Religious Right leaders are bound and determined to get Texas Gov. Rick Perry reelected, and they don’t mind drawing tax-exempt houses of worship onto the governor’s bandwagon.
Earlier this week, The Austin American-Statesman reported on the work of the Texas Restoration Project, which is an organized effort by Religious Right activists to use Texas churches to register and mobilize the so-called “values voters” on Perry’s behalf.
The newspaper, via an open-records request, snagged an e-mail that was sent from one of the Project’s leaders, Dave Welch, to the governor’s deputy chief of staff inviting Perry to four “special Pastor Luncheons.” These gatherings of hundreds of Texas pastors and religious leaders in Houston, Austin, Dallas and San Antonio are set for September and October, just before the November election, The Statesman reported.
Welch told the Austin newspaper that the pastors, “like anybody else,…want to hear the big boy. The governor coming for something just gives it some added punch.”
The Project – what exactly it is meant to restore is murky, seeing that the state’s Religious Right is in fine political shape and the Dixie Chicks were long ago disowned – boasts that it has already registered large numbers of new voters. The luncheons are apparently a last-minute effort to pump up cooperating pastors to go back to their congregations and ensure those registered voters don’t forget Perry on Election Day.
The Project also appears to have ties with Religious Right operations in other states. Some of the Project’s events have featured the bombastic Ohio TV preacher Rod Parsley, and Project leader Welch also runs a pastors’ council in Virginia Beach, Va. The Texas Project is obviously modeled on get-out-the-values-voters schemes in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (Parsley is leader of one such project in Ohio.)
In his e-mail to Phil Wilson, Perry’s deputy chief of state, Welch wrote that the Texas project was striving to create “sustained teams of pastors in each city who will take ownership and responsibility for the moral, social and political direction of their community” and that the luncheons would provide the Texas clergy with “tools and motivation for an aggressive, effective (Get Out the Vote) process in their churches.”
Like the religious-political machines in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the one in Texas seemingly could not care less about the tax-exempt status of the churches they are corralling into the political fray. Houses of worship, like other nonprofits, do not have to pay income taxes and donations to them are tax deductible. Those tax breaks are not extended to political groups and can be revoked by the Internal Revenue Service if nonprofits become too political. Indeed, the IRS has announced a ramped-up effort this year to ensure that nonprofits abide by the federal tax code’s ban on electioneering.
Federal tax law prohibits churches and secular nonprofits from using their resources to propel or defeat political runs for office. The law, however, does allow nonprofits to run even-handed voter registration drives, provide educational forums for politicians of all parties and to engage in advocacy of public policy issues.
The Texas Restoration Project’s events and its forthcoming pastor luncheons have not appeared to be even-handed at all. Most, if not all, the events feature only Perry.
Perry’s reelection bid initially looked wobbly.
Last year, after a terrible legislative session and talk of big-name Republicans preparing to challenge Perry for the Republican nomination, the governor took high-profile actions to woo the state’s all-important Religious Right base. For example, he signed measures to require girls under 18 to get parental consent before seeking an abortion and certifying a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. Neither of the legislature-approved measures needed Perry’s signature. Nonetheless, he garnered state and national press for signing them in a mega-church’s gymnasium.
Perry has not yet said whether he’ll attend the Texas Restoration Project’s fall luncheons. But his deputy chief of staff told The Statesman, “It’s certainly conceivable.”
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