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EDITORIAL

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Critics might have said Marian Franz worked for a lost cause. But she believed no witness for peace and conscience is ever wasted. And she was right. For 24 years she led the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, challenging lawmakers and peace-church members to live up to the highest ideals of their nation and their faith.

Franz died Nov. 17 at the age of 76. From 1982 until this past January, she poured her energy into working toward a goal that is both a distant dream and an urgent moral necessity.

Franz believed — as do countless Mennonites and other peacemaking Christians — that praying for peace while paying for war is contradictory and wrong. The problem is, it’s against the law to avoid it. Most of us lament the situation and pay anyway. But a few refuse to make that compromise. Conscience compels their war-tax resistance just as surely as it required thousands to refuse military service in the days of the draft.

Alternative service for war objectors provides a strong precedent for a peace-tax fund. The right to refuse military service based on freedom of conscience was established before World War II. This right is essential, but no one has had to exercise it since 1973. Today, the draft that enlists every taxpayer is the one that conscripts our money. When we pay for war, we participate in it. Those who cannot do this break the law.

The solution — respecting the right of conscience on the issue of war — is embedded in America’s tradition of religious freedom. Regard for conscience can be traced to the nation’s founding fathers. In a recent booklet, Conscience and the Courts, Franz observed that James Madison included the phrase “nor shall the rights of conscience be infringed” in a draft of the First Amendment.

In the 1940s, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone said: “All our history gives confirmation to the view that liberty of conscience has a moral and social value which makes it worthy of preservation at the hands of the state” (quoted in The Tax Dilemma by Donald D. Kaufman, published by Wipf and Stock, 2006).

Today the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill has 46 cosponsors, the most since 1990, in the House of Representatives. It has had sponsors in the House continuously since 1972 but has been absent from the Senate since 1996, when lead sponsor Mark Hatfield of Oregon retired. The latest issue of the Peace Tax Fund Update urges supporters to ask their senators to introduce the bill in the Senate. “Every letter has an impact,” the newsletter states.

That approach — persistence pays, and many small acts add up to something big — is the attitude Franz applied to her work.

“Marian was a realistic visionary,” said Alan Gamble, the Peace Tax Fund Campaign’s executive director, who holds the position Franz retired from in January. Franz combined a clear sense of what was possible today with the kind of long-term hope that once sustained champions of women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery.

Gamble recalled that Franz once said a senator had called her a “friendly pest,” which she considered a fine compliment.

“Quakers talk of the light within people, and she was able to find that by cultivating relationships with member of Congress,” Gamble said. Franz’s life will inspire many to keep the lights of peace, conscience and freedom burning. — Paul Schrag