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09/22/2004: "We're not in Kansas any more–it's more like Beijing"
According to the Wichita Eagle, a group of self-appointed snoops from the Mainstream Coalition/Interfaith Alliance are spying on conservative churches in Kansas, ready to denounce them to the KGB IRS if they don't toe the snoops' self-defined church-state line:
A plan to monitor the political activism of Wichita's conservative churches began this weekend with two people reviewing a morning worship service at the city's largest congregation.
Rose Rosenwach and Susan Kadison of Mainstream Coalition/The Interfaith Alliance Wichita were the group's first "assessment team" to conduct a review, visiting a morning service at Central Christian Church, 2900 N. Rock Road. They are watching for infractions of a law that bans tax-exempt churches from endorsing political candidates.
Netup.tv - iptv, iptv architecture Rosenwach and Kadison sat, stood and applauded with the congregation, citing a need to blend in. They also took notes and listened intently to speakers during the 90-minute service.
The group is a nonprofit organization of clergy and lay people who seek political neutrality in houses of worship during this year's election season.
They are not, however, checking up on any Unitarian, UCC, or Metropolitan Community churches as part of their intimidation gig.
The group tends to support issues such as gay rights and objects to overt attempts by any religious group to convert someone to another faith.
Among the group's complaints is the way dozens of conservative churches in Wichita lobbied state officials earlier this year to ban gay marriages in the Kansas Constitution.
Because as anyone reading the First Amendment knows, only left-wing churches such as New York's Riverside Church have the right to lobby the government.
The group, affiliated with the national Interfaith Alliance and its "One Nation Many Faiths Vote 2004" initiative, is in the process of issuing letters of caution to local congregations.
This being in the same state as Dodge City, I can only assume they've been deputized by the IRS to send out threatening letters to people whose politics they don't like.
The coalition in Wichita has about 24 people lined up to make visits over the next few weeks, [the Rev. Connie Pace Adair of the Unity Church of Wichita, the group's chairwoman,] said.
So far, no church has blatantly violated the law, she said, but there are some "real on-the-line kinds of things" going on.
And she undoubtedly knows that because training to be a Unity minister includes a crash-course in the IRS Code.
So this is what some liberal Christians have been reduced to: unable to sell their moral agenda to a public that knows better, they have to send junior G-men into worship services to rat out the opposition to the government for doing stuff that they, the rats, do all the time. (See here for one just one of countless examples.) Sounds like the practices of the Cultural Revolution are being imported into America' heartland. Pathetic.
