He, along with his wife Betsy Corner, stopped paying federal income taxes in protest of war and military spending, a decision that led to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seizing their house in 1989.
[2] Kehler has credited Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 with shaping his interest in radical politics.
[2] Kehler briefly entered Stanford University as a graduate student, but left after three weeks to engage full time in anti-war and civil rights work.
[3] His bus ride to the 1963 demonstration was also consequential in his becoming a radical pacifist, as Kehler recounted in the foreword to I Was Sentenced to Be Shot: Autobiography of a Political Objector by Max Sandin.
[2] A 2020 documentary film, The Boys Who Said No!, features footage of, and an interview with, Kehler as one of several Vietnam-era draft resisters discussing that form of anti-war activism.
Kehler and Corner, along with supporters from the local community, struggled for years with the government and with another couple who attempted to purchase and move in to the home.