Michael Bowman’s trial for alleged failure to file income-tax returns, the latest episode in the long tale of his refusal to be part of America’s abortion culture, has ended in a hung jury. “Over half of them, I believe, were for me, and a few government implants on the jury were against me,” he has ventured in a Facebook post.

Maxine Bernstein of The Oregonian has reported: “The government could retry Bowman but hasn’t said if it will.”

Bernstein had recounted in an earlier article that in 1999, 2000, and 2001, Bowman had had dealings with Joseph Saladino, “the promoter of a bogus tax dodge who insisted that personal income in the United States wasn’t taxable.” Prosecutors over the years had used those dealings to claim that Bowman was motivated by money and not truly motivated by his convictions about abortion. But Bowman’s lawyer argued that Bowman is a man who has lost everything. It is common sense that anyone who refused to pay taxes with any kind of worldly gain as a motivation would do it surreptitiously. No one refusing openly, as Bowman did, would expect any worldly gain.

Elephants in the Courtroom

There were a couple of elephants in the courtroom. One of them was Section 3 of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which has entered the United States Code as Title 42, Chapter 21b, Section 2000bb-1. The judge presiding at Bowman’s trial had ruled during Bowman’s earlier trial that allowing the RFRA to be argued as a defense in his case could “[open] the door to an argument that has the potential to go on and on.” Further arguing that “a person’s religious beliefs don’t provide a basis for avoiding taxes,” the prosecution in the latest case cited, according to the Oregonian article, “a ruling from an Oregon tax court judge in May 2005.”

Yet I call the RFRA an elephant in the room because I don’t find the “potential to go on and on” argument against the application of the Act to be at all convincing in any case that involves the government forcing its citizens to participate in killing innocent human beings. As I wrote earlier in relation to Bowman’s case,

While the government could not afford to let all conscientious tax defaulters off, it could afford to let some off, and it seems to me that compunctions about killing human beings are in a class by themselves in terms of most deserving accommodation. There must be no blow to the conscience so excruciating as the realization that one has unjustly killed and cannot undo it.

If the RFRA is not a legal basis, due to religious belief or, by interpretation, non-religious conscience objections, for refusal to pay tax money that is used to kill innocent human beings, it should be such a legal basis.

The other elephant in the courtroom was the organized pro-life movement. Members of the organized pro-life movement were not in the courtroom as spectators. They were not on the sidewalk with signs and banners. They were not in the park opposite the court with bullhorns. For months prior to the trial, Bowman and a friend or two had reached out to the pro-life world for support. Bowman’s attorney, Matthew Schindler, had stated that a crowd at the trial could make a difference. Bowman had stuck his neck out for his pro-life convictions, but the organized pro-life movement was not there for him.

Bowman (and a friend or two) had reached out to at least eight of the pro-life organizations with the biggest reputations for bold actions. They had written emails and had followed up with phone calls, or if no one answered the phone, then with text messages and voicemails. In the case of half of those eight or so organizations, confirmation had been obtained that the appeals had reached people at a decision-making level. Yet the practical response was zero. A director of one of the organizations did reply by email, “Unfortunately, we do not have the funding to send a team all the way out to Oregon.”

More worrisome yet than the lack of support for Bowman is the fact that the pro-lifers of America seem little bothered by being themselves a financial cog in the abortion machine. As I wrote two months ago, out of about 100 million pro-lifers in the US, I know only of Bowman, Kenneth Medenbach and Jon Speed as having done anything to resist being financial accomplices. The rest of the 100 million seem resigned to being a financial cog in the abortion machine. Or am I missing something? They do resist the enactment of such tax laws, no doubt, but once the laws are enacted, they acquiesce totally with their dollars.

About Speed, I wrote in that earlier article,

After the recent Cuomo-led institution of taxpayer funding of abortion in New York State, a bookstore owner named Jon Speed closed his store for one day in order to reduce, by a token amount, the sales-tax revenue available to the state.

On the day before the hung jury and declaration of mistrial in Bowman’s case, LifeNews.com announced,

Now, [Speed] plans to close his business completely and leave the state. In a post Thursday on Facebook, he blamed the “tyranny of the state” for his departure.

“Due to the continued tyranny of the State, we will no longer operate a small business in New York,” Speed wrote. “We cannot, in good conscience, continue to pay sales tax to a state that encourages the murder of its own children with glee.”

He thanked his customers and shared his family’s plans to move to Texas, which has been working hard to pass pro-life laws and defund the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Speed said they plan to continue their work in Texas to “end the slaughter of the most innocent among us.”

Hopefully there is something in the air after all.

The most effective form of anti-abortion tax resistance would probably involve pro-lifers doing significant jail time or being beaten for their convictions. It worked for Gandhi and King and their followers. But to effect at least something, a resistance action need not be illegal. I listed earlier six possible means of tax resistance. Those ideas proceed in order from harder for pro-lifers to commit to, to softer and more palatable. Having observed Bowman’s choices, I wrote up what he had done as number 1. Number 2 – moving to a pro-life state – has now occurred in the mind of Jon Speed (occurred independently of me, of course) and has been adopted by him. For all 100 million pro-lifers, there is a principle to be applied that does not require unattainable saintliness: they should minimize their abortion “footprint” – their money that goes to abortion – at the cost of some degree of sacrifice of comfort and convenience for themselves, preferably in a way that attracts attention to their strong pro-life convictions.

© 2019

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