A committee of the Southern Baptist Convention has published a pamphlet teaching members how to subvert civil laws against discrimination. The main idea is to pretend all church employees are ministers so they can use the ministerial exemption.
Friendly Atheist has the info on the pamphlet:
This Sunday, October 5th, Alliance Defending Freedom’s Pulpit Freedom Sunday will take place. They claim it’s about religious freedom when in fact it’s about creating a lawsuit they can use to try and get tax regulations against electioneering by churches tossed out as unconstitutional. Finally, this year they might get their lawsuit.
When I heard about the religious right complaint over a public school teaching yoga to students it kind of made me yawn because it is so typical. The religious right want their brand of religion to be promoted in public schools but complain about anything that they think isn’t their brand of religion. Some liberal religious people I know don’t think this hypocrisy happens so this post is for them as further proof.
Here is the basic story:
Alliance Defending Freedom, which sponsored Pulpit Freedom Sunday on October 7th, claimed over a 1,000 pastors would be taking part in violating the tax laws prohibiting a tax exempt group, such as churches, from electioneering at the pulpit. If the law breaking pastors had done some basic research they would have seen that having a protest now was a waste of time. The IRS suspended investigations of churches in 2009 due to a federal law suit. Basically Pulpit Freedom Sunday was a failure.
As I posted previously:
On Sunday October 7th, Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative evangelical Christian group, will be promoting ‘Pulpit Freedom Sunday’. It’s an event where the ADF says it has 1,000 pastors pledged to violate Federal tax laws by preaching about the election, endorsing a candidate, and sending a video of their sermon to the IRS. Their stated point is that the tax law prohibiting endorsing specific candidates violates the pastor’s freedom of speech. Once again the religious right is wrong.