Tax Expenditures

When I worked as Executive Director for the Erie County Commission on Homelessness, I often began a presentation about homelessness with a request that people who ad ever lived in housing that was subsidized raise their hands. Usually only one or two people in the audience raised a hand. I would then ask the rest of the people if any of them took a tax deduction for property taxes and mortgage interest. Most people got the point.  There are activities which the Congress has decided to encourage through the tax code, the most obvious one being home ownership. These "tax expenditures" are subsidies and some of the fiercest battles in Congress are over which activities should be subsidized in this way. 

A lot of the discussion of the "IRS Scandal" seems to ignore the fact that granting an organization tax-exempt status costs us money. Having been on the boards of two not-for-profit organizations that applied for 501(c)3 status, I have some sympathy with those who complain about the way their applications for 501(c)4 status were handled. We submit such applications believing that our organization's work is so important to society that it should be subsidized. We believe that, but it's the IRS's responsibility to determine if that belief is justified. 

I will grant that there is evidence that IRS employees made a lot of mistakes in handling the 501(c)4 applications of some organizations, but they were not the kind of mistakes that would trouble me most. What troubles me, and there is some evidence of this, is the granting of 501(c)4 status to organizations whose primary purpose is political. Excessive scrutiny of applications is a much less costly mistake than not enough scrutiny.

Leviticus 18:22

A recent and somewhat fruitless exchange on Facebook prompted me to think again about Leviticus 18:22. "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." There is one obvious thing about this verse that we tend to overlook. The commandment, like so many in Leviticus, is addressed to the men of Israel. Now that may seem a silly observation to make, but understanding any passage of Scripture requires that we take into account the context in which it was written. Israel was a patriarchal society. Although we have wonderful stories of women exercising power in the Hebrew Scriptures, those stories reveal, as do the stories of men exercising power, that religiously sanctioned power in Israel was almost exclusively exercised by men. 

This brings me to the real point I want to make here. In a patriarchal society, one in which a man may have as many wives as he can afford, how does a man lie with a woman? Not, I would suggest, as a man lies with his wife today. I am not claiming that there was not what we would identify as love between husbands and wives in ancient Israel, but that marital relationships in ancient Israel can hardly be the model upon which we base our understanding of marriage today. I might even suggest that for us a commandment might be: do not lie with a man or a woman as men in ancient Israel lay with a woman.

Marriage Equality

I have been reading posts about marriage equality this morning on Facebook and have been thinking about why some folks, even some friends of mine, oppose it. I find myself going back to an idea which I have had before, an idea which I am quite sure I got from someone else. I make no claim that this is the reason why every person who opposes marriage equality does so, but I suspect it is the reason for some.

The opponents of marriage equality are right. Allowing same sex couples to marry changes the way we think about marriage. In particular, it threatens to change the way our children and grandchildren think about marriage. Growing up, as my three grandchildren will, with friends who have two mothers or two fathers, as well as friends who have a mother and a father as they do, the next generations of American adults will know that there is an alternative to patriarchal notions of marriage. Of course, many of these children will be raised by mothers and fathers who have themselves abandoned the patriarchal model, but the presence in their lives of families that are more obviously not patriarchal makes the point much more clearly.

I don't claim that fear of the end of patriarchy is the real reason for all the opposition to marriage equality. I do think it is clearly the reason for many opponents, especially those who openly espouse patriarchal notions of marriage. Sadly, for them, but not at all sadly for the rest of us, their battle to preserve patriarchy will be lost. Not today or tomorrow, but in the years to come when their sons and daughters see how much better the alternative is.

A Diaconal Church

"What's in a name?" Juliet asked.

Perhaps a great deal when it is the name chosen by a new Pope. On Sunday, as I was listening to a talk at church given by a woman preparing for ordination to the diaconate, I remembered that Francis of Assisi had been a deacon. In a time when the Church had become very wealthy and might have been thought to have become addicted to wealth and the power that goes with it, Francis understood that rebuilding the Church would require that the Church become diaconal, serving most especially the poor whom Jesus said would also be with us.

The Roman Catholic Church has been diaconal during most of its history with hospitals and schools at the center of its service, not only to its own members, but to many other people as well. For many of us the most obvious diaconal ministers of the Roman Catholic Church are women religious, who, of course, cannot actually be ordained to the diaconate at Francis was. But for those nuns with whom I have had the privilege to work, ordination wasn't important, serving was.

It is too early to tell, but the early signs are promising. Pope Francis may be able to lead his Church down a path of renewed service to the least among us. It may be too much to expect, but it's worth hoping for such a renewal, one that might even spread to other Christian Churches and diaconal partnerships with synagogues and mosques. Christians have no monopoly on serving and becoming more diaconal can bring us into fruitful partnerships with people of other faith traditions.

Credulous Nation

To paraphrase something which Sen. Moynihan is credited with saying, " All of us are entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts." This past week I got embroiled in a fruitless discussion of the attack in Benghazi. Some of those involved cited "facts" that I could not verify. The one I came closest to tracking down was the assertion that a General in Stuttgart had been arrested when he tried to send troops to Benghazi. After a little research I discovered that Gen. Carter Ham, who commanded the Africa Command, which is headquartered in Stuttgart, was in Washington on the day of the attack and was replaced as head of Africa Command a month later. Was his being replaced prompted by his disagreeing with the Secretary of Defense's decisions about responding to the attack? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

When I had the temerity to suggest that the statement about an arrest might not be true, my comment was dismissed as a defense of he President's lies by one of those in the discussion. It appears that the convictions of some folks that the President is lying are immune from facts. Of course we can make light of conspiracy theories - as the TV show "Bones" did when one of its character said that Monica Lewinsky was a KGB trained sex agent - but conspiracy theories and other totally unfounded statements ave a way of creeping into discussions of public policy. Remember the Obamacare "death panels"? Having to answer that lie over and over again made the discussion of the actual provisions in the bill a bit more difficult.

The story of a comment of Benjamin Franklin's at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 may be apocryphal, but it does express an important truth about this country. Asked, "What we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin responded, " A Republic, if you can keep it." As President Shepherd says at the end of "An American President" democracy is hard work. Part of that hard work, one thing we need to do to keep the Republic left to us is to pay attention to facts. Political decisions based upon rumor will not serve us well.