ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 10, 1996 TAG: 9607100029
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
CLAIMING tax-free status while also engaging in partisan political activity, the Christian Coalition may be violating - at the least, it is skirting - federal tax and campaign-finance laws.
But why?
Ensuring compliance with those laws would be easy enough. The coalition could simply follow the lead of the AFL-CIO and many another interest group: Set up a separate political-action committee for partisan political activity.
That system, too, is flawed, but it is better than making no distinction at all between lobbying on issues and lending campaign support to specific candidates. With an affiliated political-action committee, the coalition's Internal Revenue Service status as a "social welfare" organization, promoting its point of view on issues, would not be in question. Meanwhile, the political-action committee could engage in endorsing and funding candidates, working for their election, and battling other factions for control of local and state Republican organizations.
Instead, coalition leaders insist that partisan political activity is not what they're about. Their private statements, as reported in an Associated Press story this week, suggest otherwise. For that matter, the group's public record of involvement in partisan politics is extensive - as anyone in Virginia knows who observed the 1994 and 1996 battles for the GOP's U.S. Senate nominations.
So why deny the obvious, when potential trouble could be averted by the simple expedient of establishing a separate political-action committee?
Disclosure requirements may be part of the answer. If the coalition's overtly partisan activities were conducted by a political-action committee, the committee's revenue sources and expenditures would be subject to disclosure.
This is not a minor point. In nonfederal elections in some states, including Virginia, disclosure is virtually the only institutional control on the influence of money in elections. Disclosure alone is not enough; Virginia needs other campaign-finance rules as well. But disclosure is a first step, and a key ingredient in any workable system for maintaining aboveboard elections.
But the Christian Coalition's reluctance to forthrightly acknowledge its partisan interests may reflect more than a desire to avoid pesky reporting rules.
Until recently, many of the evangelical Protestant traditions on which the coalition draws looked askance at politics, as inherently corrupting. The tension between this historic hostility to political activity and the Christian Coalition's embrace of it hasn't vanished overnight. The lingering tension may help explain the coalition's tendency to infuse political positions with the certitude of religious belief - and its disinclination to acknowledge the political nature of its activities.
To many people, of course, the coalition is just being hypocritical. Perhaps so. But kinder observers might see the situation as less the result of hypocrisy than of the coalition's inexperience in defining boundaries between religious and political faiths.
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