In a televised Democratic presidential forum on LGBT issues last night in Los Angeles, CNN's Don Lemmon asked Beto O'Rourke, "Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities – should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?"

"Yes," O'Rourke responded. "There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone, or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us."

Eugene explained well in this 2016 post why the IRS cannot deny tax exemptions solely on the basis of viewpoint, even if you conceive of a tax exemption as a form of subsidy (a "reward") that the government does not have not to give anyone at all, and even if you think the group propounds a hateful or deeply immoral message. The IRS

can't deny exemptions to groups that engage in "hate speech" against blacks, gays, evangelical Christians or Donald Trump supporters, while allowing exemptions to groups that praise blacks, gays, evangelical Christians or Donald Trump supporters. Indeed, the Supreme Court has made this clear: The government may not discriminate against groups based on the viewpoint of their speech. See Rosenberger v. Rector (1994) (discussing Regan v. Taxation With Representation (1983)). As the D.C. Circuit put it in Z Street v. Koskinen (2015) (itself a 501(c)(3) tax exemption case), "in administering the tax code, the IRS may not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint."

Walter Olson expands on why O'Rourke's answer was so objectionable, calling it "illiberal, anti-pluralist, and inflammatory." Scott Shackford piles on, noting the political damage that could be done: "If you care about LGBT rights, you should be glad O'Rourke doesn't have a shot: The backlash against him as a nominee would be massive."

All of these points are well taken. Perhaps most striking to me about the exchange between Lemmon and O'Rourke was not that a candidate would tell an audience what he thought they wanted to hear, but that the audience was so wildly enthusiastic about it. The reaction was explicable on one level because organized religion has been an extraordinary source of pain to LGBT people. (And of course, it has also been a source of extraordinary comfort to many LGBT people. It giveth and taketh away.)

But on another level, it's an act of forgetfulness. As William Eskridge has written, "the modern regulatory state cut its teeth on gay people." First Amendment rights, especially the cardinal directive that government may not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, has served both individual LGBT people and the organized LGBT-rights movement very well. When the government, including the administrative state and courts, failed to live up to those principles, the whole movement was imperiled.

One of the innumerable ways in which the state attempted to discourage gay-rights advocacy in its infancy was through the device of denying corporate charters, school recognition, and all other manner of what O'Rourke might call a "reward, benefit, or tax break . . for anyone, or any institution, or any organization" that violated right and good state-sanctioned principles.

Among these devices was specifically the selective denial of charitable tax exemptions for gay organizations in the 1970s. As Eskridge summarized some of the cases in a 1997 Yale Law Journal article: