Maher: US Taxpayers Must Call Out ‘Deadbeat’ Corporations That Pay Zero Taxes – Including Churches

Says Religion Is a ‘Sexist, Homophobic, Magic Act’ That Pays ‘No Tax, No Federal, State, or Local, No Income, Sales or Property Tax’

Bill Maher says there are many huge billion-dollar corporations that manage to pay no federal taxes, but on Tax Day Americans should remember among them are religious institutions, which he says pay no taxes at all.

“Now that it’s April 15 all U.S. taxpayers must call out all the deadbeats who ride for free — which includes giant corporations like GM and United Airlines, which this year are going to pay no taxes,” the comedian and pundit told his audience Friday night.

“There are 300,000 religious congregations in this country that pay no tax – no federal, state, or local, no income, sales or property tax – and they own $600 billion in property.”

Maher noted that Scientology, which he says has only about 30,000 members, “owns billions in real estate tax-scot-free, and that makes me hopping mad,” he said, as an iconic image of Scientology’s most prominent member, Tom Cruise, flashed on the screen.

The host of HBO’s “Real Time” called for the U.S. Supreme Court to “take a case about taxing churches, because it hasn’t done that since 1970, and since then religion has become much less popular. Especially with younger people,” Maher noted, adding “35 percent of millennials want nothing to do with it.”

He also noted that atheists, agnostics, and those opposed to organized religion “are now the second biggest denomination in America.”

“That means almost a quarter of us are being forced to subsidize a myth we’re not buying into,” he said. “If we levy taxes – ‘sin taxes,’ they call them – on things that are bad, to get people to stop doing them, why, in heaven’s name, don’t we tax religion: a sexist, homophobic, magic act that’s been used to justify everything from genital mutilation to genocide.”

“You want to raise the tax on tobacco kids don’t get cancer? Ok, but let’s put one on Sunday schools, so they don’t get stupid,” he insisted.

“Americans are losing their religion, because they’re catching on that religions do much more harm than good. Who enabled child sex abuse for centuries? What’s the common thread between ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and most other terrorist groups in the world? Who’s behind the new law in Mississippi that says that Mississippi now, cannot, among other things, force a baker to bake for a gay wedding.”

“Because in Mississippi, if you don’t put it in the right hole, you don’t get cake,” he quipped. “And, speaking of cake, it’s the same ‘religious freedom’ people that last year passed a law in Indiana that allowed restaurants to refuse to feed gay people, as Jesus would have wanted. Ah, yes, sweet, sweet religious freedom, free at last, to eat the potato skins here at the Flapjack Hut without some gaylord forcing his penis in our good Christian food and turning it gay. ‘You gay people hungry? Well, you should have thought of that before you embarked on your life of satanic perversions,'” he said, apparently mocking religious extremists.

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Image: Screenshot via Real Time with Bill Maher/YouTube
Hat tip: Huffington Post