Via ProPublica:According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and given to ProPublica, the FRC filed an application to change its status to an “association of churches,” a designation commonly used by groups with member churches like the Southern Baptist Convention, in March 2020. The agency approved the change a few months later.
Originally a 501(c)3 “public charity” changing to a 501(c)3 status “Church” does not change it’s tax exempt status at all. But there are special rules limiting the IRS’s ability to audit a “church” to make it harder as compared to a public charity.
Via the IRS website:Congress has imposed special limitations, found in section 7611 of the Internal Revenue Code PDF, on how and when the IRS may conduct civil tax inquiries and examinations of churches. The IRS may begin a church tax inquiry only if an appropriate high-level Treasury official reasonably believes, on the basis of facts and circumstances recorded in writing, that an organization claiming to be a church or convention or association of churches may not qualify for exemption, may be carrying on an unrelated trade or business (within the meaning of IRC § 513), may otherwise be engaged in taxable activities or may have entered into an IRC § 4958 excess benefit transaction with a disqualified person.
The Tax Exempt Government Entities (TE/GE) department of the IRS should have never changed their status according to their own rules to qualify as a “Church” you must:
The organization must operate exclusively for religious, scientific, educational or charitable purposes
The net earnings of the organization may not provide an advantage to a shareholder or private individuals
The organization can’t devote a substantial part of its activity to influencing legislation
The organization can’t intervene in political campaigns
Any activities or purposes by the organization must be legal and in line with public policy
Perhaps those 87,000 new IRS hires has FRC President Tony Perkins a known white supremacist supporter is running scared.
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1939: Ludwig Alexander Hirtreiter, aka Rex Gildo, German singer of ‘schlagers’, born in Munich. Hirtreiter aka Gildo reached the height of his popularity in the 1960’s and 1970’s, selling over 25 million records and also starring in film and television roles.
Gildo died in 1999 aged 63, having spent three days in an artificially-induced coma after attempting suicide by jumping from the window of his apartment building. He was said to have been suffering “psychological problems”. After his death, it was reported that he had been gay and involved in a relationship with Dave Klingeberg, his secretary with whom he lived, for seven years.
1953: The Los Angeles Herald-Express reports that the state department in California had fired 531 sex perverts and other security risks. The number of homosexuals fired was 425. Note: during the McCarthyist period from 1947 to 1953 more people lost their jobs for being homosexual than for involvement with the Communist party in which McCarthy was aided by the ice cold sleaze queen and deeply closeted homosexual Roy Cohn.
1969: Responding to the fourth and final night of ongoing Stonewall riots on Christopher Street New York police arrived and beat the demonstrators with nightsticks, leaving many many victims bleeding but in the end more then double the amount of police were injured during the riots than LGBT activist.
1970: A group of American Lutheran leaders issues a statement calling for an end to sodomy laws and the passage of legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation
1974: In Winnipeg, Manitoba, Derksen Printers refuses to print Understanding Homosexuality, an educational publication by Gays for Equality. Group pickets printing plant.
1975: During a joint meeting of the National Organization of Women, the Austin Women’s Political Caucus and Women’s Equality Action League, the Austin Lesbian Organization is invited to give a presentation on lesbianism.
1986: By only a single vote New Zealand’s parliament allows final debate to begin on a proposed law to lower the age of consent for gay sex to 16 and legalize gay sex. The bill eventually passes.
1989: Employees of the US Internal Revenue Service who were members of the National Treasury Employees Union receive a new contract which included protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation. But to this day it does not appear in internal ethics material.
1994: Italy’s “First National Demonstration of Gay and Lesbian Pride” takes place in Rome.
Focus on the Family, the behemoth Religious Right organization founded by James Dobson, has declared itself to be a church, thereby avoiding a requirement that it file public tax documents, according to IRS records and a document available on the organization’s website.
Focus on the Family filed as a non-church 501(c)(3) nonprofit as recently as the 2014 fiscal year, submitting to the IRS a publicly available Form 990 as most tax-exempt nonprofits are required to do. But when the group posted a Form 990 for the 2015 fiscal year on its website—dated October 26, 2017, and reporting a massive budget of $89 million—it was emblazoned with the message “Not required to file and not filed with the IRS. Not for public inspection.”
Gail Harmon, an attorney who has advised nonprofits on tax law for more than 30 years, said that she had never before seen a nonprofit organization declare itself a church. “I just found it shocking,” she said. “There’s nothing about them that meets the traditional definition of what a church is,” she said. “They don’t have a congregation, they don’t have the rites of various parts of a person’s life. There’s a whole system for what a church is.”
There is clear biblical precedent for this. It’s just like the story about how Jesus helped the money changers reincorporate into pass-through entitles in order to avoid double taxation from the Romans, while maintaining their right to engage in nakedly partisan advocacy and anti-LGBT hate.
The American Family Association and the right wing media are after the head of openly gay Connecticut comptroller Kevin Lembo who in a November 30th letter to AFA president Tim Wildmon, questioned the AFA’s “so-called attempts to protect family values.” Those include holding to a biblical stance on marriage and several boycotts of companies like Target that champion civil rights
The AFA’s statements and mission not only appear to discriminate against the LGBTQ communities … but it remains unclear what actual charitable services the AFA provides that qualifies it to participate in the CSEC. I am, therefore, initiating an investigation to determine whether AFA is in compliance with the requirements of the CSEC.
Lembo is planning to take action to try to remove the American Family Association from the Connecticut State Employees’ Campaign for Charitable Giving (CSEC), even though the Mississippi-based group qualifies as a “charity” under Connecticut’s rules and its status through the IRS as a 501c
The AFA is indeed a officially categorized as a hate group by the Southern Law Poverty Center.
Writes Bryan Fischer of the AFA:
So the constitution of Connecticut itself has identified Mr. Lembo as a man who is apparently determined to infringe on the “exercise and enjoyment of religious profession” of state employees by discriminating against them and their freedom to direct their voluntary charitable donations to a religious organization that stands for religious liberty and the natural family.
While accusing AFA of discrimination, Mr. Lembo is practicing it, exhibiting it, and displaying it. He is the one guilty of discrimination, and is a part of the reprehensible attempt on the part of secular fundamentalists to purge all traces of Christianity from the public square.
Besides citing the utterly discredited SPLC (whose “hate map” led shooter Floyd Corkins straight to the offices of the Family Research Council), the main offense he cites in his letter is our boycott of Target. Target has made it company policy to allow men who may be sexual predators or video voyeurs to wander unchallenged into female dressing rooms, where they may film or molest our wives, our daughters, and our granddaughters. In Lembo’s utterly twisted view of the world, the bigots are those who want to protect the sexual integrity of females.
Mr. Lembo is an open and proud homosexual, and his case illustrates the risk to religious liberty when individuals who engage in a sexually non-normative lifestyle assume political power.
The AFA is calling on Mr. Lembo to retract the accusatory letter he has published and to issue an apology to AFA for his religious prejudice and bigotry. He trumpets the fact that he has received awards for openness and transparency in government. It’s time for him to show us that such awards were deserved. Perhaps a remedial course in Connecticut history might prompt him to use the political power of his office to protect religious liberty rather than squash it.
Right now Mr. Lembo is in moral limbo, and is using his office to repress liberty rather than protect it. It’s time for him to come out of the darkness of bigotry and oppression and into the light of religious liberty. Perhaps he’ll begin that journey today
The other day I received word that Connecticut’s openly gay comptroller is targeting American Family Association, one of the nation’s most prominent and respected Christian ministries.
And to be perfectly blunt, these types of attacks by far-left bureaucrats are why Donald Trump won the presidency.
“This issue … really brings into focus why a lot of people supported Donald Trump as opposed to Hillary Clinton,” Hamilton told OneNewsNow. ”People feared the federal government – more specifically the IRS or the Department of Justice – being used as means of cultural and societal intimidation.”
But actually the REAL issue here that needs to be promoted is the fact that hate groups such as the American Family Association, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council set themselves up behind a fake “religious charities”, receive 501c tax exempt status, and then get away reaping charitable windfalls while preaching intolerance and hate not only in the United States but around the globe.
Unfortunately the Connecticut’s State Employees’ Campaign for Charitable Giving is not the only charity driven government worker fund that these hate groups scam and get money from. The Federal Government’s own Combined Federal Campaign giving program of the federal government of the United States also gives federal worker donated money to both the American Family Association and the Family Research Council because they are listed as official charities in their program.
In 2011, CFC pledges totaled $272.7 million with 24% of the federal workforce participating and an average employee pledge of $284.27.
So in other words the Federal Government which has a strict inclusion and non-discrimination policy gives money donated by its workers to so called “charity” groups who then use that money to preach intolerance and hate.
If the AFA is going to have the nerve to play persecuted martyrs while they defrauding hard working Americans then we must once and for all exposed these hate groups’ charity scams and have their 501c status revoked for once and for all.
Secondly we must contact OPM’s Combined Federal Campaign and DEMAND that these groups be removed from their charity rolls and receive no more funding from the pockets of federal workers.
Email: cfc@opm.gov
CFC Compliance Specialist
Mary Capule Mary.Capule@opm.gov
And thirdly show Kevin some support. He is being hounded and harassed these groups and right wing loons. Email Kevin at kevin.lembo@ct.gov or leave a message on his Facebook page. Let him know you stand with him.
“Porno Pete” Peter LaBarbera has sent out his annual year-end money beg seeking funds to fight the evil ” ‘LGBTQueer’ forces” and money to buy a new pair of leather chaps!
“All sins dishonor God, but there’s something especially deplorable and significant about the spread of homosexuality and related perversions in a civilization. Someone smart once said something to the effect that if homosexual sodomy – what Noah Webster in 1828 defined as ‘a crime against nature’ – is OK, then nothing is wrong. The court-imposed spread of sodomy-based “marriage” is a cultural act of defiance for which America will be judged – or perhaps is already being judged – as a nation. But the earthly ‘enemies’ against which AFTAH contends are all about changing the Truth standard–in a desperate quest to rationalize their sin. They want to change God’s plumb line of righteousness, based on the authority of, well, their feelings. ‘LGBTQueer’ forces–fueled by seemingly endless financial resources–work day and night to change the standard, but the standard does not change. The standard cannot change. Help AFTAH Fight Against the Lies of Big ‘Gay’ Inc: We are David and the well-funded ‘Gay’ Lobby is Goliath. Support AFTAH today with a year-end gift of $1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50 or whatever you can give! All gifts postmarked by or made online midnight Dec. 31 are tax-deductible for your 2014 taxes.”
Please note: According to Guidestar – Peter LaBarbera and AFTHA have not submitted a Form 990 since 2009 in which he states that AFTHA raised $110,000.00 in donations and of that he paid himself $75,000.00 and named Liberty Counsel’s Matt “Bam-Bam” Barber as a Board Member.
Today the judge in this matter of the National Organization for Marriages lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for leaking NOM’s 2009 – 990 tax return hit a major set-back as the judge hearing the case has concluded that the IRS’s disclosure, if there was one since it had never been proved of NOM’c confidential 2008 donor schedule as neither willful nor gross negligence. Which will rule out punitive damages that the anti-gay hate group might have received.
In April 2012, the Huffington Post and the Human Rights Campaign, posted NOM tax documents indicating GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney had given $10,000 to the anti-gay marriage group. Unfortunately this also happened while the GOP witch-hunt and targeting the IRS in behalf of Tea Party groups who were being investigated for worthiness of non-profit status. (Which many were not.)
Smelling the possibility of some money and publicity NOM’s President Brian Brownshirt jumped on the teabagistan bandwagon declaring that the IRS leaked their returns (despite the fact that the forms there were pictured showed have no IRS markings) and filed a lawsuit claiming that it was all “a chilling set of circumstances that should ring alarm bells across the nation.”
*cough * Drama Queen *cough*
With the judges ruling and also an additional ruling of dismissing the unlawful inspection claim the issue remaining for trial is NOM’s actual damages as a result of this disclosure.
Authorities were called to the IRS Cincinnati Service Center building located across the Ohio river in Covington, KY early Wednesday morning to investigate a report of suspicious white powder mailed to the facility..
The report was made around 7 a.m. on 4th Street.
The service center which houses over a 1000 employees and processes hundreds of thousands of various tax forms a day has been evacuated.
Covington Police and hazmat crews both responded to the scene.
While mailings like this are not common, with the recent bashings of the IRS by the Tea Party and the Republican party its created a heightened security risk and danger to IRS employees.
At the time of this writing the powder has not been identified.
We will update the story when more news is available.
For the past week we’ve been watching the Tea Party and GOP create a false “political scandal” claiming that Tea Party groups were unfairly scrutinized by the IRS just because they were lunatics conservative when they were applying for tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) (Which if the IRS REALLY obeyed its own rules they would NEVER be eligible for anyway.)
But now its coming to light that the Tea Party wasn’t being “targeted” and the IRS was just doing its job.
The Internal Revenue Service, under pressure after admitting it targeted anti-tax Tea Party groups for scrutiny in recent years, also had its eye on at least three Democratic-leaning organizations seeking nonprofit status.
One of those groups, Emerge America, saw its tax-exempt status denied, forcing it to disclose its donors and pay some taxes. None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected.
Progress Texas, another of the organizations, faced the same lines of questioning as the Tea Party groups from the same IRS office that issued letters to the Republican-friendly applicants. A third group, Clean Elections Texas, which supports public funding of campaigns, also received IRS inquiries.
The false sense of outrage from the right obscures the simple fact many of the applicants really aren’t “social welfare organizations” under Section 501(c)(4) and are more like political organizations that are required to disclose their donors. Nonetheless, none of the Tea Party applicants were denied c4 status but a Democratic group was. Plus, most of the applicants were from Tea Party-affiliated organizations; thus, greater numbers of them were given scrutiny.
These scandals this these bogus reports of targets say more about the sad state of the GOP, the death rattle of the Tea Party and the unprofessionalism of the media than they do about anything else.
Both Maggie Gallagher – Srivastav and Brian Brown of the anti-gay hate group The National Organization for Marriage have waddled away from the all-you- can eat buffet just long enough to take advantage of the latest GOP feeding frenzy to play victim and join in the attack of the IRS citing the publication of its 2008 990-B tax form on March 30, 2012 by the Human Rights Campaign,
“The IRS is claiming — and I think it is plausible — that low-level employees found a clever way to use their low-level job to influence (they hoped) a U.S. election. Have they been identified and fired? Because otherwise this becomes no longer a low-level problem. (You may recall that a low-level employee also released NOM’s private tax-return information to a guy claiming to be a NOM employee, who then posted it on the Internet.)”
“There is little question that one or more employees at the IRS stole our confidential tax return and leaked it to our political enemies, in violation of federal law,” said Brian Brown, NOM’s president. “The only questions are who did it, and whether there was any knowledge or coordination between people in the White House, the Obama reelection campaign and the Human Rights Campaign. We and the American people deserve answers.”
Of course NOM wasted no time issuing a beg for money to investigate the evil IRS (and help pay Brian Brown’s half a million dollar salary, of course.)
“Dear Marriage Supporter, Of all the scandals plaguing the Obama administration this week, the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party and conservative groups for harassment during the last Presidential election is perhaps the most shocking. But it pales in comparison to what we have been attempting to expose for over a year: that the IRS is also guilty of leaking our confidential tax return to our opponents at the Human Rights Campaign! Now that the eyes of the nation are fixed on this exploding IRS scandal, this is our opportunity to expose the truth! That’s why I’m asking you to make an immediate gift of $35, $50 or $100 to help us call on Congress to investigate the IRS.”
