Don and Carolyn Mosley and Max Rice are in trouble with the government. The IRS is after them because they won't hand over their tax dollars that the U.S. government insists on using to make war. The Mosleys and Max Rice are Christians who don't believe in killing or in paying the government to kill. They believe in the gospel message of peacemaking and compassion, and they may be put in jail for it.
All three of these war tax resisters work with Central American refugees and victims of war. Max, Don, and Carolyn are members of Jubilee Partners, a Christian community and service organization in Comer, Georgia. The Jubilee community has worked on resettling refugees in Canada, and, more recently, it has been a sponsor of the Walk in Peace project (see "Walk in Peace," April 1987).
Through the work of Walk in Peace, Carolyn, Max, and Don, along with others at Jubilee, have responded to the U.S. government's commitment to maintain the contra war with their own commitment to repair some of the human damage inflicted by the war. Walk in Peace raises funds for war victims, particularly by providing artificial limbs to the victims of land mines.
Along with children and other non-combatants, Walk in Peace, according to Don Mosley, has fitted several contra soldiers with artificial limbs. Having visited Nicaragua, Mosley has seen where some of his tax dollars go: to buy land mines and other weapons for the war in Central America. The question Don and the others face every day is, as he puts it, "Are we willing to turn over our cash to maim the people we work with day after day?"
LAST JUNE TWO IRS officials came to Jubilee to deliver a summons to Max and Nancy Rice. The couple was ordered to file income tax returns for the years 1983 to 1985, when they had stopped filing federal returns. Nancy and Max later went to the IRS office in person, explaining why they could not comply with the summons and giving them tax resistance leaflets.
For years they had protested the government's use of their tax dollars to finance the Vietnam War, the nuclear weapons buildup, and, under the Reagan administration, the contra war in Central America. Prior to 1983, they had refused to pay war taxes while still giving the IRS information about their incomes. But Max and Nancy discovered that the IRS would simply put a levy on their bank account and take their war tax dollars.
Therefore, they decided that if filing the income information allowed the government to collect war taxes, then their belief in the gospel compelled them to withhold that information. However, they had continued to file state tax returns in Wisconsin, where they lived at the time.
As for Don and Carolyn Mosley, they too had resisted paying war taxes, based on Jesus' teachings in the gospels. As early as the late 1960s, the Mosleys had refused to pay the federal excise tax added to every telephone user's phone bill. This is the tax that was instituted in 1966 to help finance the Vietnam War but which has never been rescinded.
They later worked in positions that paid at levels below the taxable income level to avoid contributing to the U.S. government's nuclear war preparations. And, when a trust fund was set up in their name, providing a taxable income, the IRS simply seized the Mosley's tax dollars. It was then that they also began to withhold income information, along with war taxes. The Mosleys' IRS summons, requiring income information for 1982 to 1984, arrived five weeks after the Rices'.
Last October, a Comer police officer and a federal marshall appeared at Jubilee with another summons ordering the Rices to appear in court in November. But before the trial began, Nancy was dropped inexplicably from the case; only her husband was to be prosecuted. And the Mosleys heard nothing further from the IRS, because, Don believes, the government is awaiting the result of the Rice case before acting against Don and Carolyn.
THE CASE AGAINST Max Rice went to district court and was heard by Judge Duross Fitzpatrick. Max's lawyer, Milner Ball, argued that the government was infringing on Rice's rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution, which reads, in part, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..."
Ball argued that if providing the information enables the collection of war taxes, contradicting Rice's religious beliefs, the IRS demand for the information does so as well. Moreover, the information was available to the IRS, Ball argued, because the federal government can acquire it from the state of Wisconsin. Therefore, forcing Rice to comply with the government's summons also infringes on his rights. Judge Fitzpatrick ruled in favor of the IRS.
During the trial, the judge asked how, if the real complaint was over the payment of the taxes, Rice could refuse to provide information. Ball answered that under the Bill of Rights, the government must recognize a citizen's rights at every step along the way.
According to Rice, Fitzpatrick seemed to struggle personally with the issues before him, and the judge even suggested that Max Rice should separate his acts from his beliefs: If Rice provided his income information as ordered by the court, he could thereby shift the moral responsibility to the court. Max would be free of any moral guilt, according to Fitzpatrick. "There's no way I would agree with that," Rice told Sojourners.
Rice's case is now before an appellate court. Should he lose his appeal, he may face an indefinite stay in jail until he complies with the court order; or, in other words, until he acts against his conscience.
Though he has resisted paying war taxes for almost 20 years, Don Mosley says that holding 8-year-old Elda Sanchez, a Nicaraguan girl who lost a leg to a land mine, has personalized his belief in the biblical justification for his acts of civil disobedience and war tax resistance. And that's why Don and Carolyn Mosley and Max Rice, not to mention thousands of others across the United States, are in trouble with the IRS. They are unable to separate their acts from their beliefs.
Joe Lynch was assistant editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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