I’ve seen that maniac Fred Phelps wife smiling, using her reversed alimentary canal.

And I wonder how many people saw Hitler smiling at his works, which were certainly contagious to his people.

First, the separation of Church and State was intended to protect the freedom of the various Churches to practice their brand of religion as they saw fit. It is not freedom FROM religion but freedom of religion. The state may not inflict a “national religion” on the country, although individual politicians may say anything they want about their religious beliefs and opinions. In the same way, religious leaders have as much right as any other citizen to speak their opinion and to attempt to persuade people to their way of thinking. But in secular society, they speak only as individuals (who happen to hold high office in their Churches) and their opinions should not be given any extraordinary weight because of their rank or title.

Second, individual members of the hierarchy of any Church do in fact pay all the taxes you do. In the Catholic Church, all religious men and women (nuns, sisters, brothers), deacons, priests, bishops, etc., pay personal income tax, property tax if they personally own property, sales tax if they buy something for their personal use, etc., etc. The tax exemption applies only to things bought by the Church for religious or charitable purposes. Their property is exempt IF it is used for worship or charity: churches, parking lots, cemeteries, non-profit hospitals, schools, etc., are exempt. But Church property which is vacant, rented out, or used for housing IS TAXABLE. (Convents and Rectories are taxable.)

On the other hand, no Church may endorse a particular party or politician or they will lose their tax exemption. A Church can talk about issues all it wants — it just can’t endorse a particular person.

All of that having been said, I do agree with those who hold that if a Church enters into the political arena, its tax exemption should be called into question. For a Church, for example, to spend millions of dollars pushing its political agenda (as it did in California on Issue and still claim tax exemption seems to me to be right on the cusp of legality. This is a thorny issue and will get the religionists and their deep pockets in an uproar — but I think it is worth exploring.

James…..a male priest molesting another male doesn’t necessarily mean that the priest is gay, its a lot more complex than that. Further, the molestation scandal included many heterosexual pedophiles. The reason why there was such a propensity of male victims is that they were the majority gender available to the abusers. In many cases, pedophiles don’t disciminate their victims’ gender. Assuming that all molesters of males plays into the Catholic League’s leader William Donohue’s convcition that pedophilia ia is an overwhelmingly gay phenomenon. It isn’t, never was, never will be.

The notion that gays can’t procreate is not so black and white. Nowadays, with invitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, gay men and women can reproduce and in some cases for those who are so inclined, procreate in the traditional manner. So that argument against marriage equality is totally flawed.