| ITHACA,
NY - April 4 - Citing Henry David Thoreau and General Alexander
Haig, a group opposing the war in Iraq has launched a petition
drive to enlist support for persons who choose to withhold federal
income taxes in protest against the war. Called "An Appeal
to Conscience," the petition states that the signatories,
"believing that war tax refusal under the present circumstances
is fully justified on moral and ethical grounds, publicly declare
our encouragement of, and willingness to lend support to, those
persons of conscience who choose to take this step."
A partial
list of signatories to the Appeal to Conscience includes: Joan
Baez; Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ; Noam Chomsky; Rev. William Sloane
Coffin; Dave Dellinger and Elizabeth Peterson; Shelley and James
Douglass; Daniel Ellsberg; Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton; Elizabeth
McAllister; David McReynlds, Mary Morgan; Ched Myers; Grace
Paley and Robert Nichols; Utah Phillips; Bill ("Rev. Billy")
Talen; and Howard and Roslyn Zinn.
The Appeal
was inspired by a similar declaration circulated during the
Vietnam War in support of young men refusing to serve in the
military. Entitled "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,"
it noted that "an ever growing number of young American
men are finding that the American war in Vietnam so outrages
their deepest moral and religious sense that they cannot contribute
to it in any way." Four of the Call¹s signatories,
including then Yale University chaplain Rev. William Sloane
Coffin and famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock, were indicted for
"conspiracy" to violate the draft laws by President
Johnson¹s Justice Department. Following a much-publicized
trial, two of the four were subsequently acquitted by a federal
appeals court, and the cases of the other two were dropped.
Rev. Coffin
and Mary Morgan, the widow of Dr. Spock, are signatories to
the current Appeal to Conscience.
Declaring
that citizens have "a moral duty to speak out against,
and avoid cooperation with" the war in Iraq, the Appeal
states that "refusal to pay taxes used to finance unjust
wars, along with refusal by soldiers to fight
in them, is a direct and potentially effective form of citizen
non-cooperation," and that "war tax refusal has a
long and honorable tradition among religious and secular opponents
of war."
The Appeal
also states that "the U.S. government¹s ability to
threaten and coerce other nations is a direct result of the
unprecedented size of our military arsenal, which is far larger
than that of all our allies and 'enemies' combined. The maintenance
of this arsenal depends upon the willingness of the American
people, through their federal tax payments, to finance it."
Nineteenth
century American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau
was jailed for refusing to pay a federal tax that was to be
used to finance the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, which Thoreau
and others believed to be an unwarranted act of aggression on
the part of the U.S. In his famous essay, "On the Duty
of Civil Disobedience," Thoreau wrote: "If a thousand
[people] were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would
not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them
and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood."
More than
a century later, following the million-person rally for nuclear
disarmament in New York City¹s Central Park on June 12,
1982, General Alexander Haig, then Secretary of State under
President Ronald Reagan, is alleged to have remarked, "Let
them march all they want, as long as they continue
to pay their taxes."
The Appeal
is a project of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating
Committee (NWTRCC), a clearinghouse and resource center for
individual conscientious objectors to war taxes and the coalition
of local, regional, and national groups working on war-tax-related
issues. The project was initiated by an ad hoc group war tax
refusers that includes: Ruth Benn (New York, NY), Ed Hedemann
(New York, NY), Ellen Kaye (Brattleboro, VT), Randy Kehler (Colrain,
MA), Mary Loehr (Ithaca, NY), and Lawrence Rosenwald (Wellesley,
MA).
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