Interesting front page story in the Wall Street Journal: Obama Pastors’ Sermons May Violate Tax Laws, by Suzanne Sataline:
Scholars and attorneys say that a growing number of congregations are delving into issue advocacy and partisan politics, a trend dating back to the 1980s, when the religious right enlisted churches to fight abortion. An increasing number of complaints to the IRS over church politicking have triggered agency probes into both liberal and conservative religious groups. …
"There have never been more audits than in the last three or four years" involving churches, says Marcus Owens, an attorney who represents some congregations and is a former director of the IRS’s exempt-organizations division. But while the agency has issued dozens of warning letters aimed at halting advocacy for political candidates, it has only twice revoked a church’s tax-exempt status since the tax law was amended in 1954 …
Some of the sermons mentioned Sen. Clinton or her husband in unflattering ways. … Ellen Aprill, an associate dean at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former adviser to the Treasury Department on matters including nonprofit tax law, says she believes those sermons are "clearly a violation. They’re naming names.”
Dnald Tobin, an associate dean at Ohio State University law school, who formerly worked for the Justice Department on nonprofit tax matters, adds that nonprofits cannot make endorsements or engage in a "pattern and practice that is designed to support one candidate over another." After being read sections of the Trinity sermons by the Journal, he said, "There does seem to be a pattern of attempting to tip the scales in a way for Barack Obama. And churches shouldn’t be doing that."
In some instances, the church’s ministers alluded to Sen. Obama without naming him. During a Trinity sermon observed by a Journal reporter on March 2, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the pastor, preached, "There was a non-Babylonian, a young man who heard the word of God and said, ‘I have the audacity to hope!’ Now the whole nation says, ‘Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!’" "Because that phrase is so identified with Barack Obama and because he is a member of the congregation, it’s possible that it could be interpreted as an implicit endorsement,” Ms. Aprill says. Mr. Moss didn’t return calls seeking comment.
