Gay marriage won’t hurt Christians, they said.

It’s all about love and equality, they said. And they encouraged us to place rainbows on our Facebook portraits.

But when it comes to the Left, having same-sex marriage is never enough. Now progressive writers are calling for stripping churches of their tax exempt status. As a result, it may end the lives of many churches, which undoubtedly is the goal of many progressives. 

Laws passed in 1909, 1913, and 1919 exempted non-profits — including houses of worship — from corporate excise and income taxes, and allowed contributions to those organizations to be tax exempt as well. It was feared that charitable giving would be throttled back with the passage of the new income tax.

Now progressive writer Mark Oppenheimer is eyeing churches as a huge cash cow (and when did any leftist ignore the possibility of plundering a private entity for increasing government coffers?):

Defenders of tax exemptions and deductions argue that if we got rid of them charitable giving would drop. It surely would, although how much, we can’t say. But of course government revenue would go up, and that money could be used to, say, house the homeless and feed the hungry. We’d have fewer church soup kitchens — but countries that truly care about poverty don’t rely on churches to run soup kitchens.

Helpfully adding more fuel to the fire set by Oppenheimer is Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post, whose 2013 article informed readers that “You give religions more than $82.5 billion a year.” Adding a picture of the outrageously wealthy (and some would say fraudulent) mega-church preacher Joel Osteen and his wife Victoria, Matthews used data gleaned from a sociologist who is a contributor to a publication of the Council for Secular Humanism (no bias there) to show how he thinks we’re all being fleeced by organized religion.

Denny Burke, a professor of Biblical Studies and Ethics, finds a more sinister motive behind Oppenheimer’s call to abolish churches’ tax exempt status. Writing in The Federalist, Burke finds an agenda that would demand all houses of worship jump on board with same sex marriage, or face being shut down by the Powers That Be.

Never mind that the average base salary of a full-time senior pastor ranges from $33,000 to $70,000 (source). Never mind that ministers do pay income taxes. Never mind that it is absurd to suggest not paying taxes is a subsidy. Never mind that exemptions do function to keep church and state out of one another’s business. . . .

No, the real intent of removing tax-exempt status is to cripple the institutions that continue their dissent from the sexual revolution. When tax exemptions are removed, donors will give far less than they are giving now. Churches will become liable to property taxes. That means that many churches will have to forfeit their property to the government because they won’t be able to afford the taxes they have to pay on it. Many of them wouldn’t be able to pay them now. If donations went down, they would be that much further from being able to pay them. As a result, churches that reside on valuable properties in urban locations would be immediately vulnerable. Eventually, so would everyone else.