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November 3, 2008

Lobbying Church Goers: Time to Eliminate All Church Tax-exempt Status

By Sandy Sand

More than ever churches are mixing politics and big business with preachery. They're driving their tax-exempt status straight over a cliff ...exactly where it should be ... abolished and gone down in flames!

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Let’s face it. Churches, mega-types or not, have gone so far beyond being houses of faith and worship that it’s time to declare them political arms, property owners and businesses and take away their tax-exempt status.

According to the Associated Press, church parking lots became election focal points yesterday -- the final Sunday before election day.

Approximately 15,000 volunteers from both campaigns swarmed churches in contested states over the past three weekends, passing out literature and busing people to the polls for early voting.

It’s one thing to use church parking lots as staging areas to transport people en masse to polling stations, but it’s quite another to leave piles of campaign literature inside churches and hand it out on church grounds, too.

There are definite IRS rules that prohibit churches from spouting political dogma and advice from the pulpit and environs BUT…

Shocker, in the past eight years the IRS has only gone after churches accused of supporting Democrats.

Hmmmm. Sounds just like other dirty Republican dirty tactics that involve caging and the scandal at the Department of Justice and canning DOJ attorneys who refused to go after Democrats on specious charges.

Churches and political campaigns are behaving like unruly children, pushing the limits whenever and wherever they can, because they know that 99 our of a 100 times the IRS is acting like a lax parent and not enforcing its own rules.

Churches probably never should have been given tax-exempt status, and now they are abusing the privilege to the point where it should be taken away from them permanently.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_10882812



Authors Bio:
Sandy Sand began her writing career while raising three children and doing public relations work for Women's American ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training). That led to a job as a reporter for the San Fernando Valley Chronicle, a weekly publication in Canoga Park, California. In conjunction with the Chronicle, she broadcast a tri-weekly, 10-minute newscast for KGOE AM. Following the closure of the Chronicle, Sand became the editor of the Tolucan Times and Canyon Crier newspapers in Burbank. She is currently a guest columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News and contributor to ronkayela.com

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