Tax agency continuing attacks on Christians and conservatives

Bob Unruh
WND News Center

Back in the days of Barack Obama’s White House, the IRS schemed to deprive Christians and conservatives of their constitutional rights.

Their organization applications, submitted to the IRS for approval so they could operate heading into the 2012 election, were ignored, delayed, lost and more.

Further, the IRS grilled these organizations about the content of their prayers, their membership and more – all of which was beyond what it was allowed to ask.

Directing it all was Lois Lerner, an IRS officials who pled the Fifth before Congress and when found in contempt, was given a free pass by Obama’s Department of Justice.

That was Lois Lerner Part 1. Now comes Lois Lerner Part 2, according to a report from Just the News.

The IRS under Joe Biden, like the IRS under Obama, has “subjected an elections nonprofit to a battery of prying questions about its policy positions, language choices and methodology for arriving at correct opinions and conclusions prior to peremptorily rejecting its application for tax-exempt status without appeal.”

Americans are familiar with the first round of attacks on Christians and Tea Party organizations under Obama. Eventually the federal government had to pay out millions to the groups it damaged.

That was when the Exempt Organizations Unit under Lerner targeted the groups with “intrusive scrutiny,” which froze them with “lengthy audits.”

Now the campaign by leftists in Washington is coming against an election education nonprofit called Adams, Baldwin, and Covey Foundation.

Founder Phill Kline charged the IRS has demanded answers to questions like, “Have you held [a] particular position or view on certain issues or topics? If you do, please detail the position or views of your organization,” and “Do you have any policy/policies or guidance in place to avoid unsupported opinions or conclusions and inflammatory language in the activities?”

Kline’s response to the first, “Please provide the justification for this request and also whether similar requests are made of all non-profit organizations addressing these and similar issues. [Adams, Baldwin, and Covey Foundation] views the Constitution as an enduring document that honors in application the intrinsic value of each and every individual achieved by respecting the inherent rights of the individual and the appropriate disbursement of governmental power. Elections provide an important expression of the power held by individual citizens and must, therefore, be transparent, inclusive, and accountable.”

And to the second, “ABC’s mission is to respect the intrinsic value of the individual and thereby does not seek to denigrate persons. Our work is subject to public scrutiny and challenge and [we] consistently work to answer such challenges in the marketplace of ideas. Similarly, government must respect the expression of individuals, particularly those with whom those presently in power disagree. ABC maintains this becomes difficult to do when government focuses the exercise of its power on conforming thought and speech to such vague terms as ‘inflammatory language’ as doing so invites the arbitrary and capricious application of governmental power.”

Kline said the latest round of assaults against conservatives and those of faith, by the IRS under Biden, is “further evidence that the Biden administration believes it has the authority to license thought and speech, and it doesn’t.”

The questions were sent by the agency when the citizens group applied for tax-exempt status.

Just the News explained, “Some of the IRS questions reflect the far-reaching efforts by the Biden administration in collaboration with allies in the corporate and nonprofit worlds to recast dissent from official affirmations of the invariant purity of U.S. elections as ‘disinformation’ subject to censorship and even prosecution in the name of domestic security or ‘democracy.'”

Kline charged that “The thought police have found a home in the Biden administration.”

He said the questions were not “proper questions” for the government.

Just the News documented, “ABC’s attorneys submitted its application for tax exempt status to the IRS on Sept. 28, 2021. The attorneys say they did not hear back from the agency until Aug. 10, 2022, despite making multiple attempts in the interim to follow up on next steps. On that date, the attorneys received an IRS notice dated July 25 that the agency had rejected the foundation’s application. The IRS cited the nonprofit’s failure to respond to its questions as the basis for its ruling, according to the foundation’s attorney.”

But that wasn’t true, the lawyers explained. They said they got a letter Sept. 25, 2022, that was actually dated May 23 asking questions, and setting a deadline of June 20.

Even after Lerner’s agenda was exposed, and the government paid damages, there was evidence Obama’s campaign was continuing.

In fact, the American Center for Law and Justice took the Biden version of the IRS to court over its continuing war against Christians, including one group called Christians Engaged.

In that case, the IRS put into writing the wildly untenable claim that the group’s beliefs about Christianity, the “sanctity of life, the definition of marriage, biblical justice, laws vs. lawlessness, freedom of speech, religious liberty, government and business ethics, human trafficking, fiscal responsibility in government budgeting, defense, borders and immigration, U.S. and Israel relations” all are “typically affiliated with the [Republican] party and candidates.”

The IRS soon had to back off, and it eventually granted Christians Engaged the status it needed to operate.

But there were so many questions left that the ACLJ filed a Freedom of Information Act request, then a lawsuit, over the IRS plans to target Christians with “discrimination.”

The ACLJ said in a report, “No government agency should target Americans over their political beliefs or religious convictions. That is simply un-American. But once again, emboldened by the Biden administration’s leftist ideology-driven agenda, the IRS is targeting conservative and Christian organizations.”