I just heard about this lawsuit being pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union about sales tax and the Bible. Here’s the full story from KRON4:

ATLANTA The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit arguing that a Georgia law exempting the Bible and other “Holy Scripture” from sale taxes is discriminatory.

The lawsuit says the exemption should be extended to all publications dealing with the meaning of life.

The federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of Candace Apple, whose Phoenix and Dragon Bookstore in suburban Atlanta sells a witches’ Bible for Wiccans and other spiritual books. Her co-plaintiff, Thomas Budlong, is the former president of the Georgia Library Association.

Apple and ACLU attorney Maggie Garrett say the lawsuit is aimed at ending discrimination against religious faiths that are outside the mainstream.

Here’s a link to the Phoenix and Dragon Bookstore, seeing as the whole thing offers them a lot of free publicity, no doubt.

In any event, I had no idea that Bibles were sold tax free. I wonder if that’s a local, state or federal thing. I wonder how successful their efforts are really going to be here. Mainly because they are heading down a slippery slope with the direction they seem to be taking. What I mean by that is that if you have the Bible as tax-exempt, and then ask for another set of books to be included under that statute, then ultimately you’re going to end up with another exclusionary law. Anything not included in the list originally can then have an additional suit (theoretically) brought which seeks inclusion within the tax break. And that process just continues and continues.

I don’t particularly agree either with taking the approach of including “all publications dealing with the meaning of life,” because ultimately, there’s no such thing as a publication which doesn’t somehow deal with the meaning of life. Everything that humans do, create, think about, etc deals with the meaning of life in some sense. So in effect, they are seeking an end to sales tax. Which maybe is a good thing, I don’t know. But that seems like a much bigger battle and a territory which they surely can’t win in.

Since I’m no legal expert though, who knows. But to me, the more intelligent course of action would be to simply tax Bibles and every other type of publication on an equal basis. Then you don’t run into all these other philosophical problems.