Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → tax resistance for same-sex marriage → Charles Merrill / Kevin Boyle

Charles Merrill of Edneyville, North Carolina has decided that because the U.S. government is denying equal rights to gay married couples and perpetrating the war in Iraq that he’s going to stop paying them.

This intrigued someone at the New York Post, and they’ve put out a request to interview other gay tax resisters in New York City who are resisting in protest of the government’s anti-gay policies.

In I mentioned that Charles Merrill had decided to stop paying federal and state income tax in protest against the governments’ policies of denying equal legal status to same-sex marriages. (See also the similar case of tax resister Robert Mueller.)

Merrill and his partner Kevin Boyle now have a web site at which they are collecting information about their protest and resources for what they hope to be a growing movement of tax resisters protesting for gay marriage rights.

“We’re paying first-class taxes to be treated like second-class citizens and we’re sick of it.”…

“According to the General Accounting Office, there are over 1,049 protections and incentives extended to straight married couples, none of which we get… I’m just doing the same thing that Mahatma Gandhi did in India and the colonists did during the War for Independence.”

I briefly mentioned the case of Charles Merrill. He decided to stop filing his income tax returns because the federal government refused to let him and his husband file jointly — refused, in other words, to recognize their marriage for the purpose of filing taxes.

Tuesday, I went down to San Francisco’s main library branch to look into some microfilm & microfiche that had come in from interlibrary loan concerning my recent obsession with early American Quaker war tax resistance. Before and after my research, I stopped by City Hall to watch the celebrations taking place there during the first day on which gay couples could get bona fide marriage licenses in California. There was a party atmosphere on the steps, as two-by-two, couples would emerge with a certificate of marriage and everyone would stop to applaud.

, Charles Merrill revealed that this week the government charged him with criminal failure to file.

The Internal Revenue Service has finally caught up with Charles Merrill and he may face three years in prison for not filing income taxes . The penalty for not filing for each year is 3 years in jail or a $25,000.00 fine.

Merrill said from his Waldorf Astoria suite in New York, “Marriage between ‘gender neutral’ couples is legal in California, but our union is not recognized by the Federal Government and we don’t get the over 1,000 Federal benefits automatically extended to heterosexual couples. This inequality, thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act, was voted on by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. What a can of worms that has turned out to be… President Bush believing in and talking to an imaginary sky god and wanting to make an amendment to our Constitution that would ban two people in love from getting married. The Government has no business in checking out the gender of two people who want to be married. Presidential Candidate John McCain was living in adultery with his present wife Cindy while still married to his former wife. According to the Bible, he should have been stoned to death for adultery.”

Merrill continued, “Since our marriage is not recognized by the Federal Government, the carving over the Supreme Court of the United States is just meaningless words, the words that say, ‘Equal Justice Under The Law.’ ”

Merrill’s trial is scheduled for at the U.S. Tax Court, San Diego, California.

Here’s an update about Charles Merrill’s unusual (perhaps unique) tax resistance protest in favor of legal recognition for gay marriage. (See The Picket Line, ).

First off, his trial, which had been scheduled for , has been pushed forward to . But more interestingly, well, it wouldn’t be an act of tax resistance for gay rights without a little flamboyance, would it? Here’s the latest:

Merrill, who recently suffered a stroke, said from his wheelchair, “I have buried $2 million worth of gold coins in the desert as a hedge against the economy collapsing. My partner doesn’t even know where it is at.” He continued, “If the IRS allows me to file a joint federal income tax form like any other married couple, the money is there to pay. All they have to do is dig it up. I want to pay taxes, but not treated as a second-class citizen. Gay marriage is not a state issue, as the political candidates McCain and Obama claim, any more than heterosexual marriage is. They need to rescind DOMA and make us equal citizens under federal law. As it stands now, gay married couples are taxed without full representation.”

The 74-year-old artist has been in a relationship with Kevin Boyle for 16 years.

Merrill is a cousin of the co-founder of Merrill Lynch. Prior to coming out as bisexual he was married for 23 years to Evangeline Johnson, the only daughter of Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson.

“Marriage between ‘gender neutral’ couples is legal in California, but our union is not recognized by the federal government, and we don’t get the over 1,000 federal benefits automatically extended to heterosexual couples,” Merrill said Wednesday.

A new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter, More Than a Paycheck, is out. The contents include:

  • “Bringing Light into Darkness” — Marcus Page and Mike Butler discuss their civil disobedience action at Los Alamos National Laboratory in support of the War Tax Boycott
  • Some brief notes on the “economic stimulus” checks, frivolous filing warnings from the IRS that some war tax resisters have been receiving, the IRS’s expanded snitch payment program, limits on the IRS’s ability to seize pensions before they come due, and increasing IRS interest in offshore bank accounts
  • Some news about the status of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act and about Joshua Goldberg’s war tax resistance in Canada
  • Notes from resisters, including Greg Reagle responding to critics who say that war tax resistance isn’t effective, Melissa Jameson relating stories about how her resistance relates to those around her, and a summary of the story of resister Charles Merrill
  • A plug for my book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader
  • Some committee business including an announcement of the upcoming national meeting in Eugene, Oregon in and an invitation to readers to help shape the future direction of the War Tax Boycott project
  • Jay Sordean’s review of Smedley Butler’s book War Is a Racket
  • A profile by and of A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, who takes a zen approach to ethical living and tax resistance

Charles Merrill, who is resisting taxes in protest against the government’s disfavored treatment of same-sex marriage, has taken his battle to court.

According to a press release, Merrill is challenging “the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) based on the 1st Amendment Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. He objects to not getting all the same benefits as other married couples — 1,138 of them — under a discriminatory tax code.”

Merrill argues that “DOMA is in violation of the Establishment Clause under any of the three tests the Supreme Court has created: first, under the Lemon test. DOMA was motivated by a religious purpose, and its effect has been to unconstitutionally establish religion. Next, under the endorsement test, DOMA’s purpose and effect were both the endorsement of one religious view to the exclusion of all others. Finally, under the coercion test, DOMA unconstitutionally compels the acceptance of a specific religious belief.”

Well, this is interesting. None other than Melissa Etheridge has jumped on the gay marriage tax resistance bandwagon:

Okay. So Prop 8 passed. Alright, I get it. 51% of you think that I am a second class citizen. Alright then. So my wife, uh I mean, roommate? Girlfriend? Special lady friend? You are gonna have to help me here because I am not sure what to call her now. Anyways, she and I are not allowed the same right under the state constitution as any other citizen. Okay, so I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am not a full citizen. I mean that would just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same rights, sounds sort of like that taxation without representation thing from the history books.

Okay, cool I don’t mean to get too personal here but there is a lot I can do with the extra half a million dollars that I will be keeping instead of handing it over to the state of California. Oh, and I am sure Ellen will be a little excited to keep her bazillion bucks that she pays in taxes too. Wow, come to think of it, there are quite a few of us fortunate gay folks that will be having some extra cash this year. What recession? We’re gay! I am sure there will be a little box on the tax forms now single, married, divorced, gay, check here if you are gay, yeah, that’s not so bad. Of course all of the waiters and hairdressers and UPS workers and gym teachers and such, they won’t have to pay their taxes either.

Oh and too bad California, I know you were looking forward to the revenue from all of those extra marriages. I guess you will have to find some other way to get out of the budget trouble you are in.

Gay marriage rights tax resisting pioneers Charles Merrill and John Bisceglia were quick to praise the action and urge others to join in.

Melissa Etheridge’s pledge to stop paying California state taxes in the wake of California voters’ decision to outlaw same-sex marriages like hers struck me as a sort of heat-of-anger decision — not necessarily well thought through as far as its ramifications, but with the sort of appealing righteous logic that makes you think “damn the torpedoes” and just forge ahead.

In that way it reminded me a lot of my own decision to become a tax resister, in which refusing to pay taxes seemed to have become a moral imperative for me well before I’d figured out how I was going to do it.

Now Etheridge is on to stage two: figuring out the messy details.

Etheridge and her wife were on ’s Oprah Winfrey Show, talking about their reaction to the California election results. I didn’t see the show, but here’s an excerpt from the show’s summary on oprah.com:

In a recent blog posting about the passage of Proposition 8, Melissa vented her frustration by saying she would stop paying taxes. “I tell people I have until to make true on that blog,” she says. “That was [me] letting off a lot of steam. What I wanted to do was show the absurdity of a populace thinking they can take a right away or deny someone a right … and yet feel completely fine taking 100 percent of our taxes. It doesn’t make sense.”

Meanwhile, same-sex marriage tax resistance pioneer Charles Merrill was on The Ron Reagan Show . There’s some discussion of the Etheridge tax resistance pledge and general pro-same-sex-marriage talk throughout the show, but the Merrill segment itself starts about 19½ minutes in and lasts about 10 minutes.

Merrill has been resisting , and expects to finally be able to make his case in court .

And it hasn’t escaped my notice that John Bisceglia has refashioned his “Gay Tax Protest” site into one that is promoting a National Equality Tax Prote$t for . Today, I’m tracking these three tax resisters for legal recognition of same-sex marriage, but it feels like it won’t be long now before I’ll be able to write about the “movement.”

Some bits-and-pieces from around the web:

  • Susan Balzer writes about Men­non­ite war tax resist­ers for the Men­non­ite Weekly Review. Some of the resisters mentioned: Tim Godshall, Willard and Mary Swart­ley, Ray Gingerich, Harold A. Penner, John and Janet Stoner, Albert and Mary Ellen Meyer, Don Kauf­man, Titus and Linda Gehman Peachey, and Stan Bohn.
  • Charles Merrill, who has been resist­ing taxes in protest against the govern­ment’s refusal to give equal legal recog­ni­tion to same-sex mar­riages, is urging others to join him in a national “Tax Tea Party Revolt”:

    A Tax Tea Party Revolt will be the only recourse avail­a­ble in the wake of efforts to not provide equal treat­ment to all cit­i­zens under law … This means gays, lesbians, bi­sex­u­als and trans­gender people will not be filing taxes April 15th.

  • War tax resister NTodd Pritsky at Pax Amer­i­cana takes note of the pros­e­cu­tion of a tax evader and wonders if this is going to be his even­tual fate as well. Pritsky is resist­ing both federal and state taxes (as a war tax resister, he is pro­test­ing state com­plic­ity in the mil­i­tary in­dus­trial com­plex and in the wars via the state na­tional guard). Fight­ing this bat­tle on two fronts takes a lot of energy, and he’s not sure it’s worth it.

Along with the anti-pork “Tea Parties” and the various war tax resistance actions going on this , this year there is a third set of activists using tax day as their rallying-point.

Equal Taxes, Equal Rights protesters are going to be meeting last-minute filers at post offices around the country to remind people that gays and lesbians are still paying for a first-class ticket but getting second-class citizenship.

Charles Merrill is among the organizers of protests in Washington, D.C.. And the Boston rally will include a Boston Tea Party Reenactment. Tax Day is getting crowded. It’s getting to the point where you won’t know who is protesting what without a program.

And a few more links from here and there:

One way to resist taxes — or to resist the sort of property seizure that governments sometimes inflict on tax resisters — is to hide assets so as to remove them from the reach of the tax collector or assessor. Here are a few examples:

  • Charles Merrill, who resisted his taxes as a way of protesting for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States, had an appropriately flamboyant asset-hiding strategy. “I have buried $2 million worth of gold coins in the desert…” he said. “My partner doesn’t even know where it is at. If the IRS allows me to file a joint federal income tax form like any other married couple, the money is there to pay.”
  • Lately, wealthy Italians have taken to avoiding the prying eye of the revenue agent by parking their yachts in foreign Mediterranean ports. As of earlier , some 30,000 berths had gone empty in Italian ports, which not only foiled the tax collector but “cost the Italian economy some $350 million in lost revenues from marina fees and services, and fuel sales.”
  • When Doukhobor refugees in Canada refused to pay school taxes on their farmland, reasoning that since they refused to send their children to wicked Canadian schools, they shouldn’t have to pay for them, they anticipated that the government might resort to seizure and “very thoughtfully lost no time in taking their crops from the land within the Langham school district.”

    • Edward Koryto standing in the rubble that used to be his home

  • Another, more drastic way of keeping the tax collector from your door is to demolish your house. Michigan factory worker Edward Koryto did that in to a home he had spent seven years building from scrap lumber when the tax assessors nearly tripled its assessed value, which raised the property taxes due on it by 150%.
  • I covered the strategy of holding resisters’ property in someone else’s name.
  • Later in this series, I’ll also cover taxpatriatism and mass-migration as a way of fleeing the tax collector, which is a similar strategy, and barricades as a means of keeping assets safe from the tax collector, which is another.