If you don’t want the gov’t or any other entity to be able to interfere with you then don’t use their vehicles to avoid paying taxes or get around regulations they also enforce. Otherwise they do have the right to regulate your behavior while using said instruments. If you truly want to be free then don’t be an NPO. Otherwise you have to deal with their interference.
A religious group is charging the Internal Revenue Service with using a legal loophole to first tax nonprofits’ free speech, then run away with impunity when challenged in court.
The nonprofit Catholic Answers tasted this tactic firsthand in 2008, when its president, Karl Keating, posted a discussion on the organization’s website arguing that, according to church rules, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., should not be allowed to receive communion in the Catholic Church because of his support for legalized abortion.
The IRS then levied an excise tax on Catholic Answers for engaging in alleged “political speech” against then-presidential primary candidate Kerry, a tax Catholic Answers paid.
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But when challenged in court, the IRS simply refunded the tax, while refusing to change its ruling that Catholic Answers’ speech was taxable political intervention in an election. Lower courts then ruled Catholic Answers had no course of action against the IRS.
But Catholic Answers, together with the James Madison Center for Free Speech, are now asking the Supreme Court to step in, claiming this “tax-and-run” strategy allows the IRS to arbitrarily tax churches, charities and religious activists into silence, or dodge the consequences if the nonprofits fight back.
“Not only did the federal courts in this case misapply Supreme Court law, they have allowed the IRS to engage in trickery by penalizing nonprofits who exercise their right to speak, only to return the money at the last possible second,” explained James Bopp Jr., general counsel for the James Madison Center and co-chairman of the Election Law Subcommittee of the Federalist Society. “So long as the IRS is allowed to do this, nonprofits like Catholic Answers will be deterred from speaking about individuals who are political candidates in any context for fear they’ll be investigated and taxed. Nothing prevents the IRS from doing this again. And these groups now have no judicial remedy.”