Totally offensive. Since when do you have to belong to a church to be an American? Thomas Jefferson would roll over in his grave. There should be no test of religion to apply for US citizenship.
Whatever ignorant bureaucrat told this woman, Margaret Doughty, to join a church needs to be fired on the spot. How long before this group starts telling folks what church they have to belong to.
I very much believe that we also have freedom from religion. Somehow the word “unconstitutional” keeps rattling around in my brain.
Read more: Huffingtonpost.com
I do not see this as substantially different than the IRS scandal in which conservative groups/individuals were (are?) harassed and audited by the IRS. Federal law is administered by a bureaucracy of government workers, some of whom use their power and authority to impose their political agendas, religious beliefs, and biases.
There is always a difference between intent and practical application of legislation. This is one of the reasons that conservatives want to limit the power and scope of government power. Having observed government bureaucracy in the DoD, the strong influence of personal belief/biases in the federal bureaucracy was a constant source of amazement to me: cases like this should also motivate opposition to Obamacare since bureaucratic decisions by individual government workers could have significant life-and-death implications.
Kelly, it wasn’t just conservative groups who got hassled by the IRS. Lots of applicants of both political spectrums got nailed. One such example would be the Coffee Party.
Having said that….I think that the IRS rules for C(3) and C(4) are so bogus and have so many holes you could drive a mac truck through them. Perhaps if the laws were clearly defined there would be less room for abuse.
I think the two cases are very different once we move past the bureaucrat interpretation. There is no religious test for citizenship that I am aware of. There are tests for 501s.
Kelly makes a fair point that a recurring problem with government is that it is populated by fallible humans. They make errors, sometimes whoppers. One tries to organize governments so that, when made, these things get found out and corrected right quick. But things happen.
A major distinction I can see, however, between the IRS snafu and the matter described in Moon’s post is that the legal issue the IRS workers were trying to address was one in which political groups were not eligible for the tax exemption and they were dealing with an onslaught of applications, a large number of which were coming from Tea Party-like local groups. The IRS employees set their filters (quite improperly, but not irrationally) to catch the applications that were coming from the greatest numerical source of exemption requests. Everyone agrees that it was wrong and stupid, but one can understand how they made the mistake.
I can’t even begin to imagine what program or laws the bureaucrat who said that this non-religious applicant for citizenship would have to join a church thought were at stake. It is completely outside any precept of American constitutional democracy that anyone in the country would have such a Taliban-ish view of our system.
The problem was that she is a pacifist and refused to agree to the premise that she would take up arms in defense of the nation. The reply was that there was religious conscientious objector status. The SUGGESTION was that she pick a religion and use that since there was no such status for atheists.
At what point does her age keep that from being an issue?
Why would she choose to be a religious conscientious objecter when she is an atheist?
Hard to figure out how this got so silly and confused. Conscientious objector status only applies to conscription. The Selective Service website states clearly that you can apply for such status using either verifiable religious reasons or non-religious reasons, with the latter apparently requiring witness statements attesting that your personal beliefs and lifestyle have reflected your pacifist claims. And this lady is hardly draft material even if we had a draft. Sounds to me like some bureacratic strings got all tangled up, and the humans involved got thrown for a temporary loop. Probably the first time they ever encountered that situation, especially with a lady “of a certain age” — as they used to say in polite company.
It makes you wonder why a supervisor didnt step in and fix the problem.
Perhaps this all fits in the hearty current theme that government is populated by humans who make dumb mistakes. That is an unavoidable reality. The real concern would be if there were no systems in place to catch the mistakes and prevent them from becoming systemic and perpetual.
The Bengahazi talking points, the IRS filters designed to ping on terms like “Patriot” or “progressive”, the AP/Fox affidavits, all show us that there are dunderheads all over the government. This is another one.