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The One Conscience Claim America Won’t Honor
Religious liberty claims win everywhere, except when it comes to financing war.
Jun 04, 2026
The war in Iran has forced many Americans to confront what their tax dollars make them party to. After the US has killed hundreds of Iranian children in school and bombed the country’s civilian infrastructure, more and more Americans are considering tax refusal. It’s a tradition older than the republic itself. Quakers resisted military taxes in the colonies, sometimes at the price of seized property. Thomas David Thoreau was jailed for refusing a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War. And hundreds of thousands resisted the telephone tax during the Vietnam War, when the National War Tax Resistance counted 192 centers in 45 states.
Call that “freedom.”
In an age of ascendant religious liberty, a fortunate class of Americans enjoys it in special measure. Employers, schools, religious institutions, and corporations have won exemption after exemption from ordinary legal duties they claim violate their religious faith. Creationist craft store chains no longer have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Public school football coaches may launch disruptive displays of prayer at midfield. For every belief, the court has seemed ready with a baroque exception.
Except one, of course: the pacifist’s objection to financing war. One of the oldest religious and conscience claims in American life has been a consistent loser in court. Even the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, which helped make religious freedom claims an all-conquering force in American law, worked no change for war-tax resisters. In the late 1990s, Quaker objectors tried RFRA and First Amendment claims in federal court. Some offered to pay their full income-tax bill if the money could be directed to nonmilitary uses; others withheld the military portion and redirected it to life-sustaining organizations. All lost.
Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.
Mushrooms have fared better. In 2001, a mushroom company challenged a federal program that required it to help pay for generic mushroom advertising. The company argued that it could not be made to fund a message it did not believe: that mushrooms were mushrooms, and that its own were no better than anyone else’s. The Supreme Court agreed, finding the program violated the First Amendment. Free speech principles have thus protected the consciences of corporations from being wounded by mushroom advertising. But when pacifists, under a similar theory, have objected to financing war? Court after court has told them to get over it.
In this way, American law has built a vast sanctuary for conservative religious conscience and libertarian free speech sensibilities. That sanctuary ends at the gates of the only thing more powerful: the national-security state. Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.
Courts might be able to throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do, but Congress has no such excuse. It has let the most tepid solution to conscientious objection to war taxation languish for decades. The Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act, most recently reintroduced in 2021, would deposit the income, estate, and gift tax payments of conscientious objectors and religious pacifists into a fund reserved for nonmilitary uses. Americans who object to war would no longer have to choose between violating the law and violating their conscience. Instead, the bill would offer them a third way: Pay in full, but not for war.
The Peace Tax Fund Act has been reintroduced for five decades, and a more embarrassingly modest intervention is hard to imagine. The bill reduces neither military spending nor objectors’ tax burden. It would offer accommodations less burdensome than those given to other religious-liberty claimants. And it’s been backed in different iterations over the years by giants like John Lewis, the “conscience of Congress”; Ron Dellums, the first Black chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Mark Hatfield, an evangelical Republican, World War II veteran, and one of the first Americans to witness Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.
All of this raises the question: so why hasn’t it passed? If Congress cannot enact even this most minimal of bills—one that leaves the military budget untouched and still requires objectors to pay their full federal tax burden—then the objection cannot really be about administrative inconvenience or military necessity. Indeed, the Peace Tax Fund is far more dangerous than that. By making war taxation visible as a moral choice, the act would make Americans do what the national-security state is desperate to prevent them from doing: think.
That would begin on the otherwise dry tax form, where it would be hard to miss a new option to object to war. A taxpayer might wonder why it exists. She might begin to question how the military and intelligence agencies spend their combined trillion-dollar budget. She might wonder why the country goes to war and plucks foreign leaders from their beds without public debate. The national-security state has fought hard to keep those questions at bay by keeping citizens in the dark. Questions, after all, can quickly lead to demands for answers. The Peace Tax Fund would encourage them by inviting Americans to take a hard look at the killing done in their names, and that kind of public scrutiny is an existential threat to the military and intelligence agencies accustomed to immunity from it.
This is the only explanation for an otherwise odd situation. Congress appears more willing to lose money to scattered acts of illegal tax resistance than to provide conscientious objectors with a legal pathway to objection. That makes sense once one sees that legal objection is more dangerous to the national-security state than evasion. The Peace Tax Fund Act would legitimize opposition to the military-industrial complex and its casual violence by transforming that opposition into a recognized claim of conscience. Once the state recognizes those claims as the stuff of deep moral conviction rather than the anarchical fringe, it undermines the military-industrial complex’s favorite tactic: ridiculing opponents as traitors and stigmatizing their claims as beyond the pale.
The consciences of objectors and pacifists do not command the tender political theater reserved for the craft store chain, the football coach, or the mushroom company. But that should tell opponents of the American war machine something hopeful: The people who operate it do not believe it can survive public scrutiny. The task, then, is to drag more of that machinery into the light, where everyday Americans might begin to ask whether the country uses its power for good in the world—or for them.
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In 'Troubling Escalation' Against Free Press, Pentagon Bans Reporters From Public Affairs Office
"Banning journalists from the press office in the Pentagon, where they worked professionally in previous administrations, is simply a sign that current DOD leadership fears accountability," said one reporter.
Jun 02, 2026
The Trump administration's "asinine attempts to silence objective journalism just hit a new low," said one press freedom advocate late Monday after the Pentagon announced that the US Department of Defense would mark its press office as a classified area, banning journalists from the space where they've previously talked openly with DOD officials.
Reporters on the military are currently largely banned from the building altogether as litigation is ongoing over the administration's requirement that journalists have an escort to move about the Pentagon, but the new policy means that should they be able to return, they would be even more limited in their access to public affairs officers whose job it is to keep the press and public informed.
"For multiple administrations, Pentagon reporters have used the press office to meet with public affairs officers and have open conversations about what America's armed services are doing in order to keep the public informed," said Ben Grazda, an advocacy manager for Reporters Without Borders North America.
Calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth "petulant" and pointing to his unsuccessful demand that journalists sign "loyalty pledges," Grazda added that "journalists will continue their tenacious reporting and hold the Pentagon accountable for the money, operations, and lives they impact every day."
The Washington Post reported that Pentagon speechwriters will be moved into the public affairs office, which will be equipped with the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, which is used to transmit classified information.
“This is the most transparent war department in history. No amount of spin from the Fake News media will change that. The Pentagon Press Office has been redesignated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility due to speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War sharing the facility," said Jose Valdez, the acting Defense Department press secretary, on social media on Monday, referring to Hegseth by the title he prefers.
Despite Valdez's claims, journalists referred to the decision as "Orwellian" and noted that Hegseth is further curtailing press access to the Pentagon as the US is mediating talks to end the war the US and Israel started against Iran in February.
The policy was also announced as The New York Times reported that Hegseth had blocked the promotions of nine Navy officers who had been selected by senior Navy admirals, appearing to "violate the rules governing a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based."
"Banning journalists from the press office in the Pentagon, where they worked professionally in previous administrations, is simply a sign that current DOD leadership fears accountability," said Times reporter Trip Gabriel.
The decision to close the press office to members of the press comes eight months after hundreds of journalists walked out of the Pentagon in protest of a new policy barring them from seeking information that the Trump administration had not authorized for release.
That policy was struck down by a federal court earlier this year, but the government has appealed the ruling.
The National Press Club called the Pentagon's newest policy "a remarkable and troubling escalation in the Defense Department’s ongoing effort to restrict independent reporting."
"This move does not occur in isolation," said Mark Schoeff Jr., a reporter at CQ Roll Call and president of the organization. "It follows a troubling pattern of escalating restrictions on Pentagon coverage, including efforts to limit journalists to pre-approved information, revoke credentials for routine reporting practices, and physically remove reporters from long-standing workspaces and access without an escort."
"Calling a press workspace ‘classified’ does not make the government more transparent," said Schoeff. "It creates yet another obstacle between journalists and the information Americans have a right to know, especially at a moment when the public needs clear, unfiltered information about the US military."
"Independent reporting on the US military is not optional," he added. "When journalists are pushed farther from the institutions they cover, the American people are left with less information, less transparency, and less oversight. Any effort to restrict that access should alarm everyone who values a free and informed society."
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'By This Logic, Any Protest Could Be a Conspiracy': Conviction of Spokane ICE Protesters Raises Free Speech Concerns
"We were guinea pigs," said the father of one of the convicted protesters. "They brought the swamp of Washington, DC, into our area to stop American citizens from exercising our rights that are guaranteed."
May 29, 2026
With the conviction of three anti-ICE protesters in Spokane, Washington on federal "conspiracy" charges Thursday, civil rights advocates and legal experts fear that the Trump administration may have just been handed a powerful tool to criminalize dissent.
Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II, nicknamed the "Spokane 3," were indicted last year for their actions at a protest in June 2025, where they attempted to physically obstruct ICE agents from transporting two Venezuelan immigrants to an ICE processing facility in Tacoma.
Both of the men reportedly entered the US legally under a humanitarian parole program that had been terminated by the Trump administration, leading advocates to protest their detention.
As Spokesman-Review, a Spokane newspaper, described:
Protesters that day eventually began linking arms around vans and in front of agents’ cars. The event grew chaotic. ICE agents entered a crowd of people standing outside the facility’s parking lot gate and began grabbing people by the necks and arms, pushing them to the ground. Protesters also slashed tires of vans meant to transport the detainees.
But where such activity would usually lead to charges against specific protesters for discrete illegal actions like trespassing, property damage, or other public order offenses, the Department of Justice (DOJ)—as part of a nationwide effort to crack down on protests against ICE—charged nine protesters with "conspiracy to impede or injure officers," even though no officers were actually injured during the protest.
Legal experts described it as a novel approach that wrapped many people involved in the protest into a single "conspiracy" regardless of whether they committed specific criminal acts.
“Usually if a protest gets out of hand and people are hurt or property is hurt, you see charges based on that,” Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor and a University of Washington law professor, told The New York Times earlier this month. “They’re not going after people based on specific harm done. They’re stretching conspiracy charges to target protesters and people who organize protests.”
Facing pressure from the federal government to bring the case following a national memo sent from the DOJ to prioritize and publicize cases against ICE agents, then-acting US Attorney for Eastern Washington Richard Barker resigned last year rather than bring charges against the protesters.
He said at the time he was grateful he “never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that [he] didn’t believe in." His successor, Stephanie Van Marter, however, did sign the order.
Six of the defendants pleaded guilty to the charges to avoid federal prison time. But Archer, Forral, and Mavalwalla chose to fight them, believing the case was part of an unjust attempt to criminalize their right to protest.
After a trial that lasted seven days, a jury found the three defendants guilty of conspiracy. But the defense has argued that the trial was marred by problems that rendered the verdict faulty.
As the Guardian explained:
In February, a federal judge ordered the release of a Venezuelan migrant whose transportation for deportation the protesters sought to block, ruling his arrest violated the constitution.
But the jury, drawn from conservative eastern Washington state, did not hear those facts at trial, thanks to rulings by Judge [Rebecca] Pennell. Pennell, a former federal public defender and appointee of the Democratic president Joe Biden, also ruled the protesters on trial could not use the First Amendment as a defense, though they were allowed to state their reasons for demonstrating.
Instead, the jury watched hours of law enforcement body camera video and heard from a parade of ICE agents... Jeremy Burlingame, an ICE agent who testified, had authored social media posts that called Black politicians “lying ghetto garbage” and transgender people “mentally ill.” He boosted a post showing ICE arresting a pregnant woman at gunpoint that called her a “pregnant invader.”
Federal prosecutors deemed the posts troubling enough to recall Burlingame to impeach him, despite the fact that he was their witness...
But Burlingame’s online posts, the lack of injury to ICE officers, and the absence of evidence showing communication between the three defendants prior to the protest were not enough to sway the jury.
The defendants now face potential sentences of up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine. However, they are expected to appeal the verdict and have filed a rarely used motion allowing their attorneys to argue that no rational juror could find their clients guilty.
"I question whether justice truly was served by today’s verdict,” Barker told the Spokesman-Review. "This was the first conspiracy prosecution in Eastern Washington history under... a Civil War-era law dusted off to punish members of the Spokane community who stood up for two young men who were unlawfully detained by ICE."
Video by KREM 2 News/Youtube
Looking beyond the details of the trial itself, many observers questioned the very premise of the DOJ's prosecution.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said from the start of the trial she believed it was "politically motivated."
"It was meant to make an example out of people who disagreed with federal immigration policy," she said.
City council member Sarah Dixit, who said she took part in the protest, said: "Based on the evidence that was shown, I personally didn’t see evidence of what they were accused of. Conspiracy is a charge that feels complicated to prove, and I don’t believe that the government made a strong case for that.”
Others expressed fear for the precedent that had been set. La Rond Baker, the legal director of the Washington ACLU, said the Trump administration "has a demonstrable history of using the Department of Justice to silence and punish its critics."
The administration has pursued similar sweeping conspiracy charges against other groups of anti-ICE protesters around the country—including in Los Angeles, Broadview, Illinois, and North Texas.
“The verdict was painfully disappointing,” said Archer’s attorney, Carl Oreskovich. “I think it was an extraordinarily aggressive approach to prosecution of protests. And it certainly is going to chill people who want to utilize their First Amendment right to dissent against government actions that they don’t agree with."
In a comment to The Guardian, Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and executive director of its Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, said the verdict was "frightening."
“By this logic, any protest could be a conspiracy,” he said. “The goal posts keep moving.”
Bajun Mavalwalla Sr., a retired US Army intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan, said his son—also a veteran of the same war—and the other two defendants were standing for "the freedoms that separate this country from the dictatorships.”
“People in Spokane and people in Eastern Washington need to understand that we were guinea pigs. That they brought the swamp of Washington, DC, into our area to stop American citizens from exercising our rights that are guaranteed,” the elder Mavalwalla said after his son was convicted.
“It was the whole point of the Constitution, the right to protest, the right to dissent, the right to assemble, all of those things are now in question because of this case," he said. "My son has taken the brunt of the entire weight of the United States government onto their shoulders.”
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