The American Spectator

Special Report

An Open Letter to Barack Obama

By Jeffrey Lord on 3.4.08 @ 12:08AM

Dear Senator Obama:

Our common denomination, the United Church of Christ, has a suddenly serious legal and financial problem with the Internal Revenue Service. You, personally, are the cause of this problem. Candidly? I think you owe it to those of us who are your fellow congregants to help repair the damage that you have done.

As you know, on June 23, 2007, you gave a speech to the United Church of Christ's General Synod during our church's 50th anniversary celebration in Hartford, Connecticut. The invitation was extended well before you became a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. You are one of us, and while I disagree with you politically and could not be in Hartford, certainly I initially thought the idea of inviting you to speak was a good one. Contrary to the image our denominational leaders seek to promote, all members of our church are not liberals, and certainly I am not. Yet as a conservative I believe the exchange of ideas is what America is all about.

Everything changed with your formal announcement that you were running for president. Instantly your potential appearance posed a problem for the UCC, as the IRS has quite specific rules regulating the appearance of political candidates campaigning in front of church audiences. The rules are the result of an amendment to the tax code in 1954 by then-Senator from Texas Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic leader of the Senate. This law was, per Jill "J.R." Labbe, the deputy editorial page editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, payback against "two non-profits in Texas that were actively campaigning against" LBJ's re-election to the Senate. At the instigation of the UCC's own Reverend Barry Lynn, the head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, various Christian conservatives have been penalized financially by the IRS for crossing over this line laid down by the Johnson law, most notably the late Reverend Jerry Falwell. While it is troubling that neither you nor the UCC expressed the slightest concern when a conservative's freedom of speech was being repressed, this episode inadvertently opens a chance for everyone to come together on the basic issue of freedom of expression by supporting a repeal of the LBJ law, a law that clearly is about nothing more than intimidating people of faith into silence.

Be that as it may, the LBJ law is in place. It is the law, and the IRS must enforce the rules, taking the same approach to the UCC that the UCC's own Reverend Lynn insisted be taken with Jerry Falwell and other conservatives. The moment your status as a candidate changed, both you and the UCC had two options. One, you could have gracefully refused the invitation, citing the Johnson law and your candidacy. Or the church could simply have withdrawn the invitation to you on the same grounds. Two, the church could have easily complied with the IRS rules under the Johnson law by simply inviting your competitors for the Democratic nomination. Yes, you would have been sharing the spotlight, but under the circumstances that shouldn't have been too much to ask of you.

In the event, neither of these options -- withdrawal or inviting other candidates -- was taken. And so you went to Hartford. Almost immediately you violated IRS rules, discussing your presidential candidacy from what, under the circumstances, meets the legal definition of a pulpit. Addressing some 10,000 of our religious brethren you said:

"It's been several months now since I announced I was running for president. In that time, I've had the chance to talk with Americans all across this country. And I've found that no matter where I am, or who I'm talking to, there's a common theme that emerges. It's that folks are hungry for change -- they're hungry for something new. They're ready to turn the page on the old politics and the old policies -- whether it's the war in Iraq or the health care crisis we're in, or a school system that's leaving too many kids behind despite the slogans."

Further on, you said this:

"I have made a solemn pledge that I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family's premiums by up to $2,500 a year."

The statement on health care is what's known in the trade as a campaign promise, and you made it from a UCC pulpit.

Senator, your campaign has now released a statement saying that you had only spoken about your "personal spiritual journey" at the UCC General Synod that day and were not campaigning for president. This is just not true. As if the exact quotes from your speech cited above do not show this to be considerably less than truthful, this decidedly was not what your campaign was saying before you delivered your speech. Quite specifically, the UCC website quoted your campaign officials as follows:

Joshua DuBois, the Obama campaign's director of religious affairs, said the senator's Synod speech on Saturday will be his first major address on faith and politics as a presidential candidate. The address, DuBois said, will combine personal details about Obama's religious experiences with prescriptions for how religious Americans might put their faith into action. It will also focus on "the growing movement of people of faith" from a variety of traditions, "coming together around our connections as a people and using those connections to address our common challenges," DuBois said.

Shaun Casey, an adviser to the Obama campaign and a professor of ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., said he expects the address to be "as detailed an account of how a person's faith shapes his policies as I have seen from any presidential candidate."

The UCC, filled to the brim with obliging liberal staffers, took its cue and obediently headed this announcement on its website of your impending appearance thusly: "Obama's Synod speech will be his 'first major address on faith and politics as presidential candidate.'"

UNSURPRISINGLY, ALL OF THIS resulted in a complaint being filed with the IRS following your presentation. In addition to your speech and the stories featured by the UCC's own website, the complaint cites numerous media accounts describing your appearance as a campaign event. This is bolstered by photographs of volunteers manning Obama campaign tables at the entrance to the Civic Center, volunteers who were then ushered inside for the oldest of campaign rituals -- a photo op with the candidate.

As a direct result of your actions, this last week the UCC -- our mutual denomination -- has now been notified officially by the IRS that it is under investigation.

Our national church suddenly stands in danger of losing its tax exempt status -- because of you. Do you have any idea what losing our tax-exempt status could mean to a church like mine here in Pennsylvania if in fact we are tagged financially for federal, state and local taxes? I'll tell you: this means choices about paying the heat bill versus the tax bill, paying the light bill versus the tax bill, paying for any number of church activities targeted at needy community or church members versus the tax bill and so on. Even more to the point, the president of the UCC, the Reverend John Thomas, has been abruptly forced to appeal to all of the UCC's members for urgent financial help because of what you have done, informing us that "we will need to secure expert legal counsel, and the cost of this defense, we are told, could approach or exceed six figures."

Exceeding six figures, of course, means we're talking over a million dollars. A million dollars to cover for your personal mistake. Of which the UCC has so far managed to raise a paltry $43,847.37 in a special "UCC Legal Fund" as this is written.

You make much about America's presumed inability to sustain the financial costs of the Iraq War. There is no way, by the admission of Reverend Thomas himself, that the United Church of Christ can sustain the financial costs of your decision to pitch your presidential campaign to the General Synod in violation of the LBJ law without doing serious damage to the most vulnerable in our society. Way down here on the bottom, if my church has to come up with the bucks to pay taxes as well as meet our basic obligations -- well, sorry. No can do. You have put the life of every small and struggling UCC church in America -- and perhaps some well-to-do ones as well -- in danger. This at a time when UCC churches such as the Old First Church in Springfield, Massachusetts, founded in 1637, and St. Paul's in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania are forced to close their doors, in part because they simply can't afford the costs of keeping their doors open.

If members do not give to this newly-established-for-the-purpose "UCC Legal Fund," the Reverend Thomas warns us darkly, there will also be an "impact" on the national church's office of Our Church's Wider Mission. Impact? What kind of impact? OCWM, as you well know, is the division of our church that is charged with support of missionaries, disaster preparedness, ministries to the disabled, scholarships and grants, child sponsorship and refugee resettlement, to name but a few of its functions.

The "impact" that Reverend Thomas is warning about is very easy to understand. Because of your decision to proceed with your appearance at the General Synod, on top of the effect on churches like mine, funds dedicated to the likes of missionaries, the disabled and children will have to be cut unless the rest of us pony-up to pay a six-to-seven figure legal bill to deal with this IRS investigation.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, Trade, Health Care, Business, Religion, Law, Iraq, NATO