Anti-Gay LDS Activities     

Dear friends,

Please take a moment today and send an email to your Senators and Representatives asking them to request the IRS investigate the tax-exempt status of the Mormon church in light of its political activities against gay and lesbian civil rights. The church has taken off any gloves it may have had on and declared open war against gays and lesbians in California. It has shown no compunction about using publicly subsidized dollars to do so. Let's fight back. Urge your legislators to hit the church where it hurts-its pocketbook. Feel free to modify the sample letter below to send to your own Senator and Representative today.

If you're not sure who your elected officials are, an excellent site that lists contacts for all federal, state and local governments and elected officials can be found at http://www.carrollpub.com/

In addition, I urge everyone to send a letter to the IRS directly. The address is:

Internal Revenue Service
Taxpayer Assistance Desk
Attn: Exempt Organizations
EP/EO Division Room 4310
300 N. Los Angeles St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

If enough letters come in, that will get their attention too. Please circulate this request to as many gay organizations as you can, so we can build a groundswell of pressure on the IRS to investigate the church's activities for violations of the tax code.

Thanks!
Rick Fernández

Example Letter

Dear Sen./Rep. _________:

As a member of Affirmation: Gay & Lesbian Mormons, I am very concerned about the unfair advantage that the Mormon church has in using tax-exempt dollars to fund divisive political campaigns that attack and denigrate gays and lesbians. The Mormon church, in addition to urging its members to support specific anti-gay legislation, openly donated $600,000 in Hawaii and $500,000 in Alaska last year to oppose civil rights for gays and lesbians in those states. It has now been revealed that it will marshal its considerable financial resources to attack those same rights in California, as detailed in the July 4, 1999 edition of the San Francisco Examiner. (Please note that this is not the first time the Mormon church has engaged in activities attacking civil rights for gays and lesbians in California-in 1996 the church issued a secret directive urging members to vote for AB 1982, a bill outlawing recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages, as documented by the San Francisco Chronicle on March 13, 1996.

As more states consider similar anti-gay measures, and given the church's increasingly public role in attacking equal rights, it is safe to predict that the Mormon church will extend its political activities to other states, where it will mobilize its members and spend huge amounts of tax-subsidized contributions to ensure that their citizens vote in favor of such measures. This is why I am writing to you now.

The Mormon church is attempting to protect its exempt status from legal scrutiny by calling its actions "moral." Aside from the irony of calling an anti-gay smear campaign moral, the legal issue is that the Mormon church is misusing its tax exempt status in support of an overt political campaign. I agree that the church should be free to speak out on moral issues. However, it misuses its 501(c)(3) status when it devotes, as here, more than an insubstantial amount of its activities on legislative matters, such as ballot measures and referendums. I believe the rules in 26 CFR §1/501(c)(3)-1(c) provide strong reasons to believe that the Mormon church is carrying out these activities in violation of its exempt status.

It is time to end the Mormon church's taxpayer subsidized attacks on gays and lesbians. Please use your office as Senator/Representative to protect all of our state's citizens now, by contacting the IRS and demanding a full investigation into these troubling political activities of the Mormon church. Thank you very much.

Sincerely, YOUR NAME

Additional Considerations
Some have asked whether it matters if the church engages in forbidden nonexempt activities directly, by making donations from its own financial resources, or indirectly, by encouraging its members to take action, using church resources and channels. Shouldn't the church be free to send its members "moral" messages, even if this involves political consequences, without risking its exempt status?

The short answer is that nothing threatens the church's constitutional right to disseminate its chosen message in whatever way it pleases. Loss of tax exempt status does not mean the church can no longer speak freely. It means only that it can't enjoy a free ride at the expense of taxpayers, who necessarily subsidize any organization that is otherwise exempt from paying its fair share of taxes.

How can an organization lose its tax exempt status? Regardless of whether it calls its activities moral or religious, the critical issue in the tax regulations is the church's level of activity in legislative campaigns. Anything more than a "merely insubstantial" level of activity will cause an organization to lose its tax exempt status. (See references to tax regulations below.)

Given the high profile the church has taken in mobilizing its resources and forces in support of anti-gay legislation in Hawaii, Alaska, Utah, California, and shortly, we predict, in Oregon, where similar discriminatory anti-gay legislation is pending, the church will be more and more hard pressed to say that these activities are merely an insubstantial part of its activities. While some may argue that compared to the church's overall activities worldwide these anti-gay campaigns could only be insubstantial, the proper analysis for tax purposes may not be what the church does globally, but what it does here in the United States, or in a particular state.

Affirmation strongly supports the right of the church to speak out on moral matters. But as noted above, if it violates the tax code and regulations, it should expect to do so only at its own expense, rather than with public tax dollars. We should remember that all tax exemptions are matters of legislative grace, and not a right. If the church chooses not to comply with the rules for tax exemption, it has no room to complain when it has to bear the cost of disseminating its message by itself. That is all that loss of tax exempt status would mean for the church.

Tax Code references:
§ 1.501(c)(3)-1(c)(1) says that "[a]n organization will not be [regarded as exempt] if more than an insubstantial part of its activities is not in furtherance of an exempt purpose." In addition, the tax regulations specifically deny tax exempt status to what it calls "action organizations." § 1.501(c)(3)-1(c)(3). Under these regulations, an otherwise tax exempt church would be defined as an action organization "if a substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation by propaganda or otherwise. For this purpose, an organization will be regarded as attempting to influence legislation if the organization: (a) Contacts, or urges the public to contact, members of a legislative body for the purpose of proposing, supporting, or opposing legislation; or (b) Advocates the adoption or rejection of legislation." Legislation is defined as including "action by the Congress, by an State legislature, by any local council or similar governing body, or by the public in a referendum, initiative, constitutional amendment, or similar procedure." While these regulations by no means settle the issue, the critical question is not whether, how much, or by what means money is given, or whether the activity is labeled "moral," but the level of the church activities in influencing legislation, by whatever means.