For the Sake of Science

As the upstanding citizen I am, I just finished getting through all my taxes. As it happens, I am getting money back, but I would have certainly paid up if that’s how the math worked out. Maybe I wouldn’t be doing that in January, but I would do it by April 15th. Paying taxes as they are due is just such a basic concept that one must be ignorant, stupid, or a crook to do otherwise. It turns out the Mormon Church is run by crooks.

The Mormon church worked to hide its involvement in the 2008 effort to ban gay marriage in California, telling the Proposition 8 campaign that it wanted “plausible deniability” in its connections with the movement, documents revealed in a California courtroom Wednesday show.

In the seventh day of testimony in the landmark gay-marriage trial in San Francisco, lawyers for the gay-rights side presented emails showing “close links between the Proposition 8 campaign and leaders of the Catholic and Mormon churches,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Any reasonable person would have to conclude that this sort of political involvement demands the Mormon Church pay its taxes. Maine had this same problem with the Catholic Church recently. In both cases, no taxes will be rendered. It doesn’t make any sense. Ignoring for a moment that religious institutions generally should not be tax-exempt (except as they function as charities), if government is going to grant certain groups privileges, those groups should have to abide by the rules. They constantly and consistently do not do this. No one is saying “No! You can’t support cause X!”. Go ahead, support your bigotry or yearning for a theocracy. Just pay your damn taxes when you do it.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: bigots, Catholic Church, Mormon Church, Prop 8, religion, Tax-exempt, Theocracy | 10 Comments »