Render unto Caesar

33 ministers plan to preach a sermon tomorrow in which they explicitly instruct their parishioners how to vote - endorsing a candidate. They hope to be arrested and taken to court where, they hope, they will succeed in overturning the law which prohibits them from preaching that sermon. They claim the law restricts their freedom of speech.

However, there is absolutely no law restricting their right to get up and say anything they like just because they're preachers. (There are some laws that could be used to prosecute them if they, for example, told their flocks to start killing unbelievers, but that's pretty much true of everyone. And it's not what they want to do, anyway.) The law only says that if they get that political, they will lost their tax-exempt status.

And the law doesn't exclusively apply to them. It's a rather broad law. For instance, the Progressive magazine doesn't endorse candidates for the same reason that churches don't. It's not a law aimed at stifling religious speech; it's a law which says, reasonably enough, that if you're going to be political, you can't get out of paying taxes as a non-political organization.

It's hypocritical of those churches to want to have it both ways. If their need to preach on politics, to get involved in the political process, is so strong, then they should be prepared to sacrifice their tax-exempt status as non-political organizations. To expect to be subsidized while breaking the rules is unworthy of their professed values.

I hope the congregations involved are prepared to have to pay their taxes.