Gay marriage activists target California Catholics, Mormons

On Monday, we looked at the surprising rift that opened up between gays and blacks in the fight over same sex marriage in California.

For what should be obvious reasons, however, gay marriage activists chose to focus their ire on Mormons and Catholics rather than African-Americans.

Case in point: in mid-January, San Francisco Assessor Phil Ting announced plans to collect up to $15-million from the Archdiocese. It would be the second largest tax bill in the city’s history. Not surprisingly, both sides differ as to whether or not the bill should really be so high, or even be paid at all.

The complex bureaucratic situation stems from the transfer of some Archdiocesan properties from one Catholic non-profit to another. San Francisco typically collects a real estate tax when properties change hands, but the Archdiocese argues that their transaction wasn’t a “sale” of property so the tax isn’t applicable.

“Phil Ting has taken a step that is unprecedented in the history of the state of California,” Archdiocesan spokesman Maurice Healy told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He has determined that an internal reorganization of church property, within the family of corporations of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, constitutes a 'sale' and is subject to a property transfer tax. The law is overwhelmingly in favor of the archdiocese in holding that church property transfers of this nature are exempt from transfer taxes.”

As far as diocesan journalist Jack Smith at the Catholic Key blog is concerned, the city’s proposed tax grab is simply Ting’s attempt to pander to increasingly vocal anti-Catholic sentiment in San Francisco. In other words, it is “payback for the Church’s support of Proposition 8.”

(It is also a case of history repeating itself. In 1999, then-San Francisco Supervisor Mark Leno fought unsuccessfully to revoke the Mormon Church’s tax-exempt status it publicly supported Proposition 22, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.)

“The City government has a history anti-Catholicism which has only become more strident, and politically advantageous, since the passage of Proposition 8,” wrote Smith. “Mayor Gavin Newsom excoriated the Catholic Church and the archdiocese during a tirade at what was supposed to be a Mayor's Prayer Breakfast with religious leaders, including Archbishop Niederauer. The Mayor, according to reports [at the Bay Area Reporter, an outlet serving the gay community], got a standing ovation” -- minus the archbishop and a handful of other religious leaders.

(A few years ago, Mayor Newsom famously told Californians that “gay marriage” was coming to their state “whether you like it or not.” In 2003, after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, Newsom ordered his county clerk to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in violation of California law. Four thousand gay couples received licenses before the courts ordered the clerk to stop.)

“This is fishy at the least and evil at the most,” Randy Thomasson of California's Campaign for Children and Families told LifeSiteNews.com.  “Phil Ting is doing to the Catholic Church what has not been done in other venues, taking away the Church's tax-exempt status in regards to property.”

“Angry calls for the removal of church tax exempt status are deafeningly widespread in the City,” said Smith. “The transfer tax has nothing to do with tax-exempt status, but it certainly is sticking it to the Church.”

However, the Catholic and Mormon churches “almost certainly have not violated their tax exemption,” says one surprising source: militant atheist Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “The tax code gives wide latitude for churches to engage in discussions of policy matters and moral questions, including when posed as initiatives.”

Inez Mabie, Distinguished Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, criticized an ad running last fall during the Prop 8 campaign, featuring one of her fellow law professors warning that churches which refused to perform “gay marriages” risked losing their exemptions. Mabie called the ad “pure nonsense and any lawyer who makes such a claim should apologize for misleading the many religious leaders and congregations in this state.”

(Less encouraging, however, was her assertion in the next paragraph that the “U.S. Constitution guarantees separation of church and state.” This isn’t entirely true. The phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence. It was employed by Thomas Jefferson in his famous 1802 “Letter to the Danbury Baptists” which, however eloquent, does not possess the force of law.)

A surprising number of such so-called experts also seem unaware of recent real world developments in the realm of church tax exemption. Political pressure has clearly trumped existing laws on the books, in cases such as that of a New Jersey church that refused to permit a gay “civil union” ceremony on its property. The state’s Division on Civil Rights duly revoked the church’s property tax exemption, even though New Jersey law explicitly exempts “buildings used for religious purposes.”

In fact, constitutional law professor Douglas W. Kmiec told the Chicago Tribune that “judicial decisions approving same-sex marriage or even state laws barring discrimination can be used to pronounce any opposing moral or religious doctrine to be ‘contrary to public policy.’” In the inevitable next  step, he says, state attornies general would revoke the tax-exempt status of “most orthodox Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious bodies.”

The key word is “orthodox.” In their determination to use tax exemption as a stick to beat religious institutions they disapprove of, many homosexual activists seem not to have considered the obvious consequence: that “unorthodox” churches (such as the Metropolitan Community Church) which do perform same-sex “marriages” would necessarily be caught up in the same dragnet and suffer the same financial penalty.

Perhaps cognizant of this Catch-22, other activists are taking a different approach, petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn Prop 8 on a technicality.

“All friends of democracy should be troubled” by such initiatives, according to Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Acton Institute.

She points out that the “Yes on 8” campaign was “a genuine grass roots effort, with an estimated 100,000 volunteers” supported “largely by small contributions,” while the “No” side was funded by “millionaires and movie stars” not to mention $1-million donated by the California Teachers Association from “their members’ dues money.”

Speaking of money: she says the Mormon Church “contributed a grand total of an in-kind donation of $2,078.97 to ProtectMarriage.com.”

The Proposition 8 fight pitted ordinary Christians and the Catholic hierarchy against Hollywood, the media, higher education and the State’s political Establishment. In the end, the “yes” side one, albeit narrowly: 52% to 48%. (Ironically, Barack Obama was elected President by the same margin – a victory hailed by his supporters as a “landslide.”)

However, this win cause of traditional marriage comes at the cost of a backlash that may reverberate for years to come.

San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, a highly vocal Proposition 8 advocate, attempted to reach out to his opponents in a conciliatory statement after the vote.

“What is the way forward for all of us together?” he asked. “Even though we supporters of Proposition 8 did not intend to hurt or offend our opponents, still many of them, especially in the gay community, feel hurt and offended. What is to be done?

“Tolerance, respect, and trust are always two-way streets, and tolerance respect and trust often do not include agreement, or even approval. We need to be able to disagree without being disagreeable. We need to stop talking as if we are experts on the real motives of people with whom we have never even spoken. We need to stop hurling names like “bigot” and “pervert” at each other. And we need to stop it now."

Whether or not either side will heed the Archbishop’s words remains to be seen.