Small U.S. ex-gay non-profit organizations will start to lose their non-profit status next year under new federal regulations that require all organizations to file with the Internal Revenue Service — no matter how small the organization’s budget is.

Ex-gay organizations such as Corduroy Stone in Lansing, His Way Out Ministries in Bakersfield, Life+Guard Ministries in Austin, and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays have until now straddled a line which enabled them to avoid filing in years when their annual budget fell below $25,000.

Now, these outfits will have to file regardless. Activists who for years have treated their non-profit as an afterthought or a hobby face administrative hassles, as well as exposure of their donors and leadership — or lack thereof. It is likely that some simply won’t bother to maintain their non-profit status.

It will be interesting to see how many of Exodus’ local activists survive IRS efforts to prune non-compliant and closed organizations.

After Exodus Global Alliance lost its application for charitable tax-exempt status in New Zealand, the blog Slap Upside the Head noticed that Exodus already enjoys fraudulent misuse of this status in Canada.

That prompted blogger Mark to ask a very simple question: How is it “charitable” for a U.S.-based religious organization to commit unprofessional acts of psychological abuse  against Canadian gay people?

We’d like to know the answer to a similar question: How is it “charitable” for such organizations to charge hundreds of dollars per day for this abuse?

According to Mark:

Charitable status can be revoked for one of three reasons: Voluntary revocation (unlikely in this case), Revocation for failure to file taxes (also unlikely), or revocation for a cause other than a failure to file. The latter is complicated, but states that charitable status can be revoked for “a failure to comply with the requirements of registration,” which may include the “public benefit test.”

According to Revenue Canada, claims of public benefit by any charity “may be [...] rebutted by concerns raised,” and there is definitely legal precedent of this.

Mark has thus created an action page from which Canadians may contact the Canada Revenue Agency and request reconsideration of Exodus’ charitable status.

Mark adds:

We’re looking for experts in the medical and psychological community to sign a common letter to send to the CRA attesting that Exodus is doing demonstrable harm in Canada. If you are, or know an accredited doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, please help us get in touch! Together, we’ll write a letter to send to both the press and the CRA.

We hope that some of our professional readers will contact Mark and offer to help with this common letter.

While P-FOX seeks federal bailout money for antigay parents in the United States, and the Assemblies of God seek government support for their ex-gay Teen Challenge programs, a Dutch official has revoked a handout to one of two antigay Christian groups that sought to raid the pockets of that nation’s taxpayers.

According to NRC Handelsblad:

[Dutch minister for education, culture and equality Ronald Plasterk] said that the Onze Weg (Our Way) foundation was in fact attempting to ‘cure’ homosexuality. Protecting minority interests is part of Plasterk’s portfolio.

Earlier in the week Plasterk had defended his decision to subsidise the organisation, prompted by written questions from two opposition members of parliament. Boris van der Ham of the left-wing liberal party D66 and Anouchka van Miltenburg of right-wing liberal VVD, quoted an article in the Revu weekly that claimed the group is targeting homosexuals in order to alter their sexual orientation. The organisation is mainly active among evangelical Christians and was granted a 50,000 euro subsidy in September 2008.

Another ex-gay organization, RefoAnders, received a government subsidy of 84,000 euros, according to Religious Intelligence. That handout is now being reconsidered.

According to Rene van Soeren, who commented at Ex-Gay Watch last year:

Onze Weg and RefoAnders are both closely linked to Different [an orthodox Christian foundation] — and that foundation is a member of Exodus International.

Both organizations falsely claimed to be gay Christian organizations.

The web site of the Exodus Global Alliance profiles Johan van de Sluis, 70-year-old board member of Onze Weg, who thanks Exodus for helping move European ex-gay organizations out of isolation.

Last week, Truth Wins Out expressed concern that the ex-gay Exodus Global Alliance is helping to draw youths with drug and alcohol problems into involuntary and antigay “Teen Challenge” programs in the United States and New Zealand.

Now we learn from Ken Avidor (via Pam Spaulding) that U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar is requesting $500,000 in U.S. taxpayer money for Minnesota Teen Challenge, a pray-away-the-drugs program whose parent organization — strangely enough — hires ex-gay speakers, utilizes ex-gay media, and is operated by the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.

The “Teen Challenge” network apparently offers no reputable professional counseling; instead, its amateur employees program youths with church ideology while blaming teens’ problems on “Satanic” influences such as Halloween and Harry Potter. It offers no well-designed tracking of success and failure rates; its reports and supposed success stories appear to consist of isolated anecdotes and head counts which exclude youths who failed to complete a treatment program.

Treatments, by the way, reportedly include up to a year of residency in isolation, denial of medical treatment, and relentless assaults upon Jewish and other non-evangelical faith perspectives. Supporters include U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s rumored choice for drug czar, former congressman Jim Ramstad.

Maia Szalavitz of The Huffington Post is alarmed at Teen Challenge’s substitution of brainwashing for sound medical treatment:

Further, according to Teen Challenge, “Addiction is a sin, not a disease.” Consequently, the program does not allow the use of medication.

Beyond this, it humiliates and attempts to “break down” people with addictions, using techniques that I have covered extensively elsewhere that are known to do more harm than good.

Since half of all addicts have a co-existing mental illness which often requires medication, banning it is not exactly evidence-based practice. And since there are medications that can help treat particular addictions, this is even more absurd. Given that Ramstad sponsored a bill to change the name of the National Institute on Drug Abuse to the National Institute on Diseases of Addiction, it is deeply troubling that he’d support an organization which views it as sin.

Andy Birkey of the Minnesota Independent says that Teen Challenge’s acceptance of past and future federal subsidies obligate it to submit to public scrutiny and accountability:

If you accept taxpayer money, you have to accept that you’re going to receive public scrutiny. That simple point seems to be eluding Minnesota Teen Challenge (MNTC), the faith-based drug treatment program which secured a federal earmark in early 2008 arranged by Rep. Jim Ramstad and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for its “Know the Truth” program which aims to prevent drug use.

Operating close to the border of church and state, the group’s members are unrealistic if they think their work is not going to get attention.

…The point of my article was not to suggest that MNTC was not successful or beneficial, as Scherber implies. Rather it was to point out the overtly religious nature of the organization and that the program has historically been controversial. In the interest of brevity, I left some examples out. For instance, MNTC’s stance on Halloween verges on the comical (“Halloween is a day set up totally for Satan … The more people who go out dressed as demons, ghosts, witches and goblins, the more glory Satan receives”). …

I don’t question that faith-based programs can be very effective for those that share the programs’ faith. Faith is a huge motivator in people’s lives. I think MNTC has been very effective for the clients it serves. However, I don’t think it’s appropriate for judges, prosecutors or public defenders to suggest the program as an alternative to jail.

In economic boom times, taxpayer dollars should be restricted to professionally operated and audited facilities with solid, evidence-based performance records. In troubled economic times, taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on one prosperous denomination’s religious indoctrination centers.

The United States government has a long history of subsidizing churches, indirectly, for benefits that churches and other ostensibly non-profit organizations are perceived to provide to communities.

Churches are subsidized primarily in the form of public services for which they are exempted from tax collection. Churches’ neighbors, on the other hand, pay for air and surface transportation infrastructure and regulation; clean air, water, and food; schools; national defense; Social Security, and more.

Until President Bush’s White House popularized “faith-based initiatives” costing taxpayers billions of dollars that have been funneled to churches with little accountability, churches were required not to channel the free services that they receive into the pockets and campaigns of corrupt political partisans.

“Faith-based initiatives,” while well-intentioned, became a revolving door for billions of federal taxpayer dollars to be channeled from the pockets of taxpayers into thinly disguised projects that support Republican political causes.

In 2008, shameless church leaders abandoned even the pretense if non-partisanship, as they used generously taxpayer-aided pulpits to declare the Christian Barack Obama an antichrist and to crown the nominally agnostic John McCain and other Republicans as their anointed leaders. These religious leaders knew, of course, that the politicians receiving their support would send additional billions of taxpayer dollars into church employees’ pockets. The churches, in turn, become pawns of politicians who gain effective control of churches’ annual budgets.

Various petitions such as this one are now circulating, seeking to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that channel taxpayer support into partisan political bribery and racketeering.

Advocates of a more libertarian or fair-tax approach seek instead to revoke the tax-exempt status of all churches.

Do churches provide services that justify tax-exempt status?

Should some or all churches be required to pay taxes like everyone else?

Discuss.