Virginia Legislators Yank the Confederacy’s Tax Exemption

Let’s get one thing straight.  I won’t be having a beer with members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or at the Stonewall Jackson Memorial.  And I will not join a book club meeting sponsored by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society.  I certainly won’t donate to any of those organizations and I would rather my tax dollars not subsidize them.  But I am not comfortable with two bills passed by the Virginia legislature revoking, by name, the state charitable tax exemption of those groups. The Governor should veto the bills.

I have asserted that tax exemption should and must be denied to “hate groups.”  My argument concerns the principle that not everything nonprofit is charitable, and that not everything that teaches is “educational.”  I acknowledge that the government has a high burden of proof to meet when it decides to revoke tax exemption for groups reasonably perceived as expressing or celebrating racial hatred.  But at some point racial affinity or antipathy — even if only expressed by speech — is just racial hatred. The speech may not be prohibited, but government is Constitutionally precluded from exempting or otherwise subsidizing it.  Virginia’s legislative decree seems like a bill of attainder.  A legislature can Constitutionally declare that “hate groups shall not be granted tax exemption” but I have a problem with the legislature declaring that a particular group is a hate group. I do not mean to assert that any of those groups are or are not hate groups, as I define them in my article. But a legislative body cannot make the required factual determination.  A legislature making that determination seems clearly to violate due process.  Can Congress revoke a specific group’s tax exempt status by legislative fiat?  Sometimes people who try to help only make things worse.

Anyway, here is a bit from an AP article:

Legislation that would end tax benefits for the United Daughters of the Confederacy — the Richmond-based women’s group that helped erect many of the country’s Confederate monuments — is on its way to Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who hasn’t said whether he supports it. The Democratic-led House of Delegates gave final passage Monday to a bill that would eliminate both a recordation and property tax exemption for the group. A separate, companion measure that reached final passage last week also eliminates those exemptions. The bills have moved through the legislature with mostly party-line support and relatively little debate. The few individuals who have spoken out against the legislation have called it discriminatory, while supporters argued the tax benefits have amounted to state-sponsored subsidies for Confederate monuments and are out of line with 21st-century values.  “Since Virginia no longer supports the legacy of the Confederacy, we need to reflect that in our legislation,” Democratic Sen. Angelia Williams Graves of Norfolk, the sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, said in a legislative hearing.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy for over a century has “spread the lie” of the Lost Cause — an ideology that downplayed the role slavery played in the Civil War — and “instilled fear in marginalized groups by erecting Confederate monuments around the United States,” Williams Graves said.  The nonprofit group, which owns a marble-clad Memorial Building positioned on a prominent Richmond boulevard with an assessed value of over $4.4 million, did not respond to requests for comment Monday.  But last week, it told TV station WRIC the state created the property-tax exemption in 1950, also extending “an offer of land in Richmond” to erect the Memorial Building.  The property tax exemption helps the group, which had members in the House gallery Monday, provide aid to other organizations, including the Wounded Warriors Project and homeless veterans organizations, the statement said.

An entity called the Confederate Memorial Literary Society is listed in city property records as the owner of the former White House of the Confederacy, which is part of Richmond’s multi-site American Civil War Museum. A museum representative didn’t respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.  United Daughters of the Confederacy was founded in 1894 and is open to membership by female descendants of individuals who served in the Confederate military or who “gave Material Aid to the Cause,” according to the group’s website. The group denounces white supremacy, is “grieved” that certain hate groups have adopted the use of the Confederate flag, and believes Confederate monuments are part of “our shared American history and should remain in place,” its website said.  Articles and studies have found the group helped erect hundreds of monuments and other tributes to the Confederacy around the country. The group has also been involved in lawsuits in more recent years aimed at stopping the removal of monuments from public spaces.

darryll k. jones