church – The Progressive Midwesterner

AUTHOR’S NOTE #1: The following blog post is an update to an earlier blog post, which I’ve linked to below.

AUTHOR’S NOTE #2: The blog post has been corrected to include information provided by Westville, Illinois Village Board member Darren VanDunyn, who also is the head of the local Lions Club chapter here in Westville.

Here in my hometown of Westville, Illinois, it’s rare for major controversies to occur in local politics. However, a recent political controversy involves St. Mary’s Church, the local Catholic parish here in Westville, sending out “public notice” postcards spewing anti-LGBT bigotry and railing against homosexuality.

The parish’s decision to send out these postcards to area residents has now cost the parish a major partnership. The Westville (IL) Lions Club chapter, which is led by Westville Village Board member Darren VanDunyn, is no longer partnering with, or promoting events held by, St. Mary’s Church here in Westville because of the anti-LGBT postcards sent out by the parish not reflecting the local Lions Club chapter’s values:

The Lions Club wants to make sure a controversial mailer doesn’t affect a big event this weekend. Now, they’re distancing themselves from St. Mary’s Church.

The church sent out an anti-gay mailer last month. On the other side was information about the upcoming Labor Day celebration and parade. The event is partially sponsored by the church.

Members of the Lions Club decided to drop that partnership. They say the message does not reflect their club in any way.

While I’m not Catholic, it is an indisputable fact that, in his tenure at the helm of St. Mary’s Church, Father Sauppé (I’m not sure what his first name is), the current head of the local parish, has repeatedly embarrassed Westville and has alienated a ton of people. Now, the local Lions Club here in Westville is distancing themselves from St. Mary’s due to Father Sauppé’s actions.

You might be shocked to find out about this, but taxpayers effectively subsidized the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which was perpetrated by 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof and claimed the lives of nine people, including Reverend and South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney (D-Ridgeland).

The Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative news organization, detailed how taxpayers effectively subsidized the mass murder at Mother Emanuel in their report:

Alleged Charleston gunman Dylann Roof wrote that he was never the same after discovering a website with “pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders.”

The pages that left Roof in disbelief were the product of a white-nationalist group subsidized by American taxpayers.

The Council of Conservative Citizens Inc. is listed by the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit organization that promotes social welfare, also known as a 501(c)(4). Such groups pay no federal taxes, a form of government subsidy.

To summarize all of that, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist organization, incorporated as a nonprofit “social welfare” organization, legally exempted itself from federal taxation, and published racist screeds on its website that prompted Roof to perpetrate a mass murder in a place of worship. In other words, the federal government effectively subsidized the Charleston shooting by exempting the CCC from federal taxes.

The CCC may legally be a “social welfare” organization, but, in reality, they are not a social welfare organization. The CCC is a white supremacist organization that, among other things, publicly supports far-right, anti-immigration politicians and political parties, glorifies black-on-white violent crimes, absurdly blames Chicago’s high murder rate on a misperceived lack of guns in the city, and has posted ads from at least one company selling Confederate flags online to its website. Furthermore, the CCC’s president, Earl P. Holt, has donated to many Republican politicians, including, among many others, Joni Ernst, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Jim Oberweis, Louie Gohmert, Todd Akin, Tom Emmer, Allen West, and Steve King; in fact, in some campaign finance reports, Holt listed himself as a “slumlord”. For the federal government to effectively subsidize such a hateful organization is, in my opinion, absolutely disgusting.