Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt, PhD, Praying In Jesus Name: The Obama Administration caved in to atheists and again threatens church pastors.

"The IRS has agreed to
pay closer attention to what is said in houses of worship after reaching a settlement with a secularist group in federal court last week,"
reports LifeSiteNews.
"On Friday, the IRS settled a lawsuit filed in 2012 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). The Wisconsin [atheist] group brought the lawsuit because it said the IRS was ignoring complaints about churches violating their tax-exempt statuses.
"Specifically, FFRF said many churches promote political issues, legislation, and/or candidates
from the pulpit in violation of the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which requires that non-profits not endorse candidates.
"According to FFRF, the IRS has not followed a 2009 ruling requiring it to hire someone to keep an eye on church politicking. The IRS says it hasn't ignored the ruling, but merely failed to follow it.
"The government has put a moratorium on the IRS’ investigations of tax-exempt organizations after the scandal that broke in 2013 over its targeting of pro-life, pro-family, and Tea Party groups. FFRF says that even though the IRS will not enforce the agreement because of the moratorium, they can still bring the lawsuit again if needed after the moratorium is lifted.
"FFRF said in a press release that it filed the lawsuit because of Pulpit Freedom Sunday, which in 2012 involved approximately
1,500 church leaders delivering sermons on the intersection between politics and Scripture." Many dare to mail recordings of their sermons to the IRS, inviting a lawsuit, but the IRS does not sue because they know they'd lose in court. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, especially in church.
IRS Lost 2 years Emails, Lois Lerner hides from Congress.
Defying a Congressional subpoena, the IRS chief who persecuted conservative groups
cannot locate two years of emails from 2009 to 2011 when she is accused of conspiring with White House officials and Congressional Democrats to break the law.
Using the IRS' tax power to audit the political enemies of the Obama Administration, the cover-up now
smells of abuse of power, political corruption, and lying to Congress.
Strangely, Lerner reportedly can only provide internal emails she sent to her fellow IRS co-workers, but claims any emails she sent to Democrats were "deleted" from all servers.
Dave Camp (R-CA), The Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (and my friend, whom I met in DC last summer, to encourage his investigation of IRS corruption),
said:
"The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now
calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General."
The IRS
claims a
hard-drive crash caused the loss of external emails which Lerner likely sent to Democrats in the White House and Congress,
but did not affect internal emails she sent to her co-workers. [That's a pretty selective crash, don't you think?]
The 1954 Johnson Amendment law is not just unconstitutional, it's also un-American.
Hundreds of courageous pastors take a stand every October, by violating the Johnson Amendment law and preaching about politics (just one Sunday per year) in the pulpit. Many send transcripts to the IRS demanding their own punishment, and daring the IRS to sue them in court, or try to revoke their church's non-profit IRS status.
So far the IRS has failed, repeatedly, to enforce the Johnson Amendment, because they themselves admit the law violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The government cannot tax or punish free speech, especially in church.
Religion itself is highly political, because God is God, and the devil wants to rule in His place. Nowadays the devil uses corrupt politicians to rule society and pass immoral laws.
Throughout America's history, starting with the Revolution, our nation's pastors spoke freely on political and moral issues of their day. It was not only their privilege but their duty to preach truth to power, against immorality and corruption. Historian James H. Huston wrote of 1776: "Preachers seemed to vie with their brethren in other colonies in arousing their congregations against George III." Mr. Huston also discovered the House of Representatives sponsored church services in its chambers for the first 100 years. They only stopped when better transportation took members of Congress home for the weekend.
In the mid-nineteenth century,
evangelical Christians were primary agents in shaping American political culture and ending slavery, according to Richard Carwardine, author of Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. "Political sermons, triumphalism and doom laden, redolent with biblical imagery and theological terminology, were a feature of the age," he writes.
In the 1856
election, one minister distilled the question before
voters as a contest pitting "truth and falsehood,
liberty and tyranny, light and darkness, holiness and sin . . . the two great armies of the battlefield of the universe, each contending for victory." Language like this today earns a pastor a visit or letter from the Internal Revenue Service.
In 1992, the Church at Pierce Creek in Vestal, New York placed a newspaper ad warning Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton for president. Casting a vote for Clinton, the ad warned in rhetoric echoing 1856, would be committing a sin.
The IRS took notice and three years later revoked the conservative church's tax exemption.
But the IRS does not enforce this law fairly. For example in 1994 another church in New York welcomed "New York governor Mario Cuomo (D-NY) campaigned for reelection on a Sunday morning at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem.
Cuomo was rewarded with a long, loud round of applause and an unequivocal endorsement from the pastor," according to a Newsday report.
But the IRS never stops liberals. The American Center for Law and Justice, which represented the Church at Pierce Creek, uncovered evidence at trial that the IRS knew of more than 500 instances in which candidates appeared before churches, as happened with Governor Cuomo and Bethel A.M.E., but took no action to revoke these churches' tax-exempt status.
The Johnson law is being used by the Government to shape the messages of the Church and its pastors.
Conservative churches are silenced, but liberal churches are freely politicized. This Government
censorship of ANY Church is plain and simple illegal. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech." Yet that is exactly what Congress did, and the IRS now does, by silencing churches.
Bottom line:
Our pastors are being silenced. Let's take the gag off conservative churches, and restore the First Amendment freedom of speech to our pulpits.
Friends, our Congress must vote on the record, for or against pulpit freedom. Let's take a stand today, and demand free speech be restored to churches and pastors.
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