it doesnt. civil rights are those conferred by citizenship.
False. The 14th Amendment confers basic civil rights on all
persons, citizen and non-citizen, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States (rather than some foreign country). These civil rights explicitly include the right to life, which can deprived only by due process of law.
Citizenship, of course, is conferred at birth.
As for the OP: 50 million is unlikely. Some math: There are approximately 300 million people in the United States, but only
100 million taxable returns are filed with the federal government, representing about
140 million people (nearly half of all returns are Married Filing Jointly or Surviving Spouse). In the general population, about 20%
believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. This figure fluctuates slightly from year to year, dipping as low as 13% in the mid-90’s. There is good reason to believe (and no countervailing evidence) that the taxpaying population is no different from the general population on this question (that is, views on abortion do not vary significantly by income level). So, 13% of 140 million = 18.2mil people. This can be taken as our “base.” Surprisingly small numbers of people even approve of non-violent civil disobedience, especially this sort that may run afoul of Biblical propositions. Based on some polls I’ve read (but can’t find), you would be very, very luck to get 30% participation in this, and that may be too high by a factor of ten. This leaves us with an optimistic base for tax protest of 3.7mil people.
This is not small, but it is not huge, either. It is about 1% of the total U.S. population, representing almost 3% of its income tax base, or $24bil. Compare to the NASA budget ($17bil), the National Institutes of Health budget ($30bil), the annual spending on the Iraq and Afghan Wars combined (~$150bil until recently), the Obama stimulus ($800bil), or annual spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined ($1494bil).
It is important to remember that the government gets less than half its funding from income taxes – and it spends more than twice its total funding on stuff. Indeed, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
alone cost more than all the revenue the U.S. takes in from all sources each year.
So a tax protest against abortion is unlikely to be effective, even if it can be reconciled with Biblical teaching.
