The IRS’s God Complex: IRS signs secret pact with atheists, promising to investigate 99 churches.

National Review ^ | 08/04/2014 | Quin Hillyer

[SeekAndFind]

Is the Internal Revenue Service a threat to religious liberty?

As the IRS continues to come under well-aimed fire for harassing conservative groups, on Friday it secured a final court order formalizing what amounts to a secret agreement to monitor the pulpits of ill-favored churches. The serious danger, as former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams told Fox News, is that the IRS will start treating “theology as politics,” and regulate it accordingly.

Lovers of liberty should be very concerned.

According to a June 27 IRS letter to the Justice Department, 99 churches merit “high priority examination” for allegedly illegal electioneering activities. The letter was sent in reference to a now-dismissed lawsuit filed by the atheist group known as the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). The suit originally was a rather broad one, demanding not only that the IRS enforce prohibitions against churches’ endorsing candidates specifically, but also that churches should be “required to file” what it described as “detailed annual information” that would force them (if they are like other nonprofits) to “expend substantial time and resources.”

With the end of the suit, those filings presumably will not be required (though a second suit, on just that subject, remains open). But IRS’s monitoring of alleged electioneering activities could still be quite onerous.

Traditionally, churches have been free to do just about anything short of outright candidate endorsements. Conservatives have suggested that not even that prohibition is enforced against traditionally liberal churches in black communities and that FFRF isn’t much concerned with such groups. But at least for conservative-leaning churches, FFRF has a much more restrictive agenda in mind.

[trisham]

"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?
Nothing else."

~Epictetus

God bless this site, this Free Republic.
Please click the pic

[bimboeruption]

Tragically, your Pastor is a rarity in today’s world.

TREASURE HIM!

[Rashputin]

Well, there's "what the market will bear" and there's "what the people will bear".

At some point, the price of a given good or commodity slows or halts sales. Obviously, though, no matter how expensive or intrusive our "Constitutionally Limited Republican" form of government gets, the people will bear it and are doing so.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: , the people will bear it and are doing so.

I think there’s one simple explanation... IT DOES NOT HAVE A DIRECT BEARING ON MOST PEOPLE’s LIVES, at least not now.

It’s “only” 99 churches the IRS is persecuting. Therefore, it does not concern them.

Remember the provocative poem attributed to pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis’ rise to power and the subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group?

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

[airedale]

nk it was the E.P.A. that was getting sued over different policies they couldn’t do on their own by “friendly environmental groups. Once it any to court they’d surrender without a real fight and create the policy they couldn’t get any way on their own plus have the defense they lost in court. I suspect this is a similar case as part of peeping the battlefield for 2016