Alternatives to War: Pathways to Peace Panel Albany Friends Meeting New York—March 23, 2002 We each have the right of religious freedom. How is religious freedom related to to law and taxes and war? I'll tell a story from the past and a story from the present day. John Noonan, a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has written an amazing book - The Lustre of Our Country - the American Experience of Religious Freedom. He asserts that free exercise of religion, as James Madison understood it, is a central beacon in US history. Madison's support of religious freedom "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."was the fruit of his own religious faith. The issue was lively in the 1700's - some states had established churches and taxed citizens to pay for clergy - others had charters allowing religious freedom. Madison worked at getting free exercise of religion recognized in law for 15 years. Finally Congress agreed upon the wording for the first amendment of the Bill of Rights. Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Government acknowledgment of this inalienable right had been lived into reality in New York a hundred years before Madison's accomplishment through John Bowne's free exercise of religion. As I understand the story, some Quakers sailing on the ship Woodhouse arrived at Manhattan Island in the Colony of New Netherlands in August 1657. The Woodhouse soon left because Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, had banned any religious exercise in the colony, except for that of the Dutch Reformed Church. However, five Quakers from the Woodhouse stayed behind and preached And preached. They were arrested, beaten and banished.. Stuyvesant had his council pass an anti-Quaker law, saying any resident who entertained Quakers were to be fined. Henry Townsend of Flushing tested the law and was arrested and fined. That December, thirty one Flushing residents approved a "Remonstrance" - a protest against Stuyvesant's ban on the worship of Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists and Quakers.. This Flushing Remonstrance was based on the town charter which promised Flushing's residents "to have and enjoy the Liberty of Conscience, according to the customs and manner of Holland, without molestation or disturbance." Stuyvesant arrested and imprisoned the Town Clerk, the Sheriff and the Magistrates who had signed the Flushing Remonstrance. They suffered fines, were removed from office and all but the Sheriff, Thomas Feake, apologized. Feake's sister Hannah was married to John Bowne. In 1661, Quakers John and Hannah Bowne invited Quakers to meet for worship in their newly built home Bowne was arrested for this and taken abruptly away from Hannah who had recently given birth. Imprisoned in New Amsterdam jail, Bowne refused to pay fines and would not accept the ban on his free exercise of religion. When Stuyvesant brought Hannah to see him hoping he would relent in order to go home, Hannah instead supported John's witness. Then Stuyvesant left the jail house door open but Bowne did not escape to become a fugitive as Stuyvesant hoped. Frustrated, Stuyvesant placed Bowne on a ship bound for Europe. Bowne took care to obtain from Stuyvesant a written copy of the complaint against him and a copy of the Flushing charter. When they arrived in Ireland, the ship's captain seized Bowne's possessions to pay his passage. Without resources, he sought aid from Irish Quakers and eventually was able to go to the Netherlands. From there, after persistent negotiation with the Dutch West India Company, he returned home, bringing a letter from the Company directing Gov. Stuyvesant to observe religious tolerance. He had been gone for two years. By insisting upon free exercise of his religion, John Bowne won more than his own religious freedom. He overcame the authority of the government to establish a state religion . The disposition of his case brought an end to much religious persecution in the colony, .From the Anabaptists settlement in Gravesend to the Jewish immigrants from Brazil in Manhattan , the metropolitan region was already very diverse in its composition. This religious freedom was continued under the English administration.. The Duke of York was forced to establish a representative assembly whose first act was to draft the Charter of Liberties. It included a guarantee to the people of New York against any form of religious persecution. This charter was the basic law of the colony until the Constitution of the United States was adopted with its Bill of Rights. John Bowne was the first clerk of New York Yearly Meeting. - a pattern and example for us. I want to tell you some of my own experience with the issue of religious freedom as a member of New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers, in the context of our militarized society today. I became a Quaker in my fortieth year. I had learned very little about the struggle for human rights in my schooling and very little about the skills of peaceful resolutions of conflict. These are now matters of central interest to me. At the end of the Vietnam war, I joined Quakers and others in providing draft counseling services at a local Presbyterian church. Later I volunteered as with the Alternatives to Violence Project, offering workshops for prisoners in nonviolence. In the eighties, I organized a Friends Peace Center under the care of local Quakers. That was the time when President Carter re instituted draft registration in order to "send a signal" to the Soviet Union during their war in Afghanistan. Drafting women was being considered. I had two daughters and a son near eighteen years old, and we were united as Quakers in the religious conviction that we could not kill others even in war, even enemies. The Friends Peace Center provided counseling for those concerned in conscience by participation in war and it encouraged the study and practice of nonviolent alternatives. The impetus for this full time, unpaid work arose from a personal spiritual experience. In April of l981 I received a telephone call from a friend active in the governance of her church. She said she could no longer as a Christian pay her income taxes for war. She had discussed this with her minister and decided, with his approval, to give the military portion of her taxes to the Quakers because of their work for peace. I had not yet finished my own tax return that year because I felt nauseated whenever I tried to work on it. In the moment of that phone call, the meaning of my visceral protest was clear and said I would join her in witness. This gut reaction was what some call a crystallization of conscience. A Peace Tax Escrow Account was soon established under the care of local Quakers. Conscientious objectors could place their taxes into the account - the tax money to be held in trust for the government until the government recognizes our right to free exercise of religion by providing for the taxes to go for nonmilitary purposes. Every year, for twenty years now, my income taxes go into this escrow account and I write to the government to tell them it is an act based on religion. Eventually the government seizes the amount of my escrowed taxes from my personal checking account adding statutory penalties and interest. After the manner of Friends, the amount of penalties are recorded in the minutes of our Business Meeting as sufferings for conscience sake. I am the wrong age and the wrong gender for military service but I know my conscripted taxes pay for war. They pay for CIA assassinations. They pay for the School of Americas to train foreign military personnel to violently oppress their own people. They pay for the genocidal development and possession of nuclear weapons, declared illegal by the World Court. Again and again I remember Alexander Haig's comment when a million people demonstrated against nuclear weapons in Central Park on June 12, l981. He said,
I work for the passage of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, This legislation would allow conscientious objectors a way to pay their full taxes and have them allocated by Congress to nonmilitary purposes. Other countries have similar proposed laws. I also work with Conscience and Peace Tax International, an non governmental organization that. has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. and works in New York and Geneva to support this right. Conscientious objection to military service is recognized by the United Nations as a human right derived from religious freedom. The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights regularly monitors and reports on the way that countries acknowledge or abuse conscientious objectors. The US courts recognize conscientious objection only as a "legislative grace.", The courts uphold the Selective Service Act. In this law, conscientious objectors are defined as those who cannot participate in war in any form by reason of religious training and belief or because of moral and ethical beliefs that function in the individual's life in the same way as a religious conviction, This law provides an exemption from conscription for conscientious objectors and gives them alternative service .It also allows for an honorable discharge for those in the military whose objection to war crystallizes after they join. However eighteen year olds, required to register under felony penalties for the draft, are not allowed to register as conscientious objectors. .The US courts have never recognized conscientious objection to as a constitutional right, contrary to Madison's intent and to the charters of several colonies that preceeded the Revolutionary war. Nor do the courts accept arguments based on international law, the Nuremberg principles or the UN's standards of human rights. This is a weakness , a failure in our legal system. As a conscientious objector, part of my commitment is to pursue any judicial remedies open to me. So in 1998 I agreed to bring a test case based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the free exercise clause of the US constitution and some established principles for IRS treatment of religious exceptions. My attorneys were experienced in this field. The issue in Packard vs the United States was whether the government could apply discretionary penalties against me for placing my taxes in escrow because of my religious beliefs. The judge in the Federal District Court in Connecticut made mistakes in his decision to dismiss my case. For one thing, he did not require evidence in addition to argument from the government as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act required. So we appealed to the US Second Circuit Court.. Amicus briefs were filed by New York Quakers in support of the legal issues and witness. There the court asserted, without logic, that the voluntary payment of taxes is the least restrictive means for the government to use when it burdens the religion of a someone who cannot voluntarily pay. .Various lawyers I spoke with affirmed the legal basis of my case but warned that the courts would not engage the issues that we raised. This is what happened when we appealed to the US Supreme Court, again with an amicus brief from New York Quakers. On April 17, 2000, tax day, the US Supreme Court denied certiorari. - that is refused to hear the case. It had responded similarly to two other Quaker cases in New England and Philadelphia earlier that year. I believe the three Quaker cases increased understanding of the issues in the legal and religious communities. One contribution of the conscientious objector is to unmask oppression. My attorney Peter Goldberger helped me do this when he quoted from the IRS internal manual for its employees in the brief:
As Peter said, apparently the court thinks the IRS is exempt from the first amendment. Is God a power distinct from our own or is God is a projection of personal and collective need? It makes a difference which definition that you use because projection, the common humanistic interpretation of religious phenomena, affords no secure footing for religious freedom,according to Judge Noonan. Noonan says that his own bias is that religion is both transcendent and projection and that no one can approach the subject of religious freedom without a religious bias. He believes that the remedy for the violence and hatred that we have seen caused by religion is free exercise of religion. I agree. When the courts changed from championing slavery to repudiating it, transcendent religious witness was the energy field that changed the social context allowing the courts to also change. This happened again when the civil rights movement challenged the attitude of the courts which had supported segregation to ruling against segregation. Noonan advises us that the US Courts tend view the military, the tax system and the judiciary as sacred. - beyond attack. Has a defacto state religion based national security been established? Should the government make itself a final authority to be obeyed without question? Is free exercise of religion not a check against this tendency? In the present crisis, the United States is planning an extended global war for empire . An email, circulated this week in response, quotes Hermann Goering's statement at the Nuremberg Trials.:
Are we learning this war spirit from the Nazi's as well as learning from the Nazi's how to make those atomic bombs? As I say these words, I remember that in 1945, after we killed 100,000 people with those atomic bombs, Life Magazine stated in an editorial;
Is conscientious objection to war an aberration - a position only a minority hold? Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman who has taught psychology at West Point doesn't think so. In his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost Of Learning To Kill In War And Society: Grossman cites military studies of soldiers in W.W.II which showed that only 15 to 20 percent of combat soldiers were willing to fire their weapons .Most would avoid it in what ever way they could even at risk of their own life. Grossman says conscientious objection is the normal state of men. In order to turn them into soldiers ,willing to kill, the military has to condition and desensitize them to do so. As a result of new forms of training, 90% in the Vietnam War were willing to kill.. Grossman is not himself a conscientious objector but he expresses respect for that position and concern for what happens to soldiers after war ends. As we all do. One of the tragic consequences of the Vietnam War is that more veterans have committed suicide after the war than were killed in the war. In all wars, conscientious objection arise as a witness against war. New Profile, a women's group in Israel, is presently supporting over 350 Israeli conscientious objectors.. Mothers for Peace on both sides in the war in Chechnya went to the authorities to insist that their sons not be used as soldiers and took their sons home. Churches in Columbia have formed seminaries to allow young men to be exempt for the military by attending them. The story of conscientious objection, past and present, is not often taught in school, and the rights of conscientious objection as religious liberty are not known to most people. It is a hidden story on which a peaceful world depends. At this time of year when Easter and Passover approach and April 15 tax day is soon to follow, I think back to Jesus and his response to those who would entrap him by asking if Jews should pay taxes to Caesar? I remember that Jesus had been born in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph had gone because Rome had instituted a new tax to pay for war and empire. It was a time of great social and religious challenge for the Jews. Jesus asked his questioners to show him a coin, the denarius which had been specially minted by Rome only for tax purposes. It had an image of Caesar and an inscription attributing divinity to Caesar graven on it. Mere possession of such a coin by the Jews was contrary to Jewish law. Not paying the tax was contrary to Roman law. When Jesus answered "Render under to Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's, did he advise obedience to Rome before obedience to God? It seems to me he was unmasking the idolatry involved in empire and war. We each have the inalienable right to choose who or what we worship. And the consequences of our choice are a matter of life and death for ourselves and for others.
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