This is a post I never wanted to write (even though I’ve seen the signs of it for several years), and I must apologize to my friends who are good Christians for what I’m doing right now: I’m attacking the “business” of religion, the subtle ways in which “Christianity” is milking American taxpayers for their own needs, even when the taxpayers are NOT of that faith. This is not an attack on someone’s personal Spiritual beliefs.
In today’s T-P is an article concerning Xavier University and 21 properties that it owns. I’ve been following the circumstances of many house demolitions on Squandered Heritage since the Blog was established. I’m seeing that many of these homes slated for Federally-payed demolition belong to various Christian organizations, and that most of these properties owned by these organizations have been their properties for years and they have let them rot.
They are now demanding their pound of flesh from all of America’s taxpayers for these demolitions, even if some of us are not “believers”. This is NOT right.
Also, consider the loss of property taxes when these “companies” buy up land.
Our property taxes pay for city services that we count on to keep our locale clean and safe. Remember what our city was like prior to the Flood: rotting streets and houses, crap for police protection, decaying playgrounds and a failed education system that should have produced educated people instead of the criminal element that we all have lived with for years. (yes there were crooked politicians, but I’m looking for a bigger culprit.)
That was the cost to all of us in New Orleans when around 60% of the properties here were considered “tax exempt”. Nothing has changed on that front except that now… Federal money is being demanded to tear these places down, and the “companies” reap another harvest of money from those that are not theirs. They don’t have to pay for their failures of purpose. (If they were failures, which I really doubt.)
The answer is that it shouldn’t come out of the purses and wallets of those not involved with those “businesses”. I gain nothing from the product offered, and yet I must pay for their stuffs?
(One glaring example is St. Francis Cabrini Church in Gentilly: expensive to the Arch Diocese to maintain prior to the Flood, and boarded up with no mitigation post-Flood. It was left to the Feds to foot the bill for removing a building that the Archdiocese didn’t want when Holy Cross decided to rebuild there.)
This is the same Archdiocese that owns many properties in the city that have been moth-balled, so to speak, before the infamous Flood.
These parcels should be owned by families and businesses. They should contribute to the common welfare. They could be assets to the community as a whole, not sink-holes that community money disappears into for their “needs” one morning per week. The monies required for the “businesses’” schemes rightfully belong to the PEOPLE that lived here and are trying to rebuild their lives and communities.
These are the people and the causes that the Christ believed in, not the creations of those of power and money.
In the New World the playing field shall be leveled: no business, including the religious ones, will have tax-exempt status. We are a polyglot culture, very diverse, and there is no reason for those of us who aren’t believers to be tithed for that which means nothing to us and gives nothing to the entire community.
This is one of the basic tenets of our Republic, and we must live by that.