With Kansas Democrats showing new signs of life and voters in the state starting to move away from the Republican Party, particularly in this year's Attorney General race, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that GOP candidates in the state, most noticeably AG Phill Kline, are ramping up efforts to get conservative Christian voters fired up. Yet in doing so, these candidates may have run afoul of laws mandating the nonpartisanship of non-profits such as churches, as Stephanie Strom reports for The New York Times.

A nonprofit group has filed a complaint asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the role that two churches may have played in the re-election campaign of Kansas' attorney general.

The complaint by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan legal watchdog organization, cited a memorandum from the attorney general, Phill Kline, a Republican, directing members of his campaign staff to recruit churches to distribute campaign literature and serve as the sites for events.

In his memorandum, Mr. Kline identified two Topeka churches, the Light of the World Christian Center and the Wanamaker Woods Church of the Nazarene, which he said had participated in "lit drops" by handing out campaign literature. A woman who answered the telephone at Wanamaker Woods Church said the church had no comment.

The Rev. Greg Varney, pastor of Light of the World Christian Center, issued a statement saying that Mr. Kline had preached at the church on July 9, but insisting that no illegal activity had occurred. "At no time here at our church did Phill bring up politics, re-election or campaign contributions," the statement said.

Conservative activists and politicians have gone to great lengths to play a nod-nod, wink-wink game with right wing Christian voters, semi-formally campaigning at churches without technically electioneering. Now, facing what by all indications is the worst political environment for the Republican years in more than a decade and perhaps more realistically in the last 24 or 32 years, conservatives are resorting to more overt tactics that appear to be crossing lines into not-clearly-legal and obviously illegal activities.

In principle, I don't see anything wrong with churches or other religious and non-profit organizations reaching out to the political world by holding candidate forums or town-hall style meetings. Heck, through the course of the campaign I'm managing I've been to at least a half a dozen of such events. Yet when any type of 501(c)(3) organization begins to actively support one candidate over another -- regardless of the politics of the candidate or the organization -- that organization should lose its preferential status from the IRS. It's just good old common sense that if a church wants to have the benefits of being a non-profit, it must follow the rules governing such entities, plain and simple. And if the IRS actually takes action, as it should (though I wouldn't be surprised if the agency, under the Bush White House, fails to uniformly and fairly apply the law even to political supporters of the President), then parishioners should learn the direct cause of the problems of their churches: power-hungry church leadership corrupted by promises of Republican politicians. Perhaps only then will the historic balance between the religious and the secular that has become so skewed in recent years will be righted (pardon the pun) and much-needed balance will be restored.