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UCCtruths

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Fallout from the IRS investigation

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Elizabeth Hamilton of the Hartford Courant has an excellent article today that really breaks down the IRS investigation and the allegations in the complaint. The AP article on the story did little more than circulate the press release that the UCC put out on the wires.

Americans United is busy scraping the egg off its face for not taking the lead on this issue. Its Executive Director, Barry Lynn, is an ordained UCC minister and as far as I can tell, has never filed a complaint or threatened a lawsuit againt any UCC political activity. You can decide for yourself if he's a hypocrite.

The United Church of Christ for it's part is trying hard to throw out as much FUD as possible to distort the issue. UCC President John Thomas is trying to make this a freedom of speech issue and the UCC scrambled to get a YouTube video posted which shows Edith Guffey explaining to the General Synod that Obama's appearence was not a political event. Neither of these actions actually addresses the complaint.

The specific allegations revolve around the three main criteria established by the IRS which are pretty simple to understand: If you are going to have a candidate speak as a non-candidate, the church cannot make a reference to their candidacy in any way, the candidate cannot mention they are a candidate and there can be no campaigning related to the speech - all of which happened in this instance and all of which are well documented in the complaint to the IRS. The UCC web site had numerous references to Obama being a candidate leading up to his appearence, the speech included references to his candidacy and there was active campaigning with 40 volunteers at the entrance to the Hartford Civic Center before, during and after his speech. Following his speech, the campaign volunteers were led into the Civic Center so they could get pictures with Obama. To make matters worse, UCC leaders should have known the content of Obama's speech since he gave nearly the same speech a week earlier to the Iowa Conference of the UCC.
posted by UCCtruths, Thursday, February 28, 2008

1 Comments:

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