Take away that tax exempt status - stat!

The real travesty lies beyond the voters in the California who weighed in on No on 8 (removing the ability for legal marriages in California to continue being legal). Joe My God had a little blurb on his blog about protests in NYC against the Mormon Church.

There is clearly a ground-swelling expression of rage, disappointment, and relegation to 2nd class status in the gay community. However, protest marches such as this are not directed in a politically astute manner - the current protests are just the collective anger burbling up. However, what if we took this raw anger and refocused it into an all out economic war against one of the larger agents of intolerance in these United States - that being the Mormon "Church".

I put church in quotes to reflect that everyone knows this is a corporation. The Mormon church pays no meaningful tax like a corporation. As a religious organization - they are technically tax exempt if they follow certain rules - the most relevant here is that they must not engage in meaningful political advocacy. However, with such an ENORMOUS footprint in the No on 8 debacle in California - is there any doubt that the Mormon Church engaged in political activity. See this link: http://www.mormonsstoleourrights.com/ for an interesting discussion.

Any church must not engage in meaningful political advocacy in order to maintain its tax exempt status. Well, I think that the Mormons subsidizing the Yes on 8 efforts not only crosses the line but it amounts to a Carl Lewis type long jump over the line. And because the advocacy is so transparent, documented, and coordinated - time for Joe S and the HRC elites to go to the new Congress and start an all out war on the Mormon Church. Mormons, in political terms, are not really recognized by or easily grouped with the more established Christian denominations (and the Mormon Church is viewed rather suspicously by those who are more secular in nature).

This is the perfect storm - Joe could get oodles of free press by announcing an effort by all gays everywhere to force the Congress to revoke the tax exempt status of the Mormon Church. Other Protestant and Catholic denominations are explicitly not to be targeted and this would actually work in the gays favor(and oddly enough would probably develop into an odd-bedfellows situation). The evidence is simple and transparent - so Congress should be easily placed into a situation where they will have to take a stance against the Mormons or the gays. Wouldn't that be delicious?

The Mormon Church is impervious to shame - so a generalized protest by gays against the church is pretty moot - but economically the gays can threaten to hit the church where it would have maximum damage, their tax exempt status. Just the thought of having the Church finances drug out in Congressional hearings for violation of political advocacy brings a smile to my face.

Joe - go get to work on this one. People are already mad and spontaneously protesting - channel it and make it work toward some productive end. While it won't get us married - it will allow us as gays to see what our political status is. As a group, can we force the Mormon Church into a very awkward and politically precarious position? I say it is worth burning some political capital and would be a very useful exercise to focus gay activism in a post-activist landscape.