I am a fan of all the members of the Union of Egoists, but that I also run benjamindecasseres.com and have published a few books of his work (and have many more on the way), it should be apparent that I am a BIG fan of him in particular.
What follows was a WONDERFUL surprise to me, as it is an absolutely SAVAGE assault on the church and the state, advocating for strict taxation of all churches.
-Kevin I. Slaughter
KEPT
by Benjamin DeCassers
as published in The Clarion | Vol. I – No. 7-8. | March-April 1933
The oldest and most placidly accepted lie about ourselves is that in this country there is no liaison between the State and the Church. They are “divorced”, to use the old cliché.
In reality, they are not divorced because they were never legally married. Uncle Sam is, and always has been, a bachelor—some impolite commentators would say a bachelor verging toward the sere and senile. And, like all professional and incurable bachelors, he has his flock of chisellers and gold-diggers.
Uncle Sam is, in fact, Sugar-Daddy to the oldest and most remorselessly prehensile courtesan in the world—the Church. By absolving her billions of dollars of taxation—mainly thru fear of political reprisals—she lives in a secure and decaying splendor that the most wanton of the classic chippies would have envied.
This physically, mentally and spiritually childless old trollop, the Church, goes scot-free of any responsibility whatever. The whole country may go to pot—but not this old wench. She has more than four billion dollars worth of tax-free property in her name. Nothing can happen to her while Sugar-Daddy Sam crooks the knee before her.
She rules the household of her Sugar-Daddy as completely as Nell Gwynn ruled the court of Charles II. Her fingers are stuck in all his pies—legislative, economic. educational, cultural and political. She prescribes what Uncle Sam should and should not drink and in many. States the rules of private fornication and divorce.
When this ageless taxless Moll knocks on any of the doors of Sugar-Daddy Sam he cringes and quakes. No voice is ever raised against her in Congress or in the prints. She claims, and receives, privileges, that no other American citizen enjoys, for her ballyhooing parasites—the priests, rabbis and parsons.
She lives on the moth-blown fiction that she is a spiritual and educational necessity, that she distributes vast largesses of ethical and God-begotten manna to the Sugar-Daddy’s children, some 120,000,000 veritable bastards if they can stand for this colossal graft much longer while taxes are mounting and the national budget can’t make ends meet. She even cries out that her Sugar-Daddy would go to pieces like an old ga-ga doodlesack if she didn’t feed him with her pious boob-porridge. In her old withered bosom the Church nurses one dear thought—the hope of some day, when we are all quite down and out, reviving the glories of her youth, of again making the State her pimp. And what a pimp this Sugar-Daddy would be if she ever got a mediaeval stranglehold on him! What golden pickings! The Whore of Babylon would be a little Eva in comparison.
Receiving 100 per cent protection from national, State and City laws, enjoying all the benefits for which the rest of the people have to pay in taxes and sweat, the Church gives nothing in return except tax-free and half-fare pick-plates, evangelists with
the minds of soda jerkers, paid snoop-snouts, Lord’s Day Alliance nose slitters, boards of castration, sweet-scented choir-boys of morality, bucket-shop bishops, political badgers, blackmailers of legislative bodies. drooling anti-theater, anti-liquor and anti-sex bawlers, anti-evolution and anti-cultural Torquemadas, and watch and Ward muzzlers.
The Church has representation without taxation. It is a vast business and political organization, with hoards, lobbyists and salesmen. It has been estimated that if the Church was taxed it could yield above $200,000,000 annually, No one believes any longer that the Church has the importance of those other tax free institutions. She has
grown immensely rich on special privilege, She never had any official or Constitutional standing in this country, She is left alone because the Sugar-Daddy is stricken with mortal fear when he even thinks of bringing her under the holding of private property in this country, and as such should be taxed.
The kept old lady should be made to cough up into the common kitty.
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