by James Hutson

Created on: February 17, 2008

I wrote this article in response to the ACLU's continued fight to keep the moral voice of Americans silenced through the continued enactment of a bad law.....The Johnson Act of 1954.

"Let us look forward to the time when we can take the flag of our country and nail it below the Cross, and there let it wave as it waved in the olden times, and let us gather around it and inscribed for our motto: 'Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever,' and exclaim, 'Christ first, our country next!'." -Andrew Johnson

"Politics do not belong in the Church," the voice proclaims, "But we will ensure the purging from our public life of all those priests who have mistaken their profession and who ought to have been politicians and not pastors."

No, not the words of the ACLU or the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Not even the defensive ramblings of Obama, Clinton, Romney, or Thompson in reference to their all too public and all evidently shallow professions of faith. Bryan Fischer, Executive Director of the Idaho Values Alliance points these quotes are attributed to one person and one person only and are the age-old agenda of tyranny and repression. Adolph Hitler uttered those words in December of 1934.

Dan Gilgoff, Senior Editor at U.S. News & World Report, would have us believe that this is clearly evident by the passage of the 1954 legislation that forbids political activity that aims to help, or hurt, candidates for public office for tax-exempt organizations, commonly referred to 501(c) 3 organizations or non-profits. Churches, according to Gilgoff's research or opinion, are forbidden to aid or oppose candidates for elected office.

"Tax exemptions for non-profit groups were never intended to offer tax relief to partisan political advocacy," Gilgoff proclaims should be the impus for concern regarding the IRS enforcement failures of the bill, "....Congress set out to fix in 1954: preventing Uncle Sam from subsidizing [it]."

Gilgoff brushes aside allegations that the bill, originally attached to another, unrelated bill by then-Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson, was nothing more than Johnson's usage of the 'whatever goes' Congressional attitude of the time to derail the support of two non-profit organizations (Facts Forum and the Committee for Constitutional Government-neither church organizations) of his opponent in the coming election as something 'conservative Christians' bring up. No matter, Gilgoff opinions, the courts have upheld the Law.

Patrick

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