Tuesday, June 1, 2004

Following up on a prior TaxProf Blog post on the Texas state Comtroller’s denial of tax-exempt status to a local Unitarian church: the Comproller has backed off the challenge to the Unitarians but is challenging the religios status of Ethical Culture. Mark Kleiman questions the distinction between the two groups:

Maybe there’s a real distinction there, but it looks to me as if they’ve decided that the belief system of a bunch of people who used to be Christians but now aren’t, quite, is a religion, while the belief system of a bunch of people who used to be Jews but now aren’t, quite, isn’t a religion. Maybe the Ethical Culture Society should start calling themselves what my Orthodox rabbi back in Baltimore used to call them: “Jew-nitarians.”

(Thanks to reader Stuart Levine for the tip.)