After your local tax day event, come to Long Wharf in Boston where we will come together as a community and demand equality in one loud, dramatic, voice.

Over 200 years ago, fellow Bostonians stood up against unfair taxation and dumped crates of tea into the Boston Harbor. Today, we reenact their brave act and continue the fight for fairness and equality.




More info on the Boston Tea Party Re-enactment

Join us on April 15th as we throw symbolic federal tax forms into Boston Harbor, in a lively 21st century recreation of a seminal 18th century blow for freedom and equality. History will come alive that Wednesday at 5:30 on Long Wharf, near the Aquarium T-stop. Present-day patriots are encouraged to attend and wear colonial period costume if so inclined to make a statement against antiquated social policy.

The people of Massachusetts have a history of rising up to protest injustice. On December 16, 1773 Boston patriots gathered at the Old South Meeting House, outraged over the central government’s exploitation of tax policy to make a heavy-handed political point. In disguise colonists charged Griffin Wharf (filled-in now but near modern-day Long Wharf), where the Dartmouth was anchored with a cargo of East Indian tea subject to British tax. The price of the tea was going to be rock-bottom, to induce economically-distressed colonists to buy into the imperial tax as a British prerogative. Patriots objected to the manipulative ploy, so they boarded the Dartmouth and threw the tea into Boston Harbor rather than yield on principle. Events were set in motion that culminated in the British evacuation of Boston on March 17, 1776 and the Declaration of Independence later that year. And tea consumption in America plummeted, with coffee becoming the patriot’s hot beverage of choice.

Today our federal government plays favorites by denying some families tax and other legal benefits others get in the same situation. The lash of discrimination is felt particularly hard in the land of Paul Revere and John and Sam Adams. Massachusetts has recognized same-sex marriages for five years, yet gay and lesbian taxpayers are hit with a surtax that married straights don’t pay if their employer’s health insurance covers their spouses. Consider the situation of Bob F and Jim S, who’ve been married since 2005 and live in Jamaica Plain. Bob is a Massachusetts state employee, with excellent health benefits. Jim is a contract worker whose job doesn’t carry benefits. Because, under Massachusetts law, the state includes Jim in its health insurance umbrella, Bob must pay tax on the “in-kind” income Jim’s health insurance coverage represents to him in legal fiction. That adds up to less income for Bob after taxes—a discriminatory federal surtax for being in a legal same-sex marriage. Other legal rights, like social security spousal survivor benefits and special immigration status which go to straight married couples, are also denied to legally-bound couples who happen to be gay or lesbian.

Like the manipulative British taxes on tea, intentional federal discrimination against same-sex families represents a highly invasive form of social engineering worthy of King George himself. Preferred families get benefits denied to legally-bound but second-class families, as though the government can or should be influencing how people fall in love. That’s inequality so fundamental that it tears at the basic American values which grew out of historic events like the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The Declaration of Independence reminds us that “all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The time has come for the federal government to stop discriminating against loving couples because some religious denominations (though not others) don’t acknowledge their commitment. Let’s turn the page on federally-mandated inequality and treat committed and loving couples evenhandedly, to honor the values our Republic was founded on.


note: the boxes of 1040's will be attached to strings so that we can remove them after the event. No pollution will occur.