Here we go: Churches want full power to play in politics and still maintain their tax-free status:

Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.

The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.

“For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church,” ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. “It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It’s not for the government to mandate the role of church in society.”

One can only suppose that these churches have become so used to their tax-free status that they believe it is a gift from god, and not part and parcel of the separation of church and state; that the whole reason for being tax-exempt is not because churches just naturally deserve it, but because paying taxes is inextricably tied to representation. Churches already get away with so much–they have powerful lobbies, they get mentioned far more than is comfortable in places of legislative and executive power, and candidates bow and scrape before their leaders and covet their endorsements, all this without being taxed. Now they wish to tear down the last remnants of the wall separating church from state and become fully, openly political, completing the transformation they have been fighting to achieve, merging the church with government, while still claiming as their inalienable right freedom from being taxed–setting them up as a special, elevated group which gets full political privileges without having to pay the cover charge everyone else does.

The timing of all of this is also clearly opportunistic; coming just two months before the election, they want to have the full impact of supporting McCain, and they are probably hoping that they can use the Supreme Court challenge for cover–that if they lose, they can claim that they were shielded by the blanket protection of that challenge and can keep their tax-exempt status afterwards. And with the Bush administration covering things at least until January, they might be safe in that assumption.

But there is a very good chance they will not lose, or at least that they will make some gains; the new Bush court leans somewhat in that direction. You know that the Wingnut Four will always vote as a block for anything the right wing wants them to, so it’s a matter of getting Kennedy to agree with them just enough. And even if they don’t get that, they might be able to use this to energize the base–kind of a reverse Roe v. Wade, a way of telling Christian conservatives that if McCain wins, they get even more influence.

It’s very good political strategy, which should scare you, unless you like the prospect of religion gaining more power in politics–which many religious people probably think is a spiffy idea. But if you are religious, you should be afraid of religion marrying into politics. Very afraid.

I will now step aside and let Tim continue in the comments.