Beto O’Rourke Doubles Down on Revoking Tax-Exempt Status of Churches Opposed to Same-Sex Marriage

DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

While no other country has done _that specific thing_ that I know of (Although it’s possible.), a lot of countries do, in fact, restrict what sort of entities people can donate to for tax deductions. As I said, Australia has a literal list of eligible entities, that’s apparently not that big, and doesn’t include churches.

In fact, we already restrict what sort of entities people can donate to for tax deductions. For example, 501(c)(4)s, which look a lot like 501(c)(3)s, can’t be used for that. Or…any other 501(c).

Pretending that _reducing_ the eligible tax deductible part of a donation to otherwise-eligible non-profit, is somehow an insane unprecedented thing, when other countries literally don’t allow donations to be deducted from taxes at all to many of those sorts of entities (Or to _any_ entities!), is very silly.

As for hurting woman/minorities…a major problem of the system as it is set up is that we actually have a lot of religious charities with…a lot of prejudice. Extremely unprofessionally operated, discriminating against whoever they want. And…sometimes even professionally discriminating, like the whole bunch of religious hospitals that have been popping up that refuse to perform any sort of procedure that would end a pregnancy, even when medically required.

But don’t think it’s just those sort of deliberate rules. Often it’s just the entire thing is structured horribly with no oversight or anything.There are religious-based shelters that, for example, are extremely dismissive of minorities, and ones that are just horrifically corrupt in general.

Search for some of the horror stories from the Salvation Army one day. Which, yes, as a charity is officially prejudice against SSM, which is bad, but it’s _also_ extremely poorly set up and basically each chapter can do whatever the hell it wants and there’s tons of stories of outright theft from people they are supposed to be helping.

Religions are extremely bad at starting professional real charities. They tend to just…hand everything to a church member they think has good intentions. Now, sometimes, they get smart, and form the charity external to themselves and bring in experts and can have multiple churches involved. Yeah. But usually it’s just a completely cock-up from start to finish. And, yes, sometimes non-religious charities are badly formed too, but they tend to not have any funding and collapse basically immediately. Whereas religious ones tend to end up with a lot of money. Money that could be better spent elsewhere.

So…if you truly want charities to help people, religions should be encouraged to stay as far away as possible. If they want to help people, they should find a charity and help it…or consult some professionals and form an independent charity with reasonable operating procedures.Report

DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

Well. I will say that if you want to make an explicit policy statement that in exchange for increased accounting requirements churches aren’t subject to people suing them on Title VII grounds, I think that a lot of church organizations would take that deal. But I don’t think that’s actually what you want.

Well, no, it’s not, because I have no idea where you got ‘increased accounting requirements’ from?

My proposal is to create rules that would penalize 501(c)(3)s that do not operate like actual charities. Or, rather, would simply not reward the non-charity things that they do. There’s no condemnation there, if a non-profit is large enough it’s going to have some paid staff, but we can encourage that to be minimal.

It just so happens that churches are _really bad_ at spending money on actual charity. Slightly under 50% of the average church budget is personnel costs. Which means that donations to them would only be about half tax-deductible.

So the trick is, we propose this, and then wait for the inevitable outcry from, mostly, churches. And we go ‘Oops’, and make a new category for them. Let’s call it 501(c)(30). It gets created for churches to belong to…and like I said, I’d even be willing to allow the same level of tax deduction as _now_, full tax deduction. (Which would, of course, be more than what they would get under my changed 501(c)(3) rules.)

And 501(c)(30) would explicitly allow discrimination, but it _also_ would explicitly require things to be _churches_ instead of ‘religious charities’ that try to operate in the gray area of ‘We can do anything we want, we’re a religion’ but also ‘Oh, we’re a real charity, the government can team up with us’.

Meanwhile, anyone who wants to be an actual charity over in 501(c)(3) now has to comply fully with non-discrimination laws. They can certainly be operated by religious people, in fact, churches might want to start their own just like other 501(c) entities often have one…but they can’t discriminate in hiring or who they help, can’t even promote one religion over another…

…one we get all the churches out of 501(c)(3) where they don’t belong.Report

DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

I mean, you’re pounding hard on the distinction between A Church and A Charity; what do you have in mind that A Church cannot do that A Charity can?

Partner with governments. Get any sort of government subsidies. Accept any sort of vouchers.

You know, the thing we keep having lawsuits about because ‘religious charities’ and ‘religious schools’ and ‘religious hospitals’ keep trying to interject themselves into benefits the government has created to encourage the public good.

A organization get be in the religious category, and do whatever they want, help or refuse to help anyone you want, and can’t take a _dime_ of government money or anything. Note they’d still be a non-profit, and…I’d even be willing to let donations to them be tax-exempt. I’m talking about they wouldn’t be able to accept things like vouchers to private schools or subsidies to hospitals to cover the uninsured, etc.

Or they can be in the charity category, absolutely cannot discriminate, and often work with the government…if the government want to encourage what they do.Report