Lynn: Moral values and taxes

( see our other archived posts 4/30/2004 )

RALPH LYNN Board of Contributors
Monday, February 07, 2005

This story from the Dec. 12 San Francisco Chronicle is on the "man-bites-dog" level of news.

A professor at the University of Alabama Law School persuaded the Republican governor of Alabama "to sponsor a liberal tax measure that would have revolutionized the collection of taxes in Alabama, a state with the most regressive tax system in the nation."

Maybe we should remind ourselves that a regressive system shifts the burden from the rich to the poor.

However unsurprising the statement may be, it is necessary to state that the governor in question is a Southern Baptist whose voting record is "conservative enough to make most Religious Right leaders" give him an enthusiastic "amen."

How did this latter-day miracle (I use the word loosely) come about? The professor in question, Susan Pace Hamill, has, in addition to her legal training, a degree from Beeson Divinity School, an "explicitly evangelical" seminary in Birmingham, Alabama. Beeson is connected with Samford University, a Southern Baptist school in Birmingham.

Her law-review article, "An Argument for Tax Reform Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics," came to the attention of Gov. Bob Riley. He endorsed Amendment One, the liberal tax measure that went before Alabama's voters on Sept. 9, 2003.

Perhaps readers need to be reminded that about 90 percent of Alabamians are Christians, with a considerable percent being Southern Baptists of one kind or another.

No doubt some readers need to be reminded, also, that most Southerners – not just those in Alabama – have been voting for tax-cutting Republican presidents since the mid 1960s. That was when LBJ rammed the Civil Rights Acts through the Congress.

That consummate politician then sadly but accurately observed that he had just lost the South's support of his beloved Democratic Party for a generation.

Thus, nobody was surprised when the Christian Coalition was instrumental in defeating Gov. Riley's quixotic attempt to right serious wrongs by a margin of 2-to-1.

No psychoanalysts are needed to explain why there has been no organized Baptist opposition to the Texas sales tax system, which exploits the poor in our rich state.

But we do need psychiatrists to explain the fact that some Baptists oppose the state lottery on the grounds that the poor would – quite voluntarily and enthusiastically – bet and lose their money in the vain hope of easing their poverty.

The Chronicle got its news item from a speech which Professor Hamill gave at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco in 2004. There, she observed that she was waging a sort of holy war to restore "traditional moral values to the collection of taxes."

There, also, in answer to questions as to how and why the Religious Right always out-organized any religious forces on the left, she unhesitatingly replied in a single word, "Greed."

Asked to amplify, she observed that it is obvious to informed, honest people that "soup kitchens and all that" can never substitute for economic justice. Dr. Ralph Lynn is a member of the Board of Contributors, Central Texans who write columns regularly for the Tribune-Herald. He is a retired professor of history at Baylor University.

source: http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2005/02/07/20050207waclynn_board.html