A noxious anti-religious federal judge, appointed by Jimmy Carter, has misadjudicated that an Internal Revenue Service exemption that allows clergy to shield a portion of their salary from federal income taxes is unconstitutional.

The clergy housing exemption applies to an estimated 44,000 ministers, priests, rabbis, imams and others. If the ruling stands, some clergy members could experience a substantial cut in take-home pay.

The suit was filed by the Madison-Wisconsin-based "Freedom From Religion Foundation" on grounds that the housing allowance violates the separation of church and state and the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The group's founders have said that if tax-exempt religious groups are allowed a housing subsidy, other tax-exempt groups, such as FFRF, should get one, too.

U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Crabb on Friday (Nov. 22) ruled in their favor, saying the exemption provides a benefit to religious persons and no one else, even though doing so is not necessary to alleviate a special burden on religious exercise.

The case, decided in the District Court for the Western District Of Wisconsin, will likely be appealed to the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the states of Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

The housing allowances of pastors in Wisconsin remain unaffected after Crabb stayed the ruling until all appeals are exhausted. Crabb also ruled in 2010 that the National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional; that ruling was overturned the following year.

Churches routinely designate a portion of a pastor's salary as a housing allowance. So, for example, a minister who earns an average of $18,000 might (but does not always) receive up to another third of income, or $6,000, as a tax-free housing allowance, essentially earning $24,000. Having to pay taxes on the additional $6,000, would mean a substantial cut in salary.

Crabb ruled that the law provides that the gross income of a minister of the gospel does not include the rental allowance paid to him as part of his compensation, to the extent used by him to rent or provide a home and to the extent such allowance does not exceed the fair rental value of the home, including furnishings and appurtenances such as a garage, plus the cost of utilities.

Tobin Grant, a political science professor at Southern Illinois University, said the exemption dates from an era when churches paid clergy who lived in church-owned parsonages.

Over time, fewer churches owned parsonages and instead gave clergy housing allowances, which were also treated as tax-free. The difference, however, was that these were regular salaries that now had an exclusion. Part could be tax-free, part could not. So, why not give a pastor a huge housing allowance, which is tax free?

The ruling addresses the housing allowance, while parsonages are still tax-exempt properties, like the churches that own them.

Peter J. Reilly, a contributor to Forbes, wrote that the exclusion goes back to 1921.

The law's tax exemption has been contested since a decade-old dispute between the IRS and California megachurch pastor Rick Warren. In 2002, the IRS attempted to charge Warren back taxes after he claimed a housing allowance of more than $70,000. He eventually won the federal court case, and that led Congress to the rules for housing allowances. The allowance is limited to one house, and is restricted to either the fair market rental value of the house or the money actually spent on housing.

Annie Laurie Gaylor is co-president of the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, one of the few atheist/freethought organization staffed by a majority of women.

Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, co-presidents of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, who brought the suit, hailed the decision, somewhat blasphemously uttering: "May we say hallelujah! This decision agrees with us that Congress may not reward ministers for fighting a godless and anti-religious movement by letting them pay less income tax," they said. "The rest of us should not pay more because clergy pay less."

The Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and Southern Baptist-affiliated GuideStone Financial Resources plan to fight for the exemption.

The clergy housing allowance isn't a government establishment of religion, but just the reverse, said Russell Moore, president of the ERLC. The allowance is neutral to all religions. Without it, clergy in small congregations of all sorts would be penalized and harmed.

Separately, in a federal court case in Kentucky, atheists are challenging IRS regulations that exempt religious groups from the same financial disclosure requirements of other nonprofit groups.

What do the people think? Their comments below:

Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus have different ideas about the Creator, but they all agree on a tax break for clergy under attack by an atheist group who purports that the tax break discriminates against non-religious.

Interests diverse as conservative evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and one group broad enough to embrace both the Southern Baptist Convention and The International Society for Krishna Consciousness filed legal briefs in recent days asking an appeals court to reverse a lower-court decision ending a 60-year-old "parsonage allowance" that allows churches to provide ministers with tax-exempt housing allowances in lieu of housing them in parsonages on church property.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed a brief April 8 representing Muslim, Eastern Orthodox and Hindu religious groups as well as the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and International Mission Board.

The brief says the groups disagree profoundly on matters of theology, but are united by their deep concerns about the “direct, immediate and harmful financial effect on faith groups that rely on the parsonage allowance to provide housing to their ministers.

The Church Alliance, a coalition of the chief executive officers of more than 30 denominational benefit programs, weighed in April 9 with a brief arguing that the tax break passes constitutional muster because it has a First-Amendment-concordant Non-Establishment/Non-Prohibition neutral purpose and its primary effect is neither to advance nor inhibit religion nor any sects nor denominations thereof involving persons directly and indirectly related to such.

The United States Supreme Court has long distinguished between overtly patronizing and directly funding sectarian or denominational religious organizations, contrasted with merely lifting government imposed burdens so as to allow those organizations to exercise their religious mission more freely, claimed groups including the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A., Board of Retirement and Insurance of the National Association of Free Will Baptists and Converge Worldwide, formerly the Baptist General Conference.

When Congress chooses to not impose a burden on religious organizations whether by means of tax exemption or regulatory exception it honors, rather than transgresses, this nation’s long tradition of avoiding destructive or even blasphemous entanglement between church or synagogue or mosque, and state.

ADF lawyers claim the lower court’s decision turns upon one critical assumption that every tax exemption is a government subsidy, and challenge the idea on numerous grounds.

All the briefs respond to a surprise ruling in November 2013 by a federal judge in Wisconsin that a section of the tax code granting a benefit for "ministers of the gospel" not available to everyone else favors religion over non-religion, thus creating an establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The case is currently on appeal before the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago. It started in September 2011 with a lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group based in Madison, Wis., advocating for so-called "freethinkers" such as atheists, agnostics and skeptics in deliberate and self-consigned slavish bondage to blatant adversarial hostility against religion since 1978.

The lawsuit claims the housing allowance shows favoritism by the government for religion over and against disbelief. The feds says the group has no standing in the case because it doesn’t seek the benefit for itself but only wants to withhold it from others.

FFRF leaders claim the parsonage allowance, passed in 1954, is a holdover from Cold War-era politics denouncing atheistic communism as a threat to the American way of life. The Beckett Fund brief on behalf of Muslim, Southern Baptist, Eastern Orthodox and Hindu religious groups, however, says the intent is to ensure equal treatment for ministers and non-ministers under a "convenience of the employer" doctrine first recognized by administrative rulings in 1914.

The doctrine applies to people like hotel managers who must live on premises, military officers who must live in the barracks or commercial fishermen who must live on a ship. In those cases the employer pays the cost of an employee’s housing, but the IRS does not consider it income.

Since its inception, the federal income tax system has recognized that some housing costs are incurred primarily for the convenience of the employer (such as an IRS-registered business entity deemed, for example, an IRS-registered church or synagogue or mosque) not for the employee’s (pastor's or rabbi's or imam's) personal consumption and are therefore not income, the brief argues.

The "convenience of the employer" doctrine flows from a very basic principle about the nature of income, the brief continues. For something to qualify as income, there must be an economic gain which primarily benefits the individual IRS-registered-church/synagogue/mosque pastor/rabbi/imam taxpayer personally apart from benefitting the IRS-registered church or synagogue or mosque he is the religious leader of. The brief explains that any number of things might benefit both a (pastor/rabbi/imam) worker and the (church/synagogue/mosque) employer .... such as meals, travel, entertainment and office furnishings, but if they are primarily intended to further the business rather than compensate the employee, they are not treated as income.

Over the years Congress has carved out a number of specific exemptions for Americans living overseas, government workers and anyone required to be away from home or business for an extended time.

Becket Fund lawyers say ministers fit comfortably within the convenience of the employer doctrine. They are typically required to live at or near the church to be close to those they serve. They are expected to be available at all hours of the day and night.

Ministers are expected to use their homes for various church events like Bible studies, meetings, meals for new members and providing temporary lodging for guest speakers and missionaries. The comfort and privacy of a home sometimes is better than a formal office for things like crisis counseling with church members or sensitive staff meetings.

Many congregants also expect the minister’s home to be accessible for non-planned social visits. Sermons are often prepared in the home. In many small churches, the minister is the primary caretaker of the church building.

The majority of Southern Baptist congregations are small, with very limited financial resources, the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission argues in a portion of the brief. As a result, most are unable to afford a parsonage and rely heavily on the parsonage allowance to ensure that ministers have the housing needed for their job.

The International Mission Board says it relies on the ability to assign housing locations to its missionaries in a way that furthers its Christian ministry, or, in secular terms, in a way that is for the convenience of IMB.

The starting base salary of a missionary is a little over $20,000 and the average base salary of an IMB missionary family is about $40,000, the IMB argues. With approximately 5,000 commissioned missionaries serving in 150 countries around the world, it continues, loss of the clergy housing allowance would have a devastating financial impact on the IMB.

"The court’s decision does not evince hostility to religion, nor should it even seem controversial," plainly-pernicious-against-religion cruelly-insensitive FFRF attorney Richard L. Bolton said in a statement. "The court has simply recognized the reality that a tax-free housing allowance available only to ministers is a significant benefit from the government unconstitutionally provided on the basis of religion."

The lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) challenging the clergy housing exclusion was, again, counter-challenged as the feds filed a brief in the Seventh Circuit defending the constitutionality of the law and arguing that FFRF lacks legal standing to bring the case.

After reciting the history behind the longstanding clergy housing provisions now found in Section 107 of the tax code, the government’s brief summarizes the proceedings thus far in the FFRF case and explains why the Treasury and the IRS believe both contrary-to-Christian-religious-expression FFRF attorney Richard L. Bolton and the FFRF-complicit federal judge (Barb Crabb) reached the wrong conclusion in finding the clergy housing allowance exclusion of Section 107(2) unconstitutional.

First, the government argues that the anti-religious FFRF attorney should have never brought the case to the district court, and the anti-religious district court judge should have dismissed FFRF’s case, because the FFRF organization and its leaders lack standing required of plaintiffs to bring a challenge in federal court. While FFRF claims the clergy housing allowance provision unlawfully discriminates against leaders of non-religious groups, FFRF’s atheist co-presidents never actually tried to claim a housing allowance for themselves with the IRS. As a result, the government argues it was premature for judgette Crabb to infer that FFRF suffered any kind of personal injury sufficient to bring the lawsuit.

Plaintiffs here have not personally asked for the § 107(2) exclusion, nor are they litigating their own tax liabilities. Because they seek only to deprive others of the exclusion, they have suffered no actual personal injury at the hands of the Government.

Indeed, if the FFRF lawsuit continues into effect without being reversed, the federal government would be liable for astonishing back-relief payments to FFRF as compensatory-damage indebtedness.

Assuming for argument’s sake that FFRF and its leaders had standing, the government’s brief goes on to explain why the clergy housing allowance exclusion is not unconstitutional as a permissible non-prohibitionary accommodation of religion never specifically set up nor monetarily established by the government by direct Treasury-Dept funding. The government suggests that the history behind the law demonstrates it satisfies each part of the test used by courts to evaluate whether a law violates the Establishment Clause or the Non-Prohibition Clause of the First Amendment.

Section 107(2) has a First-Amendment Non-Establishment/Non-Prohibition purpose and effect and avoids excessive church-state entanglement."

Barbie Crabb misstated that the housing-allowance exemption provides a "benefit" to "religious persons" and "no one else," even though exempting is [purportedly to her] "not necessary" to "alleviate a special burden on religious exercise."

First of all, she did not qualify "benefit" as to whether or not it was merely financial or sociological/spiritual to "religious persons" [but] "no one else."

Second, she did not qualify what was meant by "religious persons" - as to whether such was religious clergy and/or religious parishioners and/or outsiders having a religion of crusading against typical majority religions.

Third, she did not elaborate on whether the "special burden" (which she admitted was a burden) involved money or more than money - such as mental anguish and other consequences not directly related to money.

Fourth, and typical of heretics who embrace non-scientific evolutionist mythology and who misuse an environment not their own but instead belongs to a human-behaviors-and-misbehaviors-recording Creator, she impersonalized the "burdening" (against whatever?) by failing to associate persons with what is involved but instead substituting an abstraction called "religious" "exercise" (whatever is meant by "religious" and whatever is meant by "exercise") for actual people involved with and participating in religious allegiance and worship. Such relegation-to-conceptual-abstraction absurdity is also characteristic of those who de-personalize problems of firearms misuse and alcohol misuse by blaming guns for deciding on "their" own (non-existent!) free wills (which firearms do not intrinsically have free wills whatsoever) to murder people, and/or faulting alcohol for deciding on its own (obviously ludicrous!) free choice (which benign-by-itself-substance alcohol does not intrinsically have any free choice whatsoever) to abuse by itself choosing to get persons dangerously drunk whether or not the free-willed persons themselves want to do that.

By judge Crabb adversarially, irresponsibly, and illegally striking down the law, she caused the Wisconsin District Court to err and is personally duly liable for restitution of various types, as it the FFRF attoney who presented the case before her as the FFRF plaintiff. She failed to come to grips with the reasons Congress enacted § 107 in the first place. She also disregarded the fact that the housing exclusions provided to ministers are merely part of a larger Congressional design providing exclusions or deductions for certain employer-provided housing benefits for all taxpayers.

If the appeal to the 7th Circuit Court in Chicago is successful and overturns Barbee Crabb, FFRF's Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, plus accursed-for-having-no-love-for-the-Lord FFRF attorney Richard L. Bolton who presented FFRF's frivolous-lawsuit case to judge Crabb, it behooves those illegally harassed by the malevolent lawsuit imposed by the four individuals named above, to countersue, and petition the Appeals Court judges to require from them financial remedies as restitutional compensation for damages relating to malicious-intent-caused mental anguish, hate crime, and attorney's fees.

Moreover, obviously-hellbound FFRF lawyer Richard L. Bolton who brought the frivolous lawsuit to Crabb must be reprimanded, given a final disbarment warning, and disallowed from bringing any more cases to any Wisconsin court for a period of not less than 5 years. Judgette Barbee Crabb must be censured and not allowed to adjudicate in any more cases for the next 3 years, with immediate suspension of pay during that time.

Until the appeals process concludes and the Seventh Circuit issues a ruling, the suit will have no effect on ministers who currently receive a housing allowance from their church or other employer.