Spirit in Action
Praying for Peace, Paying for Peace, Part Two - War Tax Resistance in Georgia and in Federal Court
I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from this struggle and weak from growing old. I have no hands but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give and make you the ragged and the morn. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue, through you and will be done. Fingers have I none to help untie. The tangled nuts and twisted chains the strangle fearful minds. Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind. Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be sharing our second visit with some people scattered across the USA who refuse to pay taxes which go to fund the war machine of our nation. This is all the more important for us as we approach tax day, April 15, when Americans hurry to file their income tax forms, sometimes aware of, but also often blind to the fact that almost 50% of every federal income tax dollar goes to fund war or the preparation for war. Some individuals have found within themselves a conscientious objection to sending their dollars to fund the military and thereby be complicit in the killing and damage done, typically in the name of national security. My two guests today are from the northeastern and southeastern corners of the USA. Dan Jenkins is currently before the Federal Appellate Court in Manhattan seeking recognition for conscientious objection for taxpayers based on the 9th Amendment to our federal constitution. We'll first visit with Robert Randall, a deeply committed Christian from Georgia who serves with the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. Welcome to Spirit In Action Robert. Are you a longtime resident down there? I was raised in South Georgia but over on the west side of the state in Albany I was raised a conservative United Methodist Christian during the 1960s, but of course when you're growing up in the 1960s you have to confront the possibility of being personally involved in war so I did that within the context of my Christian experience and God's spirit led me to a pacifist Christian faith and of course an obvious component of that was to not pay for war, a practice that I've been following for over 30 years now. You said that the step of not paying for war taxes was an obvious step but I think that for most Christians they don't look at it that way. What Christian group did you get connected with and what led you to this conversion of your ideas? It was so long ago that it's hard for me to remember exactly but you know Jesus is very clear in the gospels about the connection between money and faithfulness and wealth and passing through the eye of a needle. There's one point at which Jesus says your heart will always be where your treasure is. It's just very, very obvious to me that one cannot be a Christian and at the same time pay for killing the very people for whom Christ died. So it's clear that Jesus and his teachings are central to what you believe about war tax resistance or war tax conversion as I believe you call it. Are there any main threads, any main values, any main principles that best capture what's important about war tax resistance to you? For me it's primarily an issue of faithfulness, a question of who is God or to put it in that most ancient of decisions. It's about idolatry, a heedy worship. As Jesus said your heart will always be where your treasure is. The issue of where we choose to put our money has to do with who we trust, who we rely on from whence comes our salvation and to spend your money on war is to say that you believe that these false gods of metal, the bombs and the bullets and the tanks and the battleships and the missiles are the things that are going to save us and that is exactly the opposite of trusting in God for our security and our salvation. We live in a national security state and of course the Christian is supposed to live in a God security state. So to me it is so central to my faithfulness that I have no choice about it. There is no way that I can pay for war. You said that the church you grew up in was conservative. They wouldn't be supportive of your practice of war tax resistance now. Well the United Methodist Church officially on the national general conference level does support war tax resistance. It supports conscientious objection and it has supported the legislative efforts to create the religious freedom piece tax fund. But no my local church in Albany, Georgia of course my position would be probably pretty extreme to any of those folks. Where did you go from your conservative Methodist upbringing? Did you stay church all the way through or what kind of transition did you actually go through in the 1960's? Well I graduated from high school in the spring of 1970's so I mean I literally grew up in the 60's. Those were my teenage years. I had some experiences beyond the local church because I was involved in the conference level youth ministry activities so I got a chance to meet people from other places and one of the big experiences for me was coming to a conference youth ministry event over here on the coast at Pitt-Eppworth by the Sea and meeting some Christians from other countries from Southeast Asia. And just being opened up to the reality that God is a God of all people and that God loves all people and that folks don't have to be like me in order to be under the care of God. Once one becomes open to the expansiveness of God's love then it becomes contradictory to be involved in anything that would have to do with killing as I said the people for whom Christ died. Like church or religious group or non-religious group did you get involved with from there or did you just stay United Methodist all along? I guess currently my theological position would be more in line with sojourners, the radical evangelical Christian social justice position that sojourners takes is the one that I resonate with the most. You know Robert when I first talked to you this morning you said that you were really pumped to start talking about war tax resistance right now. You want to mention to our audience what the event was that got you keyed up about it? Well yes, I just opened the letter from the war resistors league which contains this year's pie chart that shows the breakdown or where your federal income tax money goes. And this year there's a special little note in there from national war tax resistance coordinating committee on which I'm currently serving as an alternate member. So it's signed by myself and six other of my good friends from around the country encouraging people to donate to the war resistors league because it has always been such a supporter of war tax resistance which I happen to prefer to call war tax conversion because most war tax resistors take that money that they're not sending to the war machine and use that money for other good purposes to meet human needs or to work for peace. So it's really conversion and the most deeply religious sense of the word. The sense you serve as an alternate on the national war tax resistance coordinating committee. Perhaps you can share with our listeners a website or other contact information if people want to connect up with this. I think they've got a rich assortment of information for people who are thinking about war tax resistance or as you say war tax conversion. Yes, NWTRCC.org is the website. It's just initials for national war tax resistance coordinating committee.org. And what exactly will they find there on the website? They'll find a lot of basic information about war tax resistance. They'll find links to our national network of area contacts and counselors. We maintain a network all over the country so that people can find someone relatively close to wherever they are to talk with and counsel with. They'll find lots of information about how to do war tax resistance. The national war tax resistance coordinating committee puts out a whole series of practical pamphlets that get into very minute detail about issues that arise when you start dealing with taxes and with the IRS. They'll find a link to join our listserv. We have a listserv nationally, well, internationally I guess since it's on the internet, a listserv for people that are interested in war tax resistance issues and a lot of other things there at that time. Did you start out right away doing full-scale income tax, redirection, conversion, resistance? Or did you start out as a lot of people did in the 1960s when there was the big movement to not pay the phone tax, the federal excise tax on phone services, which had its roots as a war tax specifically when it was founded many decades before? I began with income tax because I became a Christian pacifist before I ever had to confront the issue of paying taxes. No, I wasn't making enough money when I was in college to have to deal with that. It was after I left college and after I got married and after I got a job and started earning enough income that I had to deal with it. By then, I already had six years of being a pacifist under my belt. You mentioned, Richard, that you started actually doing war tax conversion after you got married, so I guess this was a household decision with you and your wife both participating. Well, actually, no. One of the great tribulations or problems that I've had throughout my 30 years of war tax redirection is that I'm in what those of us in the war tax resistance movement calling mixed marriage, where one spouse is a tax resistor and the other spouse is not. My basic decision about not paying for war was not a household decision because I came into the marriage with that position. I already was a pacifist long before I got married. Their decisions about how to deal with that, of course, are household decisions, and my wife made a decision to support me in what I had to do in order to be faithful. Does the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee also provide some legal resources? I want to remind folks that that website is the initials for the organization, n-w-t-r-c-c-dot-o-r-g. So do they provide some legal resources? Yes, we have legal resources. In fact, in the old days, we had a big, huge, thick legal manual that some lawyers had put together for us, and some of us still refer back to that from time to time. Although, of course, the laws have changed on some elements of it, but we have access to some key attorneys in the country who make a point of keeping up with and specializing in the laws that relate to war tax resistance. The number of lawyers in the country who actually do that are accountable on one hand, but when we need legal advice, we get it. You know, Robert, I'm wondering in your association with the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. If you have any sense of the number of people actually practicing war tax resistance in the U.S. right now, nobody really does have any idea. We generally say maybe 10 to 20,000, but in my opinion, there's not much of a basis for that figure because not paying for war tends to be a very personal decision, and the way in which people do that varies so greatly, and a lot of times it's intricately connected with other related issues, like just basic issues about lifestyle or basic attitudes towards government. So, for example, a person who chooses to totally drop out of the system and basically live in the underground economy, do you count them as a war tax resister or not, and even more basic, how do you even count them? Because by definition, if they're living outside of the system, you don't have a way to count them, so nobody really knows how many. You mentioned that one of the more challenging aspects of your war tax redirection is how you've worked that out with your wife. Are there other aspects of the experience that have been particularly challenging? Have you had tribulations in doing your war tax redirection over the years? Not in my opinion, because from a faith perspective, I count all things as being to the glory of God that come my way as a result of practicing this particular type of faithfulness. So, the occasional seizure of money from a bank account or garnishment of wages or things like that that some people might consider to be tribulations or difficulties, I don't view them that way, I just view that as a natural logical result of the faithfulness. The Beatitudes ends up with blessed are you and people curse you and hate you and revile you and burrow you in jail for my sake, that it's a blessing. Mostly war tax resistance is just a very boring form of civil disobedience because nothing happens. You go on with your life and that's it. Have there been seizures of your property or of your funds by the IRS that have put you in a tough spot? No, one of the advantages about war tax resistance as a form of civil disobedience is that it's very much under the control of the person doing the civil disobedience. It's a slow motion of civil disobedience. You know, it's not like sitting in at a congressional office or crossing a line in a military installation where somebody comes and arrests you and then you're physically in the custody of someone else and you have no control over the situation anymore. With war tax resistance, you're entirely in control and you know what you're doing and you know how much you're not paying and you can decide the extent to which you want to provide for the possibility of any kind of a seizure or whatever. So if you provide for those eventualities, then it's not very likely to get you in any kind of a real bind. We also have a war tax resistors penalty fund that exists within the country that's administered by the Fellowship of Reconciliation Chapter in North Manchester, Indiana, and through that fund, people from all over the country share in the expense of the burden of additional interest and penalties that might be seized from somebody else who's a member of the fund. So if somebody does have a seizure, those extra additional interest and penalties get spread out amongst hundreds of people and you know that kind of evens things out for us. I'd like some of your thoughts, Robert, on one of the major stumbling blocks for many people who consider doing war tax resistance and that is that frequently, when the government comes after you and levies your account or gets it from your paycheck, they end up taking not only the original amount, but the penalties and fees and interests that they impose on you afterwards. And so in other words, it feels really horrible to not only be letting them have their money for the military through that means, but the fact that they're getting extra, maybe even twice as much as they would have got otherwise. My wife and I have been discussing this just recently and my wife raised this concern because in fact we're in the process of having the federal government levy money from her paycheck for not only the back taxes, but the penalties and interest which have almost doubled that amount at this point. How do you end up thinking about that? How do you deal with that from a point of view of conscience? I have several responses to that. One response is that the war tax resistance or redirection movement taken as a whole clearly keeps a lot more money away from the war machine than what the war machine ends up getting back out of it. The only time I know of that anybody really did a survey on that and tried to get a sense of it was the New England War Tax Resistance Group about 20 years ago surveyed their people and they found that the government eventually got about one third of the resisted tax money, the other two thirds they never got. Using that and extrapolating from that and realizing that that survey could only be done amongst people who were identified as war tax resistors and therefore did not touch a whole lot of the out of the system people. We can feel good about the fact that as a whole we are keeping money away. However, what your wife is talking about of course is your own personal individual situation and yours sounds pretty similar to mine because apparently neither one of us have arranged things in a way to prevent the government from eventually seizing money or collecting from us. My responses to that are twofold. Number one, focusing on the money is falling into the trap of materialism. In our society money is granted way, way too much importance and it really isn't about the money, it's about conscience and faithfulness. The government doesn't fight wars with money that it has anyway, it fights wars with money that it's borrowing so war tax resistance doesn't keep money away from the war machine in any tangible physical dollar for dollar way, that's not what it's about. War tax resistance is about confronting the war machine with an alternative reality and an alternative spirituality and an alternative faithfulness because that alignment of myself with God is the only thing that really is going to put an end to war. If you could speak to our leaders, the House Senate, President, our generals, what would you want to say to them about war tax resistance or about war tax redirection? Well my first message of course is there should be no war taxes because there should be no war. I mean as a Christian pacifist my message to them would be that God through Christ has shown us a better way and that way is to love your enemies and to do good to those who curse you and do bad things to you and to turn the other cheek and on and on and on you know just quote the gospel up and down. If we actually lived that then we would be in a much better world and the issue of war taxes would be moot, you know that's the first thing I would say to them. The second thing is but if you cannot see your way towards that then at the very least you should honor the religious freedom of those of us who are called by God to live our lives that way and there needs to be provision within the tax code for that religious freedom or another way to put that is you know the concept of conscience, subjection that currently exists within the selective service laws need to be carry over and put into the tax laws as well. Could you say a few words Robert about why you prefer to deal with war tax conversion or war tax redirection as a concept instead of war tax resistance and how that works for you? Well the redirection does feel very good and in fact the redirection is the point at which the money does make a difference you know at that point because we're on a completely different scale small amounts of money make a huge difference so if the amount of income taxes that I'm refusing to pay this year is a thousand dollars that's nothing to the war machine it might be a lot to this little group in my own community that's struggling to do something good for people you know right down there the street level. You know Robert I think a lot of people worry that if they do war tax resistance that they're going to be thrown into prison or something are there any other consequences of doing war tax redirection that people should be aware of if they're thinking about this? Another thing that's happened in our experience with this that doesn't happen to very many people I always wonder whether or not I should mention it because it is so rare is that in 1984 my wife and I did experience a house seizure and that word is even not appropriate because the house was never really seized it's all just a paperwork thing but that year the IRS it's sort of like if you happen to stumble across a revenue agent who for some reason decides they really want to get their money from you then you might be privileged to experience something like this but that year the IRS did do the paperwork to season sell our house yeah it was it was just a fantastic experience because I alerted all the media to it the media came out and did interviews with us you know I was on each of the major network stations in Atlanta on the front page of the paper the IRS decided to do a sealed bid auction to avoid the publicity around a public auction so we got all of our friends and other people in the war tax resistance group and connected groups in Atlanta to send in alternative sealed bids things like so many hours of community service or food for Central America and a lot of creative alternative bids that the IRS agent had to sit there and open up and read through as they did the sealed bid and again is another example of how war tax resistance is civil disobedience that's under your control we went the very next day and redeemed the house back from the winning bidder because under the law when the IRS sells off real estate you have 180 days in which you can redeem the property back from the winning bidder and so we did that having collected up the money that we would need in order to be able to do that ahead of time so it you know it's just a wonderful experience we got way more publicity than one could ever ever hope to purchase and made the public witness that there is an alternative way to think about one's relationship to the government and the government's relationship to your money and your money's relationship to your faithfulness that's a wonderful and inspiring story to hear and I know that I asked you earlier about what communities were upholding you in your faithfulness and it's clear from that story that you've had a whole group of people who've been there for you and made your witness possible and fruitful community is important the nice thing about new technology and and the internet and and websites and listsers and all that kind of thing is that we no longer are bound to a geographically based community so even if you're out in the middle of tiny rural town USA and you don't think there's anybody else around who believes the way you do or is willing to redirect their federal income taxes which is probably not a true belief in the first place you know most people just don't get out to find the other people who think the way we do but even if you are in that kind of situation there now is the ability to link up with plenty of other people and become a part of that broader community all around the country well I'm pretty sure you have more stories to share but I think it's time we better be moving on so I just want to thank you Robert for your service as a witness all of these thirty thirty plus years also your service with the national war tax resistance coordinating committee which again website is n w t r c c dot org and I want to just thank you for speaking with me well and thank you so much for your twenty five years of war tax resistance and for doing this show and getting the word out to people thank you again Robert you've been listening to a spirit and action interview with Robert Randall who serves with the national war tax resistance coordinating committee and who has carried his witness of faithfulness through war tax conversion as he prefers to call it for about thirty years now those of you familiar with my show know that I'd like to toss in a bit of thematic music here and there and when I asked Robert if he had any songs that were particularly powerful and applicable to him he immediately thought of Buffy St. Marie's song universal soldier but Robert had also just rewritten words for this song this past year to the theme of the universal taxpayer so I asked him to share his rewritten lyrics so this is Robert Randall and his version of universal taxpayer he's earning for two or for one or for more she's working with paper or gears she's working full time or only part time we've been working for a thousand years we're paying from our paychecks and we're paying with returns and we know we shouldn't pay but we know we will anyway we'll pay to kill each other with those forms and we're paying for the good we're paying because we should we're paying as a responsibility responsible for weapons and responsible for bombs and we think we'll put an end to war this way and we're paying for the soldiers we're paying for the press who says it's for the piece of all where the ones who must decide if we're paying for his lie but just go on with filling out that form and without our money how would Bush kill the people of Iraq without it Saddam would have stood alone where the ones who give our money as a weapon of the war and without us all this killing can't go on where the universal taxpayer and we really are to blame blood money comes from far away no more it is the taxes of you and me and people can't you see this is not the way we put an end to war that was Robert Randall and his rewrite of universal soldier talking about today's spirit in action issue war tax resistance I'm mark helps meet your host for this and other northern spirit radio productions and I'm from the Midwest USA while our first guest Robert is from the southeastern USA and will now move to another long term war tax resistor this one from the northeastern USA Dan Jenkins was raised Quaker spent a term in the peace corps in Nepal and is currently appealing his case on war tax resistance through the federal courts Dan thanks so much for joining me for spirit in action thank you for finding me and inviting me to say a few words Dan you're in the midst of or actually you're pretty far along in the process of a court case concerning war tax resistance can you update me and my audience on where that is where you've been where you're going with that court case the court case is in the middle of a sequence of in the federal courts there was just an oral argument at the second circuit court down in Manhattan on February 22nd started out in the tax court a number couple of years ago was turned down by that court summary judgment but I persisted with every opportunity to submit and ask for reconsideration to the courts and the tax case I was handling myself with some assistance and suggestions from others but now I have an attorney that's handling the case at the appeals level we will wait now for the court to make a decision we're hoping to go back at least to the tax court and actually make a full argument which I was denied before the case is opening some new ideas and thinking about the liberty of conscience rights that belong to all of us as Americans and we'll take the case in whichever direction it's open to us how did you get involved in this stuff Dan have you long been a war tax resistor or actually what's the term that you prefer to use I consider myself a military tax with holder because I calculate what I owe the government in taxes and I withhold portion and put it in escrow I consider that the government's money we do not have a dispute the government and I about what is owed I don't spend on on other things I'm basically saying that the government has a right to ask for taxes but there's also an individual right of conscience that requires an accommodation that I need not be coerced into supporting a military preparations either in person in service but also in terms of supplying the armament the weapons through funding how long have you been doing this Dan pretty much after I was a I returned from a p-score job being a p-score volunteer as soon as my income required me to pay income tax I've been pretty much doing it since that time which is the mid 80s every year that I've owed a significant amount I've written a letter in of conscience and put the money usually in escrow in some past years the money was eventually levied by the IRS from a checking account there have been times when they never bothered and I just left the money in the escrow account which gets used for other life-affirming purposes and then in 87 I ended up in tax court once before this was a separate case I did it myself and I was in the small claims process and then in 2001 I owed enough money that I needed to make a decision and I just decided to take every option I had available to me in terms of communicating with the IRS and the Treasury Department and take every appeal process that I could and just see how far I could go well you know how many years since then and that's the case it's now at the federal appeals level and we'll pretty likely go on from there I'm a little unclear Dan what was there that was different about 2001 why in 2001 did you end up being able to or deciding to fight it as opposed to in other years it just turned out that in 2001 I owed it was about two thousand dollars at that particular moment I had the opportunity to go through the process again and that's what I decided I would do I would just take every step it's not necessary to take every step in dealing with the internal revenue service if you don't make every effort to make every appeal there are time clocks and they run out after you get certain types of notifications and if those time clocks run out the government by statute has the right to levy or try to obtain those tax with owed by levy or other means but if you follow the regulations that's what I did decided to do in 2001 was to follow every opportunity and not just make a statement and then take the hit so to speak in '87 I ended up in the court the government was asking for a fine to be imposed and it turned out I read a statement when we had our hearing I was actually stunned when I went into the courtroom I'd never been in a courtroom before and when I walked in there was actually in all this sort of insignia up on the wall it was a U.S. seal that said in God we trust right on the seal just like it says on the dollar bill I had a statement of the reason I had withheld the money and why I felt it was appropriate and then I also mentioned to the judge that behind him on the wall was posted the phrase and God we trust and he really had to contain himself from like turning around and looking behind him I said it does not say in military strength we trust or in armaments we trust and I just said I tried to live by the maxim which is displayed in the courtroom and I hope that that would help to explain my actions concerning my federal income taxes whether that had anything to do with it the penalty was not applied at that time is that the so-called frivolous lawsuit penalty with a fine of I think five thousand dollars at that time it would have been five and that's an interesting question because it's been increased over the years originally there was no penalty right after the era of the war in Vietnam there were many cases that came into the tax court then the penalty was raised to five hundred dollars and there were fewer cases but they still came and then it was raised to five thousand so I would during the time when I believe had it just changed from five hundred to five thousand these cases are considered frivolous or groundless seems a rather harsh designation but it's a legal technical term that it's basically means that the law settled basically forget about it and if anyone bothers they should be penalized many cases have been brought in spite of the fine and in most incidents the fine has not been applied I've noticed usually it's the cases where people come back with the exact same argument like the next year those are the only times I believe that there were fines in the past I find it interesting Dan that you got involved with war tax resistance just shortly after your own Peace Corps experience because I served in the Peace Corps and it was a year and a half after my return that I got involved with war tax resistance in Milwaukee where was your Peace Corps experience and did that have some effect in terms of what you eventually did with respect to war tax resistance? Well I served in South Asia in Nepal and I worked on rural, village, water supply systems I'll go back a step I was raised in the Quaker tradition thinking about things like participation in military and violent means of solving conflict has been something always part of my life so I had my CO papers submitted to the draft board in the late 60s but I never had to qualify as a conscientious objector because my number at that time they used a lottery system based on birthdays and my number came up to be so high that it was I'd never be called. That event I can't explain to you but I find that that system was the most immoral system for asking for national service that there could possibly be it split my generation it split people all of us who could have been asked to serve in some way in national service and instead just by the luck of the draw some people were asked to were actually compelled by the government to face being ordered to kill people and I just walked out and so the reason I ended up in the P-score is I determined for myself that I would do some kind of alternative service because I felt it was appropriate as a gesture to myself but mostly to gesture to everyone else of the same age. I was very fortunate to be able to qualify for the P-score I feel like I did my national service that way doing the P-score work opened my mind to the world but it was a progression that by my good fortune I had already been on on a path because of the people Quakers and people had been around me my whole life so dealing with the with the funding for military activities is just a natural next step for progression we're all responsible just because we're not 18 years old and have to face the fact of registration doesn't mean that you know we're all responsible for what we do our government is over the people and we are the people at this stage of my life I'm involved being responsible for designing how my money is used so that's why I do the tax business now and that's why I was a P-score volunteer before. You mentioned Dan that you were raised Quaker and this was part of the natural influences and the natural progression that led you to war tax resistance and the P-score. Can you talk any more about the specific beliefs the specific ideas specific values that are part of your upbringing part of what form do you that led you in this direction? This is a hard question the answer if I ask myself what do I really believe and what do I believe is the correct way of acting in the world the answer is obvious to me. I think conscience is one of the most mysterious things that exist. I also believe that when our country was put together when it was founded I believe the idea of individual conscience the power of that and the importance of respecting liberty of conscience was pervasive and I believe it was built in to our system. I think it was there because people like Quakers had come to this country in Mennonites and Church of the Brethren and other religious groups that come to the New World because they were seeking a place to be able to have freedom of conscience so in a strange way I feel like our laws and I feel like the way our country was established our spiritual heritage is actually in our constitution and in the constitutions of the states that pre-existed the federal government. My two answers to your spiritual question, one is I think it's an individual thing that if we really listen to what is called a still small voice that we each have inside us I think there's answers there and I believe that that power of the individual conscience was protected at the time of the nation's founding and I believe that that's fertile terrain for us to go back and rediscover. I've been a war tax resister for a couple decades now and one of the cons that I've experienced and particularly my wife and I were just discussing with this recently is how horrible it feels that not only they get our taxes for war but when they come and love your count or get it out of your paycheck or something when they get the money that way they get not only the original amount but maybe double the amount because of all the penalties and interests that they post on it. How do you deal with that concern, the feeling that well maybe I wasn't effective enough because not only did they get the taxes but they got a whole bunch more to put into their war machine? The way I look at this is if the government has to collect penalties and interests for us to have a dialogue then that's the cost. It's not that I feel personally burdened because I'm particularly paying taxes that are used for the military. I feel burdened by being coerced into participating at all and it just takes paying extra in order to have this dialogue with the government and I feel encouraged and I'm absolutely optimistic by looking far enough back in the past we can see how this whole cycle was played out before and it just takes people that are willing to pay that extra penalty for the process to move forward. As a postscript in my case the second case which is now on appeal the tax court not only didn't allow me to make my full argument that I was also fined $5,000 and that penalty now has been increased from five that you mentioned before it's up to $25,000. I knew that going in I'm not a wealthy person but I put money aside in an IRA account for years and there's enough there to cover at least one hit of $25,000 and when I realized that if I got to my retirement age and I hadn't used that money to face the fear of the penalties because I feel I have an excellent argument and an excellent explanation for the government that I wouldn't be satisfied. That large penalty has stopped a lot of cases but again if you're looking to the people of the past who really did this offering they didn't let penalties or anything else stop them from expressing their conscience to the government and to their society at large and we are all beneficiaries of that today. Dan it seems to me that you've been willing to take some pretty big hits in order to maintain your principled stand about not paying for the preparation for war or for war. Have you had support when you've been going through these tribulations either material or spiritual or whatever form? Have you had support from folks around you to help you maintain your stand? First I'm not currently a member of any Quaker meeting although I am in a tender as I'm technically called at my local meeting my wife is a member there and that meeting has provided for me from the very beginning a clearness committee which is something that they do for their own members when there's someone feels like they have a particular calling or a particular problem that they're dealing with. So when I began this recent tax case I had a clearness committee through the meeting and that was extremely valuable and they still continue to support me today. I also would like to say that this is a team effort my wife and I work on this together I could not do this without her interest and her support and we work on this as a team. It's very difficult for someone to do this on their own because we work together and because she brought me into a wider Quaker community as well in New York State is the reason why my particular case is actually opening doors for many other people. The New York yearly meeting which is the large Quaker body that covers New York State and Connecticut has been involved in supporting me. I'm part of one of their committees that deals with conscientious objection to military taxation in support of the case. They actually wrote an amicus brief for the appeals court in my case and there were many people showed up to attend the oral argument in Manhattan. So that's the community starting with my own family and the local religious organization that I associate with and to the broader association that's the support I've received. And it's a two-way street. They've gotten a tremendous amount from having me do this because they are able to ask themselves what they feel and what their conscience tells them and through me because I am privileged to be in a situation where I could take the time and afford to actually possibly be penalized thousands of dollars because I was in that position it provides opportunities for them. For example, the local meeting actually answered some questions about war and religion that were posed in the newspaper as a group and that was just recently published and this would never have happened otherwise. As you mentioned Dan, there are a lot of people who fought court cases, have risked the frivolous court case fine, that the courts sometimes impose on people bringing cases about war tax resistance and other tax resistance. Why is your court case going to be different? What is the basis that you're using for your claim of religious freedom that's going to be different than how other people have done it so that you don't automatically just get this frivolous fine? The federal government has just drifted, it's slipped I would say, into the business of coercing individuals into supporting military by paying for it or by serving and this is the remarkable thing that I've unearthed by carefully looking at what happened when the country was put together, the original ability to compel service, armed service, lies with the sovereign states, not with the federal government, the states reserved this power to themselves by constitution and this is the people of those times speaking in their constitutions because they felt they needed state militias but at the same time, almost without exception, all the states that compelled military service and the state militias also made accommodations and exceptions for those people with what they used to call religious scruples of conscience, including Quakers, including Shakers and Mennonites and in some instances any person that had religious scruples. They were asked to provide an equivalent and in the case of New York State, that equivalent at different times was used to support common schools and/or support basically programs for the poor and in other times is for general county government, so actually the precedent has already been established in the states for alternative service for tax dollars, the same concept that we're trying today to have accepted in the national level. What happened was that the state militias, as they were phased out after the Civil War, the federal government began to slip, as I would say, into the business of coercing military service and paying for military without an express grant from the people, it's not there, it's not in the constitution. The government slipped into this as the state slipped out of it and it took about 50 or so years. But what happened was that the federal government took over this power without the counterbalancing historical counterbalance of accommodating religious conscience. During that 50 years time it just sort of went into the shadows and so what we had is the federal government suddenly deciding they needed huge manpower in World War I and invoking conscription without having the historical and traditional underpinnings that the states had a hundred years earlier. It's a historical transition or evolution, you might say, and so my case is based on the fact that the bearing of arms in state militias prior to the federal government being formed as well as afterwards because the soldiers from the national army were to be provided by state militias, there was no federal standing army at the beginning. From the beginning, again because of the people that had religious reasons for being in the new world, had insisted that they would not serve under arms but they would serve their communities in other ways, the concept of not providing munitions or service in exchange for some other public service is part of our legal tradition in history. And my case is based on the fact that those rights of conscience, liberty of conscience rights are still retained by the people and are actually protected via the federal constitution through the Ninth Amendment, which basically says that just because certain rights are listed in the Bill of Rights doesn't mean that other rights retained by the people can be denied or disparaged by the federal government in the future. This was all worked out, the counterbalancing was worked out, the accommodation for conscience was worked out and the federal government was created in a way that clearly allowed those rights to continue and we've just by historical evolution drifted off from that original concept and that's the basis for my legal case. There were reasons why conscience is not mentioned in the federal constitution and that's because it was fully covered in the state constitutions where the people of those times felt the rights were actually better protected in the state's constitutions than in this fledgling federal government that they put together. Well, Dan, I know that there's a lot more detail and intricacy to be explained about this case and I do hope that our listeners will follow the case as you move forward. You've got a big job ahead of you and I'm glad to know that you have some really, really solid support behind you. I wish you well and I wish you success in your efforts for everybody's sake but specifically with my own personal gratitude as another war tax with older who stands to have his conscientious acts liberated by your work. For most of us, the intricacies of the law are just too daunting, really daunting and so it's all the more impressive that you've taken on the job of putting this case before the U.S. legal system. That's why I really want to say that I appreciate being a guinea pig here with me because it takes practice, tell these stories and it takes practice to phrase things in a way that people's minds open. That's really the task for us is to find ways of using the stories and using these personal convictions to actually open doors and open minds. I want to thank you for sticking with doing this for all these years that you have and taking whatever hits that you have but those of us that have this opportunity are actually, well, that's what my conscience is telling me, it's like I'm obligated to do this. This is my gesture to the people that came before me in the same way that my joining the Peace Corps was my gesture to those in my generation whose names ended up on a crayon a wall in Washington, D.C. They had no much choice and I do have choice and it's my job just to remind everyone that this is not a hard problem to solve. Thanks again, Dan, very much. Thank you. That was Dan Jenkins, war tax resistor from New York, whose court case is winning its way through the court system at the current time. He's the second of two war tax resistors I spoke to today. The first was Robert Randall, an active war tax redirector who lives down in Georgia. This is the second in the three part series of interviews with war tax resistors leading up to tax day April 15th. You can hear them again via my website, northernspiritradio.org and you can find links to the organizations mentioned in this interview and other helpful information on that website. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands But Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeat@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this, to love and serve your neighbor, enjoy in selflessness, to love and serve your neighbor, enjoy in selflessness. [Music] [Music]