BishopAccountability.org
	Probing Pushy Preaching By Laurence D. Cohen Hartford Business June 14, 2009 http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/news9237.html Are you really angry at a church or a coven of Cohen the Columnist worshippers? Your best bet is to call the IRS and accuse the religious folks of violating some obscure paragraph of the tax code. It's not that your accusation is likely to stick; it's just that the IRS guys are the only guys dumb enough to take on the case. God and Satan have teamed up to create a bewildering stew of tax law and First Amendment litigation and ethics regulations more complex than the Baltimore Catechism. No one wants to go there. It would be like knocking on the door marked 'Hell," just to see what's going on. And then, there's the Connecticut Office of State Ethics, which, in violation of the laws of God, Man and Common Sense, has decided to "evaluate" the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, to determine whether it acted as a lobbyist up there at the state Capitol, where lobbyists are required to wear badges and have preachers point at them and scream, "unclean, unclean." The Diocese has lobbed its own legal hand grenade with federal court action seeking an injunction that would make the ethics guys go away. In March, when the General Assembly considered a bill that would have required laity control of parish finances, rather than the priests and bishops, the Catholic hierarchy unleashed its public relations machine, urging the laity to march on the Capitol and tell the politicians to mind their own business. Some of that activity, including Web site rhetoric and organization of the Capitol rally, teetered on the edge of what some might consider "lobbying," which would require filing 37 forms in triplicate and asking the God of Bureaucracy for forgiveness. Taxing Investigations A cranky judge, or a wise politician, will probably make all this go away at some point. But at the moment, the issue does provide a thimbleful of entertainment. This case is different and somewhat more entertaining than the more typical IRS investigations, sniffing around to see if religious folks risk their tax exemption by meddling in things political. Murky questions of where freedom of religion and freedom of speech begin and end are even more complex, when the supposed sin is "lobbying." Churches are, in fact, banned from the political endorsement game if they want to keep their tax exemption. But when some preacher or denominational bureaucrat sort of, kind of, suggests that a certain candidate is closer to God, it occasionally inspires not-very-convincing litigation that solves almost nothing at all. The Connecticut "ethics" case is a bit different, in that the church's tax exemption is not the issue, but whether the diocesan leaders were acting as lobbyists; that is, paid pleaders for the best interests of the "client." If the matter at hand had not been a piece of legislation, but merely a casual idea floated around by public policy types, the "lobbyist" matter never would have come up. Of course, the bishop and his gang would have naturally stirred themselves to debate the idea of peculiar legislative oversight. With the protest aimed at a particular piece of legislation, instead of only an idea, is what the Diocese of Bridgeport did "lobbying?" It would be easier to debate the nature of transcendence. Churches and their members do have First Amendment rights, to speak, to engage in the "right to petition," to practice their religion, with mild and murky exceptions. If this case doesn't disappear, eventually a judge will utter the magic question, "compelling state interest?" and toss the mess out the door, suggesting that Connecticut isn't sufficiently at risk from bishops run amok.
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