Originally published on Forbes.com.
The IRS hates patriots and loves Satan seems to be the message in some coverage of Judicial Watch’s revelation about the speedy approval of exempt status for the organization that sponsors the “After School Satan” program. Judicial Watch’s release led with:
While the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes conservative groups wait years for tax-exempt status an “After School Satan Club” launched to hinder Christian-based counterparts got its nonprofit ranking in just ten days, records obtained by Judicial Watch show.
Breitbart picked up on the issue with ‘After School Satan Club’ Received Fast-Tracked Tax-Exempt Status From IRS:
Documents obtained by Judicial Watch show the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) fast-tracked tax-exempt status for an “After School Satan Club” in Tacoma, Washington, while the federal agency was discovered to be either denying conservative and Christian groups the same status or making them wait for years.
Not surprisingly the Tax Prof picked up the story as Day 1409 of The IRS Scandal. The Prof suspended daily coverage a while ago but does post when something comes up.
The nice thing about Judicial Watch is that they provide the source documents that they base their fantasies on. So you can see for yourself that Reason Alliance Ltd, which does in fact sponsor the After School Satan program, applied for exempt status on October 21, 2014, using Form 1023-EZ and that the IRS positive response is date stamped October 31, 2014. Reason Alliance Ltd. is connected to The Satanic Temple. According to Lucien Greaves, who responded to my request for information about Reason Alliance, the program that After School Satan is countering is the Good News Club, a project of Child Evangelism Fellowship. Well, there you go.
Only that document does not support Judicial Watch’s claim when you include the “While the IRS makes conservative groups wait years” part. In a way, it is because of the activities of Judicial Watch and the other scandal narrative promoters, that Professor Samuel Brunson calls the Outrage Industrial Complex in his coverage of this flap. You have to know a bit about the IRS Scandal to understand that, so I will give you a little background.
The IRS Scandal Competing Narratives
My talk with Lucien Greaves, who is kind of the public face of Reason Alliance Ltd and as far as I can tell The Satanic Temple, made me realize this part is necessary. Lucien was kind of shocked and a little bewildered by the Judicial Watch release. This is because he, like many people, is not really aware of the IRS Scandal which those of us in the tax blogosphere have lived and breathed for going on four years now. Day 1 by Tax Prof count is May 10, 2013, with a report that:
Lois Lerner, Director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division, admitted that the IRS had been giving additional scrutiny to applications for tax-exempt status from goups with the “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their title. She denied there was any political motivation and blamed the practice on a low-level employee in Cincinnati.
I am the last IRS Scandal agnostic. I lean towards the theory that the whole thing was not politically motivated, but contrary opinions of Joe Kristan and George Will make me hesitate to commit to that view. People on the right tend to believe that Lois Lerner was President Obama’s minion and that the IRS stole the 2012 election. So now maybe it is shown that she was taking her orders from Satan rather than the President. Same difference.
Regardless, the competing narrative accepted by the IRS is that the scandal was a service failure. Even if the Tea Party groups were not eligible for the exemption status they applied for, they had the right to get a decision one way or another. Actually the IRS might have come out of this better if they had issued a batch of denials, since the groups that wanted to take a denial to court would have had to talk about what they had been doing themselves rather than focus solely on what the IRS did wrong.
One of the IRS response to the service failure was to provide an expedited exemption process for smaller groups (Less than $50,000 in income and $250,000 in assets). Form 1023-EZ is two pages as opposed to 26 pages for Form 1023. It is filed electronically and according to this story in the Journal of Accountancy, average processing time is thirteen days. Lucien told me that it had actually taken five weeks, but he was measuring from the time they hired a lawyer to set the group up. Sending the exempt application to the IRS was likely about the lawyer’s last step.
So Judicial Watch’s disparate treatment claim is entirely unfounded. Unless they can find some conservative or Christian groups that have had different results from using the expedited process established in 2014 in order to avoid a repeat of Teapartygate, there is nothing to complain about.
As with many of the tax stories I cover, the story behind the story is more interesting. So I think it is worth knowing a little more about “After School Satan”, which frankly is a pretty disturbing notion.
Would You Sign Your Kid Up For After School Satan?
After School Satan was a response to the Good News Club which addresses the Establishment Clause concerns of Christian evangelism in public schools by making it about neutral facility use that requires parental permission. The Satanic Temple and Reason Alliance Ltd do not actually advocate Satan worship, pacts with the devil or even belief in a supernatural entity of any sort.
The mission of The Satanic Temple is to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will
I remain puzzled as to why they use the term Satan other than to be obnoxious. (Lucien admitted that there is just a bit of that in calling themselves Satanists.) They do however offer an explanation here:
No, this program wouldn’t be “better” if we merely called ourselves Humanists. We are Satanists. That is how we identify, and it is how we’ll continue to identify. It makes no difference who does or does not choose to recognize an atheistic Satanic philosophy as a legitimate religion. Satanism is the foundation of our sense of cultural identity and we’re not willing to change how we contextualize our own lives to make ourselves more palatable to others. Just the same, there are those who will lament that our program, introduced into public schools, would be better for children if done under the label of Humanism, Skepticism, or anything less controversial than Satanism. We wholeheartedly disagree. As we are intentionally and pointedly placing After School Satan Clubs in schools where proselytizing evangelicals have established clubs, we think that the counter-balance of a Satanic club isn’t simply acceptable, but necessary. While the Good News Clubs try to invade children’s minds with traumatic and unhealthy guilt-ridden admonishments — such as that they “deserve God’s punishment for sin, which is death” — the very presence of Satanic after school clubs demonstrate that there are opposing religious beliefs held by responsible, respectable, moral people who live productive lives without the burden of superstitious fear. For children to see and understand that “blasphemous” names and iconography can be utilized by good people without repercussions, sends a positive message encouraging critical examination and free thought.
All the material online by the After School Satan program seems pretty benign likely suitable for use in a Unitarian Universalist religious education program except for the introductory video which is really creepy.
For me it evoked the Blair Witch Project. I asked Jonathan Schwartz of Interlock Media to take a look at it. He reported back
The Satanists got a pretty good video editor, but saved big time by not shooting a frame. Backed by a typical heavy metal Satanist soundtrack, a dark musical movement that has been banned in some countries, we see stock images of the devil, Shirley Temple and her gleeful playmates, old running footage of kids getting on buses but played backward, kids running in a field, this time backwards, and a Maypole for fun.
(Full disclosure all the video on my own youtube channel was produced by Interlock)
Lucien told me that he put the video together himself and that it was meant to be a provocative response to the Good News Club being allowed to use public school facilities. Bottom line, I would say that I would not feel real good about signing my kids up for After School Satan, even though I don’t find their actual philosophy objectionable.
About Lucien Greaves
“Lucien Greaves” is a nom de guerre. You won’t find it hard to penetrate, but I decided to leave it at that for this piece. Lucien is a little shy about revealing details about himself like his age, although he does own to be part of Generation X. His identification as a satanist arises out of his study of the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s. As best as I can tell that thing would have allowed the shade of Charles McKay to an another chapter to Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. This article – Conviction of Things Not Seen: The Uniquely American Myth of Satanic Cults by Dan Shewan – includes comments by Lucien.
Other Views
I reached out to some of the Christians I became acquainted during my Kent Hovind coverage. Ernie Land, Kent’s consigliere, wrote me:
Satanism is an evil belief that is destructive to a society, as well as being against any Christian value. Christianity, my description as adhering to Christ Teachings or Bible teaching, is a noble teaching with very worthy, and loving beliefs that advance a society. All this said and against my beliefs on life if the law defines Churches and if they, even against my beliefs, fall under legal definition, then the law has to apply to them as well. It’s up to a society to choose to live at peace, with joy, happiness, and the blessings of a true God, or choose to allow such evils, allowing that society to fall away into sins that will ultimately destroy the society or move it to become an unblessed society.
As it happens Reason Alliance was not claiming church status, but I probably didn’t frame the question to Ernie as well as I should have.
Rudy Davis, probably the most vocal of the Hovindicators, wrote me.
So in regards to your question about the Satanic Temple, I want the government to stay out of the business of selective enforcement of taxation. What is good for the goose is good for the gander so the Satanists should not be treated any differently than Christians when it comes to taxation by the government as long as they can refrain themselves from the baby sacrifices to Beezlebub, in my humble opinion.
Practical Takeaway
When people asked me about applying for exempt status for fairly modest organizations I generally advised that I thought that the game might not be worth the candle. Looking at how simple Form 1023-EZ has made things, I’m rethinking that. For a long time, I have believed that the dose of credibility that organizations get from having 501(c)(3) status was largely unfounded. The new process means that it should confer no credibility at all. If someone implies that their 501(c)(3) status is somehow a seal of approval, you need to put your bs detector on high alert. A storm is coming.
The extreme ease of obtaining exempt status combined with extremely limited IRS resources is likely to create severe problems with phony charities as time goes on. The danger is a recurring theme in Paul Streckfus’s EO Tax Journal. Referring to Professor Brunson’s post he wrote:
Another member of The Surly Subgroup, Professor Leandra Lederman, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, added the comment that the tea parties have only themselves to blame for After School Satan’s quick IRS approval, as they facilitated, albeit unintentionally, After School Satan’s fast exemption by forcing the IRS to create the Form 1023-EZ after their complaints about processing delays. We all have to deal with the law of unintended consequences, even where Satan is involved.
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