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Loading ...Supreme Court stays out of Episcopal dispute
10.05.2009 12:14pm EDT
(Washington) The Supreme Court won’t get involved in a dispute between breakaway Episcopalians and their former national church over who owns a California church and its property.
The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from the St. James Anglican Church in the Diocese of Los Angeles. It is one of several dozen individual parishes and four dioceses nationwide that voted to split from the national church after the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire.California courts have ruled that, while St. James had the right to split off from the larger church, the congregation could not take parish property with it, even though the parish has held the deed to the church for decades.
The Episcopal Church has argued that its rules bar anyone from walking away with denomination property, which often includes large endowments and land worth millions of dollars. The conservatives who want to separate say they have spent years, even decades, spending money to maintain and improve the buildings.
St. James is now allied with an Anglican diocese in Uganda.
The case is St. James Parish v. Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, 08-1579.
So let themselves revote themselves back in and VOILA.
The Supreme Court’s decision to stay FAR away from this fight just makes it better. The dissidents won’t be happy ’til they get their way. Some will probably try to amend prior donations, especially anything triggered at a certain date (annuities and tithes come to mind). If you say that you belong to Church X, then sooner or later that church has to balance its own books by deciding who does and doesn’t really belong. Since the dissidents are hellbent on forcing out the majority, it’ll probably come down to the Episcopal Church to decide whether to formally split. This is where it could get fun.
Imagine that somebody claims to be Episcopal, and claims that they’ve donated X amount of money to the church. Well, if it’s thousands of dollars or more, the IRS is gonna want proof. If the Episcopals take donations with strings attached, it’s gonna create one helluva mess, and could force the Episcopal Church to make a formal commitment. If that excludes the dissidents, their donations/tithes won’t be registered as having gone to an existing church. Imagine a ballsy gay-rights group then filing complaint with the IRS regarding a church that isn’t really a church–not by the definition of its denomination, and not by prior IRS definition. Then, the dissidents either pay taxes, or they acknowledge that they have been cast out–and the Episcopal Church is gonna have to stick with that, if they wanna avoid entanglement in tax crap. Sure, the chances of the IRS actually dealing with this issue according to their own black-letter policies is near zero, but we’re also in a time of a LOT of Federal red ink…hey, I can hope, can’t I? Whatever the case, what happens in the US is probably gonna reshape the Anglican Convention, and it may be part of a huge shake-up in the established Protestant denominations in the US. Again, I can hope, can’t I?
I agree with secrity: let em go to Uganda.
They should move to Uganda if they are so bigoted that they want to be in an Ugandan church.
Just what is the price of principled bigotry? They will reap what they sow.
Guess the wingnut faction put a little too much faith in the idea that Scalia et al were *that* eager to mix church and state. Sorry ’bout their luck.
And rightfully so, there is no way that the Supreme Court should be involved in this mess that they themselves, the breakaway Episcopalians, have gotten themselves into. Firstly, it is just a complete waste of taxpayer’s dollars of which the Church has been exempt in paying to start with. Secondly, if these conservatives have had so much money in the past to spend on buildings, property and such, then surely to goodness they can figure out how to raise the money again if they are so stubborn about toodling off with their ultra conservative views.
So a gay guy gets promoted in a church and conservatives want their stuff back (there’s a joke in there somewhere).
Nice to see where their hearts really lay. Isn’t greed a pretty big no-no? I guess its selective per the norm, haha.
I wonder if the westboro basket cases evolved the same way?