were
confronted with the realities of war.
“We heard stories and saw photos from Vietnam that never made it into the
North American press,” Ray recalled. “We also met people who lived through the
experiences of Nazi Germany and realized that much of what happened in World
War Ⅱ was largely the result of good people following orders.”
In Gingerich enrolled at Goshen Biblical
Seminary, where he was challenged by the teachings of John Howard Yoder, a tax
resister himself. When the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, for Ray to
pursue a doctorate at Vanderbilt University, the couple began attending a
United Methodist church that was deeply involved in urban ministry.
“I got my theology at Goshen Seminary but we saw how it could be lived out at
that church in Nashville,” Ray said. “Our time there made us realize that
peacemaking is a Christian mandate — not just a Mennonite ideology!”
Family peace initiatives have not been restricted to Ray and Wilma. When
President Jimmy Carter reinstated the military draft in
, sons Andre and Pierre both decided not to
register.
“Here’s a case of children and parents teaching each other,” Wilma said. “We
had been through a lot of painful and joyful growth experiences together. To
them, not to register was the logical way to live out the convictions we
shared.
“As the cost for not paying our military taxes increased we could only move
ahead. To do otherwise would have been a betrayal of our sons and their
convictions.”
More than lip service.
Although James and Leanna had long felt a commitment to blend personal faith
and active social concern, their awareness of the need to give more than lip
service to their beliefs was heightened during
when they helped to start a
Mennonite church in San Francisco.
In that setting James got involved with a number of peace causes and groups,
including counseling military personnel who wanted to claim conscientious
objector status.
“That was a fantastic experience,” James said of their time in the Bay Area.
“I was impressed by the aggressive and committed efforts of many peace
activists, even though many may have acted from purely humanitarian motives.”
Both couples are quick to draw on their understanding of Jesus’ teachings and
example to support their actions.
“The gospel addresses our relationship to other human beings,” Ray said.
“Salvation is a personal response but it is also communal. It means
‘wholemaking.’ War and preparation for war is the epitome of death and
destruction.”
“I hold to an evangelical faith that includes the message of peace and
nonresistance,” James added. “I believe that Jesus can save us from
militarism, hateful attitudes, and a spirit of revenge in the same way he
delivers us from other sins.”
“Our church has failed to see the logical progression from the conscientious
objector stance and Mennonites’ refusal to buy war bonds in
to the war tax resistance stance
of ,” Ray stated.
Added Wilma: “Our peace witness dare not be limited to nonconscription. Why
put most of the burden on 18-to-20-year-olds to take a
CO stand
while we middle-aged men and women go on paying for war? At the same time we
expect our young people to believe that participation in war is wrong.”
Stance is costly.
Both Gingerichs and Rhodeses have paid a price for their stance.
For the Gingerich family, it has included repeated threats from the Selective
Service System and a lien placed on all their personal property.
James Rhodes earned tuition money to attend Eastern Mennonite College and
Seminary by working as an artificial inseminator for dairy farms up and down
the Shenandoah Valley. He later lost that job as a result of local pressure,
but he “feels no animosity” toward those who called for his ouster.
James noted that the harshest criticism has come from other Mennonites at a
time when interest in Christian peacemaking and nonresistance is gaining
momentum in a number of mainline denominations.
Both couples indicated they have had “valuable and redemptive” talks with
IRS
officials. According to James, these encounters “allow us to move from systems
to individuals and open the door to exchange viewpoints.”
“A certain amount of understanding has developed,” he added. “The
IRS
people seem to empathize with our position and apparently don’t know what to
do with us.”
Gingerichs have journeyed to Charlottesville, Virginia, to meet with
IRS
officials and have encountered “extremely personable people… there’s a feeling
of mutual respect.”
The two families commend each other’s positions, but cited the need for other
people who are involved in varied forms of tax resistance to “become more
visible.” They are active in a local “Christians for Peace” group that has
about a dozen members.
“I often feel like we are pretty much going it alone,” said Wilma. “We long
for the day when the focus shifts from our having to defend our position to
the real question of how pacifist Mennonite Christians can go on paying for
war and claim to be followers of Christ. We need greater accountability to
each other in the church.”
“There’s a need to develop an open forum and network for people who are at
different places on the war tax issue to get together and learn from and
encourage each other,” Ray said. Added Leanna: “I would feel a lot more secure
in our position if we knew for certain that a dozen Mennonites in this
community would be willing to take a public stand with us if at some point
we’d be taken to court.”
The couples emphasized that their methods of war tax resistance are not the
only valid approaches, and both expressed a desire for more dialogue and sense
of solidarity with the larger Mennonite Church.
Whatever course one pursues for the cause of peace, it is important to do it
“with a sense of joy,” Ray noted. “Lose your sense of exuberance and it
becomes an overwhelming burden. At that point one must back off to gain fresh
perspective.”
Witness will continue. Ray and Wilma expect to continue withholding that
percentage of their federal income taxes that goes for direct military
purposes and to continue talking and working with individuals and within their
professions to keep the issue alive.
James and Leanna, meanwhile, “feel comfortable” with their simple living
approach, recognizing that it doesn’t allow them to confront government
officials and others as directly as Gingerichs have.
“When our children get older, we’ll need to adjust our strategy,” James said.
“For now, our fear of what could happen to us has gone from near paranoia to a
real sense of peace and freedom.
“Our response, however small, is at least a symbolic effort to say ‘no,’ to
refuse to contribute toward the ultimate destruction of God’s people and his
beautiful creation.”
“Paying a Price for Peace”… is one of the most encouraging articles you’ve
published recently. It is encouraging to see two families who take their faith
in Jesus Christ very seriously. In my mind, they are acting out the very core
of the gospel message to love, to be peacemakers, and — above all — to be
obedient.
On the other hand the article can cause one to be depressed because of the
lack of support and criticisms Rhodeses and Gingerichs have received from
fellow Mennonites. Mennonites, of all people, should be cheering these
families on, even if they are not in complete agreement with their tax
witness.
Joyce and I have also withheld portions of our federal income tax payment,
making it necessary for the Internal Revenue Service to put liens on our
checking account. It is a lonely feeling. To me, any action that lessens
another human being, lessens me. It is sin for me to sit in the safety of a
protected home and claim no responsibility for what my money buys. To tell
someone we love them and apologize for the fact that nearly half our tax
dollar is being spent in preparation to kill them, is the ultimate lie and
irony. I cannot love you if I am preparing to kill you.
On the other hand, Harry Shenk
wasn’t as thrilled.
He started off with the traditional Render-unto-Caesar line that Jesus had
never discouraged paying taxes to militaristic Rome, and then ended on this
curious note:
Jesus never challenged the state on these practices, nor did he indicate that
paying taxes implied responsibility for these heinous crimes.
I don’t think Jesus paid any war tax. I think he probably lived below a
taxable level, and I affirm anyone who chooses this path. I also pay no war
tax. Our tax checks are not divided into portions by the Internal Revenue
Service, but are thrown together into a central fund, against which huge
government checks are drawn. I simply decide in my heart which huge government
check I want my money to be a part of. For me, it’s food stamps and interstate
highways.
The former moderator of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), Lord MacLeod of
Fuinary, has called for the creation of a peace army committed to withholding
the 13 percent of income taxes which the British government spends on defense.
MacLeod hopes such an army will be able to persuade the government to allow
people to give an equivalent amount of their taxes to starving countries
instead. Even if the government refuses to go along with the idea, he said,
taxpayers should still withhold the money and spend it on famine relief.
War, MacLeod said, is no longer “a disciplined conflict between nations”;
instead it has become “mutual mass murder of women and children between
hemispheres. The church must go radical about war.”
The Mennonite Central Committee held
an executive committee meeting
in and shot down the
proposal to stop withholding war taxes from the paychecks of objecting
employees:
The committee also heard a report from a task force established after several
staff members asked
MCC
not to withhold their federal income taxes. This was to allow them to keep a
portion of their taxes as a protest of taxes used for military purposes.
Committee member Phil Rich reported that the task force had met with leaders
from eight Mennonite denominations over the past year to seek counsel on how
to respond to the tax-withholding issue. None of the denominations counseled
MCC
to honor the staff members’ request.
The Executive Committee voted 7-1, with three abstentions, to accept the task
force’s recommendation that the staff members’ request be denied. The
recommendation will go to the
MCC
annual meeting for final action.
Staff member H.A. Penner expressed appreciation for
MCC’s
serious attention to the issue, but asked if the process might be only half
done. “Have we listened to persons on the other end of our bombs and our guns?
Are we listening to the church in Central America, the Philippines, and South
Africa? What would they say?”
This is the twenty-eighth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
When I hit in the archives it seemed to me that I started seeing a lot more mentions of how “our tax dollars” were financing this or that government-sponsored horror, but much less followup from there about how such a thing might lead one to resist paying.
Maybe that was seen as an obvious corollary by then, or maybe some people had abandoned the idea of war tax resistance as impractical and had just become resigned to complaining.
It’s hard to tell from the record.
That’s not to say there wasn’t war tax resistance content.
Plenty of it.
The “Taxes for Peace” war tax redirection fund, run by the Mennonite Central Committee’s (U.S.) Peace Section, announced it’s annual drive in the issue.
The fund would be redirecting money to the Lancaster County (Pa.) Peacework Alternatives Project, and announced that they had redirected $4,600 to a project to aid victims of violence in Guatemala the previous year.
A curious story, “The parable of the taxpayers” by John F. Murray appeared in the .
It was a sort of updating of the “parable of the talents” from the Bible.
It included a character who was a war tax resister but the parable chided him for hiding his money away from the tax collector rather than spending it on good churchly stuff.
Perhaps this indicates that this was one stereotype of war tax resisters — as miserly sorts — that was prevalent in Mennonite circles.
The emerging war tax resistance movement in Japan took the offensive in , according to this article:
A Mennonite pastor is among 22 Japanese tax resisters who have sued the government for what they say was an “unconstitutional” collection of their taxes in .
The 22 are all members of Conscientious Objection to Military Tax (COMIT), and 12 of them are Christians — including Michio Ohno, a Mennonite pastor in Tokyo.
The government action involved the seizing of the bank accounts of Ohno and two others.
The 22 charge that Japan’s so-called Self-Defense Forces is a violation of the post-World War Ⅱ constitution, which forbids the country to have an army, navy, and air force.
So, they charge, the collection of taxes for the military is also unconstitutional.
Members of the Mennonite Church in the United States contribute $9 to the federal government for military purposes for every $5 they contribute to the local church for the cause of Christ.
Nine to five is the proportion of military support to local church support.
Nine to five is also a traditional eight-hour workday.
The fruit of our labor is paying for the arms race.
The nine-to-five calculation is based on figures from the current Mennonite Yearbook, p. 190. The contributions given by U.S. Mennonite Church members through the congregational treasury in totaled $57,269,704. This figure does not include individual gifts that were not channeled through the congregation.
The estimated military tax paid by the same people in was $105,800,000.
Stanley Kropf, churchwide agency finance secretary, estimates that the pretax income of Mennonite Church members in was $1,602,600,000. I have calculated a 12 percent tax rate paid on that income, with 55 percent of the taxes going to past and present military costs, including a portion of interest on the federal debt attributable to inflationary military spending.
I believe that these figures are correct within a margin of 5–10 percent.
No great concern?
Maybe it isn’t a matter of great concern.
Some say that the government is responsible for what it does with tax monies.
We are not accountable.
Bernard Offen, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, thinks differently.
His letter of war-tax protest came across my desk recently, and I share it as a stimulus to reflection on our war taxes in :
The guards at Auschwitz herded my father to the left and me to the right.
I was a child.
I never saw him again.
He was a good man.
He was loyal, obedient, law-abiding.
He paid his taxes.
He was a Jew.
He paid his taxes.
He died in the concentration camp.
He had paid his taxes.
My father didn’t know he was paying for barbed wire.
For tattoo equipment.
For concrete.
For whips.
For dogs.
For cattle cars.
For Zyklon B gas.
For gas ovens.
For his destruction.
For the destruction of 6,000,000 Jews.
For the destruction of 6,000,000 Jews.
For the destruction, ultimately, of 50,000,000 people in World War Ⅱ.
In Auschwitz I was tattoo #B‒7815. In the United States I am an American citizen, taxpayer #370‒32‒6858. I am paying for a nuclear arms race.
A nuclear arms race that is both homicidal and suicidal.
It could end life for 5,000,000,000 people, five billion Jews.
For now the whole world is Jewish and nuclear devices are the gas ovens for the planet.
There is no longer a selection process such as I experienced at Auschwitz.
We are now one.
I am an American.
I am loyal, obedient, law-abiding.
I am afraid of the Internal Revenue Service.
Who knows what power they have to charge me penalties and interest?
To seize my property?
To imprison me?
After soul-searching and God-wrestling for several years, I have concluded that I am more afraid of what my government may do to me, mine, and the world with the money if I pay it… if I pay it.
I do believe in taxes for health, education, and the welfare of the public.
While I do not agree with all the actions of my government, to go along with the nuclear arms race is suicidal.
It threatens my life.
It threatens the life of my family.
It threatens the world.
I remember my father.
I have learned from Auschwitz.
I will not willingly contribute to the production of nuclear devices.
They are more lethal than the gas Zyklon B, the gas that killed my father and countless others.
I am withholding 25 percent of my tax and forwarding it to a peace tax fund.
Offen gives permission to reproduce or publish his letter and says he may be contacted at Sonoma County Taxes for Peace, Box 563, Santa Rosa, CA 95402.
No simple answer.
What is the answer to the war-tax dilemma?
I offer no simple one.
I simply identify a challenge to our faith which will not go away.
And I think it is helpful to have some idea of how much money, and in what proportion, we are giving to the death machine.
St. Augustine said, “Hope has two sisters: Anger and courage.”
Beautiful women, these, in an age of despair.
Thank you for printing the article by John Stoner, “Nine to Five”… It is good but uncomfortable for us to be reminded of our involvement in military and war-related activity.
I wonder how much longer the Mennonite Church can remain so silent and still carry the distinction of being a peace church.
In a democracy, silence gives consent.
In light of Scripture, our history, and the present reality that Stoner points out, how can we Mennonites give our consent to spending so much for war?
Withholding federal income tax for conscience’ sake is still a lonely and often misunderstood act, even within the church.
True, there are individuals and small segments of the Mennonite Church who have taken positions similar to the Stoners.
But I long and pray for the time when such actions of civil disobedience will be strongly supported and encouraged by the majority of Mennonites.
A war tax redirection ceremony and tax day protest was covered in the issue:
Michigan group gives war-tax money to the poor.
On the income-tax deadline of , a group of 11 people in Kalamazoo, Mich., called “Partners in Peace” gave a public witness to their beliefs in front of the post office.
They mailed their income-tax returns minus the amount they calculate is used for military purposes — 50 percent.
Instead the group gave that amount — which together came to about $5,500 — to five local agencies that assist the needy.
Here Partners for Peace member Karen Small gives a check to Marcia Jackson of Loaves and Fishes.
The group, which includes Mennonites, also conducted a short worship service with singing, prayer, and testimonies by several participants.
Onlookers were given printed statements and pens with the inscription, “If you pray for peace, should you pay for war?”
This is the second year the public witness has been conducted.
Winfred Stoltzfus, a Mennonite doctor who is a member of the group, said he and others are being “harassed” by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which is seizing bank accounts and portions of their paychecks.
“Even if you are not a war tax resister, you can help those who are,” say a group of Christians who operate the Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
Based in North Manchester, Ind., it helps resisters when they suffer financial loss through the seizure of penalties and interest by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
The fund, started in as a project of the local chapter of Fellowship of Reconciliation, is currently trying to broaden its base of support because of the increasing number of requests for assistance.
More information is available from the North Manchester Fellowship of Reconciliation…
While war tax resistance seemed mostly a U.S. phenomenon during the Vietnam War era (and this led to some chagrin when Canadian Mennonites felt like they were being dragged into disputes about it), Canadians were also getting in on the act by this time ():
Conscience Canada, a Victoria, B.C.-based organization objecting to Canadian military taxes, held its first national conference recently.
Several participants reported that they sent the military portion of their taxes to Peace Tax Fund — a trust account administered by Conscience Canada which is not approved by the government.
Member of Parliament James Manley told the participants how they could be more effective in lobbying their MPs.
Motions favoring peace tax legislation were introduced in the House of Commons by Manley in and and by MP Simon De Jong in .
Reporting on war-tax resistance in the United States, Robert Hull, a Mennonite who chairs the Washington, D.C.-based National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, said his group has enlisted 55 representatives and four senators as sponsors of peace tax legislation in the U.S. Congress.
“Conscience Canada is part of a movement in 17 countries, from Finland and Spain to Australia and New Zealand,” said Edith Adamson, the organization’s coordinator.
Study packet on militarism in Canada from Mennonite Central Committee Canada.
It includes pamphlets, articles, and a fact sheet.
The packet helps Canadians struggling to discern a faithful Christian response to militarism, including the issue of whether or not to pay war taxes.
It is available for a suggested donation of $3 from Information Services at MCC Canada…
David Charles wrote a commentary for the issue in which he went on at length about the horror of nuclear war and said “Some have even come to recognize our complicity in the situation through silence and the payment of war taxes.”
And: “Our continued silence to a government that is not merely content to collect tax but is mortgaging the entire country to pursue a ridiculous ambition is conveying a message of acceptance.”
But his suggested response was hilariously pathetic:
We can write on the bottom of our tax returns that our money is to be used to build peace, not more arms.
For an increasing number of Christians the conscription of their taxes for military purposes is becoming a problem of conscience as clear as the conscription of their bodies for military service.
The question will not fade away.
Are the excuses offered by Nazi collaborators or Iran-contra conspirators that someone else is making the decisions that much different than washing our hands of responsibility for how the state uses the resources God has given us?
Challenge and action.
The study suggested by MCC and the militarism resolution — “Growing in Stewardship and Witness in a Militaristic World” — which will be considered by the General Assembly at Purdue arose directly out of the struggle of conscience about war taxes by some members of the church.
The proposed resolution is intended to alert us to the broad scope of this challenge and suggest appropriate actions.
Let us expand our support for proposed Peace Tax Fund legislation in both the United States and Canada, recognizing that legal recognition of conscientious objection to payment of taxes destined for military use will require the same patient persistence which resulted in legal recognition of conscientious objection to military service.
Let us prayerfully examine the practice of church organizations withholding and transmitting income taxes of church employees who themselves are conscientiously unable to pay taxes for military use.
As part of that effort, we will participate in a conference planned for for Mennonite, Brethren, and Quaker employers to share their experiences relating to tax withholding and conscience and to develop a strategy for relief of this ethical dilemma.
Let us continue to support those whose conscience prevents them from paying taxes destined for military use or from registering with the U.S. Selective Service System.
A report from the conference, carried in the issue, carried the ominous quote “Personally, I think the Peace Tax Fund is a way out of this” as a way of excusing why the Mennonite Church seemed to be waffling rather than taking any committed stand:
A statement on “Growing in Stewardship and Witness in a Militaristic World” was approved more quickly.
It offers suggestions to congregations for ways to counter the increasingly pervasive “evil” of militarism in North America and around the world.
Ed Metzler, who presented the statement, said one of the best ways Mennonites can oppose militarism today is by supporting the campaign for “Peace Tax Fund” legislation in both the United States and Canada.
Metzler, who is peace and social concerns secretary at Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries, said this would permit conscientious objection to war taxes in the same way that Mennonites and others won the right to conscientious objection to war.
He called to the podium the executive director of the campaign in the U.S. — Marian Franz, a Mennonite.
“Conscience is contagious,” she said, “and peace concerns are spreading far beyond the historic peace churches.”
Approval of the statement did not end the discussion on militarism.
Especially after Mennonite Board of Missions president Paul Gingrich reminded the delegates that his agency is still waiting to hear what it is supposed to do about employees who request that taxes not be withheld from their paychecks so that they can resist war taxes.
“I wish this body would act on this,” he said.
Metzler agreed, pointing out that the Mennonite Church General Board “ducked the issue” by calling for a general statement on militarism.
“We wish the issue would go away,” he said, “but it won’t.” Moderator-Elect Lebold defended General Board inaction, noting that the church is deeply divided on the subject.
“Personally, I think the Peace Tax Fund is a way out of this,” he said.
Nondelegate Ray Gingerich, an Eastern Mennonite College professor who is a war tax resister, challenged the notion of having to wait on the government to make legal a matter of conscience.
Many delegates seemed to agree, and by majority vote, they instructed General Board to take immediate action on tax withholding and give a clear answer to MBM and other agencies seeking guidance.
Well, I think so.
It is an odd question for a 53-year-old person because nobody’s asking me to wreak violence on anybody else.
We are all very fortunate to have that little dialogue about paying over the coin to Caesar because otherwise we 53-year-olds, if we thought of being pacifists, would have to think of financing nuclear weapons.
I guess that little dialogue lets us out, or at least in some people’s minds it does.
But I figure that by now the taxes I paid have bought a lot of destructive weaponry, if I am paying my share.
The Church of the Brethren (Anabaptist cousins of the Mennonites) also held their annual conference.
The issue reported:
An agenda item on “taxation for war” prompted little debate, since a study committee said the church has written enough about war-tax resistance, and that it is time for members to study seriously what has been written.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has publicly asked the forgiveness of an 81-year-old Cincinnati minister who was defrocked by a regional church body 25 years ago for his antiwar activism.
Maurice McCrackin, pastor of the nondenominational Community Church of Cincinnati, was deposed from the ministry by the Cincinnati Presbytery in after he refused to pay the portion of his income taxes that would go for military spending.
Meeting in Biloxi, Miss., the denomination’s highest governing body, the General Assembly, formally confessed error in removing McCrackin from the ministry and endorsed an action taken in by the Presbytery of Cincinnati restoring him to clergy status.
The attempts to get the Mennonite Church to take risks on behalf of war tax resisters got the goat of of Elmer S. Yoder, who wrote the following for the issue — again suggesting the Peace Tax Fund as a way of sidelining the problem:
The concluding appeal by a delegate at Purdue to “respect the individual conscience” in regard to church institutions not withholding “war taxes” failed to address a key question.
The appeal sounded simple and persuasive, on the surface, but it is much more complex and far-reaching.
Whose conscience is to be respected?
The conscience of the individual employee of an institution or the collective conscience of a board of directors, or perhaps even General Assembly?
The corporation is a legal entity and owes its continued existence to statutory provisions.
The centralized management of the corporation can and does express the collective conscience of the institution.
Our major church institutions are incorporated and directed by boards.
The directors have been charged with the optimum operation of the institutions.
The institutions (corporations) are faced with options different from those of an individual in respect to a refusal to pay the tax in question.
An individual refusing to pay what he considers is the war tax would be confronted by an agency of the government.
The result might be the placing of some financial restrictions upon him, or additional legal action, such as seizure of property, or in extreme cases, imprisonment.
Noncompliance by a church corporation would almost certainly result in governmental measures amounting to a substantial loss of freedom.
This loss could well include its legal base to perform the objectives and purposes included in its charter and given by the Mennonite Church.
An individual Christian respecting the conscience of a war-tax resister suffers no detrimental consequences legally.
A trustee of a church institution is in a completely different situation.
By consenting with fellow trustees not to withhold the tax in question, he and the trustees are inviting various restrictions on the institution via legal action.
Legal alternatives of not withholding the war tax have been researched thoroughly by the General Conference Mennonite Church, without finding any legal recourse.
This means that trustees of church institutions would engage in civil disobedience by not withholding from any employee’s salary the part of the tax he protests, but in addition, would push the institution into a morass of legal restrictions and extended court procedures that would severely hamper the operation of the institution or drain its resources through protracted legal fees.
This is not a plea to act only on the basis of potential consequences.
The call to faithfulness supersedes consequences.
But faithfulness in great diversity of understanding, such as the war tax issue and the legal consequences, is difficult to achieve.
It is not in the interests of brotherhood to create or foster an institutional versus individual conflict, but neither is it proper or ethical to evade the issue of an institutional conscience.
In church institutions that conscience is molded by the larger brotherhood and those directly charged for the operation of the institutions — the trustees.
Nearly 100 years ago, the Mennonite Church began forming institutions (corporations) to carry out more effectively its tasks of nurture, education, and evangelism.
The institutions have served well and have contributed in many ways to the mission of the Mennonite Church.
Shall this servant role of the institutions continue?
Trustees of the institutions can, by openly defying the law over an issue on which such a diversity of opinion exists within the Mennonite Church, shackle the institutions, rather than performing as stewards.
Perhaps the time is coming, in the United States, when the church may again need to preach, to teach, and to evangelize without the legal entity of the corporation.
Perhaps there again will be the time for the fabled school with the professor on one end of a log and the student on the other.
The church corporation, which makes possible educating larger numbers, would be conspicuously absent, because of legal ramifications.
But, in my opinion, that time is not yet.
Perhaps, rather than urging a course of action which would eventually eliminate faculty and staff positions in the institutions, the energies and efforts devoted to this should be channeled into making possible a legal alternative, such as the Peace Tax Fund.
Devoting one’s energies to making it possible for larger numbers to step out and take advantage of the Peace Tax Fund certainly would be preferred to potentially reducing the church institutions into ineffectiveness.
The “New Call to Peacemaking” initiative was still active, but seemed to be deemphasizing war tax resistance.
It is not until the penultimate paragraph of this story that war tax issues are mentioned:
Some of New Call’s limited resources do go to renewing the vision within the historic peace churches.
In a conference will be cosponsored with the Quaker War Tax Concerns Committee on the challenge to church organizations from employees requesting their federal taxes not be withheld so they can exercise their conscience in relation to war taxes.
Thank you for sharing Ike Glick’s courageous decision of conscience to resign from a company that might be involved in military contracts ().
All of us in North America are inextricably involved in an economy addicted to huge military expenditures.
Ike’s conscience challenges especially all of us who think that the taxes we pay to build weapons of war are something for which we have no responsibility.
Our stewardship teachings tell us it is God’s money.
How we use that resource surely must be a matter of conscience as much as the way we use our God-given talents in our occupations.
This is the twenty-ninth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
In the Mennonite Church danced right up to the brink of committing to corporate war tax resistance, as other church bodies around them considered their own similar actions.
The traditionalists were increasingly restive, though.
For example, in the issue, a letter to the editor from Robert L. Beiler took the traditional Romans 13 line and then went on to pointedly ask why war tax resisting Mennonites don’t seem to make any noise about taxpayer-funded abortions — and anyway the United States is a great country and we should be happy to pay taxes here.
The issue reported on how another Christian group was dealing with war tax resisters in the fold:
The General Board of Friends United Meeting — a Quaker denomination based in Richmond, Ind. — has adopted a policy of not withholding the federal taxes of employees who are conscientious objectors to paying taxes used for military purposes.
This means the denomination is willing to violate Internal Revenue Service tax regulations in order to support the conscience of its employees.
The policy requires employees who desire to participate in the witness of military tax refusal to first participate in a “clearness process” with their local congregation.
They are encouraged to compute the military percentage of their income tax, using the figures of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and voluntarily deposit that sum in a special denominational account held for that purpose.
The remainder would be submitted to the IRS.
In taking this action.
Friends United Meeting is pursuing a long Quaker tradition of recognizing all outward warfare to be inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It joins one other denomination in taking this action — the General Conference Mennonite Church.
Friends United Meeting is also seeking legislative remedy through the U.S. Peace Tax Fund bill in Congress.
This legislation would permit tax payers morally opposed to war to have the military part of their taxes allocated to peacemaking.
Leaders of two peace organization talk about military taxes — Julie Garber of Fellowship of Reconciliation and John Stoner of Mennnonite Central Committee U.S. Peace Section.
Representatives of several “traditional peace church” denominations met to try to swap ideas about how to cope with the war tax resistance issue (Paul Schrag reporting):
Praying for peace while paying for war is a contradiction that historic peace churches must oppose by speaking out and taking action, representatives of those churches agreed at a consultation in Richmond, Ind. For some people, war tax resistance — refusing to pay the portion of one’s taxes that goes to the military — is a moral imperative.
Their consciences will not allow them to help pay for machine guns and nuclear bombs.
The question of how church organizations can help their employees follow their consciences — and how to deal with the risks involved for both employees and employers — were the issues that nearly 40 Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers struggled with at the meeting.
The church leaders, agency representatives, and lawyers affirmed their support for individual military tax resisters and for efforts to seek a legislative solution by working toward passage of the Peace Tax Fund Bill in the U.S. Congress.
They agreed to organize a peace church leadership group to go to Washington sometime in the future to support the peace tax bill and to express concerns about tax withholding.
They also agreed to help each other by filing friend-of-the-court briefs if tax resisters are prosecuted and by sharing the cost of tax resistance penalties, if necessary.
“You may think the world will little note nor long remember what has happened here,” said Marian Franz, a Mennonite who is executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
“But I regard it as a historic meeting.”
People from churches that have policies of breaking the law by not withholding the federal taxes of employees who oppose paying military taxes shared their experiences with people from churches considering adopting such a policy.
The General Conference Mennonite Church and two Quaker groups are in the first category.
The Mennonite Church is in the second.
Mennonite Church leaders, including Executive Secretary James Lapp and Moderator-Elect George Brunk Ⅲ, came to the meeting to explore church policy options on military tax withholding.
The General Assembly of the Mennonite Church asked the General Board to develop a recommendation on the issue for consideration at the next General Assembly in .
“This roots us in a larger movement,” Lapp said of the meeting.
“It gives us ideas and handles about how other people have addressed it.
We don’t have to start from ground zero.”
General Board plans to formulate questions about tax withholding for congregations to discuss.
It will prepare its recommendation based on congregations’ responses.
The meeting, held at Quaker Hill Conference Center, took place in an atmosphere of excitement generated by a gathering of people from different traditions who share a vision.
In the long and lively discussions, participants challenged each other and their churches to recommit themselves to active peacemaking and prophetic witnessing on the war tax issue.
Robert Hull, peace/justice secretary for the General Conference Mennonite Church, said it was frustrating that many members of historic peace churches are not willing to witness against financial participation in preparing for war although they are opposed to physical participation in war.
When a church or organization decides to honor employees’ requests not to withhold their federal income tax, it assumes serious risks.
Any “responsible person” who willfully fails to withhold an employee’s taxes theoretically could be punished with a prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
An organization could be fined $500,000.
But such penalties have never been imposed on legitimate religious organizations, nor are they likely to be, said two lawyers at the meeting.
The usual Internal Revenue Service response to war tax resistance is to take the amount of tax owed, plus a 5 percent penalty and interest, from the employee’s bank account.
IRS has not taken even this action against the four GC employees who are not having their taxes withheld.
They pay the nonmilitary portion of their taxes themselves and deposit the 53 percent that would have gone to the military in a designated account.
IRS has not touched that account since it was established after GC delegates approved the policy in .
All GC personnel who could be subject to penalties have agreed to accept the risk.
The Friends World Committee for Consultation, which has had a nonwithholding policy , has had tax money seized, plus interest and penalties, from its resisters’ bank accounts.
The Friends United Meeting adopted a nonwithholding policy .
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends will decide in whether it should have such a policy.
Charles Boyer of the Church of the Brethren said he would use the input from the meeting to work toward helping his denomination develop a policy on tax resistance.
Participants made suggestions for improvements on a draft of “A Manual on Military Tax Withholding for Religious Employers” written by Hull, Linda Coffin of the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns, and lawyers Peter Goldberger and J.E. McNeil.
The manual is expected to be available .
The consultation was sponsored by the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns and New Call to Peacemaking.
The latter is a cooperative peace organization of the historic peace churches.
New Call to Peacemaking plans to sponsor a military tax withholding meeting for a wider range of church groups sometime in the future.
Whether or not military tax resistance “works,” participants agreed that people’s moral imperative to follow their consciences must be respected.
“No conscientious objector ever stopped a conflict,” said William Strong, a Quaker representative.
“But they had to explain what they did, and the vision was kept alive, and those ripples — you don’t know where they stop.
The Mennonite Church was playing catch up with their cousins the General Conference Mennonite Church when it came to deciding how to react to employees who were conscientious objectors to military taxation, but now it was their turn to begin the process.
From the issue:
As the result of a General Assembly mandate , Mennonite Church General Board has initiated a plan to consider church agency tax withholding.
The General Assembly action calls for General Board to bring to the assembly a proposal for how the church should respond to questions of conscientious objection to the payment of military taxes and the institutional withholding of the military portion of employees’ income taxes.
Steps in the consideration process, as approved at the board’s meeting, began in with participation in the interdenominational Employers Tax Withholding Consultation in Richmond, Ind. Then a working document, clarifying the issues and enumerating possible responses, will be prepared for General Board study.
Board members will devote a day to the issue prior to their regular meeting.
The discernment process will continue as revised copies of the working document are available for conference and congregational study .
A summary of conference responses will be included in the General Board docket in , when the board will develop a recommendation to be presented for General Assembly action in .
The issue noted that the “first major public event” of the Peace and Justice Center at Stirling Ave. Mennonite Church in Kitchener, Ont. “was a… seminar to explore alternatives to paying taxes for military purposes.”
In a letter to the editor in the issue, Jurgen Brauer wrote that after reading Tolstoy he came to feel that “it is high time that the issue of tax withholding (or redirecting) becomes the major issue of the church.”
The “Taxes for Peace” fund gave its annual update
in the issue.
They’d decided to donate all of the taxes redirected through the fund to the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund , and announced that they’d redirected about $4,000 to “the Lancaster County, Pa., Peacework Alternatives project.”
Poster on war tax resistance from Mennonite Central Committee.
The words on the poster are by John Stoner: “We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.”
It is available from MCC at…
The General Board of the Mennonite Church met in :
Chris Longenecker tells General Board how she decided to ask her employer — Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions — to stop withholding the military portion of her taxes from her wages.
Eastern Board, like other Mennnonite Church institutions, is waiting for guidance on this issue from General Board before it honors a request like this.
Ed Metzler (left) and Jim Lapp lead the General Board discussion on war taxes.
In a decision that will lead to breaking the law if approved by the General Assembly , the General Board of the Mennonite Church has recommended that war taxes not be withheld from the paychecks of denominational employees who request that.
The 32-member board passed the recommendation unanimously, with a few abstentions.
The action, which came during the board’s meeting in Kitchener, Ont., was a long-awaited response to several people at church agencies and schools who, because of conscience, do not want to pay the portion of their taxes — about 50 percent in the United States — that goes to the military.
It was also a response to an impatient General Assembly that instructed General Board to take a stand on the issue.
“This has been an area we have been reluctant to move in,” said General Board executive secretary Jim Lapp in introducing the matter.
Ed Metzler, the denomination’s peace and social concerns secretary, said the main reasons for taking the non-withholding action are to allow individual expressions of conscience and to witness against militarism.
“But is this the best way to witness against militarism?” asked Tim Burkholder of Northwest Conference.
Other board members wondered if the church corporately should break the law to satisfy the consciences of a few individuals.
The board members, meeting at Pioneer Park Christian Fellowship, gathered a day earlier than usual to take up the war tax matter.
Metzler arranged for a variety of speakers to address the subject, including two persons who have requested non-withholding — Chris Longenecker of Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Carman Albrecht of Mennonite Central Committee Ontario.
John Stoner, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Peace Section, delivered a ringing “call for courage” based on the book of Revelation.
“It is unthinkable that John the Revelator would not see, in our time and place, the war tax demands of Western democratic militaristic capitalism as a challenge to our faithfulness to the witness of Jesus,” he said.
Bob Hull, peace/justice secretary for the General Conference Mennonite Church, explained the lengthy process that led to his denomination’s decision to honor requests for non-withholding.
It included a four-year effort to explore all legal channels — legislative, judicial, administrative — for avoiding the payment of war taxes.
Finally, at their convention in Bethlehem, Pa., 72 percent of the GC delegates voted to defy the law — the first denomination to do so.
(Several Quaker groups have since done the same.)
To date, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has not moved against the GC Church.
In the discussion that followed, several people argued that consistent conscientious objection to war should include a refusal to fight as well as to pay for fighting.
Others wondered why the Mennonite Church — and other denominations — agreed so easily to a law in the U.S. (and earlier in Canada) that required them to withhold taxes from employees’ wages, thus putting the church in the role of tax collector for the government.
For a while it looked like the board members might postpone action on the issue or pass the buck to the 22 conferences of the Mennonite Church.
But Moderator Ralph Lebold reminded them of their instructions from General Assembly, and Dean Swartzendruber of Iowa-Nebraska Conference urged the board to “decide here today.”
In the end, the decision was made after much deliberation and considerable rewriting of the proposed action.
In addition to honoring requests for non-withholding, it includes support for the Peace Tax Fund bill in the U.S. Congress that would provide conscientious objection to war taxes and a call for “serious attention” to the question of the church as tax collector.
The recommendation will now go to the conferences for review.
, General Board will take the responses from the conferences and shape a final recommendation for submission to the General Assembly.
The board members agreed that the recommendation will be introduced in person to the leaders of each conference by a denominational staff person.
Gospel Herald kept readers up on the news of other denominations struggling with the same issue ():
Philadelphia-area Quakers took a historic step recently to aid employees who were opposed to paying taxes for war purposes.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, in its 308th annual session, agreed to withhold but not forward to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service the estimated military portion of its employees’ federal income taxes.
This money will be set aside in a special fund and paid to IRS with interest when there is assurance the money will not go for military spending.
Currently the organization has 42 employees, of which an average of seven are tax resisters at any time.
The decision to establish the set-aside fund for war tax resisters augments the decision to refuse cooperation with IRS levies on salaries of war tax resisters employed by the Yearly Meeting.
The policies could make the group liable for sizable fines and penalties for breaking federal law.
The Yearly Meeting also could incur liability for employees’ unpaid taxes.
And some Mennonite congregations were taking stands on their own (, Cindy Hines Kurfman reporting):
War-tax resistance is an important subject at Lafayette (Ind.) Mennonite Fellowship — important enough that members commit themselves to “support for those who, for reason of conscience, resist ‘war tax’ payment.”
To Ken Nagele, who began refusing to pay a portion of his taxes in , war-tax resistance originally meant not paying “the percentage associated with nuclear weapons.”
He now refuses to pay for “all current and past military spending,” but still pays the portion that benefits veterans in the belief that he is “helping those scarred by killing.”
Nagele uses a Friends Committee on National Legislation document each year to determine how much he will withhold.
This year the figure is 53.1 percent.
The refused portion will be deposited in the Near Eastside Community Federal Credit Union of Indianapolis.
This community-development credit union makes loans to low-income persons and small businesses in an economically depressed portion of the city.
Another member, Mary Ann Zoeller, is refusing to pay war taxes for the first time.
“As a Christian, I knew I could not, in good conscience, support the killing of others,” she says.
“Yet the existing tax laws require me to do just this, by asking me to pay taxes that finance military services.
Following Christ’s teachings of love of his persecutors, even to the loss of life, I have been led to question my support of our military.”
Zoeller sends the war-tax portion to Amnesty International, a human rights organization.
Alternative methods of war-tax resistance are also demonstrated by several families in the Lafayette congregation.
One family, whose income is below the taxable level, has written a letter to their tax commissioner since which explains their belief that paying for war is a sin.
Another couple keeps their payment to a minimum by following the example of their parents; live simply and give a large percentage of income to the church.
A Virginia congregation has decided to officially support its members who refuse to pay the military portion of their taxes.
Community Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Va., has 20 members who illegally withhold some of their tax money as an act of conscientious objection to war taxes or are seriously considering it.
“The congregation’s decision grew out of the desire and concern of a few of us that our action be more than the isolated action of individual conscience,” said Orval Gingrich, one of the 20. The congregation is encouraging all its members to include letters of protest with their income tax returns and has notified Internal Revenue Service that it fully supports its members who don’t pay war taxes.
By it was time for another backlash letter to the editor.
Titus Martin hit the predictable Romans 13 notes and warned readers against relying on their consciences when conscience and scripture disagree.
As a compromise he suggested that readers use charitable deductions rather than civil disobedience to lower their taxes.
Even the Presbyterians were getting in on the tax resistance act, according to this news brief:
The document describes obedience to civil authority as normative for Christians but asks the denomination to set up a special fund to support Presbyterians who suffer financial losses because of a stance of resistance.
The paper argues that withholding taxes to protest U.S. military policy is proper under certain circumstances.
Such activists are entitled to emotional support from the church, the paper says.
The IRS went on the offensive against the Philadelphia Yearly meeting, which may have been frightening news for a Mennonite Church which was contemplating taking a similar stand ():
The Internal Revenue Service has filed two suits against a Quaker group in Pennsylvania because the organization has refused to attach the wages of two employees who have withheld part of their income taxes as a conscientious protest against military spending.
The lawsuits against the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends seek $17,000 in connection with federal taxes that were not paid by William Grassie and David Falls.
IRS said it takes such action against the employer of anyone who fails to pay taxes on the ground that salaries are property that can be levied by the government in such cases.
A new resource is available on the war-tax issue for Mennonite Church conferences — and others — that are currently considering whether church institutions should be instructed to not withhold taxes from the wages of employees who express conscientious objection to the military portion of their taxes.
Conferences are to submit their counsel to General Board in preparation for a proposal to General Assembly at Normal .
The resource is a just-published book called Fear God and Honor the Emperor: A Manual on Military Tax Withholding for Religious Employers.
Each purchaser of the book will be on a mailing list to receive future updates on the subject.
The book is available at a special price of $11 from Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries…
This is the thirty-second in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
In I felt the tide start to recede. The war
tax resisting faction had gotten thoroughly distracted by the promise of Peace
Tax Fund legislation, and the conservative taxpaying faction went back on the
offensive in favor of paying taxes without concern.
One of the symptoms of the decay of the war tax resistance position (that I’ve
also seen exhibited elsewhere) was the plea for new resisters to refuse to pay
some tiny, safe token amount of taxes in lieu of more firmly-motivated and
whole-hearted resistance. From the issue:
Christian Peacemaker Teams
(CPT)
is asking U.S.
taxpayers to deduct $3.03 from their federal taxes, as a symbol of their
objection to the $303 billion Defense budget.
CPT
would like congregations to collect withheld money and send it to become part
of the offering at the organization’s conference in Richmond.
Va. The offering will go to
school districts such as the one in Petersburg.
Va., which cannot afford to
buy textbooks.
“The Peace Tax bill is not going to be passed anytime soon,” says [Marian]
Franz frankly. “Not enough people have said they care — and that includes
Mennonites.
“I see a bitter irony in that,” she continues, “because if there were such a
fund, pacifist Christians would say that it was God’s will that they use its
provisions. Yet these same people are doing little to make this fund a
reality.”
The issue printed this
syndicated short news item:
Peace activist Randy Kehler has been jailed and his family’s house confiscated
because of his decade-long refusal to pay
U.S. taxes.
Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have withheld their federal taxes since the
late 1970s. Instead, they have sent their tax dollars to nonprofit
organizations that assist war victims and the poor.
The Internal Revenue Service laid claim to the couple’s house in Colrain,
Mass., to recoup some
$32,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties.
Discussion by a panel of war tax resisters highlighted a Lancaster,
Pa., meeting sponsored by
the group Taxes for Life. Some 20 people attended the meeting, which also
included a showing of the video Paying for Peace.
Taxes for Life urges individuals to withhold a small, symbolic amount from the
payment of their
U.S. income taxes
and to give the money instead to a local school project. More information is
available from Taxes for Life…
The statement on “Christian Conscience and Military Taxes” says that Illinois
Conference “will seek to support our members who feel a genuine call from God
to withhold payment of military taxes.”
The statement cites examples of this support as including prayer and personal
encouragement, finances, and witness to “political and social powers.”
The resolution also calls on Illinois congregations to contribute a minimum of
$5 per household to the Peace Tax Fund campaign.
The “Taxes for Peace” tax redirection fund gave its annual report and plea for
new funds in the issue:
The U.S. Peace
Section of Mennonite Central Committee
(MCC)
is inviting contributions for the Taxes for
Peace fund. Established in , the fund gives
people who withhold war taxes a way to give their money for peaceful purposes.
This year’s contributions will go to
MCC
U.S. peace
education projects. More information is available from
MCC
U.S. Peace Section…
John K. Stoner tried to blow on the fading coals in the
issue:
The voice of the victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of children, abused and traumatized by war, will not be still.
by John K. Stoner
Last Thursday my phone rang. The voice at the other end of the line asked for
John or Janet Stoner. “I’m John Stoner,” I replied. “Hello. I am Charles Price
of the Internal Revenue Service. I am calling about the letter you sent
indicating that you are withholding part of your income tax payment.”
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said no to
paying the full amount of our income tax. The man could not understand why
anyone would invite the collection pressures of the
IRS upon
themselves by withholding some taxes. But by the time the conversation was
over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was for us a matter of
faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9
kind of experience of being called before the authorities. By the sound of
Mark 13,
Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
“Why do they have to keep bringing up this business about taxes for war?”
someone asks after a congregational meeting. “Why doesn’t this war tax
question just go away?” asks another at a session on strategies to reduce the
military portion of the
U.S. budget.
The reason war keeps coming up and won’t go away is because the voice of the
victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of the children, abused and
traumatized by war, doesn’t go away.
Every discussion about peacemaking in these times must face the question of
how taxes are collected and spent.
Americans watched their tax dollars at work in Iraq. They killed between one
and two hundred thousand people in a month’s time. They left a nation of 17
million people strangled — its water polluted, its hospitals without
electricity, its homes dark, and its classrooms cold. Today malnutrition,
disease, and destitution are the continuing results of this man-made plague of
death and despair.
Since then, an international study team on the Gulf crisis found that the
mortality rate of children under five years of age was almost four times
greater then than before the Gulf War. More than 75 percent of Iraqi children
feel sad and unhappy, worry about the survival of their family. They are
haunted by the smell of gunfire, fuel from planes, fires, and burned flesh.
Taxes paid for all this. It is for those of us who are Christians, as
taxpayers, to sidestep our share of the responsibility. We can choose to “just
say no” (how simple that sounds when we prescribe it to someone else’s moral
choice and how difficult it sounds when it is ours).
Your $3.03 Taxes for Life equivalent can be sent to Christian
Peacemaker Teams…
CPT
also suggests you write a letter of witness to the
IRS with
copies to your representatives in Congress, your
pastor, and your local newspaper. Taxes for Life funds will
be used for education purposes.
I believe God is calling us to plead for the end of the
destructive social institution of war by
refusing to pay for it. We are called to this as clearly
and inescapably as our forebears were called to
abolish slavery. The question is not whether we can achieve that
goal in a year or decade. The question is whether that is our goal — and
whether the world knows that it is our goal. It was Jesus’ goal, and it should
be ours.
One way to enhance this witness is through a symbolic war tax refusal called
Taxes for Life. Sponsored by the Christian Peacemaker Team, this plan would
have taxpayers redirect an amount equivalent to one penny for every billion
dollar of the U.S.
military budget to education. For ,
this is $3.03.
If you do this, and the
IRS
calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law. Go
on to say that you are far more apprehensive about breaking God’s law. Tell
them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the victims of war, and that
you have decided that you will not take their blood upon your hands. Then
leave the outcome with God.
For U.S.
Mennonites, one way we can work at it at this time of year is to take yet
another look at the tax question. As John Stoner reminds us…, it is our taxes
that keep the military going, that make possible aggression and belligerence.
Because of this, some choose not to pay a part of their taxes as a protest.
Others consider that overreaction.
But let us not make that our battle. While we do, more people starve. Let us
rather join hands to find all the ways possible to address the huge military
expenditures of our country, and of the world.
Members of a Newton, Kan.,
group heard reports on the
U.S. Peace Tax Fund
bill in a meeting. The Peace Tax
Group also discussed ideas for creating a local alternative tax fund. Carla
Morton and Stan Bohn reported on their visits to Washington,
D.C., in
connection with a Congressional hearing on the tax fund bill. In addition,
group members talked about starting a local fund for such projects as
environmental protection, mental health care for veterans, and retraining of
military workers.
The following disheartening news was carried in the
issue:
Friends Journal, a Quaker monthly published in
Philadelphia, has agreed to pay $31,343 to the
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service.
The payment covers back taxes for the magazine’s editor, who had refused to
pay them because of religious objections to their use for military purposes.
The magazine’s board had refused
IRS
demands that it pay the taxes on behalf of the editor, Vinton Deming.
However, the Justice Department warned the board that it would face legal
action unless the matter was settled, and the magazine’s lawyer advised the
board that it could not win such a case in court.
Now that the pro-taxpaying conservatives were no longer on the defensive, they
apparently no longer felt the need to promote the Peace Tax Fund legislation as
an alternative to lawlessness for Mennonites concerned about their taxes paying
for war. Now they could attack the Peace Tax Fund as being also
scripturally unsound. Or so said
Ernest E. Mummau
in a letter to the editor
that evoked the usual Romans 13 / the government is divinely ordained to bear
the sword / Christians are told to pay taxes without complaint / the Church
should stay in its own domain and shouldn’t meddle with the state line of
argument to tell Mennonites to stop trying to tell the government what to do
with their taxes.
The fourth international conference on war tax resistance and peace tax
campaigns was held in Brussels in . The Gospel Herald article,
and especially the quotes from Peace Tax Fund activist Marian Franz, tried to
spin it as though it was more or less exclusively a Peace Tax Fund promoting
event, with very little mention of actual war tax resistance:
Conference participants came with at least one thing in common, [Marian] Franz
said: “We all find it a clear violation of conscience to pay the military
portion of our taxes; we seek statutory recognition of conscience against
paying for arms as an extension of the right to refuse to bear arms.”
The conference, which draws primarily European and North American
participants, has met every two years .
The gathering allows participants “to hear stories of resistance and to
compare our progress in gaining conscientious objection
(CO)
status to payment of military taxes within our respective countries,” Franz
said.
For instance, NCPTF
hopes to convince Congress members to pass a law permitting people
conscientiously opposed to war to have the military portion of their taxes
allocated to peacemaking.
“Most countries have a similar approach to war tax resisters,” Franz noted.
“The standard response of governments, when they do respond, is to add civil
penalties and collect the unpaid taxes forcibly. Imprisonment for war tax
resistance is rare.”
Court responses to these cases are usually predictable as well. “The issue
usually raises a ‘political’ question which the courts cannot address, or the
courts decide that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience or
religion do not outweigh the duty of the citizen to pay taxes,” she said.
[Franz said:] "Most European war tax resisters entered the scene in
. The presence of Cruise and Pershing
missiles woke them up. They suddenly realized that Europe had become a giant
football field on which the two superpowers could bounce their nuclear
weapons.”
This prompted another
letter to the editor,
this one from Russell J. Baer, which also used the Render-unto-Caesar / Romans
13 beef to complain about activists who have an issue with paying war taxes.
This is the thirty-fifth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
The Gospel Herald would cease publication as an independent magazine at the beginning of , merging with The Mennonite as the Mennonite Church merged with the General Conference Mennonite Church.
Today I’ll show some of the final mentions of tax resistance in the magazine before the merger.
The “Taxes for Peace” redirection fund gave its annual update in the edition:
Mennonite Central Committee U.S. peace and justice ministries is again inviting contributions for the “Taxes for Peace” fund.
the fund has allowed people who withhold the portion of their taxes that would go for military purposes to contribute that money to peacemaking initiatives.
In , the funds will bolster efforts to halt the production of cluster bombs and landmines and support resources on conscientious objection to military service and taxes.
Contributions made payable to MCC can be sent to “Taxes for Peace,” MCC U.S. Peace and Justice Ministries…
A report on the “Taxes for Life” group appeared in the issue.
They somewhat carelessly redirected their taxes from the federal government to the state government, for what that’s worth:
Taxes for Life delegates present a check of diverted war taxes for health needs of low-income families to the governor’s office in Harrisburg (Pa.) on .
They are (left to right): Herb Myers, Annn Marie Judson, John Stoner, and Dave Schrock-Shenk.
Lancaster, Pa. — On , the day U.S. income taxes are due, some Mennonites here diverted a portion of their war tax money toward health needs of unemployed persons.
They presented a check of $1,000 to the office of Governor Tom Ridge in Harrisburg.
The war tax objectors are part of Taxes for Life — a group that meets to support each other in seeking biblically nonviolent responses to the government’s demand for funding of war and military preparations.
Governor Ridge had threatened to cut 260,000 persons off the medical assistance rolls in Pennsylvania, arguing that the money was not available in the state to cover those needs.
“We wanted to demonstrate that if wasteful and destructive expenditures in military systems could be redirected, life-giving programs like health care to vulnerable citizens could be well-funded,” says member Earl Martin.
Speaking to government actions.
On , in a perhaps unrelated action, Governor Ridge announced his intention to compromise on his cut-back proposal.
The $1,000 gift came both from diverted federal war tax money and “sympathy money” from supportive friends, according to Martin.
For example, Sarah and Herb Myers of Mount Joy, Pa., wrote to the Internal Revenue Service, “How can we continue contributing financially toward the madness and sinfulness of our military system when we have claimed to be conscientious objectors to serving in the military?”
The Myers, Mennonite medical professionals, each withheld $28.50 from their taxes due to the IRS.
The $28.50 symbolized a dime for each of the $285 billion the United State government spends on current military expenditures.
“We realize the above action is illegal and we do not undertake it lightly,” they wrote to the IRS.
“We have taught our children that laws are to be obeyed “unless they violate one’s commitment to a higher power than the government.”
[sic] But in a democracy, they added, “we must speak clearly toward our government’s actions or we too are guilty of complicity.”
On , members of the Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster took a celebrative “second offering” in which children and adults walked forward to contribute “sympathy money” to the Taxes for Life effort.
They added $575 with that spontaneous offering.
Governor Ridge’s representative, after an extensive discussion of the issues with Taxes for Life representatives, received the check only to pass it on to the state treasurer’s office.
Whether the state treasurer will choose to cash the check marked “diverted war tax money and contributions” remains unknown.
The issue of whether a person could be a Mennonite in good standing, and be a soldier at the same time, was still being argued out in the letters to the editor column.
Here’s an excerpt from Eldon Epp’s letter in the issue in which he tries to bring the discussion back around to war taxes:
I wonder if we often limit our nonviolent witness to refusing military enlistment.
That leaves the onus for the sins of violence on military personnel.
Our witness must include the invitation to military personnel to consider Jesus’ way.
That witness has integrity when the rest of the church is also asking how to be nonviolent Christian citizens.
Mennonites paying taxes and remaining silent about an astronomical “defense” budget are also complicit in violence.
Brother Leslie Francisco Ⅲ expressed this well in Between the Rock of Peace and the Hard Place of Outreach.
A letter from Perry Keidel () began by advocating war tax resistance, but then suggested Peace Tax Fund lobbying instead:
While no war now rages that demands our sons, people of conscience in the United States are nevertheless forced into the morally unconscionable position of underwriting the continued, unchecked growth of the largest military industrial machine in history.
Mennonites have a proud and painful history of refusing to compromise on the issue of military conscription.
But given that war revenues from Mennonites are enough to at least support the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, we cannot at the same time be called uncompromising pacifists.
Perhaps the state department concedes CO status to Mennonites because we still by and large hire the soldiers that fire the bullets.
If Mennonites are unable to take responsibility for the use to which the state allocates revenues forcibly taken from them, then Mennonite understandings of separation of church and state must expand to organized refusal to cooperate in paying war taxes.
Every Mennonite congregation should send two or three letters to their U.S. Senators voicing their concern and asking that the Peace Tax Fund bill be adopted.
This bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide that a taxpayer conscientiously opposed to war have tax monies spent for nonmilitary purposes.
That’s the first step.
In the issue “vsw” (Valerie Weaver) wrote about angels without wings (i.e. ordinary people who do extraordinary things), and included war tax resisters among them:
[I]f angels play wonderful, life-giving jokes on the world, then I’ve seen them… They play jokes of life on the government by refusing to pay war taxes and then giving more to mission and service agencies than the government would even require for itself.
And in the issue, J. Lorne Peachey wrote an editorial asking what makes Mennonites special or different.
In the process, he gave short shrift to war tax resisters and demonstrated how much their stars had fallen:
Larry Hauder’s questions are worth pondering: How are we different from the world?
What does it mean today to be separate?
My favorite answer is that, in addition to accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord, we believe in a lifestyle of peace and nonviolence.
Yet that’s hard to make visible when our country is not involved in a major war.
Those who try to do so through such means as refusing to pay “war taxes” we generally dismiss as too zealous in making discipleship practical.
The issue reprinted from The Mennonite a news brief about the IRS seizure of the home of war tax resisters Elizabeth Gravalos and Art Harvey.
Editor J. Lorne Peachey was back in the to ask whether one reason the Mennonite Church was stagnating might be because it wasn’t being persecuted for taking bold stands:
…comfortable North American churches aren’t growing while persecuted churches in other countries are.
How do we “stand alongside [the poor, the dispossessed, and the outcasts]”?
Some of us have answered by withholding our war taxes.
Others have joined Christian Peacemaker Teams. Some sell or give away their possessions and live in community.
Others go into dangerous parts of the world and attempt reconciliation.
Yet these are mainly individual acts.
For the most part, we as a total church have not been able to agree even on these relatively simple attempts toward faithfulness.
Can a non-persecuted, comfortable church also be a growing, faithful church?
The record has not been good.
In Mennonite history, we have the examples of churches in Russia and Europe, where, as Christians grew wealthy and accepted, their message became diluted and weak.
Even in the New Testament we read much more about the “mission outposts” that were being questioned and oppressed than we do about the more wealthy and better-accepted mother church in Jerusalem.
A faithful church that’s not persecuted?
God just may be giving North American Mennonites another chance to see if that’s possible.
We are the best-read, most-educated, and probably the wealthiest Mennonites who ever lived.
Can we catch a vision to channel that knowledge and wealth into living and proclaiming the gospel rather than in spending the majority of it on ourselves?
We… try to legally avoid federal taxes because of the large portion which supports the military.
We have some tax breaks that many others do not have because John is an ordained minister.
But, as a matter of principle, to legally avoid taxes, we have placed our savings in tax-free investments, tax-sheltered Individual Retirement Accounts, and similar 401K instruments.
These savings, with tax-free compounding, have grown to $200,000 — by saving 15 percent of our annual income with interest compounding at an average rate of 6 percent over the years.
Another international conference on war tax resistance and peace tax fund campaigns was held .
Again, the Gospel Herald coverage of the event made it out to be mostly a Peace Tax Fund legislation conference, with actual war tax resistance only a footnote:
London, England — Supporters of peace tax campaigns and war tax resistance from 16 countries met here, , to discuss the progress and importance of working corporately toward a peace tax law.
Three American Mennonites attended the conference that was hosted by British members of the Peace Tax Campaign: Marian Franz, director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund; Cesar Flores, member of the Honduran Mennonite Church, and Susan Balzer, administration committee member of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
Speakers reported on the peace tax legislation proposals in various countries and expressed the belief that if one country passes a peace tax bill, other countries would soon follow.
In , the United States became the first country to initiate peace tax bill proposals.
Current lobbying efforts are geared toward making the bill’s passage a religious freedom issue.
Keynote speaker Erik Hummels, from the Netherlands, defined peace as “a dynamic process of cooperation among people which includes human rights, economic justice, and the absence of situations that can lead to war.”
In addition to observing Prisoners for Peace Day and honoring those who have been imprisoned for conscientious objection, conference participants attended workshops on war tax resistance issues.
Meanwhile, on the 25th anniversary of the original introduction of the peace tax fund bill in the U.S. Congress, Representative John Lewis would try to attach it as an amendment to some bill that would actually see action on the floor, but his attempt was voted down.
A Clinton administration spokesperson testified against the amendment.
The bill would then be rewritten into something closer to its present form, under the title “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.”
How can I work for peace if I pay for war?
Is paying for soldiers to murder less evil than pulling the trigger myself?
Millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Japanese, Salvadorans, Iraquis, Koreans, and Germans begged their gods to protect them as U.S. bombers destroyed their homes and crops and massacred their families.
Some of the victims prayed to Jesus.
All this happened while Christians in the United States paid taxes to build and fly the U.S. bombers and sang every Sunday about God’s love for all people.
Half of every federal income tax dollar goes for war — past, present, and future.
Tax dollars are the lifeblood of the military beast devouring the world’s poor.
In order for the U.S. or any other empire to plunder and to massacre, two things are required from many citizens — silence and paying taxes.
For 18 years I have paid no federal income tax by living under the taxable income level, and I also am not silent.
I prize living the truth as best I see it far more than unnecessary material possessions.
I say — not with my money, not with my silence, not in my name!
“If you really care about not supporting the military with your taxes, use the full charitable donations deduction allowed,” the speaker in our young adult Sunday school class challenged.
We could deduct up to 20 percent of our income for charity.
Twenty percent — the figure echoed in my thoughts.
My husband-to-be, George, and I had chosen to follow parental patterns of tithing 10 percent and giving gifts above and beyond.
I knew no one who gave even close to 20 percent.
Yet I certainly cared deeply about using my money for life-giving purposes rather than for building up an arsenal of destruction.
Was George stirred as I was?
Through discussion, George and I soon reached agreement.
We would move toward the goal of giving 20 percent.
Thus began a joyful journey of stewardship as a married couple.
In the first year of marriage, we inched toward our goal.
We used bicycles while saving for a car.
George continued graduate studies while I started my first full-time job.
Within four years, we had a fuel-efficient car and our first child.
We had managed to reach 15 percent in donations.
Even though I stayed home with our infant and we had a tight budget, we were able to eat good, nutritious food, continue with retirement savings, and buy the things most important to us.
When George finished school, we moved to the United States for a job.
We moved at the right time — housing prices had soared in our area, and we sold our small condominium for several times the price George paid a decade before.
Our household income increased dramatically.
We had major stewardship decisions to make.
Initially, I felt disoriented in the new economic terrain.
Reducing our military taxes continued to be a high priority for us.
Since interest from mortgage payments is tax deductible, we invested in a spacious house on a wooded lot.
We committed to making our home an open place for those who needed a place of retreat from the stresses of human services, overseas work, or ministry.
Buying the house reduced the need for other stewardship decisions; after donations, mortgage, taxes, and utilities, our budget was more generous but not radically different from student days.
By the time our second child was born, we had nearly reached our goal of 20 percent donations.
We started catching up to our goals for university savings for our young ones.
And, to wrap up this series of excerpts, here is an excerpt of a letter to the editor from Jacob Hubert () which is the only example I’ve seen that takes Mennonite nonresistant / pacifist principles to a logical anarchist conclusion and determines that taxation itself is a violent act that Mennonites should not countenance:
Martin Shupack asserts that the federal government, while sometimes a “violent rebel,” can be an instrument for good when used for such causes as welfare for the poor, Medicare, Social Security, and other social programs designed to help those in need (“Violent Rebel or Valuable Servant,” ).
What Shupack does not seem to realize is that all government programs are the products of violence, regardless of who benefits from them.
Taxes can be collected only if the government backs up its taxation policies with violence and threats thereof.
The question, then, is this: are Mennonites absolutely for peace and against the initiation of force?
Or is the taking of money by means of violent coercion acceptable when the money will be spent on causes they regard as worthwhile?
If the Mennonite Church is to be consistent in its opposition to the use of force, it must be opposed to it in all forms — including the form of taxation.
