Hey wait... I thought churches weren't allowed to endorse candidates.

[begin_within]

Pastors Guiding Voters to GOP

The Christian right seeks out members who might not go to the polls. The focus is issues, but some leaders don't oppose endorsement.

(snip)

One online guide to discussing the election in church, produced by the Focus on the Family ministry, offers this tip: If a congregant says her top concerns are healthcare and national security, suggest that Jesus would make abortion and gay marriage priorities.

....

Pastors have a right to work directly for candidates on their own time, as long as they don't use church resources. In a recent article aimed at evangelical preachers, (Mathew D. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel) wrote that they "should feel free" to go even further and endorse a candidate from the pulpit because he thought the IRS law was unconstitutional. He repeatedly noted that the IRS had rarely sanctioned churches. The Church at Pierce Creek in Binghamton, N.Y., is the only one ever to lose its tax-exempt certification, for sponsoring newspaper ads that opposed presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

Full story here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-churchvote1oct01,0,7179475.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[pooja]

1. I think its been this way forever... the church I went to as a child

was very Republican. One of my friends was a democrat. During his senior yr, he ran for public election. Anyway he would debate everyone else... I remained completely silent. I did not want to go thru that abuse. It is one of the reasons, though I loved most things about this church, that I left. A church is supposed to be a sanctity.. a place you can think, rejoice, rejuvenate, reflect, meditate, cleanse... when you bring outside influences in it tarnishes the sanctity and it tarnishes the true teachings of Jesus.

[valerief]

4. Churches, with their mega faith-based funding, are recruitment

centers for the GOP and its misguided policies.

[WCGreen]

2. They can't endorse people from the pulpit because that

would jeopardize their non-profit standing...

It is not about church and state....

Church for profit who file tax returns and pay taxes are more than welcomed to campaign...

But that would mean divulging how much money they fleece from the flock and the huge salaries that some of these "men of god" are recieving....

And then the contributions from the flock would not be tax deductatble...

And they would have to pay property tax as well which would go far to help the struggling public school systems that rely on property tax for funds...

So, let them stand in the pulpit, let them jeopardize their tax exempt standing...

A good amount of their donations would disappear since the flock could no longer deduct money from their income tax and charitable giving only goes so far without a tax deduction attached....

[petronius]

3. They're not - Staver and Dobson are giving some very bad advice

I'm wondering if they know that, if they're willing to throw a bunch of pastors under the bus as long as it gets the vote out this cycle.

The IRS has been cracking down in recent years (on both left- and right-leaning churches), which has troubled me a bit; my feeling is that the gov't should be hands-off on religious organizations except in the most egregious cases. However, Dobson and others are trying to push churches so far across the line that the IRS will have no choice but to crack down, and I think it's going to have significant repercussions...

My fear is that if the Rs do manage to win out this cycle, they'll be able to pressure the IRS into backing off, or, more likely, they'll push the IRS to sanction an equal number of left-leaning churches as right-leaning, even if the degree of misdeeds are much different, in some misguided quest for 'fairness.'