Axing Charitable Tax Exemptions Will Hurt The Left
The Left benefits from tax exemptions more than the churches it disagrees with do.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, a font of fanciful think pieces have sprung up to explain what it means going forward. Both the Left and the Right have jumped into a debate over tax-exempt status for churches. Felix Salmon argues at Fusion that if a church refuses to marry people of the same sex it should lose its tax-exempt status in the same way that Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status for banning interracial dating.
Charles Cooke at NRO takes on that assertion: “If we are to have such a thing as a ‘nonprofit’ group, the federal government surely cannot decide who is eligible and who is not on the basis of whether they happen to agree with the present constitutional order.”
Salmon, perhaps sensing that he was being accused of bullying the religious, clarified his position on Twitter:
Truth is, if I was in charge I’d abolish ALL tax exemptions and deductions. Force all subsidies to be explicit.
The Milwaukee Museum Art has given us a good example this week. They accepted the donation of a work of art that depicts Pope Benedict XVI made entirely of condoms. Conservatives immediately called for the museum to lose its tax-exempt status. In a blog post, the archbishop of Milwaukee said:
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