Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” → Quakers → 20th–21st century Quakers → Elizabeth Boardman

It must be tax season. Yesterday I had to tell a newspaper reporter, “hey, can I get back to you on that? I’ve got a radio interview coming up and I need to keep the line free.” I may need to get a press secretary to help me out during these last couple of weeks before Tax Day.

This morning, war tax resisters are the lead article on the San Francisco Chronicle’s SF Gate site, and on the front page of the Chronicle’s business section. The article (“The tax bucks stop here”) features area tax resisters Dorothy Hansen, Elizabeth Boardman, Steve Leeds, and myself.

And yesterday, Susan Quinlan, Scott McCandless, Elizabeth Boardman, and myself were interviewed by Susan Galleymore for Raising Sand Radio. McCandless is one of those unusual conscientious tax resister / constitutionalist tax protester hybrids. He was using Irwin Schiff’s mad theories for a while, and now he has a new set that strike me as equally implausible.

But here’s the thing: the way he tells it, he’d racked up about $10,000 in unpaid taxes when he was doing things the Schiff way back in the day, and when the IRS finally caught up to him he agreed to an “offer in compromise” with them — $600. He paid $600 to erase $10,000 in unpaid taxes. Perhaps there’s a method to this madness after all.

War tax resister Paul Sheldon was interviewed for a tangent in a Justice Talking radio show on the subject of tax reform. He redirects $25 of his income tax each year from the U.S. Treasury to UNICEF.

The October issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter, More Than a Paycheck, is out. It includes:

• The reports from the 12^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns from Ruth Benn and Ed Hedemann that I linked to last month.
• Clare Hanrahan’s review of We Won’t Pay: A Tax Resistance Reader:

  “both daunting and encouraging and well worth the considerable reading time… captures in one indexed volume many individual acts and campaigns of conscientious objection to war and of revenue refusal to tyrannical governments… sincere voices and challenging arguments.”

• Elizabeth Boardman’s review of American Quaker War Tax Resistance:

  “167 intelligent and intense writings on the challenging question of whether people of conscience should pay for war… People struggling with this moral issue today will be guided by the writings in this book and may find some wonderful language to use in their own statements of conscience… a straightforward and compelling book.”

• Some notes on frivolous filing warnings, new tax laws, and IRS enforcement techniques.
• Notes about tax resisters Bob Williams, Mike Palecek, and David Schenck, about the trial of two Los Alamos National Laboratory protesters, and about the upcoming New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters.
• A story about long-time resister Thomas Wilson. The state of Massachusetts suspended his dental license 21 years ago when he stopped cooperating with state tax laws because the state, in turn, was acting as a collection agency for the IRS. Wilson kept practicing dentistry without a license, and was able to keep doing so until this year when he was forced to shut down after a competing dentist ratted him out to the state board of registration.

  At 75 Tom is philosophical about closing the door on his professional life and has no regrets about his choices. “In this present economy we’re getting a payback for what the government has been doing and what I haven’t been paying for and resisting all this time. People ask if war tax resistance changes anything. I can’t say that, but it’s helped me put up with what we have to put up with in this country.”

Here it is, the big day. I’m fresh back from holding signs and banners and handing out pie charts at a local BART station in the cold pre-dawn commute hours.

In an hour or so, with some trepidation, I’ll see how well my message goes over at the “Tea Party” protest.

The local American Friends Service Committee put together a banner illustrating federal discretionary spending

Barry Hermanson hands out “postcards for Obama” with his pie chart graphic

Elizabeth Boardman displays my federal spending graphic

Here’s a brief report on the San Francisco Tea Party from Elizabeth Boardman, who was the other war tax resister present:

Oooh, my aching feet!

But otherwise I am pleased I went out to Civic Center at noon today to see what the Libertarians et al. were doing. A small cadre was just leaving the plaza to join the bigger group in front of the federal building. There were maybe 300… listening to speakers and responding with loud applause and cheers to many remarks.

Signs were anti-pork, anti-socialism, anti banks, anti-Pelosi and Obama, and anti-“illegal aliens.” One sign said “Socialism is an Obamanation.” One said Democrats and Republicans both tax and spend and indebt us too much. One sign said “Left and right, unite.”

I looked and looked but couldn’t see Dave anywhere. I suddenly realized that this crowd was ripe for Barry’s postcard. So, bless my old feet, I rushed to the Meetinghouse and the AFSC, took all the postcards I could find, and went back to hand out maybe 40–50 of them in about ten minutes. One guy shoved the card back at me, but I kept moving so fast that most hadn’t grasped the pie-chart side before I was gone. I hope no one threw them down.

On the way back to the rally (which was at the city hall by then), I helped a guy trying to carry too many Ron Paul signs, and we happily talked up a storm about left and right coming together at the far side of the circle.

As I alluded to about a month ago, a group of Quakers from the Pacific Yearly Meeting is trying to reinvigorate the tradition of Quaker war tax resistance.

Some of them are resisting their taxes in some way, and a couple of them are trying to get the government to recognize their conscientious objection to military taxation by means of legal challenges.

But most of what they seem to be asking their fellow Quakers to do in this campaign is to “Pay Under Protest” — in which they would pay their taxes just as usual, but would then write their Congressional representatives to complain about the injustice of it all.

Their literature plays up this “Pay Under Protest” campaign as being “a campaign for war tax resisters” and a way to “take a stand against war taxes” as though writing a letter to your congressperson were actually a form of tax resistance.

I think the organizers see this as a way for potential resisters to dip their toes in the war tax resistance pool, and at least to get thinking about how they might confront their taxpayer complicity. By enabling people safely and easily to get just a little forward momentum in this area, perhaps the campaign will cause them eventually to adopt some genuine war tax resistance tactics.

I’m worried that such an approach might backfire, and make it seem as though since the organizers are demanding only a small, insignificant, useless gesture, they must not be motivated by a very urgent concern.

Telling a Quaker that when she pays her taxes she’s buying war and that she should therefore start paying under protest is like telling a smoker that you’re concerned that he is in danger of cancer, heart disease, and emphysema and so you think he should start smoking under protest. (How concerned are you really?)

The campaigners have convinced the Palo Alto Meeting to approve the following minute on war taxes:

As a faith community, we believe that war violates our shared religious conviction that we should love our enemies and acknowledge and nourish that of God in every life.

We declare as a corporate body our objection to paying war waxes.  We express our conviction in acts of individual witness ranging from letters of protest to government officials to acts of civil disobedience.

Nice that it merits mention, but pretty weak sauce. Compare that vague expression of disapproval with the unambiguous declaration of conduct that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting put out back in the day (this version comes from the Rules of Discipline of 1893; I’m not sure when it was originally adopted):

It is the judgment of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.

If you would like to assist in the effort to reinvigorate war tax resistance in the Pacific Yearly Meeting, or if you are a Pacific Yearly Meeting Quaker who practices some form of war tax resistance or protest and you would like to add your name to their list, contact Elizabeth Boardman, one of the campaign organizers.

Susan Quinlan and Elizabeth Boardman from Northern California War Tax Resistance (the host group of the upcoming national gathering of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee) were on the Raising Sand radio show recently. Here’s the show:

Jeffrey Viguie, as John Woolman, reads from Against War and War Taxes

California war tax resister Elizabeth Boardman has filed a Claim for Injunctive Relief against the IRS.

Boardman says that the agency is violating the First Amendment right to freedom of religion, and to the later Congressional bolstering of that right by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, by labeling her war tax resistance “frivolous” and failing to provide a taxpaying method that accommodates her sincere religious beliefs forbidding her to pay for war (Boardman is a Quaker).

At a luncheon held to mark the filing of her Claim, actor Jeffrey Viguie, playing the part of 18^th Century Quaker John Woolman, addressed the attendees, and read from the “Epistle of Tender Love and Caution” in which Woolman and others promoted war tax resistance to the Society of Friends in 1755.

The April issue of More than a paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter, is now on-line. Contents include:

• A report back from the “Conscience and Taxes in a Culture of War” forum in Pennsylvania earlier this month featuring Shane Claiborne, Pat Hostetter Martin, Jack Payden-Travers, and Kelly Denton-Borhaug
• Counseling notes including information on the availability of low-income legal clinics to tax resisters, new estimates of the size of the underground economy and of the number of non-income-tax-paying households, and the IRS’s use of “ghost returns” when they battle non-filers.
• International news from the Conscience Canada group of war tax resisters.
• Ideas & Actions including a radio show sponsorship by a local war tax resistance group, an anti-census action in Britain, and Elizabeth Boardman’s evocation of John Woolman.
• A profile of Carol Dotterer and Ruth Kirk

In other war tax resistance news:

• Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, was at Mount Holyoke college recently to address the more recent Wikileaks action and the government retaliation against accused whistleblower Bradley Manning. According to one account:

  While in the area, Ellsberg said he planned to visit with Randy Kehler, an old friend and tax resister whose refusal to pay taxes led to a much-publicized 1991 confrontation with federal authorities that forced Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, from their Colrain home.

  Ellsberg said he first heard Kehler speak at an anti-war, draft resisters event in 1969 when Kehler talked about being willing to go prison rather than go to war.

  “He made a very strong impression on me,” Ellsberg said. So strong, he said, that he got up and left. “I went by myself to a men’s room at the back of the auditorium, just by myself, and sat there on the floor and cried.”

  It was that moment, Ellsberg said, that he realized he would have to act on his own already strong feelings about the waste and folly of Vietnam.

  Without Kehler’s example, he said, “I wouldn’t have copied the Pentagon Papers.”

• War tax resisters Jack Herbert and S. Brian Willson appeared recently on the Veterans For Peace Forum:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Peter J. Reilly, who has a blog at the Forbes website, writes about how the IRS labels conscientious objectors to military taxation “frivolous” as a way of discouraging dissent, and how war tax resister Elizabeth Boardman is challenging this in court.
• Some developments in the “won’t pay” movement in Greece:
  • The movement’s guerrilla electricians reconnected the electricity to a poor family in Bournazi that had been unable to pay the tax-swollen rates. They invited the media along, as there’s something newsworthy about the tax collector leaving an unemployed man, his oxygen-tank-using mother, and school-aged child in the dark: “The cold and lack of power create medieval conditions for the poor family who lacked the basics: could not cook, heat, wash, preserve food and medicine in the refrigerator, or read to the young schoolgirl. In a nutshell: hell.”
  • Twenty toll-gate-lifters in Larissa and Volos have been indicted for inciting people to pass without paying tolls. The Panhellenic Federation of Workers Associations of the Local Government has taken the side of the resisters, saying that “the trial is a clear criminalization of the mass political movement against tolls.… the criminalization of ideas and therefore constitutes a flagrant violation of democratic and constitutional liberties and criminalization of belief… it is a clear attempt to terrorize the resistance of our people, especially the practices of those who in an increasingly massive way endorse social disobedience and resistance to act against the tax hike…”
  • I wish I could read Greek or that mechanical translation were more sophisticated. This page seems to be describing a tax resistance tactic that involves paying a single euro in road tax to the federal government, accompanied with a letter of protest about how road taxes & fees are being siphoned off by foreign creditors rather than being used to keep the roads in decent repair.
  • The government is trying to promote a new social norm in which people will be free to refuse to pay for goods and services they receive, unless they are presented with a printed receipt — this in an attempt to crack down on off-the-books transactions. The government has signaled that it won’t prosecute people who steal from merchants in such circumstances.
• The National Taxpayer Advocate (a sort of ombudsman within the IRS) issued her annual report recently. One bit caught my eye: the Advocate estimates that U.S. taxpayers spend a combined 6,100,000,000 hours per year doing the recordkeeping and filing they have to do to be tax compliant. Janet Novak, at Forbes, puts that in perspective:

  That’s the equivalent of more than 3 million workers toiling away full time, all year. By way of comparison, the Federal government employs the equivalent of 2.1 million full-time civilian workers and Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has 1.4 million workers in the U.S., although not all are full time.

Here are a handful of artifacts relating to the American war tax resistance movement circa 1967.

First, some relics that were filed alongside a letter from Herbert Sonthoff to W. Walter Boyd (though I think this filing may be arbitrary and that the letters are not related to each other):

An Open Letter ^*

At this late date it is pointless to muster the evidence which shows that the war we are waging in Vietnam is wrong. By now you have decided for yourself where you stand. In all probability, if you share our feelings about it, you have expressed your objections both privately and publicly. You have witnessed the small effect these protests have had on our government.

By April 15^th, every American citizen must decide whether he will make a voluntary contribution to the continuation of this war. After grave consideration, we have decided that we can no longer do so, and that we will therefore withhold all or part of the taxes due. The purpose of this letter is to call your attention to the fact that a nationwide tax refusal campaign is in progress, as stated in the accompanying announcement, and to urge you to consider refusing to contribute voluntarily to this barbaric war.

Signed:

Prof. Warren Ambrose	Mathematics, M.I.T.
Dr. Donnell Boardman	Physician, Acton, Mass.
Mrs. Elizabeth Boardman	Acton, Mass.
Prof. Noam Chomsky	Linguistics, M.I.T.
Miss Barbara Deming	Writer, Wellfleet, Mass.
Prof. John Dolan	Philosophy, Chicago University
Prof. John Ek	Anthropology, Long Island University
Martha Bentley Hall	Musician, Brookline, Mass.
Dr. Thomas C. Hall	Physician, Brookline, Mass.
Rev. Arthur B. Jellis	First Parish in Concord, Unitarian-Universalist, Concord, Mass.
Prof. Donald Kalish	Philosophy, U.C.L.A.
Prof. Louis Kampf	Humanities, M.I.T.
Prof. Staughton Lynd	History, Yale University
Milton Mayer	Writer, Mass.
Prof. Jonathan Mirsky	Chinese Language and Literature, Dartmouth College
Prof. Sidney Morgenbesser	Philosophy, Columbia University
Prof. Wayne A. O’Neill	Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Prof. Anatol Rapoport	Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan
Prof. Franz Schurmann	Center for Chinese Studies, University of Calif., Berkeley
Dr. Albert Szent Gyorgy	Institute for Muscle Research, Woods Hole, Mass.
Harold Tovish	Sculptor, Brookline, Mass.
Prof. Howard Zinn	Government, Boston University

^* Institutions listed for informational purposes only

P.S. The No Tax for War Committee intends to make public the names of signers, hence if you wish to add your signature, early return is desirable. Contributions are needed, and checks should be made payable to the Committee.

The following page, dated 11 March 1967, shows a mock-up of the intended public advertisement showing the signers’ names:

The committee will publish the above statement with names of signers at tax deadline — April 15.

Send signed statements to: NO TAX FOR WAR COMMITTEE, c/o Rev. Maurice McCrackin, 932 Dayton St., Cincinnati, Ohio 45214.

For additional copies of this form, put number you will distribute and name and address on the following lines:
No. _____ Name ____________________
Address _________________________

Signers So Far

• Meldon and Amy Acheson
• Michael J. Ames
• Alfred F. Andersen
• Ross Anderson
• Beulah K. Arndt
• Joan Baez
• Richard Baker
• Bruce & Pam Beck
• Ruth T. Best
• Robert & Margaret Blood
• Karel F. Botermans
• Marion & Ernest Bromley
• Edwin Brooks
• A. Dale Brothington
• Mrs. Lydia Bruns
• Wendal Bull
• Mrs. Dorothy Bucknell
• John Burslem
• Lindley J. Burton
• Catharine J. Cadbury
• Maris Cakars
• Robert and Phyllis Calese
• William N. Calloway
• Betty Camp
• Daryle V. Carter
• Jared & Susan Carter
• Horace & Beulah Champney
• Ken & Peggy Champney
• Hank & Henry Chapin
• Holly Chenery
• Richard A. Chinn
• Naom [sic] Chomsky
• John & Judy Christian
• Gordon & Mary Christiansen
• Peter Christiansen
• Donald F. Cole
• John Augustine Cook
• Helen Marr Cook
• Jack Coolidge, Jr.
• Allen Cooper
• Martin J. Corbin
• Tom & Monica Cornell
• Dorothy J. Cunningham
• Jean DaCosta
• Ann & William Davidon
• Stanley F. Davis
• Dorothy Day
• Dave Dellinger
• Barbara Deming
• Robert Dewart
• Ruth Dodd
• John M. Dolan
• Orin Doty
• Allen Duberstein
• Ralph Dull
• Malcolm Dundas
• Margaret E. Dungan
• Henry Dyer
• Susan Eanet
• Bob Eaton
• Marc Paul Edelman
• Johan & Francis Eliot
• Jerry Engelbach
• George J. Etu, Jr.
• Mary C. Eubanks
• Arthur Evans
• Jonathan Evans
• William E. Evans
• Pearl Ewald
• Franklin Farmer
• Bertha Faust
• Dianne M. Feeley
• Rice A. Felder
• Henry A. Felisone
• Mildred Fellin
• Glenn Fisher
• John Forbes
• Don & Ann Fortenberry
• Marion C. Frenyear
• Ruth Gage-Colby
• Lawrence H. Geller
• Richard Ghelli
• Charles Gibadlo
• Bruce Glushakow
• Walter Gormly
• Arthur Goulston
• Thomas Grabell
• Steven Green
• Walter Grengg
• Joseph Gribbins
• Kenneth Gross
• John M. Grzywacz, Jr.
• Catherine Guertin
• David Hartsough
• David Hartsough
• Arthur Harvey
• Janet Hawksley
• James P. Hayes, Jr.
• R.F. Helstern
• Ammon Hennacy
• Norman Henry
• Robert Hickey
• Dick & Heide Hiler
• William Himelhoch
• C.J. Hinke
• Anthony Hinrichs
• William M. Hodsdon
• Irwin R. Hogenauer
• Florence Howe
• Donald & Mary Huck
• Philip Isely
• Michael Itkin
• Charles T. Jackson
• Paul Jacobs
• Martin & Nancy Jezer
• F. Robert Johnson
• Woodbridge O. Johnson
• Ashton & Marie Jones
• Paul Jordan
• Paul Keiser
• Joel C. Kent
• Roy C. Kepler
• Paul & Pauline Kermiet
• Peter Kiger
• Richard King
• H.A. Kreinkamp
• Arthur & Margaret Landes
• Paul Lauter
• Peter and Marolyn Leach
• Gertrud & George A. Lear, Jr.
• Alan and Elin Learnard
• Titus Lehman
• Richard A. Lema
• Florence Levinsohn
• Elliot Linzer
• David C. Lorenz
• Preston B. Luitweiler
• Bradford Lyttle
• Adriann van L. Maas
• Ben & Sue Mann
• Paul and Salome Mann
• Howard E. Marston, Sr.
• Milton and Jane Mayer
• Martin & Helen Mayfield
• Maurice McCrackin
• Lilian McFarland
• Maureen & Felix McGowan
• Maryann McNaughton
• Gelston McNeil
• Guy W. Meyer
• Karl Meyer
• David & Catherine Miller
• James Missey
• Mark Morris
• Janet Murphy
• Thomas P. Murray
• Rosemary Nagy
• Wally & Juanita Nelson
• Marilyn Neuhauser
• Neal D. Newby, Jr.
• Miriam Nicholas
• Robert B. Nichols
• David Nolan
• Raymond S. Olds
• Wayne A. O’Neil
• Michael O’Quin
• Ruth Orcutt
• Eleanor Ostroff
• Doug Palmer
• Malcolm & Margaret Parker
• Jim Peck
• Michael E. Pettie
• John Pettigrew
• Lydia H. Philips
• Dean W. Plagowski
• Jefferson Poland
• A.J. Porth
• Ralph Powell
• Charles F. Purvis
• Jean Putnam
• Harriet Putterman
• Robert Reitz
• Ben & Helen Reyes
• Elsa G. Richmond
• Eroseanna Robinson
• Pat Rusk
• Joe & Helen Ryan
• Paul Salstrom
• Ira J. Sandperl
• Jerry & Rae Schwartz
• Martin Shepard
• Richard T. Sherman
• Louis Silverstein
• T.W. Simer
• Ann B. Sims
• Jane Beverly Smith
• Linda Smith
• Thomas W. Smuda
• Bob Speck
• Elizabeth P. Steiner
• Lee D. Stern
• Beverly Sterner
• Michael Stocker
• Charles H. Straut, Jr.
• Stephen Suffet
• Albert & Joyce Sunderland, Jr.
• Mr. & Mrs. Michael R. Sutter
• Marjorie & Robert Swann
• Oliver & Katherine Tatum
• Gary G. Taylor
• Harold Tovish
• Joe & Cele Tuchinsky
• Lloyd & Phyllis Tyler
• Samuel R. Tyson
• Ingegerd Uppman
• Margaret von Selle
• Mrs. Evelyn Wallace
• Wilbur & Joan Ann Wallis
• William & Mary Webb
• Barbara Webster
• John K. White
• Willson Whitman
• Denny & Ida Wilcher
• Huw Williams
• George & Lillian Willoughby
• Bob Wilson
• Emily T. Wilson
• Jim & Raona Wilson
• W.W. Wittkamper
• Sylvia Woog
• Wilmer & Mildred Young
• Franklin Zahn
• Betty & Louis Zemel
• Vicki Jo Zilinkas

Following this was a page explaining how to go about resisting:

Some Methods of Nonpayment

1. For those owing nothing because of the Withholding Tax.
   
   Such persons write a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, to be filed with the tax return, stating that the writer cannot in good conscience help support the war in Vietnam, voluntarily. The writer therefore requests a return of a percentage of the money collected from his salary.
   
   Note: Of course, the IRS will not return the money. However, the writer has refused to pay for the war voluntarily and has put it in writing. This symbolic action is not to be belittled since anybody who does this allies himself with those who will withhold money due the IRS.
2. For those self-employed or owing money beyond what has been withheld from salary.
   
   Such persons write a letter to be filed with the tax return, stating that the writer does not object to the income tax in principle, but will not, as a matter of conscience, help pay for the war in Vietnam. The writer is therefore withholding some or all of the tax due.

Note: In all cases, we recommend that copies of these letters be sent to the President and to your Senators.

Remarks:

The Internal Revenue Service has the legal power to confiscate money due it. They will get that money, one way or another. However, to obstruct the IRS from collecting money due (by not filing a return at all, for example) seems less important to us than the fact that each is refusing to pay his tax voluntarily. With this in mind, many of us are placing the taxes owed in special accounts and we will so inform the IRS in our letters.

Willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail, together with the costs of prosecution. So far, the IRS has prosecuted only those who have obstructed collection (by refusing to file a return, by refusing to answer a summons, etc.). Usually, the IRS has collected the tax due plus 6% interest and possibly an added fine of 5% for “negligence”. The fact that the IRS has rarely, if at all, prosecuted tax-refusers to the full extent of the law does not mean they will not do so in the future.

Finally, an article from the December 1967 edition of The Capitol East Gazette:

Tax Refusal Urged by Group

Two thousand anti-war leaflets on telephone tax refusal were distributed in Capitol East on Saturday, Nov. 18, by members of CHOICE, a group of local residents who are withdrawing their support for the Vietnam war.

The leaflet explains that the 10% phone tax was enacted in April 1966 specifically to raise money for the Vietnam war.

According to CHOICE, the phone company will not remove a person’s telephone if he refuses to pay the tax. The company asks refusers to state why they are withholding the tax and then turns the matter over to the Internal Revenue Service.

According to CHOICE, there are presently 25 known tax refusers in the Capitol Hill area.

Those desiring CHOICE’s leaflet are asked to call LI 6‒9836.

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 1987

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 1987, 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 1 February 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 21 May 2013 for another example of the agency being forced to back down on this issue.

A profile of Barbara Reynolds appeared in the 15 February 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 since 1970. 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.”

Last August, 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 1984, 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 1984, 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 1984 and has seized $100.83 from her checking account. ”

In the 15 March 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 (9/28/82), the clerk of the Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting noted, “The name Meeting for Sufferings derives from the 17th century 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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 a few months earlier “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 the fall of 1987.

This conference, somewhat delayed, was announced in the December 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 February 1988 by New Call to Peacemaking and the Quaker War Tax Concerns Committee.

A note in the back of the 15 March 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 1 May 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 upcoming “seminar/lobbying day” on behalf of the Peace Tax Fund, and an upcoming “National War Tax Resistance Action Conference” — which is to say, a NWTRCC gathering.

A letter from Geoff Tischbein in the 1 July 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 January. 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 1986, Revenue Canada assessed the amount of tax that Jerilynn had withheld from her 1982 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 1982 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 October 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 1967 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 1970.…

She went to Canada in 1976 and became a Canadian citizen in 1984. Beginning in 1982 (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 1986 against a ministerial decision that she should be assessed the amount she deducted in 1982 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 1988 and the Supreme Court declined to take up her case in 1990. She appealed further, to the UN Human Rights Committee, but they too refused to hear her appeal.

Another article in the October 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 December 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 2008

After noting several years of dwindling coverage of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal, it was a pleasant surprise to see that the magazine devoted its March 2008 issue to the topic.

Robert Dockhorn wrote the opening editorial. Excerpt:

Historically, many Friends have refused to participate in armed forces, and occasionally Friends, in an organized way, have refused to pay taxes to finance military activity. But mostly, especially in recent years, only a few individuals, acting on the basis of individual conscience, have refused to pay taxes that are “mixed” — i.e. where one cannot determine which monies are funding which functions of government. These individual Friends have sometimes received endorsement from their meetings, and on occasion, meetings (including yearly meetings) have gone so far as to encourage individual Friends generally to think seriously about tax resistance.

In this issue of Friends Journal, we offer several articles that address this subject. At the center of them is a moral dilemma: how can those of us who are clear that our government is pursuing an immoral, militarist course live with our consciences in the knowledge that we are funding this activity? What is required of us? What are our real choices? What is our most effective response? And, at another level: are we required only to be faithful to our consciences, and to leave the consequences in God’s hands?

For eight years — from tax year 1979 to 1986 — my wife, Roma, and I refused to pay the military portion of our federal income tax, as calculated by Friends Committee on National Legislation. We donated the refused amounts to various causes that we felt were appropriate. During these years I was employed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Eventually, the IRS came to my employer and sought to levy my wages for the owed amounts. Much searching resulted, and the yearly meeting, while declining to turn over the funds, placed them in a separate account and did not hide them. Eventually, they were attached. And in 1987, Roma and I prayerfully considered our course, sensed that we were no longer led to this resistance, and settled with the IRS, paying a substantial amount of interest and penalties. We followed a leading, and the leading changed for us. In the entire process, we were supported and nurtured by my monthly and yearly meeting (I am a Friend, Roma is not) — but it was our leading, supported by meetings, not the meetings’ leading.

And that is part of the question in these articles. It is not just about what individuals can do, and should do. It is also about what all Friends can and should do — together. How are Friends led today?

The first war tax resistance article in the issue came from Nadine Hoover, who told the story of Dan Jenkins’s attempt to get the courts to recognize conscientious objection to military taxation as a right of individual conscience that American citizens had before the enactment of the U.S. Constitution and that they had deliberately not relinquished by means of that document (see ♇ 24 August 2013).

The courts weren’t buying it, and in fact found the argument so far-fetched that they upheld a $5,000 fine against Jenkins for using legally-frivolous arguments. Hoover thought the arguments were good enough to be worth repeating in the Journal, however.

She noted that “nearly three dozen Quakers and other supporters” joined Jenkins when he was arguing his appeal, and she argued:

To pay war taxes or to purchase from or invest in corporate structures that profit on war or use military might in order to secure wealth, in violation of our religious conviction, plants a dis-ease among us. Friends’ witness is letting our lives speak — not that we will be protected but that we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable — knowing our faith will sustain us, set us free, and give us joy. I have experienced this joy when I live in accord with my conscience and faith, regardless of the apparent, temporal consequences.

She invited “Friends who will stand before the courts and proclaim our faith… [or] write their statements of conscience and share them with others… [or] make the commitment to represent and/or support any Friend who is called to this witness” to write a war tax resistance committee of the New York Yearly meeting. She hoped that if enough Quakers began to resist, they might make a change in the country the way the women’s suffrage movement did.

The change Hoover was hoping this would bring about was that the government would legally acknowledge conscientious objection to military spending by passing the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, or something along those lines:

Quakers, Mennonites, Shakers, and others have maintained this testimony throughout U.S. history. Still many people today, of a wide variety of faiths, do not pay taxes for military purposes because this action violates their essential religious beliefs and moral convictions of conscience. Passage of this bill by Congress would facilitate the payment of all taxes owed by these principled people.

Perish the thought.

Hoover shared a minute from the New York Yearly Meeting, dated April 2006:

The Living Spirit works in the world to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people. We are united in this Power. We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction. We will seek ways to witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.

Then she listed off some possible “ways to witness”:

• encourage your congregation to write and deliver a statement of conscientious objection to paying for war
• write a statement of conscience to include with your tax return and to send to various other people
• redirect some or all of your taxes “to an escrow account to be held in trust for the U.S. government”
• file more lawsuits using Jenkins’s 9^th Amendment argument
• live on a below-the-tax-line income
• divest from “corporations that profit from war” and invest and spend more responsibly
• “Pursue local ordinances that deny corporations recognition as persons, and that deny recognition of corporate charters as contracts”

It was a long, rambling, repetitive, sometimes vague and random-seeming (what did corporate charters have to do with any of this?) argument. It represents one weird extreme of the Peace Tax Fund idea, which had come to be seen by some supporters as an end in itself, rather than a means to a more important end. Why do we resist paying war taxes? Because that might help us get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed!

The following article, edited by Karen A. Reixach, tried to account for how enthusiasm for conscientious objection to military taxation had taken hold in the New York Yearly Meeting in recent years. It began by identifying a “movement of conscience” in much the same way that voluntaryists describe ideal noncoercive politics, with a quote from Jim Corbett:

Nonviolent civil initiative by covenant communities is… the way human beings preserve and develop society based on consent, in which the rule of law, as distinguished from the rule of commanders, is necessarily grounded… Civil initiative must be societal rather than organizational, nonviolent rather than injurious, truthful rather than deceitful, catholic rather than sectarian, dialogical rather than dogmatic, substantive rather than symbolic, volunteer-based rather than professionalized, and based on community powers rather than government powers.

The article hoped to describe how when individuals articulate and share their conscientious yearnings, by means of a “statement of conscience,” they can find like-minded souls to form a “movement of conscience” that can work together to “act on our collective beliefs of conscience,” using the recent activity in the New York Yearly Meeting as an example.

She described some of the minutes and reports from the Meeting that had touched on peace and justice issues in recent years, and on the Meeting’s support for Dan Jenkins in his court cases. Then:

In 2007 the yearly meeting’s Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War sponsored a series of conferences in support of this growing movement of conscience. The first conference was held at Purchase Meeting the weekend following the oral argument of Jenkins in the Second Circuit in February 2007. The court hearing and the conference were attended by about 35 Friends and others from the metropolitan area and the northeast region. Out of that conference arose two strands of action: exploring the possibility of group legal action, and expanding the movement of conscience [PDF illegible] step of writing a statement of conscience.

The second conference, in June 2007 at Rochester Meeting, featured a public forum on the failure of violence that included Robert Holmes, professor of Philosophy at University of Rochester; Derek Brett, of Conscience and Peace Tax International; and Frederick Dettmer, the attorney representing Daniel Jenkins. During the following day and a half, Friends continued to consider action steps individually and in concert with others.

The third conference was held at Flushing Meeting in September 2007… It focused on international venues for raising freedom of conscience issues as they apply to paying taxes for war. A fourth conference April 2–4, 2008, is being planned; and as momentum builds, we envision more every few months, inviting ever-widening circles of participants.

I don’t see many details there about what, if any “action steps” the conferees decided on. Jens Braun is quoted in the article as suggesting some possible next steps:

1. to develop a better theoretical understanding of pacifism and the failure of violence, so as to share this vision more convincingly
2. to “explore, develop, and improve the many ways Friends can work towards not paying for war” — 
   1. get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed
   2. try new court challenges along the lines of Dan Jenkins’s
   3. develop and use workshops and other outreach material
3. to join with counterparts in other countries, for instance at international conferences

The Yearly Meeting then issued this Minute:

To Conscientious Objectors to Paying for War Everywhere,

New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends invites you to join us in acknowledging that paying for war violates our conviction in the Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people.

We call on all conscientious objectors to paying for war to state in writing 1) your belief against paying for war and the preparations for war, 2) major influences in forming your belief, 3) how it is demonstrated by the way you live, and 4) a request that our government recognize and accommodate our convictions.

We ask anyone who prepares such a statement to send it to NYYM Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War… We ask Friends to send your statement to your monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings to record in the minutes having received your testimony.

The thing that unnerves me is that it’s possible to read the whole article without seeing a single reference to one of these newly enthused New York Yearly Meetingers actually refusing to pay their taxes (except for Jenkins himself, who put his taxes in escrow with a promise to pay them into a government “Peace Tax Fund” once one was established). There’s lots of talk about writing statements of conscience and holding gatherings and planning legal strategies and contacting legislators and all that, but where is the actual not-paying-for-war part? Of “the many ways Friends can work towards not paying for war,” you’d think some of them might involve not paying for war. Hopefully this just went without saying, but I worry.

A sidebar from David R. Bassett and Karen Reixach concerned the status of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, and where one could look on-line to find information about it. Another, by John Little Randall, described his work with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and with Conscience and Peace Tax International.

The following article, by Jens and Spee Braun, wrote about war tax resistance as part of (and contributing to) a larger project of living a life of integrity, and how not-straightforward it all is. It’s a good overview of what a typical modern American war tax resister is in for:

Are you frustrated thar the war goes on and on? Has your conscience brought up with you the subject of not paying for war? Be careful; your conscience can make you do things (albeit for a good cause) that can turn your life upside down!

You don’t really want to think of refusing to pay part of your taxes to the government, do you? For starters, no matter how you calculate the percentage to refuse, there will always be some frustrating other formula that makes just as much sense. You can use the FCNL percentage of the budget going towards war, but the War Resisters League has another calculation and number. You can refuse to pay a token amount, or you can simply not pay the estimated 50 percent or so of the tax burden that goes to war-making, past war debts, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons work, and all that spying we do. How to decide?

And then, to top it off, you have to figure what to do with the money not going to the government! Give it to charity? Put it in an escrow account? Use it for peaceful and life-affirming purposes at home or overseas? Of course this problem can be avoided by living under the taxable-income level — if you don’t mind life without all the great stuff we have nowadays.

After you make these decisions of how to go about not paying for war, have fun telling your employer that you don’t want any funds withheld from your paycheck and not to send any money directly to the government for you!

If you get really serious, you can take the government to court, try to change the laws, or try to change the lawmakers. So many options!

And that is not all. Deciding to be a conscientious objector to paying for war and setting up the mechanisms by which you put action into your intentions is the easy part. Once you do that, you know your conscience will have taken a few strides into your being. And with that foothold (not to mention the knowledge and understanding you have been given for having taken those steps), your conscience will begin to demand all manner of other deviations from a normal daily way of living!

Here is where life gets really dicey. The problem is integrity. As your conscience integrates one part of your life with your belief structure (and who says they need to be integrated — people have believed one thing and done another for as long as there have been people!), the process can turn into a domino effect with all sorts of other areas likewise wanting to be integrated. It becomes a terrible sacrifice.

And don’t believe those who say it is actually liberating! It is like putting your house in order: once you start organizing the mess, you keep finding other things to clean up that you didn’t even know were out of place. Take finances. It turns out that we could all pay less in taxes, i.e., buy fewer bombs, if we took all the deductions coming to us. What? Well, for example, if you keep track of all that travel to Quaker committee meetings and write down the mileage in a little book to document the expenditure, it may be deductible.

Businesses deduct driving and lunches (and even golf games), but Quakers seldom do. That is so because we Quakers generally are not hagglers; we want to pay our full share of taxes to support our government as it builds roads, keeps up national parks, and pays politicians’ salaries. We just don’t like that uncomfortable part that goes to war. In the house-in-order analogy we want to share our cake, but not have part of it be eaten by our neighbor the landmine manufacturer.

You might think about something as useful and simple as your credit cards. Who really wants to question those little pieces of plastic that make renting cars or buying great books over the Internet so easy? Even (especially) if you pay off your bill in full every month, there can’t be anything wrong, you think, in using a system that would collapse if everyone were responsible, saved their money before making purchases, paid off debts promptly, and weren’t willing to pay usurious interest charges. In particular, don’t think about how, if you do pay off your bill each month, the credit company tolerates your borrowing money free of charge only because others don’t pay up and you might not in the future. See? If you get started, who knows what trouble you will make for yourself Now you have to think about going inside to pay cash and talking to the gas station attendant rather than swiping the plastic card out at the pump!

Can we retain integrity in our relationship to money? Forget it! You know very well that money is not important enough to spend precious time keeping track of, even if some folks call it a representation of our life force. Better to spend time on that street corner protesting the lousy war. And heaven forbid the government would audit our finances, since we have been occupied with the real spiritual tasks of speaking truth to power in public places. They say money talks, but not like we can!

We’ve been told that early Friends opened their financial books to their meeting communities. We can’t do that anymore — it’s hard enough to talk about sex, but to talk about our money? Who can trust others that far — well, except if the others are insurance companies, brokerage firms, or retirement planners? We sure can’t trust our spiritual community to have the power and scale of resources to support us in need or relieve the fears of what would happen to us without money!

Yes, money is scary, so don’t bother pondering the irony of why fear of getting out from under its control ends up being even scarier then being part of a war-based society where you can believe whatever you want, as long as you pay up. It’s not worth it — and besides, a messy house is so much more comfortable!

The next article was by Elizabeth Boardman. She laid out the problem this way:

Among Friends, there is not much debate about whether war taxes are problematic. Depending upon the federal budget for the year and how you count the line items, about half of our income tax dollars will be used for the outrageous costs of war. Thousands of our personally earned dollars will be used to enrich the military-industrial complex, to make killers of young men and women,. and to cause death and destruction in the world. Letting our own money be used this way is not consistent with good stewardship, with right sharing, with Quaker testimonies, or with Christian teachings.

The question of whether and how we can resist is much more complex. Standing up to Goliath is possible only for the most confident David.

She mentioned a different set of anxieties than the Brauns had covered in their piece: worries that tax resistance or protest might trigger an audit (and then worries that such an audit might uncover math mistakes, or worse, “convenient” errors)… worries that the accountant who helps her with her tax forms will disapprove of her stand and maybe drop her as a client… difficulty reconciling willingly racking up IRS penalties & interest with her otherwise frugal and practical economic practices… difficulty finding the time to research and plan her tax resistance strategy… reluctance to break the law (or to be known as a law-breaker).

In the face of things like this, Boardman recommends that prospective war tax resisters start small: maybe with phone tax resistance, or some sort of symbolic protest like withholding $10.40 from your taxes or supporting the Peace Tax Fund.

She also recommended that people who resist quietly, by slipping below the taxable income line, start making some noise about what they’re doing — otherwise “we accomplish nothing but a sense of personal righteousness.”

Following this were an excerpt from John Woolman’s journals (see Excerpts from the Journal of John Woolman) and from the letter Woolman and twenty other Quakers sent to their fellow-Friends in 1755 to explain why they could not pay taxes being raised for war expenses (see ♇ 16 December 2005).

The next article in the set was by Steve Leeds. He described becoming a war tax resister in the 1970s and 80s and then drifting away in discouragement after the IRS garnished his salary for the taxes, penalties, and interest. Then:

Fifteen years later, through renewed spiritual commitment and membership in a Friends meeting, I was led to take action with other Quakers on war tax resistance. It began among a few of us, and that’s all it takes.

Early in 2006, my meeting began cohosting war tax resistance gatherings with Northern California War Tax Resistance. We urged Friends in our meeting to engage in symbolic war tax resistance — refusing federal phone taxes, paying under protest, withholding symbolic amounts, or living below the tax line — and letting our legislators know about it. We found that a number of households in the meeting partook in some form of war tax resistance, symbolic or otherwise.

Philosophically, it’s a slam dunk. No more war. Not with my dollars.

Logistically, though, it’s easy to become fixated on the mechanics and legal aspects of war tax resistance. There’s a lot to learn and consider. My journey, through discernment, prayer, and the support of others, led me to focus on complex social and financial issues. Mostly, I have been confronting my fear of the IRS and the insecurity of not knowing where this will lead.

For the 2006 tax year I have held back $1,040 from the IRS (symbolic of the IRS 1040 form). Living with multiple feelings — fear, joy, and liberation — makes life whole. My faith as a Quaker, striving to be nonviolent and to oppose all wars, has led me down this path. I am sustained by the knowledge that many Quakers throughout history have resisted paying taxes for war. When I think that we as a faith community need to do more, I know that the we starts with me.

So! Quite a bit of material and many perspectives there — and a great deal of contrast in approaches between the pursuit of legal accommodation from the New York Quakers and the cautious but deliberate war tax resistance of the California Quakers (Boardman and Leeds were both from the San Francisco Meeting). It had been years since the Journal devoted that much attention to the topic, and they haven’t done so since.

The series of articles prompted a lot of discussion in the letters-to-the-editor column of subsequent issues — some of it quite hostile to war tax resistance.

• Dennis P. Roberts noted that the Bible is full of stories of war, and that it “establishes beyond any doubt that the performance of an army in the field is directly correlative to the quality of the faith and spirit of the society or nation that put it there” and that because “the heart, faith, honor, and spirit of a nation” is best represented by “the fighting soldier, the fighting sailor, the fighting marine, the fighting airman,” he finds that “this nonpayment of war taxes can indeed be carried to frivolous extremes.”
• Lucinda Antrim thought that war tax resistance “contradicts the Testimony of Community… We are, here in the U.S., members of the community of the United States.… I find myself agreeing, somewhat to my surprise, with the judge’s imposition of a ‘frivolous” fine on Dan Jenkins.” (Naomi Paz Greenberg responded that she could not understand how this vague and unarticulated “Testimony of Community somehow nullifies our historic Peace Testimony”.)
• Perry Treadwell responded that he did not recognize the U.S. government as his “community.” “Thirty-six years ago I was led to refuse to pay war taxes… I currently send the small amount that I calculate this warrior nation wants to agencies that support the families of wounded military personnel. I have followed Thoreau’s warning: ‘What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.’”
• David Zarembka wrote in to correct “the impression that the IRS is as omniscient as God, all seeing, all knowing, never making a mistake in getting the last farthing out of the helpless tax resister. Nothing could be further from the truth.” He recounted some IRS blunders in his own case, and said, “I have always made sure that the cost of the IRS getting funds from me exceeded any penalties and interest that they might charge. In my 37 years of war tax resistance I am certain that I (and all the other active war tax resisters I know as a group) have withheld much more funds for government war-making and given them to peace organizations than the IRS has ever collected, including penalties and interest. I don’t think that this excuse should be used by Quakers as a group as a cop-out for refusing to pay for our wars. In fact, if all Quakers in the United States were war tax resisters, the IRS couldn’t even cope with our collective resistance.”
• George Levinger, who said he’d been a phone tax resister in the Vietnam War era, had soured on war tax resistance, considering it ultimately counterproductive largely because the government succeeded in seizing the taxes from him with penalties and interest. He suggested channeling the resources you might otherwise use in war tax resistance “to contribute to various sorts of peace-promoting organizations” instead.
• Ruth Hyde Paine wrote in to promote the “penny poll” idea.
• Gary Shuler wrote in to sing jingo bells: “As a retired military man, I take exception to anyone who wants to use the privileges of this country and not help to foot the cost. Many of my forefathers and yours died for this freedom and you don’t want to pay taxes to keep it? Move! Cuba is nice!” (Isn’t it cute that in 2008 someone was still using the idea of tyranny in Cuba as a contrast to the U.S. rather than an example of it?)
• For Pamela Haines, the challenge presented by war taxes seemed largely to be a challenge to come up with good excuses not to resist them. Excerpts:

  I don’t think the problem is just lack of courage, at least I hope not! Part of the difficulty, I believe, is the extent to which we are embedded and enmeshed in a deeply violent world. It’s not just the portion of my tax dollars that goes to deadly warfare. It’s my computer, the disposal of which poisons poor people in Africa and Asia. It’s my everyday purchases from invisible corporations that destroy lives and habitats far from mine. It’s my energy consumption that threatens the very viability of future generations.

  If war tax resistance seems too hard for most of us, what do we do if that’s just the tip of the iceberg? Some Friends are not deterred by the seemingly impossible and set out to disentangle themselves from the whole mess — living below taxable level, with only the bare necessity of purchases and a minimal carbon footprint. This may be a true calling for some, and certainly a courageous one, but I know it’s not mine. To me the focused goal of living a life free from complicity with institutional violence would involve participating in another sin, that of separation from my neighbors.

  Is it better not to do a right thing, if by doing a right thing you would be being inconsistent in not doing all possible right things?

In the April issue, Jamie K. Donaldson explained why she gave up on trying to change the United States and left it rather than continue to be part of its war machine. She’d contemplated tax resistance at one point, but decided it wasn’t for her. Here’s how she describes that decision:

I was haunted by the quote attributed to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig: “Let them march all they want as long as they pay their taxes.” Suddenly the television shots of millions of people in the streets protesting the start of war lost their inspiration for me, and I wallowed in our powerlessness to prevent it.

Haig’s cynical remark exemplified my inner struggle as well as a wrenching and age-old moral dilemma for all Friends. Some bear it as a cross, enabling them to continue the Lamb’s War on behalf of love, truth, and justice. Could I, too? Alas, the contradiction of working for peace while paying for war, of being complicit by mere participation in the U.S. “system,” became untenable and intolerable. I explored war tax resistance, but rejected it because I hold the assets of my incapacitated mother and could not allow the government to garnish money for her care to recuperate my taxes withheld.

An obituary notice for Stephanie Kennedy in the May issue mentioned her work on war tax resistance. An obituary notice for Charles Richard Johnson in the August issue called him “a dedicated war tax resister.”

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 2009

There was a bit of an anti-war tax resistance backlash in the Friends Journal in 2009.

In the February issue, Peter Phillips came out against war tax resistance in a two-page article. Here is a summary of his argument:

• Friends’ advice against paying war taxes is sometimes incoherent. The New York Yearly Meeting suggests that friends “examine… voluntary payment of war taxes” but taxes by definition aren’t voluntary. The practice of some Quakers of refusing to pay but allowing the government to seize the amount by levy makes such war tax resistance “insignificant.”
• What do people mean by “war taxes”? If it’s the percentage of the revenue that goes to the Pentagon, even some of that money isn’t spent for war (for instance the Army Corps of Engineers work to rebuild hurricane-damaged New Orleans). What about “reparations to Iraqis whose property is damaged” or “the Air Force’s remarkable mediation program that resolves employment and procurement disputes without litigation” — or, in the other direction, what about the Interstate Highway system, which was initially designed as a defense measure: is money raised for that, too, “war taxes”? Is everyone on their own to decide what taxes are war taxes, or is there an authoritative answer, or is it okay to withhold symbolic amounts — what is the justification for withholding Elizabeth Boardman’s $10.40, an arbitrary amount that has nothing to do with war spending?
• Withholding of taxes is not a good way of withholding funds from the war machine for the simple reason that the government won’t decide how to respond to a shortage of funds by respecting the reasons why the tax resister withheld them. It is every bit as likely (perhaps more likely) to cut spending elsewhere. “Should Head Start, research on solar energy, unemployment benefits, and support for healthcare all be underfunded in the exercise of our righteousness? A consequence of my not joining the armed forces in 1971 was that someone else did who would not otherwise have had to. People were hurt because I was not there to help. This too is a consequence of conscientious objection. Are those who advocate withholding part of their taxes prepared as well to live with the consequences of their actions?”
• There is a Quaker ethic of trying to adapt to communal consensus that is expressed in many of its teachings, and the ethos of participating as equals in trying to probe a dilemma and adopt a communal consensus is one of the things Quakers have contributed to the American polis — war tax resistance turns its back on this with its ethos of individualism and rejection of the decisions of the community.

You will not be surprised to learn that Phillips’s article led to some exchanges in the letters-to-the-editor column in later issues. Here is a summary of some of the back-and-forth:

• Dennis P. Roberts thought the article was “the finest work on war taxes I have yet seen in the pages of your journal” and then told a half-remembered story about a terrible massacre in colonial Pennsylvania that could have been prevented but for the pacifism of the “strong Quaker elements within the settlement.” — “I cannot say or recall with certainty whether this story is fact or fiction. What does it matter? Either way, an important lesson is drive home eloquently and powerfully: military preparations sometimes must be made.”
• Robin Harper responded with some suggested guidelines for Quaker war tax resistance that he thought might meet some of Phillips’s criticisms (see ♇ 19 July 2013 for an excerpt from this letter).
• David R. Bassett felt that Phillips had been too dismissive of war tax resistance in general after concentrating his criticism on a few specific arguments and methods he found to be weak or ineffective. What about resisters who keep their income below the tax line? Or people like Bassett who work in the judicial and legislative arenas to try to get something like conscientious objection to military taxation legalized? Or folks who try to make sure their investments and purchases are clear of involvement in war?
• Perry Treadwell compared Phillips’s “rationalizations” to “Friends’ historical resistance to confronting their complicity in enslavement,” and thought that just as a few Friends had to break from the pack and lead Quakers to an abolitionist stand, it will take Quakers speaking out against paying for war to make their “spiritual testimony” come to life.
• Daniel Jenkins called Phillips’s argument “smooth and lawyerly” and “crafted… to lead to a foregone conclusion.” He felt that Phillips gave short shrift to occasions when “conscience may sometimes transcend the constraints of conventionality and pressures of conformity.”
• Naomi Paz Greenberg considered Phillips’s argument that by not serving or not paying taxes you are merely foisting the responsibility off on someone else to be flawed:

  The moral consequence [of Phillips’s decision not to serve in the military] is not that other people were made to serve in his stead, as Phillips suggests. The moral consequence of his not serving in war is simply that he did not violate his conscience by serving. Others could have and did make their own choices, consulting conscience or not.

  The moral consequences of not paying taxes for war are similarly direct.

  She even suggested a more radical outlook toward taxes that I have rarely seen in Quaker circles:

  Our taxes are compulsory, and in some sense they are the least desirable way to provide a constructive economic foundation for a compassionate society. They presuppose that there is no Friendly nor Christian nor Jewish nor Hindu nor Muslim nor conscientious nor atheistic nor socialist love for one another and so we must be forced. Paying taxes separates us from those with whom we might otherwise be in community, and with whom we might shake hands, share food, share laughter and tears. Paying taxes for war separates us from many of them irrevocably.

  Some Friends testify that we expect better of ourselves than that, because we know experimentally that God expects better of us.

  Greenberg also felt that there was a big difference between the Quaker ethos of consensus and conformity when “recognizing the sense of the meeting” and trying to figure out how to confront “legislation written by lobbyists and summarized by Congressional interns in a process that has been compared to the making of sausage.”

An obituary notice for Kent Larrabee in the February issue noted that “[f]or much of his life, Kent purposely lived below the poverty line in order to identify with the poor and to avoid payment of income taxes for war.”

In the May issue, Arthur Waskow offered a reading of the “Render unto Caesar…” koan that puts it into a context of thousands of years of Rabbinical debate about the passage in Genesis that reads: “God created humankind in God’s own Image.” He thought that Jesus had been intending to refer to this debate, and not intending to give any advice about taxes.

An obituary notice for Lillian Willoughby in the May issue mentioned that “Lillian felt called to refuse to pay war taxes, and the IRS seized her car in the spring of 1970.” An obituary notice for Arthur Evans in the August issue said that “[f]or 20 years, Arthur withheld the portion from his federal income tax that he believed went to war and weapons, and in 1963, he was jailed for 90 days for refusing to turn over income records to the Internal Revenue Service.” And an obituary notice for Merrill Hallowell Barnebey in the December identified him as “a war tax resister.”

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 2010

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 2010.

The January 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 March issue included Harrison & Marilyn Roper telling the story of their war tax resistance. Excerpts:

In 1982 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 1999 we were honored with the “Good Samaritans of Houlton” award for our volunteer work and in 2006 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 25 August and 26 August 2013), 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 May 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 June 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 June issue noted that “they [Gordon and his wife Edith Carlton Browne] were military tax resisters in early 1960s.”

A book review in the November 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 (1987–1993), 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 1994, as a success because a strong and violent reaction from the Israeli government failed to suppress it.

Some news from the the war tax resistance movement in the U.S.:

• War tax resister Jason Rawn is interviewed by Bruce Gagnon on the This Issue show about tax resistance and related topics.
• Alexander Lee shares his memories of war tax resistance pioneer Juanita Nelson. And Democracy Now! reviewed Nelson’s life and work and reposted a 2015 interview with her.
• Peter J. Reilly, at his Forbes blog, covers the case of war tax resister Elizabeth Boardman, who has been trying to get the courts to force the IRS to stop treating conscientious objection to military taxation as a legally “frivolous” argument. A federal appeals court shot down her latest set of arguments.
• The Mennonite Central Committee (U.S.) is organizing a tax redirection campaign that focuses on supporting New Profile, a program that assists conscientious objectors in Israel.

There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:

• a look back at the life and work of Juanita Nelson with contributions from Bob Bady, Karl Meyer, Ginny Sсhnеider, Ed Hedemann, Lori Barg, and Ed Agro
• some notes about trends in tax enforcement including IRS levies on royalty income, the sudden decline in property seizures for the past 15 years, phone tax resistance, and Elizabeth Boardman’s attempt to get some respect for war tax resistance in the courts
• a note about the passing of Dirk Panhuis, who had been active with Conscience and Peace Tax International
• some updates about war tax resisters Julia Butterfly Hill and Joseph Olejak, the Spring Rising anti-war action, Greg Wise’s mouthing off about tax refusal, and the Mennonite Central Committee’s war tax redirection program
• news about tax day outreach on social media, at the U.S. Social Forum, at the Jewish Voice for Peace conference, and the Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship
• and a profile of Peter and Mary Sprunger-Froese of the Bijou Community — excerpt:

  Members of the Bijou Community were already involved in war tax resistance when Peter and Mary arrived. Early on, money was held in common, but that evolved over the years to each doing their own thing. One year the community did a tax protest and filed a 1040 saying they didn’t want to pay anything “because we don’t want to support the war.” That seemed to trigger an audit, which took an exhausting six months of collecting receipts to convince the IRS that members were not living off donations that came in for the soup kitchen and houses of hospitality. “The IRS said don’t file like that anymore because it messes up our system, and we said don’t audit us anymore because it messes up ours!”

Also, on the War Tax Talk blog, Jason Rawn reviews David Hartsough’s book Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. Excerpt:

David Hartsough is a Quaker and a War Tax Resister who has for decades been redirecting a large portion of his “tax obligations,” believing that if war is abolished, “humanity can not only survive and better address the climate crisis and other dangers, but will be able to create a better life for everyone. The reallocation of resources away from war promises a world whose advantages are beyond easy imagination.” (Editor’s note: The 2016 U.S. budget for past, present, and future wars is $1,300 billion.) He cofounded the Nonviolent Peaceforce, inspired in part by Gandhi’s idea of a shanti sena, a peace army, and this organization is now active in 40 countries, stationing trained professional peaceworkers in conflict areas around the globe and is sustained by an $8 million budget. He works with World Beyond War and is currently executive director of Peaceworkers in San Francisco. Waging Peace has been in the works for 27 years.

And Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was a guest on Law and Disorder radio recently.

Today, a few final notes from the Friends Bulletin archives, as we reach the 21^st century.

The March 2003 issue was haunted by the U.S. attack on Iraq that would begin that month.

A statement from the Santa Cruz meeting in that issue included this remark:

The Meeting urges all of its members to find direct expression of their opposition to this escalation of violence — including war-tax resistance, public demonstration and public civil disobedience, [and so forth]…

Also in that issue, Bob Runyan wrote up this thoughtful reflection on the implications of taxpaying and tax resistance:

We Don’t Look Dangerous

by Bob Runyan
Chico (CA) Meeting

I missed my chance to be a conscientious objector when my number didn’t come up in the last year of the draft. It was 1973. During high school I got the opportunity to think through whether I could kill other people in a war. I couldn’t see how I could possibly allow myself to be trained to shoot or bayonet another human being.

Well. It’s almost 30 years later and my wife Kathy and I’ve been well trained in killing. Not the kind of face-to-face killing that kept me awake in my high school years. Like a bomber pilot, we never see our victims unless they show up on the news. Maybe we can’t even be directly implicated. We don’t look dangerous, but we are accomplices.

Over the years we’ve been trained to look the other way as our federal taxes paid for others to kill, or threaten to kill, in our places. From Vietnam to Afghanistan and beyond, we’ve had a hand in financing the deaths of millions of human beings. With the nuclear weapons and delivery systems we’ve helped pay for, billions of others are threatened.

Well, we didn’t have a choice did we?

We didn’t think we had a choice. If we didn’t pay our taxes we’d go to jail. That simple, right? The idea of resistance never even occurred to either of us until seven or eight years ago. Since that time Kathy and I have wrestled with the idea of conscientious objection to the draft in high school. The two ideas are closely related.

Our family’s bodies and minds are useless to the military at this point. Our tax dollars are valuable. They are being drafted and have been drafted since we started working and making a living wage. In today’s high-tech military, warm bodies are of secondary importance. Cold cash is key.

Military spending makes up between 40 to 50% of the federal budget, depending on whose statistics one uses.^* In order to resist conscription of my family’s share of this money, I submitted a new W-4 to my employer and adjusted dependent allowances to reduce my withholding. Now only about half as much is removed. At the end of the year we will correctly fill out and file our federal income tax return as usual, but we will only pay 50 to 60% of the balance due. The remainder, the military portion, we will redirect to worthy causes. With our tax forms we’ll enclose a letter that will explain the reasons for our action.

What will happen to my family and me? Lord knows, but if past events are good predictors of the future, then this is the likely scenario. First, the IRS will send us letters. These will go from brusque to threatening. There might be a personal visit. At some point, maybe in a few months, maybe in a few years, they will come after the money. This they will easily find in our family bank accounts or by garnishing my pay. They will take interest and penalties beyond our unpaid balance. They will almost certainly not put Kathy or me in jail (as I said, the Federal Government has little use for our bodies, and no one is known to have been jailed for war tax resistance in the U.S.A. for over a decade, though there are thousands of resisters).

So what’s the point? If they’re going to take the money anyway, why go through all of this?

The point is that we have a choice about whether to look the other way while my money is used for murder. In our way of thinking, we have an obligation to object when we see evil, to avoid participating in it willingly or tacitly, and to try to do what we can to stop it. The military will likely get our tax money, but we will not have handed it to them. They will have to take it.

We don’t look so dangerous. But maybe we are. Instead of being a threat to world peace, we’ve taken a step toward being a threat to world war.

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^* Good sources for this information are the American Friends Service Committee, War Resisters League, and the Center for Defense Information.

That issue also reprinted an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about Elizabeth Boardman’s trip to Baghdad shortly before the war. That article mentioned in passing her war tax resistance.

The September 2007 issue included an article by Vickie Aldrich on “A History of War Tax Resistance in the United States.” Another note in that issue mentioned that her Meeting, the Las Cruses, New Mexico, Monthly Meeting had adopted a minute “in support of war tax resisters.”

Another article in that issue included the following minute, approved by the Intermountain Yearly Meeting:

Our religious convictions lead us to take a stand against war. There are many ways to do this, one of which is war tax resistance. We support those in our Yearly Meeting who feel called to war tax resistance.

The March 2008 issue featured a query from Peg Morton of the Eugene Friends Meeting: “Are We Ready to Refuse to Pay for War and Accept the Consequences?” She asked Quakers to remember their history of war tax refusal, and invited them to take part in the “War Tax Boycott” that NWTRCC had organized that year.