Freethinkers United! Conference 1997
Orlando, Florida
[Mitchell Modisett: I hope the amplification system is working. If you can hear me clearly and distinctly, wave at me. Aha! People in the back are not waving. All right, all right, that's fine. I was a school teacher for 28 years and I enjoyed, it didn't seem like it'd be more than 27 and we used to start each day by saying "good morning" to the students and they'd say "good morning teachers." OK, that's fine. Christos, we are ready. Would you would like to introduce John Henry Patrick Murphy?]
[Christos: If I can say all his names together, I will. Good morning again and welcome to today's session. Before I produce our speaker, I would like to tell you a few words about our struggle in Florida on a similar case. As you know Atheists of Florida is a 501-C-3 organiza-tion, exempt from taxes from the Federal Government, but when we applied for our Florida sales tax exemption for sales and use tax, they deny us the same privilege they provide to the churches or to religious organizations. Although we present all the evidence that we are a group, an educational group, a support group, that we are having meetings, we do all these, similar or even better things for the community at large, like the churches are doing. And because we don't worship God, and we don't have a place of worship, they deny us the tax exempt from the state of Florida. We took the case to the courts and five days ago, a week ago, we received from the Court of Appeals in Miami, the Fed District Court. Their decision say that while in order for us to declare the statute unconstitutional we have to present more evidence. In other words the three judges that were afraid to issue an order declaring the statute unconstitutional and now they are forcing us to start all over in the court. The way that they phrase their decision, they are not allowing us to go to the Supreme Court of the State of Florida. So we have to continue our struggle in the courts with a new filing and this time we are prepared to present more evidence proving that the discrimination is unfair and even we are going to get the same privilege or we are going to force, hopefully, and this is what we are looking for, to declare the statute unconstitutional and therefore will be the first step in taxing the churches. So, I would like also to mention that the whole this is the transcript from the depositions and all the hearings that we had. It's a big volume. We spend only from our very small treasury that we have about $1600 for this case. The rest was time donated by our attorney and all the people that were involved with that. Without further adieu I would like to introduce our next speaker who is going tell you about his struggle in the state of Colorado. Mr. John ... uh ... Murphy, whatever, Esquire. (applause)]
I was named after my three uncles John, Patrick and Michael and John and Patrick never left Ireland and I got to know Mike as a young man, as a young person. We ought to have a couple of definitions so we can intelligently discuss it. A referendum is not started by the people. A referendum is started by the legislature itself. It's a referred measure. In Colorado they ask the people to vote on whether or not we should have death penalty--some of the hot potatoes that the legislature doesn't want to deal with--they refer it to the people. That's a referendum; that's not what we had. It's very easy to have a referendum, you only need about 46 people to vote to have a referendum in our state house and we'd have one. An initiative is what we had; it's much more work. Under Colorado law you must go out into the streets and into the homes in the cities and gather signatures and you must gather five percent valid signatures, five percent of everybody that voted in the last election for the secretary of state. And because of that in Colorado we needed 54,000 valid signatures and if somebody doesn't "dot" and puts Pat instead of Patricia, or something like that they might throw out the signature. And so, you really have to get 85-90,000 signatures to keep them from throwing you off the ballot and "them" happens to be the government that was basically organized against us. So, I didn't know anything about initiatives or referendums or anything else; I was just a stillborn Christian and I was kind of like Sampson, you know, a one-man campaign against the Philistines, and I'd do things like take a little classified ad out in the local newspaper in bold type and it'd say "You're all welcome -- Saint Jude." Things of that nature, you know. I didn't know about you folks and others. And, I had a radio program, I still do, in Colorado Springs and it's only one hour a week, but I kinda counteract what the rest of them are up to and it's a free-thought type of format instead of reading the nice parts of the Bible, I read the ugly parts of the Bible. "Today's reading will be from Robert G. Ingersoll, chapter 2 verse 18" or what not, and "Why I'm an Agnostic" and mix it up with the religionists quite a bit and also get quite a bit of support from local atheists and freethinkers of every stripe. I have a lot of fun doing in. I had no idea what it could turn into. Dan Bridges up in Aurora had heard about my radio show, Murphy's Law, and one time he knew I was talking and he was in the audience and he had been working at that point in time about eight years on taxation--real estate taxation only. You just heard about other types of taxes, benefits that the government gives to churches. But this was just real estate tax. So as it broke out Dan Bridges asked me to be part of the team along with Jack Basart, your Madeira Beach local person who also was in Colorado at the time and owned some property there, but he's not a Colorado resident, so he kind of was in the background, but he was very definitely a big force in this--and financial and other efforts involved. So, the big decision was how to break it down. Who gets into the exempt tent? Who should be taxed? And what kind of a rational basis. We arrived on a conclusion that if any non-profit is discharging a community responsibility that the government would have to do otherwise they should be tax exempt. So, non-profit religious schools. They teach math; they take kids out of public schools that we'd have to support otherwise. They deserve tax exemption. They're discharging community responsibility--the education of our young. Housing--for the infirm, for the disabled, the abused persons. You've got the actual language there in the "trifold". All of those we determined were government responsibilities and anything else was mere charity. They didn't like the adjective "mere" charity when we'd say that. And it should support itself. It should be supported by its supporters. So, that was basically the division. And of course churches are not only not a government responsibility, they're a prohibition--by our Constitutions that it's not government involvement, much less responsibility and so they would be the chief targets. When you get down to it when we finally got the figures out of the state and untangled everything, we found that there approximately 9,000 properties in Colorado that would be affected by this, but we couldn't tell people how much the money would be because nobody knows. Dan Bridges will address that particular scandal--issue-- during part of this presentation. But we do know that there would be at least $100,000,000 in reduction to taxes if churches and most non-profits paid their own. When we analyzed who owned these 9,000 properties, at least 80% were owned by churches--church entities, youth camps, retreat centers owned by churches--things of this nature. Some of them used one or two weeks a year, but needed five and police protection 52 weeks a year. And, we went out and we got our signatures. People were very happy to sign it for the most part. You would see some fantastic fits thrown by people once they found out what we were up to and it was a matter of hilarity at times. But we got our signatures and we got that sucker on the ballot, and we believe it was the first time in American History that American citizens of any state have had an opportunity to vote whether or not churches should pay real estate tax along with others.
So, all of the sudden we had momentum. L.A. Times called and said you finally made it--your into the 40's. We never had the money to take a poll. We barely had the money to get it on the ballot. You don't find that many people no matter how much they appreciate our cause, that are willing to stand out there in the sun for eight or ten hours in front of a super market asking people to sign an initiative to tax churches. You have to pay people to do this. And it cost about $1 a signature. School teachers during the summer, people like that. I don't want to take anything away from our volunteers who did in fact, our families, Dan Bridges' and other supporters in Colorado got about 8,000 signatures that we didn't have to pay for. But we had to pay for most of the signatures. Altogether we got over 97,000 signatures to fulfill a requirement of 54,000, but we voluntarily excluded almost 10,000 signatures because of an infirmity with the circulator that took them. We don't know whatever stealth or subterfuge or if it was just a klutz. But at any rate it cost us money. And, once we got it on the ballot it started to roll, and the media, the press attention was incredible. Dutch TV 2 from Holland. We were on CNBC and MS..whatever they are and CBS Evening News with Dan Rather Memorial day. We made ourselves known and they were in the background quite a bit in the summer months. The election, of course, was not until November 5th. When we were into the forties, the local press said we were 39,38% of the population was in favor of this, we were just saying if we had a quarter of a million, if we had 200,000, just think we could push it into the fifties. Well, Dan Bridges is much more than a realist than myself, and he continued to prop up reality in front of me as he saw it and I think he saw it pretty well.
But I didn't give a damn. I never had so much fun in my life. It was a trip. I got my motor home all painted up. Mary let me paint up our motor home and it had signs all over it that said things like "Vote yes - churches and non-profits should pay real estate taxes." on both sides in big letters. Then it said: "charity begins at home," "God isn't broke," "Now you have a choice," and "Why should all of us be forced to support all of them?" That kind of thing. I'd have the press along with me; they would be riding along from city to city to debates and you would see the people passing, giving us digital salutes. And then you'd see them kissing us. The Chronicle of Philanthropy had their reporter out here; they had us on the front page, color. They couldn't believe it, this reporter. What a great fellow he was; he knows what the "skinny" is! And he--we were passed by two women in a Mercedes; one of them put her head out the sun roof and then her whole body almost, I mean kneeling on the seat and blowing kisses at us. You couldn't see her because her hair was ... you know. But at any rate these were some of the great experiences we had.
And when it all came out we had about a million four that actually voted in Colorado, a state of some four million for the last quadrennial election. And we got over a quarter of a million votes, so not as much as one in five, but not as little as one in six. Some where between one in every five and half people, if you got 'em there one of them would be for us. That was after they spent about $800,000 that we know about. It drove us out of the 40's, into the thirties, into the 20's, and finally into the high teens in a period of about five weeks from late September until November. They hit it hard on television. They told upwards of a dozen lies about us, one of which was that we said "tough luck." and we tried to get the Secretary of State who runs the elections in Colorado to force them to say who said it. Dan asked me if I said it. I never said it. Dan said he didn't say it. We both knew we didn't say it. What are you going to do about poor Frank and Mary. That was the image that they propped up--an elderly couple with a cane and their places that they would get benefits from would be leaving, would be shut down. Everything was going to shut down if you would listen to them. Maybe it was upwards of a thousand lies like Mark Twain said about the Bible. But at any rate, we never said "tough luck" about these kind of people, but that's the kind of ad campaign that they run. They just decide let's put these words into their mouth and you know these very pious people. The Catholic Church donated tens of thousands of dollars against us. They were going to be primarily affected. Colorado isn't particularly a Catholic state, compared to like Connecticut or Massachusetts, but it is definitely a tremendous amount of power there in that church. They were against us. I didn't get much static over it myself. My family did. My family of origin, they're you know into the church kind of thing with fairly cool eyes, but still they had to take a hell of a lot of static. What did I learn? I learned that it's possible to get this done. Believe it or not, we just had a tax limitation passed in the 90's in Colorado. It took three efforts before the citizens finally embraced it and passe it. Just because ... we weren't defeated. Dan Bridges and John Murphy, Jack Basart, we weren't defeated. Amendment 11 was defeated for the first time. I want to come back in the year 2000. I want to get it back on the ballot and I want to have a campaign chest, not just the money to get it on the ballot, but we need some money for a campaign if it's going to pass. We are going to have to reduce our sights rather -- to get it passed. We won't have any trouble getting it on the ballot again, regardless of what way we stage it or fashion it. It's obvious that about one out of six people want to tax 'em all, the long, the short, the tall--we don't care what they are up to--pay tax if you own real estate. We'll get it on the ballot. That's a quarter of a million people that voted for it. They would sign the initiative again. But, we need to enlarge the exempt tent in my estimation. We need to have a threshold for our agricultural counties who absolutely would refuse to tax churches. Most of their churches are humble. Most of them aren't ostentatious. If we had a threshold of perhaps $200,000. The first $200,000 of all church property should be tax exempt. Anything above that they'll pay taxes on. It's hard to find a church in agricultural Colorado that has a church of ... that would have to pay any tax to begin with. Allow the blood banks, allow the food kitchens are tax exempt. Some of the, if you'll look at our language, they had to use their property solely and exclusively for housing their abused persons, safe houses and what not to be exempt. Food banks don't house people and so they'd be taxed. We took a lot of static over that. The food banks of course are funded by you, in case you don't know it, for the most part. Catholic charities get 65% of their money from the tax payers, but what they do is they take all the bows and get all the credit when it belongs mostly to us. But, let them get in the exempt tent along with blood banks and things of that nature. No body ... we didn't hear a whimper out of the hospitals. They donated plenty of dough against us, but they know they are not objects of charity in the public's eyes. We call them "the sisters of commerce" is what we call them in Colorado. They are out of Cincinnati, that run our hospital, and we ... there's no fondness in the community toward those hospitals and the way that they operate.
So we had a great opportunity to open the door; we made a few mistakes, but we did a lot of things and I am real proud of the efforts that we made. Fund raising. Here's my only pitch [bitch?]. I never did any fund raising. We were going to try to go to this one or that one, Playboy Foundation, we didn't know who to go to. But, we have some time now. We have three years. I have a radio show. I am not going try to raise a lot of money this way, but you might be interested; if there is interest, I would have tapes of the radio show, which is very definitely a free thought forum and sell them $5 a piece, whatever; there'd be about 40 a year. Sell them in groups of five for $5 a piece and whatever the amount of money that comes in over the cost of production, 100% of that would go to Coloradans for Fair Property Taxation for the year 2000 campaign. That's the only little idea I have so far. On the trifold, we're keeping our web page alive. We're going to be adding to it real shortly and if you'll look at your trifold it gives our web address. That outfit went broke--that server, unfortunately, and so where it says XLN.COM if you'd strike that out and put USA.NET. Everything else works and you can get to our web page. It says XLN.COM and then it has that little "worm"--a tilde, it's called, and then the slash. All that's OK where it says "fair tax". Just strike out XLN.COM, put in USA.NET and you'll get to our web page. I'm very very thankful to Dan, to Jack and his wife Miriam and of course to my wife, Mary, who was with me that entire time and we had a very, very fulfilling experience. And being ourselves and saying, "hey, what's fair? what's fair here?" That's all we're asking for is fairness. And we have received so many compliments and people asking us "don't give up, you bring this back." We're going to bring this back if I can, I mean if it's possible at all, I want to do it. Colorado probably isn't the best state for it. Your state is, Florida. They give you a 25% homestead here and everything else is taxed. Well in Colorado homeowners only have to pay 1/3 the tax that a business owner has. In Colorado the assessed valuation of a home is less than 10% of the actual, so if you have $100,000 home the assessor says it's worth about $9,500 and you multiply that figure by the mill levy. If you own a business they multiply it by 29%, so a $100,000 business has to pay, is now assessed at $29,000 at three times more than the home, and you multiply the same mill levy times that assessed valuation. So the business owners in Colorado are picking up the slack for the homeowners, keeping the homeowners happier. And in Florida I couldn't believe the taxes Jack and Miriam were showing me around. $1800 the annual tax for a small home that in Colorado might be $800, $700 total. That's even with your homestead exemption, so this state would be ripe [right?] for it.
Initiatives. Of the eastern states, states east of the Mississippi River, there's only seven states that allow the initiative. You'll never get a referendum on this. They will not sign to turn this over to the voters out of your state houses in America. But the citizens can do it. The western states, only seven of the western states do not allow the initiative, so you can see the difference. In the east there's only seven states allowing it. In the west there's only seven states that disallow it. About 26 of the 50 states allow initiatives. It can be done anywhere. Colorado might not be the best state. If any of you want to pick up the gauntlet and run with it and take a hard charge at that, let me help you. I'll sure do the best I can to give you the information we have. But one of the best things that ever happened to me, was this man Dan Bridges walking into my life and I want to introduce Dan now and he wants to tell you the scandal that he uncovered by doggedly going to all of our 63 counties trying to meet with the assessors to untangle the numbers, because the numbers are wrong. What they are telling the public of the value of the churches, the value of many of the nonprofits, are lies. They are simple lies. They are not mistakes. We ... I don't want to poach in his grove, but things like two counties in Colorado have almost $10,000,000 worth of private schools, according to the assessors. Never been a private school in either of the two counties. What's going on. We think ... Dan has untangled the facts. The meaning of it is still open, will lead to debate. But the three of us will be up here. Dan is going to talk and then Jack Basart is going to talk and the three of us will do our best to answer any questions that you might have. Let me not leave this podium without thanking you, thanking everybody who has the courage to share their honest thoughts whether they're controversial or not and those that have come before us and the kids we are raising with honest thoughts and honest ideas. That's where the whole health of our country can lie because doing what we've been doing is miserable as far as I am concerned. Dan would you come up here and tell them what you have found, please?
[applause]
Christos: Can everybody hear in the back?
Dan Bridges
First thing I want to do is publically thank John Murphy for his effort in this campaign. Without John we wouldn't have gone anywhere near where we went. He's a great guy, did a great job. [applause] And next, I'd like to honor Mary Murphy. Mary would you stand? [applause] Mary is one of the best sports I can imagine. I mean we went through some rough times. John ended spending $60,000 of his own and Mary's money and Mary never complained. And the last day when we ended up just way, way down, she never, never indicated: "Oh my god, why did you ever do this?" Early on, I kind of imagined that we'd be at the 25% level with Jack and I who worked on this early looked at this thing as something that well we'll put it on the ballot, we'll spend our money getting the petition signatures, we'll coast through the latter part because we probably can't win. Well, lo and behold, after we got on the ballot, this is about the time I spoke to many of you at the Atheist Alliance convention in Minneapolis, we were at 38% and we thought, my gosh we're going to win. I can't believe, you know, I really thought we were on track then. And we were looking awfully good, come about June John was beginning think, well maybe we need to find a scandal to pull this thing off. And Jack Basart had been after me to see if we couldn't take the assessor's figures for religious, charitable and all other categories, which is basically the non-profits and see how these things progress through time. So, I dug out all this stuff. I did it all for all 63 counties in Colorado and I imagine most other states, there's eight different categories of exempt properties. There's Federal, there's state, county, political subdivision, that means something like a fire district, a school district, religious, private schools, charitable and all other. The all other category might include something like the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, the U.S. Olympic Committee, so when we ended up deciding we'd go for all the non-profits, I mean we really took on a pretty big group. Anyway, about June it became obvious that these assessed values went up and down, just all over the lot. We didn't know what to make of all this. I called John and said we've got a scandal; I don't know whether it's going to help us or hurt us. John immediately, with his excellent sense of getting after it, said we are going to take this to the independent newspaper in Colorado Springs. They're gutsy, they can do anything; they'll do it for us we don't have to totally solve this thing. Well, what happened was the gal we talked to, Carry DeGatt, had a sister, Diana DeGatt who was running for U.S. Congress from Denver, Pat Schroeder's old city and as soon as Carry started talking to Diana, Diana, I'm sure said, "We had better not open that door; that's bad news. I might get into trouble; I might lose. Don't you touch that thing." It just went on from there. Come September, it was time for us to have our final hearing before the Legislative Council. We went in there thinking that we'd be treated fairly, which was not something we should have expected. It was worse than that. We beat 'em cold in terms of this stupid argument they'd been frying up that somehow residential property rates were going to go up in some area. Well, this was a farce. I won't try to get into what nonsense they were using, but it was a flat lie. At the end of the thing, the chairman of the committee managed to switch us off, not finish the thing, all these guys went out in the coat closet; they worked for about three hours behind our backs, John had to go off to another speaking engagement. So left Jack and I sitting there, and unfortunately we chose to sit in the back of the room. We didn't have any idea they were going to do it to us. We couldn't even hear what they were saying up there. Well, lo and behold, they forced the sentence into what we call the blue book which is something which is mailed out to all registered voters that sure enough, residential property rates would go up in some area. And unfortunately, this switched the whole thing. From then on we started going downhill. Every time we tried to counter this they'd come up with some other lie. And, we never could beat that thing. Let me give you a couple of examples of what happened in this assessors' mess. Sawatch County, the federal--and this is a county which has a lot of national forest, which is federal--is to remain at 41 million, they took it down arbitrarily to $50. Well, we can explain that one, dropping it down makes it easier for the county to increase their taxes without being caught. It gives them more room to do that, which they're not supposed to do under another Colorado State Law. But the other thing that happened was some of these other counties raised numbers like, John was mentioning the private schools that never existed. Unfortunately, we've not totally solved exactly what's going on there. My suspicion remains that there's an equalization gimmick that once these numbers are raised that gives the county more room to get equalization money from the state because of these higher exempt numbers. So, we're still battling that. In conclusion, I'd like to put it this way. Early on, in this country we had slavery. That wasn't fair. It took us a long time to get over that. We finally conquered that one. The next item was women's vote. It wasn't fair that women were not allowed to vote. Again, it took a long time to break that. It's obvious this fight is going to take a long time but let's face the facts. This business of allowing tax exemption for churches is not only unfair, it's unconstitutional, and I want to read you a little bit from ACLU policy number 92. This is a quote: "ACLU believes that tax benefits for religious bodies are constitutionally forbidden in spite of wide-spread and long-standing practice." We need to get that message out any way we can, talking to ourselves isn't going to do it. We've got to educate the public. If I can I'd love to have Jack come up and say a few words. Jack is a former business professor at the University of Colorado. He is an expert in real estate appraisal and so on. He is a Floridian that many of you know. Jack ... [applause]
Jack Basart: Thank you Dan. It's a real privilege to have worked with Dan and John in this. It's an incredible effort when you consider the fact that ... you can't hear? This initiative and all that it's about is an incredible effort when you consider the fact that every single politician in this state, in Colorado, and in the United States is against us. They may say to themselves when they are home by themselves and nobody's listening that they think it is a good idea, but they would never admit it to each other or to their constituents. And they're are the ones that are protecting this privilege, this tax-free ride, I call it, privilege, of people who own real estate that you and I are essentially subsidizing. I mean, if they want to own property, that's fine, but they should pay for the fire and police protection and all the stuff, the services that they receive, just like we do. If they don't want to do that, then they shouldn't invest in real estate. And, I don't know how many of you have read some of the articles in many publications, one of them that I always refer to as the U.S. News and World Report magazine article which was an excellent ten-page revelation, really, about tax-exempt businesses and properties in the United States, and this is an absolutely huge, huge amount of money. If we're worried about the national debt, if we are worried about other tax revenue problems, it could be solved immediately by just taxing non-profit real estate. [applause] I'm going to open this up and have Dan and John come up and we'll try to answer any questions that you might have.
Q: Give us the states east of the Mississippi that have initiatives.
Murphy: I don't have all 26 of them memorized. I know Massachusetts allows them ... Oh he wanted to know the seven states east of the Mississippi, that allow the initiative process and I am sorry I can't ... Florida's one of them, Massachusetts, Illinois, that's three of the seven, that's pretty good.
Q: I'd like to know how much money you spent on this initiative, ...
Murphy: As Dan said, I spent about $60,000. Dan, I never did ask you but I know it's upwards of $20,000 and I think Jack Basart had quite a bit in that pot. We didn't raise much outside of ourselves, quite frankly.
Dan: I am the treasurer so I had better know. Total was $114,000. I estimate that John spent $63,000, that includes office expense which we did not report. More or less I spent $33,000. More less Jack spent $16,500, and the other amount we got in contributions.
Christos: My follow up question is knowing that the majority of people unfortunately in our country are Christians, and therefore, though some of them will want for taxing the church, but the majority will, nevertheless they are Christians. Most of them will stick with their religion. Don't you think it is more wise to spend a fraction of that money and fight the case in the courts where the court has to interpret the law?
Murphy: Basically, the gentlemen doesn't believe that ... I believe he said that the Christians, since most of the country are Christians, they wouldn't vote to tax the Christian Churches. I disagree with that. It's true that titularly we are a Christian Nation as they say, as far as percentages. However, people are in church because of fashion show. People are in church because of the business. People are in church because of the mother, the wife, whatever. They sell insurance there; that's a great reason to go to church. And deep down in their hearts, if they knew that there real estate tax would go down in their homes and in their other properties, they would have voted for this. We couldn't counteract $7-$8,000,000 worth of TV that says your home taxes are going to go up if you vote for Amendment 11. When we rewrite this we are going to say all the money goes to reduce home taxes. None of it goes to business, you know, kind of thing, to explode that. The court system, the Supreme Court Cases in this basically state that taxation is one of the essential ingredients of government, and taxation is up to the legislature. In the initiative process the people become the legislature. The state becomes the legislature, once you have it on the ballot, and therefore they won't interfere with it. I don't think that the Supreme Court of the United States would rule this unconstitutional.
[turn tape over]
... spend some time. I don't know how you address the question there because in a place like Connecticut and some others, the nonprofits are written into the state constitution.
Murphy: We are amending the Constitution. The people can amend the Constitution. That's what we were doing in Colorado and the people in Connecticut can do it if the initiative is allowed, but I don't think it is in Connecticut. I don't think the people have a right to overrule the legislature, which is what an initiative is all about.
We left exempt all colleges, schools, because, if you look at the trifold, the reason is it's a community responsibility, education, and therefore we left it in the exempt tent. Yale wouldn't have to pay taxes, had they been located in Colorado and had it passed, Yale would not be taxed, still.
Q: I want the citation on U.S. News and World Report ... do you have that.
Jack: It's the October, 19 ... She wanted to know what U.S. News and World Report Magazine had this non-profit information in it. And it's the October 4 or October 6 issue, 1995 ... I think it's 1995. No wait a minute, it's 1996. It's the October 1996 issue, that's right, it's last year's issue, and it's an incredible article. You will be amazed at what they are getting by with. For example, one of the things I was astounded to hear was the NFL the National Football League owns about $20,000,000 worth of property. They pay no taxes.
Q: The seven states ... Since I'm from the west coast I'd like to know the seven states that will not allow it.
Murphy: He wants to know ... I think all west coast. Yeah, he wants to know, I can't imagine, that man's a train caller back there, and I've still got to repeat it! California allows it. The state of Washington allows it. I don't know about Oregon, but we've covered the whole coast except for that. They do? The whole west coast.
Dan: Generally speaking, it's most everything except Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah I'm not sure about.
Q: Considering the amount of lies that were ... told about you during this campaign, do you anticipate similar tactic in the year 2,000 ...?
Murphy: More of them. They are going to have a lot more lies. They're going to have a lot more money. But if we even had $200,000, it would be an awesome amount of money compared to what we had. You see, to buy radio and TV spots. The other problem that I didn't mention: the press does not take you serious unless you got a war chest of dough, and I don't care if you are running for municipal county state office, if the other side has $10,000 and you've got $100, which is essentially what we had, they ignore you to great extent, in spite of that we got a hell of a lot more press than they ever thought we'd get, I believe.
Dan: Can I add something about going the legal route. You know back when Christos and I were both in American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O'Hair did her best, and I think she did a reasonable job, trying to go the legal route, in politics are such that I just don't think we will succeed with the legal route. That's why I chose to go the petition route.
Q: Could you give us the status from the Supreme Court's point of view on the legal route? You mention policy #92, but I think that is the ACLU's policy interpretation. As I understand it, the Supreme Court has not ruled obviously tax-exempt status for religions unconstitutional.
Murphy: In 1970 A gentlemen from New York state named Weiss, who was a religionist, but he thought churches should pay taxes, filed a case saying that he is forced to support churches that he doesn't belong to and that he doesn't think it's fair. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled it to be a political question. That means it wouldn't be unconstitutional to make him pay tax, do you see there's some benefit in Weiss. A political question is not going to be dealt with in a court room. It's dealt with in the public forum of society and in the state houses of our nation, so that he wanted to know the case name and it's Weiss V Commissioner, 1970, Supreme Court of the United States. Yes sir?
Q: I understand that Madalyn O'Hair obtained a lot of her money through legal means by suing Bill Buckley when he defamed her and the lawsuit was settled out of court and he settled the law suit so it wouldn't be disclosed how much she got. I understand she got nine or seven million dollars, ... so she must have got a good sum of money. Maybe you can think about suing the people ....
Murphy: Thank you very much. That's a great idea. I can't imagine defaming Madalyn Murray O'Hair. She turned on like a profane hair dryer and I wouldn't be afraid to defend somebody allegedly defaming her. Yes sir?
Q: I just wanted to echo your sentiments there. If you have enough money and are willing to lie in this country, nobody is going to bother you.
Murphy: That's about what happened. That statement he made is accurate. They didn't get bothered by it. We tried legal means to have a redress, for the Secretary of State to say you prove that ... he said it on #1 talk radio show, KOA, 18 states get it, 37 states get it at night time. We were having a debate on that on the #1 talk show in Colorado when he said he had me on tape saying "tough luck" to all these old people that wouldn't have any more benefits, allegedly. And, we asked for it and we asked the Secretary of State and they just ignored us. Yes sir?
Q: I was wondering if you could counteract... national talk shows ... I know they're rather trashy and all, but that's what a lot of people watch and I think .... if you have a story to tell they will put you on ...
Murphy: Yes I would consider doing it. The gentleman said that if we got on national talk shows instead of just statewide we could get the issue around the country a whole lot better. We would have been on all those had we had some campaign money, I believe. The amount of interest we could have generated for our side would have been awesome.
Q: ... generate the funds from that. You would not need the money to get on those shows. They just want you to have interesting stories to tell ...
Murphy: Well, I'm willing, let me on. Yes sir.
Q: I don't think you are going to get on a national talk show unless you get sex into the picture.
Dan: John is clever enough to figure out how to do that. [laughter, applause]
Q: ... supreme court whatever ... national vote ... supreme court will follow the dictates or at least the mandates. It's getting to the point ... administration .. getting your points across because Congress would be favorable ..
Dan: I think I am going to have a little trouble repeating the question. John, why don't you repeat the question, but I want to answer this.
Murphy: The point was well made that I agree with, that the courts follow Congress, follow the mood of the people, and I think it was meant to be that way. We don't want dynamic change in American society based upon our Constitution. It's a cumbersome process. It takes a long time and by the time the people finally state the will of the people, the politicians follow and then the courts follow at the very last. That's the way it's normally been. Sometimes Congress tells the courts to go into the forefront such as the Civil Rights Act. You know we'd still have separate but so-called equal but for Congress in '64. Then the courts all of the sudden became active in this area. Before then they didn't enforce it. Now the question came down to would Congress tell the courts what to do by embracing the taxation of churches? And Mr. Bridges I think has an opinion.
Dan: I think we are going to have a difficult time getting any of these politicians who are basically running for reelection and folk if you don't know it that's the big problem. In 1978 I ran for U.S. Congress. I proposed the concept that we needed limited tenure, two terms for Senators, a maximum of three for the U.S. House. Get in there; do what you are supposed to do; call the tough shots and move on. But, these guys that stay in there forty years. They're killing us.
Murphy: One more question the timekeeper Christos says. Yes sir?
Emmett Fields: I agree that it has to be done in the courts. I believe you remember that integration was done in the courts. No politician would touch it. I have a ... case in federal court that challenges the right of the government to establish religions. If it cannot establish religions it cannot give them tax exemptions.
Murphy: Good luck on that case. He has a case right now; where are you from? Are you in the Federal system?
Fields: I am in the district court for the district of Columbia is where I filed the case. I'm Emmett Fields, I've probably corresponded with most of you.
Murphy: Well congratulations to you in your efforts and we sure applaud it.
Fields: It's been pending for eight months.
Murphy: Good for you. [applause] Good for you.
Dan: Can I make one final comment? There is just no telling what direction this animal will take. You know, we might end up getting fees against some of these non-profits. It might take a direction that none of us anticipate. What we need to do is just keep the pot boiling. Keep letting them know this is unconstitutional; this is unfair. And by and large, in my view, with the population going out and the resource base going down, we've got to look at a lower standard of living and pretty soon money is going to become progressively more difficult to come by and one way or another we're going to get our way.
Q: I'd like to say something. We have a nucleus of people like you who have a genuine interest in having ... churches pay taxes ... and I would like to suggest that with the nucleus that we have here that we start to contribute and we start to give you support. If you need money let us know. We should be here... That's what we should be doing ... so that we can support each other.
Christos: Well I'd like to commend you John and your team for your efforts, and of course wish you well. My personal opinion of course is that we have to go through the courts because if we force the judges to interpret our Constitution, we have a fair chance, but it's nothing wrong to go through your way. Any effort will be beneficial for all of us. Before we close this session I would like to mention to you that Atheists of Florida sponsors a scholarship fund. We name our scholarship fund after Mark Twain, and it is the Mark Twain scholarship fund. At one o'clock today we are going to present to the winner of last year's competition, the students, they apply and they submit an essay along with their application. The first winner was a young student from University of Florida, Gainesville, and he won the $500 First award. The second winner was from the Institute of Arts in Fort Lauderdale. She won $300. Today we are going to present a certificate to the first winner who is present. Next door in Salon Two where we have our books and pamphlets and other material, there is a booth for the Mark Twain Scholarship fund. The motto of the fund is "It is better to light a candle than to blame the darkness." I think this is very obvious and very profound. We have books available and the proceeds will go to the Mark Twain Scholarship. the book that we have is Mark Twain's Letters from Earth. Most of you must be familiar with the book, but it is not easy to find in the bookstores. So, we had to order them direct from the publisher. There are some other materials you might like to take from the area, and in exchange you can place your contribution because we don't sell this. If you contribute $12 you can get the book of Mark Twain. We cannot sell otherwise we have to collect sales tax. Anyway, along with your big envelope you had something from the scholarship fund, a pamphlet, explaining why we name our scholarship after Mark Twain with different quotes from his many books criticizing religion. Most of the pamphlets or the brochures came with the envelope. Now the envelope is asking you to donate $20, $30, $50, $100, whatever. But if you want to donate even $5, it is very welcome, so we can be able to next year increase or give more scholarships to the students, and I would like to mention the recipients of the scholarship fund, they are not necessarily members of Atheists of Florida. As long as they are free-thinking persons, they are eligible for our scholarship. So, thank you again and you have half hour to go over there and browse, and also we have the TV room where you can see tapes of Atheists of Florida Forum.
Mitch: Christos and I agree on everything except this half hour. It is now what, 10:35? Our next speaker is scheduled at 10:45, so we have not 30 minutes, but ten minutes and I will leave you with this thought. It's better to light one small candle than to set the whole damn house on fire.