U.S. tax authorities ignore illegal political activities by churches

November 13, 2012 • 5:43 am

Yesterday I kvetched about a Baptist preacher in Texas, Robert Jeffress, who was apparently violating the U.S. government’s stricture against religious figures campaigning in an illegal way for and against Presidential candidates.

To retain their unconscionable tax-free status with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), U.S. churches and their pastors cannot engage in “official” political activity. The U.S. tax code for religious organizations says this:

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all IRC section 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches and religious organizations, are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made by or on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violation of this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise tax.

. . . for their organizations to remain tax exempt under IRC section 501(c)(3), religious leaders cannot make partisan comments in official organization publications or at official church functions. To avoid potential attribution of their comments outside of church functions and publications, religious leaders who speak or write in their individual capacity are encouraged to clearly indicate that their comments are personal and not intended to represent the views of the organization.

Jeffress was, from the pulpit, urging his flock to vote against Obama and, later, for Mittens. I noted that this violated the tax laws, and wondered why his church wasn’t in trouble.

The  answer is that the IRS isn’t even bothering to investigate such breaches. According to boston.com,

The IRS monitors religious and other nonprofits on everything from salaries to spending, and that oversight continues. However, Russell Renwicks, a manager in the IRS Mid-Atlantic region, recently said the agency had suspended audits of churches suspected of breaching federal restrictions on political activity. A 2009 federal court ruling required the IRS to clarify which high-ranking official could authorize audits over the tax code’s political rules. The IRS has yet to do so.

Dean Patterson, an IRS spokesman in Washington, said Renwicks, who examines large tax-exempt groups, ‘‘misspoke.’’ Patterson would not provide any specifics beyond saying that ‘‘the IRS continues to run a balanced program that follows up on potential noncompliance.’’

However, attorneys who specialize in tax law for religious groups, as well as advocacy groups who monitor the cases, say they know of no IRS inquiries in the past three years into claims of partisanship by houses of worship. IRS church audits are confidential, but usually become public as the targeted religious groups fight to maintain their nonprofit status.

. . . [Marcus ]Owens, who was with the IRS through 2000, said the agency had once initiated between 20 and 30 inquiries each year concerning political activity by churches or pastors. He said he knows of only two recent cases the IRS pursued against houses of worship or pastors, and neither involved complaints over partisan activity.

‘‘What the IRS is desperate to do is to avoid signaling to churches and pastors that there is no administrative oversight,’’ Owens said. ‘‘The IRS has been vigilant with regard to civil fraud and criminal cases, but those aren’t all that common.’’

The tax code allows a wide range of political activity by houses of worship, including speaking out on social issues and organizing congregants to vote. But churches cannot endorse a candidate or engage in partisan advocacy. The presidential election has seen a series of statements by clergy that critics say amount to political endorsements. Religious leaders say they are speaking about public policies, not candidates, and have every right to do so.

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has recently taken out full-page ads in major newspapers, featuring a photo of renowned evangelist Billy Graham, urging Americans to vote along biblical principles. Graham met last month with Mitt Romney and pledged to do ‘‘all I can’’ to help the Republican presidential nominee.

A November 5 editorial in the Los Angeles Times recounts a number of flagrant violations of the tax code. Here’s just one:

  • In Peoria, Ill., Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Jenky ordered priests in his diocese to read a letter to parishioners the Sunday before the election criticizing “the president” for including contraception in his health insurance mandate. Jenky then warned that “Catholic politicians, bureaucrats, and their electoral supporters who callously enable the destruction of innocent human life in the womb also thereby reject Jesus as their Lord.” He ended with this appeal: “I therefore call upon every practicing Catholic in this diocese to vote. Be faithful to Christ and to your Catholic faith.”

Not only are churches flouting the law, but they’re boasting about flouting it:

. . . And last month, dozens of churches participated in the fifth “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” sponsored by the conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom. Participants were invited to preach about “what Scripture says about the selection of our national, state, or local leaders.” Some preachers sent their sermons to the IRS, essentially daring the agency to investigate them. The alliance boasts that none of those pastors has been punished or censored by the IRS.

If churches are to be given tax exemptions (i.e., no property tax, tax-free housing allowances for ministers), then they can’t engage in political activity. To do so constitutes a government subsidy of religious incursion into politics. The reason the IRS is sitting on its hands is obviously a policy decision from the top, maybe even involving Obama, although that would be strange because political activity by churches usually favors Republicans. As we know, though, Obama is distressingly friendly to religion.

The IRS should stop turning its head away from this stuff. Of course, if America was really serious about the separation of church and state, we wouldn’t be giving such tax exemptions in the first place.

Pastor feel that Obama’s election will summon the Antichrist

November 12, 2012 • 12:24 pm

This is such a sad commentary on the state of our country.  From The Christian Post:

A Texas megachurch pastor recently claimed that President Barack Obama’s re-election victory would lead to the rise of the Antichrist.

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas, made remarks on Sunday before the election that should Obama win, his victory would lead to the reign of the Antichrist.

“I want you to hear me tonight, I am not saying that President Obama is the Antichrist, I am not saying that at all. One reason I know he’s not the Antichrist is the Antichrist is going to have much higher poll numbers when he comes,” said Jeffress.

“President Obama is not the Antichrist. But what I am saying is this: the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.”

Jeffress would go on to say that “it is time for Christians to stand up and to push back against this evil that is overtaking our nation” and to do so via “the ballot box.”

This is not the first time that Jeffress has garnered controversy for his remarks regarding major political figures. During the Family Research Council’s “Values Voters Summit” in October of last year, Jeffress called Mormonism a cult.

“Mitt Romney is a Mormon, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Even though he talks about Jesus as his Lord and savior, he is not a Christian. Mormonism is not Christianity. Mormonism is a cult,” said Jeffress, who was supporting Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s bid to become the GOP presidential nominee. [Note: according to The Deseret News, Jeffress did a 180° and endorsed Romney in April.]

“It’s a little hypocritical for the last eight years to be talking about how important it is for us to elect a Christian president and then turn around and endorse a non-Christian.”

When push came to shove, however, hypocrisy suddenly became expedience, for after Rick Perry dropped out of the race, Jeffress found that he shared “Biblical principles” with Mittens.

More important, isn’t it against U.S. law for preachers to engage in political endorsements? Someone should remove the First Baptist Church’s tax exemption.

Jeffress, who sees the imminent arrival of the Antichrist

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Why is one sex mimetic rather than the other?

November 12, 2012 • 9:54 am

The other day I posted a picture of a weird planthopper that mimicked an ant, but only the male planthoppers. Females weren’t mimics at all.  I also pointed out a similar case, but in the reverse direction: in the African butterfly Papilio dardanus (as in many butterflies), it is the female that’s mimetic and the male is not.

In the case of butterflies, I asked readers to guess why the mimicry was limited to females.  The classic explanation, but not the only one, is that males are constrained from mimicking a distasteful model species because of sexual selection.  That is, the females are genetically hard-wired to prefer a certain male appearance, while males will pretty much court anything. This difference in behavior allows the females to change their appearance in local populations, evolving to resemble other species of butterflies that birds learn to avoid because they’re distasteful (this is called Batesian mimicry). The males, however, are subject to countervailing selection; whle they could gain some advantage by also becoming Batesian mimics too, this is presumably offset by the reproduction they’d lose by becoming less attractive to their own females.  Ergo female-limited mimicry.

Now this is only a provisional explanation. It sounds good, but as far as I know (and I may be wrong) it hasn’t been tested.  And, at any rate, the planthopper I showed had male-limited mimicry: males mimicked ants and females did not. What could explain this reverse situation?

Again, we don’t know, but one explanation is that the sexes inhabit different niches, and males live in a habitat where selection is stronger to be mimetic.  It’s not always true that males and females live in exactly the same places, or eat the same kind of food.  Perhaps the male planthoppers live more often with ants, or in habitats that contain visible ants, which make them subject to stronger selection to resemble ants, which birds also avoid because they’re distasteful. Or perhaps females spend a lot of time laying eggs up in trees, where there are few ants.

These are all speculations, and ones that can be tested, but I’ve found at least one case of male-limited mimicry in a beetle where there seems to be an explanation based on niche differences.

Henry Hespenheide, in a paper published in 1975 (reference and link below), found a species of wood-boring beetle (a “bupestrid”) in which the males resembled another distasteful and brightly-colored red-and-black species, but the females did not. Here’s the two species: Chrysobothris humilis is the edible bupestrid species that is dimorphic, Saxinis deserticola mojavensis is the distasteful non-dimorphic species in which males and females are a striking red and black. Note that in the mimic species, only the males are red and black.

Hespenheide showed a niche difference between males and females of C. humilis males sit on the end of twigs waiting for mates. And this is where the models are found as well, and hence the males more likely to be subject to predation (and to be seen along with the model species) than are females, who stay more on the ground and presumably don’t encounter much predation.  Thus selection would thus be stronger on males to look like the models.  Females, on the other hand, might be better off begin cryptic, since they have different predators, or maybe very few of them.  (Hespenheide suggests another explanation, involving dilution of the protection of mimicry by mimetic females, that sounds a bit dubious to me.)  At any rate, there is an obvious niche difference between the sexes that could explain sex-limited mimicry.

Again, this is a tentative explanation and could be tested by various transplant experiments, moving beetles around in their environments, or by using “model” beetles made out of soft clay and painted different colors (a technique used to test mimicry in mice).

______________

Hespenheide, H. 1975. Reverse sex-limited mimicry in a beetle.  Evolution 29:780-784.

A priest goes after scientism (again)

November 12, 2012 • 6:28 am

The physicist Sean Carroll is a really nice guy—not strident at all, but uncompromising in his godlessness.  But Sean’s affability doesn’t immunize him against attack, for he’s recently published an essay in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (see my take on this execrable volume of apologetics here,  here and here) that is one of the book’s two or three pieces that doesn’t kiss the butt of Christianity. (The book’s editors falsely claimed that it would not be a volume “defending or promoting Christian faith.” What a joke!)  You can read Carroll’s excellent essay online. It’s called “Does the universe need God?” and the answer is “Hell, no!”

That, of course, will inevitably raise the hackles of theologians, who earn their daily bread from asserting the opposite. In particular, it’s ticked off the smug and foolish priest Father Robert Barron, who has responded to Carroll below, mistakenly calling Sean’s pieces a book rather than an essay.

We’ve previously encountered Barron, a priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago and Rector*/President of Mundelein Seminary/University of Saint Mary of the Lake.  In May of this year I wrote about his complaint that atheists were at fault for not being nihilistic enough, and in July of 2010 I discussed Fr. Barron’s request for Christians to pray for Christopher Hitchens.

Watching this guy is like listening to fingernails on a blackboard, and in this video he scratches about scientism for nearly nine minutes:

It’s the usual trope: “science can’t explain the beauty of Michelangelo’s work,”  and “science can’t analyze truth, meaning, and goodness.”  He decries the “incredible arrogance” of scientists who claim otherwise. But really, which scientist does that?  We might one day be able to explain emotions like love or the admiration of beauty—and perhaps many moral intuitions—by analysis of brain patterns and evolution, but “meaning and goodness” will probably remain the purview of philosophy for a long time to come. Note that I said “philosophy,” not “religion.”  For religion has made no progress in any of the “nonscientific” questions Father Barron raises, and of course the whole point in his decrying scientism is to enable religion.  Sadly, different religions have different standards of truth, beauty, and meaning (Islam prohibits music and depictions of the human figure, for instance, which aren’t considered beautiful; and to a Catholic, the good life doesn’t include nonmarital sex).  Give me secular philosophy over theology any day!

Barron then goes on to make—get this—the cosmological argument for the existence of God, though he dresses it up in fancy words appropriate for his Sophisticated Parishioners™.  But it still hasn’t progressed beyond the arguments of Aquinas. As Barron argues:

“This process [the chain of  contingent “causes”] must end in some reality which is not contingent; whose very nature it is ‘to bei: in sum esse—being itself [note how he adds gravitas to this his dumb argument by using Latin words]. This is precisely what serious believers mean by ‘God.’  That is why God is not one fussy cause among many; one element within a mechanistic system. God is rather the answer to this question: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ‘Why should there be a universe at all?’ ‘What finally explains contingent reality?'”

And my responses, hardly novel, are these:

1. The universe may well not be “contingent.” That is, not everything, including physical phenomena, must have a contingent “cause”.  Why does a radioactive atom decay when it does? As far as we can tell, and as physics tells us, there is no “cause”. It just happens at a given moment, and it’s a probabilistic phenomenon.  In light of quantum mechanics (and also earlier philosophers), the notion of “cause” in the universe is outmoded.  And if quantum phenomena have no cause, why must the universe?  Ergo, the universe could have caused itself, as physicists keep telling us. Barron is simply wrong when he argues that “one must evoke an extrinsic cause to explain why matter behaves this way.”

2.  I know this question makes theologians snicker, but I still think it’s a good one: “WHAT CAUSED GOD, THEN?”  Their usual response is that God doesn’t need a cause, for He is the “Uncaused Cause.” But that’s just semantics; you terminate a (false) infinite regress in something that is by definition called “God.”  But that could be the universe, in which case the universe is God.  Saying that “God” is the ultimate cause is like saying, as Dan Dennett argues, that “Fred” is the ultimate cause, for you can call the Uncaused Cause anything you want.  It’s not an explanation, but a semantic device to make the questions stop.

And I needn’t point out that even if you accept an Uncaused Cause, that is no evidence that it corresponds in any way to the Abrahamic God of Fr. Barron, or indeed to the God of any religion.

Finally, if there is a cosmic “being” that created the universe, what was it doing before the universe was around? Just sitting around twiddling his celestial thumbs? SOMETHING had to bring God into being, amirite? If theologians want to argue that the Abrahamic God needs no cause himself, then they have to do more than assert it: they need to provide evidence.  And, of course, that is just what Fr. Barron doesn’t want to do: at the end of his spiel he argues that God is beyond scientific proof or disproof.

Sean has a brief response at Cosmic Variance, “The absolute limits of scientistic arrogance“, which includes this riposte:

As good scientists, of course, we are open to the possibility that a better understanding in the future might lead to a different notion of what is really fundamental. (It is indeed a peculiar form of arrogance we exhibit.) What we’re not open to is the possibility that you can sit in your study and arrive at deep truths about the nature of reality just by thinking hard about it. We have to write down all the possible ways we can think the world might be, and distinguish between them by actually going outside and looking at it.

So tell us, Fr. Barron, how did your lucubrations in your library lead you to the notion that the Uncaused Cause was the God of Abraham, who spawned a divine son who was resurrected?

What this clip does show, beyond question, is that theological explanation has not progressed beyond that of medieval times.

___________

*I strove mightily not to mis-type this word.

A tweet from Matthew

November 11, 2012 • 12:49 pm

For one thing, it’s captive: born in a Japanese pet shop.

Slow lorises are endangered primates from Southeast Asia.  Read part of the Wikpedia entry:

All five species are listed as either “Vulnerable” or “Endangered” on the IUCN Red List and are threatened by the wildlife trade and habitat loss. Although their habitat is rapidly disappearing and becoming fragmented, making it nearly impossible for slow lorises to disperse between forest fragments, unsustainable demand from the exotic pet trade and traditional medicine has been the greatest cause for their decline. Deep-rooted beliefs about the supernatural powers of slow lorises, such as their purported ability to ward off evil spirits or cure wounds, have popularized their use in traditional medicine. Despite local laws prohibiting trade in slow lorises and slow loris products, as well as protection from international commercial trade under Appendix I, slow lorises are openly sold in animal markets in Southeast Asia and smuggled to other countries, such as Japan. They have also been popularized as pets in viral videos on YouTube. Slow lorises have their teeth cut or pulled out for the pet trade, and often die from infection, blood loss, poor handling, or poor nutrition.

I doubt that any reader here would buy a slow loris because of this video, but because I’m putting up a video, I need to emphasize that YOU ARE NOT TO BUY OR WANT ONE!

A planthopper with sex-limited mimicry

November 11, 2012 • 6:49 am

Oddly, the Guardian has published an account of a new insect species by Quentin Wheeler, a systematist at Arizona State University and director of the International Institute for Species Exploration. (He has also proposed a new species concept, but the less said about that the better.)

His article, however, is intriguing, for it describes a planthopper (an insect in the order Hemiptera, superfamily Fulgoroidea; also called “leafhoppers”) that apparently mimics an ant.  As Wheeler says of the Fulgoroidea:

 . . . [it is] a worldwide group of true bugs [JAC: remember, only the Hemiptera are “true bugs” to an entomologist] with about 12,000 species. That is, by the way, more than twice as many species as all mammals combined. To say that planthoppers are diverse is putting it mildly. They range in size from less than 2mm to over 100mm, populations exist with both flighted and flightless morphs, many are camouflaged green while others are brilliantly coloured including reds, blues, and hot pinks. And some, like F. indicus, are ridiculously shaped.

The new species is Formiscurra indicus, found (as the name indicates) in India; this specimen was collected near Bangalore and described by Vladimir Gnezdilov of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Chandrashekharaswamy A. Viraktamath of the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore.  The intriguing thing is the sexual dimorphism, with the males looking antlike (I don’t have a picture of the female):

Formiscurra indicus

 

As Wheeler notes:

Sexual dimorphism is nothing new in the tribe Caliscelini, to which the new species belongs. In fact, males and females of two species of the genus Gelastissus look so different that they were initially described in separate genera! Females of the new species have reduced wings, a very compact body form, and the front of the head elongated into a cylindrical process. But the male is something else entirely.

Even as an entomologist I had to do a double take when I first looked at the photograph of F. indicus to be sure I knew which end was which. Males of the species apparently mimic ants, although it can be debated whether the ants should be flattered. The abdomen is exceedingly shortened and bulbous and the main part of the cranium almost looks as if it is part of the thorax, which has impressively long legs, but these modifications pale in comparison to an elongate protrusion on the front of the head that is approximately the size of the abdomen and similarly bulbous. Weird.

There are two questions that Wheeler raises implicitly but doesn’t address:

1. Why mimic ants?  Ant mimicry is common in many diverse groups; in fact, Wikipedia has an article on it.  There could be several explanations for why the planthopper is such a mimic.  The mimicry could be aposematic, that is, the ants that are being mimicked are poisonous and distasteful, and predators have learned to avoid them.  By mistaking the leafhopper for an ant, the hoppers gain respite from being eaten, an obvious selective advantage.  Alternatively, the leafhopper could live in an ant colony and gain advantages that way, including protection by being in a group or getting access to the ants’ food. I find this less plausible since ants are good at sniffing out intruders.  And there are undoubtedly other possible reasons for mimicry.

2. Why are only the males and not the females mimetic?  This is tougher; one would think at first blush that males and females would be subject to similar selective pressures. But that’s not necessarily true.  In swallowtail butterflies of the species Papilio dardanus, for example, males retain the ancestral wing pattern, which is similar among populations, but females diverge, with females from different places mimicking different unpalatable models.  P. dardanus is palatable—to birds. In the picture below, we see different “races” of P. dandanus from different places in Africa mimicking different local model species, all of the models unpalatable (the P. dardanus female mimics are in columns at left and right, while the local models are in the center).

The males in all populations look pretty much the same: like the male at upper left. (A female at upper right is the presumed “ancestral” form, which occurs—and looks like the males— in areas where there are no unpalatable models.) But note that the females are free to vary among populations—a remarkable case of inter-population differences within a species.  Why do the females but not the males vary, responding to local selective pressures?

One explanation involves sexual selection, and I’ll leave you to ponder that and make suggestions below?

By the way, which end of the hopper above is the head?

h/t: Matthew Cobb