By Bob Allen / Baptist News Global
This is an abbreviated version of the story. For the full story, click here.
A Baptist group specializing in church/state issues says the threat of churches and other religious organizations losing their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage “have been highly exaggerated” in a two-page handout released in light of the landmark Supreme Court decision recognizing that gays have a constitutional right to wed.
“Churches have long followed their own rules for performing marriages without such threat,” the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty said in a resource document titled The Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling: What you need to know now.
The BJC, a 79-year-old education and advocacy organization representing 15 national, state and regional Baptist bodies in the United States, says the high court’s 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states doesn’t change that.
Any threat to the tax-exempt status of religious entities, the BJC says, would require “over-expansion” of a 1983 Supreme Court ruling against Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school in Greenville, S.C., which lost its tax-exempt status over a policy prohibiting interracial dating and marriage.
In that decision, the Supreme Court agreed 8-1 with the IRS that to qualify for tax exemption as a “charitable” organization, an institution must provide a public benefit and not be contrary to public policy.
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