In a reversal of decades of legal precedent, the Internal Revenue Service said in court filings on July 7 that churches and other religious 501 c(3) organizations can endorse political candidates in certain circumstances.
The new position, which was made in a joint filing intended to end a lawsuit brought by a group of high-profile Christian organizations last year, carves out a narrow exception to the Johnson Amendment, which has banned political activity by churches since 1954.
The rule was introduced by former President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1954 when he was serving as the U.S. Senate Majority Leader. It banned all tax-exempt organizations like churches and charities from “directly or indirectly” participating in politics, specifically in endorsement or opposition of candidates.
Possible good side effect is churches visibly promoting candidates you dislike so you can actively avoid them. I’m not a church guy at all but having it be obvious which ones are the true cranks and which ones are more middle of the road, or the rare lefty churches seems like a silver lining here.
I don’t think this will change much internally, churches are heavily political and the no endorsing candidates law was seldom, if ever, enforced.
Since that was never, ever enforced - it’s just an update to the reality of the situation. They got sick of atheists trying to sue them for doing illegal things. So they just bought the government.
Religions always fight to spread their hate fiction as far and wide and young as possible.
Does this apply to all religions or just those that believe in white Jesus?
It’s christians. That’s who it applies to. Only christians. They bought the government, and they aren’t going to let other religions have their say. Even if they’re supposed to.
White jebus, black jebus, penguin jebus - they’re all real christians, no matter how many times they tell you “I’m the only REAL christian, everyone else is just a FAKE christian!”. Fuck christians and their hate religion, as well as all the other hate religions.
“When a house of worship in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith, it neither ‘participate(s)’ nor “intervene(s)’ in a ‘political campaign,’ within the ordinary meaning of those words,” the agency stated in the filing.
Basically preachers are allowed to tell their conversation who to vote for.
congregation*
We’ll see how they react when the Satanic Temple formulates some kind of neato, creative protest around it.
But I think we can assume the worst.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
They are going to be sued by Christians or the government itself. We are no longer a country bound by the rule of law.
Well that’s some bullshit
This is even darker than cu v fec
Yeah, won’t this effectively result in de-facto unlimited campaign contributions, if not outright electioneering? Churches are often polling places for elections.
Indeed.
It’s another example of Donald making something explicitly legal that, before, was still occurring but technically punishable under the law. That’s what I hate about Donald the most, the normalization of the worst aspects of our governing system.
You… hate the way he rips the mask off of things that were already happening and forces them into the public’s awareness?
I do, yes.
It would be different if he were a reformer and it were happening for positive reasons, but that’s not how the US Government operates.
This corruption will be coopted and used by future administrations, and people will just forget that these practices were ever illegal to begin with, not unlike everything that became normal in the War on Terror. Everything Donald is doing now became legal and permissible because of the egregious abuses that were normalized by Obama and Dubya.
It’s clear Democrats are comfortable with this too, because their only opposition, if you can call it that, is sternly-worded letters.
it being illegal gave it plausible deniability to the people doing it and made people doubt that it was happening at all.
now that the plausible deniability is being unmasked, there’s no way for anyone to doubt that it’s happening.
Doubt that it’s happening? Nobody was doing that. Everyone knew it was happening and why. Churches are corrupt, and willing to corrupt a government to get their way at any cost. It’s been that way since FOREVER.
Legalizing it isn’t ‘pulling a cover’ off anything. It’s not a good thing in any way. It’s allowing corrupt religious assholes have their way for cash. They bought the corrupt government officials, lobbyists, everything. They’ve been doing the same things for thousands of years. It’s not a secret. It never was. This is what they do, and they never stop.
Religious people are fucking morons. They’re trained to be. They’ll believe whatever their priest handlers tell them to believe. That’s how that works. “Look the church is corrupt, here’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 ways in detail and with hard proof!” - “nuh uh, it’s not”.
Your misanthropy is showing. Medieval peasants would launch uprisings over Church corruption, and they couldn’t even read.
