Systemic media bias can present us with many unanswerable questions, and the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision recognizing a Wisconsin Catholic Charity right to go tax-free brings one of the big questions to mind.
What one wonders is if MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS barely covered the June 5 unanimous court decision acknowledging religious liberty because the leftist media love tax thievery, or because the Trump Administration supported the plaintiffs’ rights, and the Trump team was proven correct.
At issue was a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision compelling the Wisconsin Catholic Charities Bureau and four affiliates doing charity work in the “Forward” state to withhold portions of employee checks in order to conform to the Wisconsin Labor Department’s “unemployment insurance” tax.
State attorneys successfully had argued before the Wisconsin justices that Catholic Charities had been complying to its unemployment insurance tax demand since 1971.
But the length of time they have complied with an unethical demand is irrelevant. Both traditionally, and constitutionally, the state is not supposed to demand money from any religious group in order for the religious group to exist. If that were the case, the agents of government not only could impose such onerous taxes that many religious institutions would be unable to survive, said agents of the state also could arbitrarily create invasive tax hurdles, audits, and privacy invasions, not to mention forcing the churches to “steer” their behavior in ways that fulfill government preferences, not the strictures of God.
Of course, that's an important analogue to what the taxman does to us and to business owners, employees, and consumers, who are trying to live in peace. And it happens to be so important, the Trump Administration offered to the Supreme Court a briefing to back the Catholic group in its fight.
Which is where the lack of media attention becomes concerning. Don’t waste your time trying to find national video coverage of the important matter, and even the text reporting was scant.
CNN’s John Fritze and Devan Cole devoted a few-hundred words to the case and decision, noting:
“(I)n interpreting the law – and siding with state officials – Wisconsin’s highest court determined that the work Catholic Charities was performing wasn’t inherently religious. It did so in part by noting that the group did not attempt to ‘imbue’ beneficiaries with the Catholic faith or ‘supply religious materials’ to them.”
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And, to their credit, Fritze and Cole also offered one of the key insights expressed in the Supreme Court decision, an insight coming from, of all people, leftist Sonya Sotomayor, and which became the lynchpin on which the case was decided:
“The problem with that analysis, Sotomayor wrote, is that Catholic teaching forbids using works of charity for proselytism. That meant the state tax law, as interpreted by the state’s highest court, discriminated against Catholicism.”
Which is a no-brainer, of course. But it avoids two larger issues.
The first was expressed by Clarence Thomas, who would recognize the protections against ANY taxes pushed onto any religious group, and not leave it to state whim or the distinction of the Catholic tenets that would allow a church to be left alone.
“The First Amendment’s guarantee of church autonomy gives religious institutions the right to define their internal governance structures without state interference."
Which is correct, and it brings us to the second of the two larger issues.
The second applies to all people. As economist, sociologist, professor, and author Thomas Sowell famously said, “…what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?”
The obvious point of freedom is that none of us – and, especially, no one in government – has a right to place conditions on what portions of our earnings we can keep. No one has a right to tell another he can hold the fruits of his labor if the work is in form “X” or in form “Y.” We have the right to keep our earnings, and this Wisconsin dispute underscores that larger moral point.
But one would not know the importance of this decision by looking for deep coverage in the dinosaur media. Even Wisconsin-based news outlet WKOW devoted twice as much time to a leftist skeptic of the ruling than it did to a representative of the charity, which has been fighting this case for 10 years.
And none of them -- not even the Supreme Court members -- made the final constitutional point, which is that the First Amendment only delineates Congress as being forbidden from infringing on speech or establishing religious tenets. The big historical takeaway is that the Founders actually left speech and religion jurisdiction in the hands of the states, and, if the Supreme Court members really wanted to teach contemporary Americans something valuable, they would have ruled on whether the Wisconsin Constitution provides for freedom of speech and religious liberty.
And it does. Not only that, the state constitution prohibits involuntary servitude.
Which is something Wisconsin citizens might mention to the tax collectors, next time they come calling.