TV Ministries’ Tax Exemptions

Does Thomas forget that the First Amendment rights are going to be violated if the IRS does what he has proposed. Does he realize that if one part of our society is denied or prohibited from exercising our fundamental human rights, then all of us will be denied participation in what one believes. Is this what Thomas has in mind?

We are not a primitive society; we do not need more government control on anything. Take a look at the national budget for example. The people in this country can take care of the crooks and false prophets, not a self-righteous press that cares nothing about destroying individual lives for the sake of selling papers.

Does Thomas know that if you start singling out a particular group for supposed or real crimes or abuses, sooner or later you start to have a situation like they had in Nazi Germany of putting people in a certain place (ghetto) and stripping them of the profession and jobs they worked at. All in the name of public interest, a vague but undefinable entity that the press always seems to refer to when writing about other segments of our society that is not the press itself.

If you think I’m overreacting it does not take much for the government to take away the rights of a segment of society when it deems it in the public interest to do so. The press has an important function of preserving not segregating the rights of the people as a whole, not just its own self-interest. It seems to me that the press as a whole has taken the role of Pharisees, that the TV evangelists had for so long.

JULIO F. DAVILA

Placentia