I don’t think the use of the word gift is helpful. Let’s call it a tax break. Getting a tax break isn’t exactly being allowed to keep your own income. It’s being exempted from a tax you would otherwise have to pay (and other people have to pay). It you make $100,000 and would ordinarily have to pay 20% in taxes ($20,000), and you get enough deductions so you only have to pay $15,000 in taxes instead of $20,000, the government isn’t letting you keep $85,000 of your own money. It’s giving you a $5000 tax break. It never made any kind of claim on $80,000 of your income. It made a claim on $20,000 and gave you a break so you wouldn’t have to pay that much.

Of course, the Republican proposal at the moment is do away with all of those breaks and lower the rate for everyone. The problem is what breaks they really intend to do away with, and whether it’s politically feasible to do away with the popular deductions.

I believe you’re missing the point – I have a duty to pay taxes, a duty I’m more or less happy to fulfill. When we had a bunch of children, my taxes effectively went down – is that a ‘gift’ from the government? Rather, it is a recognition of the obvious fact that by raising children, my wife and I are making a contribution in kind, so to speak, to the nation’s future, in lieu of taxes.

My situation as a father is not fundamentally different than a church’s traditional role in providing services in lieu of taxes. (And, just as I get the tax break whether I raise up solid citizens or hooligans, churches get the break on the assumption that they are funding good works – the chief good work being their simple existence as houses of worship.)

Conclusion: there is no sense in which churches are getting a ‘gift’ by not paying income taxes, unless one assumes ALL revenues any of us receive is property of the state, which can then graciously give it back to us. This is a totalitarian assumption in the root meaning of the word.

Note that this is not an argument that churches should or should not be taxed, merely that being allowed to keep your own income is never a ‘gift’ in a free society.

If I have the power, then I get to determine what is compelling, and if someone else is in power, presto-chango, the state suddenly has a different compelling interest. But these interests are not not some pure and simple form existing out there in the ether.

Really, who in the hell cares if only a priest can head a religious order’s schools or a nun can only head her order’s schools? Is this the kind of “injustice” we need to spend a lot of time worrying about? Are there really hundreds of men and women in our entire population out there gnashing their teeth that they can’t be president of these institutions? I don’t think so.

These places were built up usually with the hard earned contributions of working class Catholics who wanted to support specifically religious institutions headed by their favored orders. There is nothing invidious or harmful about the selection process used by those religious orders. The state’s interests in butting in are virtually nil.

Sanctimonious indeed. Only time I’ve ever told my students to read a book introduction last.

Joseph,

No, not at all. What is a “gift” (I don’t really agree with the word, actually) is any tax you would owe but are exempted from because you do something the government wants to promote. So if you give money to charity, and you take a tax deduction for it, that deduction is a “gift”—a tax break the government gives you to encourage you to do something for charity. Nobody is saying that everything you keep once you have paid taxes is a gift from the government.

Minor point touched upon, but could use a little expansion: by this logic, the 65% or so of my earnings I’m allowed to keep is a ‘gift’ from the government. Gee, thanks!

Other than that zinger, the rest of the quote didn’t seem to support the idea that Nussbaum (with whose work I am completely unfamiliar) was all that crazy a liberal. Weighing religious freedom against the interests of the state is serious business, and she seems to be speaking seriously. What’s missing is distinctions, which it would be our job to supply – and several comments have tried to supply them.

Other than the tax/gift issue, my hackles remained flat.

And the anathema against making distinctions between sexes is as obscure and esoteric a taboo as any thought up by a religion. It is not a matter of rights. No one has a “right” to be a priest.

Usually, the concept of public utility is pretty generously construed, but, inevitably, cases will arise where the objects of some association are seen as positively mischievous. In France, not long ago, we had the case of a group that forbids its members to defend the nation, to take part in public life, to give blood transfusions to their minor children and that the parliamentary commission on cults has listed them as a cult which can disturb public order. Not surprisingly, the revenue sought to deny tax exemption to their publishing house. Their places of worship were exempt, for these do not have to show “public utility.”

As usual, most people would accept that a line has to be drawn somewhere. It is like the difference between red and orange: some cases are clearly on one side of the line or the other, whilst others are not.

Regarding the precedent of Bob Jones, I think it’s important to forefront the fact that what is at stake is not the right of a Catholic university to hire only priests as presidents. Nussbaum is very clear about that.

The sad thing about all of this is that Reno is spitting in the face of a potential ally in dismissing Nussbaum on the basis of so very little. What are the “liberal pieties” she endorses? Here are the central positions she defends in her two books on religious freedom: a) a more expansive accommodationist position is superior to the weaker Lockean position evinced in, for example, the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Employment Division v Smith; b) religious freedom must include more than freedom to believe so that it includes a robust freedom to practice; c) the American understanding of church/state relations is strongly to be preferred over any thing like French laicite; d) this last fact not withstanding, our history is checkered by significant failures to protect religious freedom (including a lamentable history of anti-Catholicism), the causes of which still bedevil us.