A mosque dispute in this Atlanta suburb is shining a spotlight on an antidiscrimination law increasingly pitting the Department of Justice against zoning officials across the country.
Lilburn’s city council plans to vote Tuesday whether to allow construction of a 20,000-square-foot Muslim worship center between a large Baptist church and a Hindu temple on a busy thoroughfare also lined with gas stations and strip malls.
The city council rejected zoning applications in 2009 and again last year for the center amid stiff opposition from some residents, who say the large mosque would bring too much traffic and noise and encroach on the neighborhood behind it.
The Justice Department is now intervening in zoning disputes. I am so glad they don’t have anything more important to do.
They now have plenty of time since they’re not defending the DOMA and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
When I attended an Anglican Church in Cyprus the sermon had several references on the lines “Moslems in the West get everything they ask for – even more than Christians, while we are discriminated against in majority Moslem countries.” The preacher relied on certain English newspapers for his authority.
But the thing the preacher was most bothered about was the failure of a growing Protestant Evangelical Church in Egypt to get the local authorities to approve the change of use of the building they were worshiping in.
This same law also protects Christian churches from being discriminated against. Of the four RLUIPA cases I have been involved in, one involved a Buddhist retreat center and 3 involved Christian churches that were being blocked by the community from using land that was appropriate for religious use.
Jim–If you read the entire story, there is no evidence of the government putting any aditional burden on the mosque. The property is obvioulsy not zoned for the use and the city/planning commission has apparently done traffic studies to back up what they have done so far. At some point it may be appropriate for Eric Holder to get involved, but there needs to be something more than this for the heavy arm of the Federal Government to be smashing Lilburn, Georgia. The process isn’t even finished. The mosque has presented an amended plan which has yet to be voted on, which makes it evident they never needed a 20K square foot building in the first place. The problem is people like Holder live their whole lives seeing everything through the looking glass of discrimination, even though they personally are overtly privileged. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail! And I will bet you the Obama administration would NEVER, NEVER, NEVER intervene on behalf of a predominatly white or mixed race Christian Church.
#5 David — No I didn’t read the story carefully, nor am I commenting on this specific situation. I am just saying that in my experience it has protected Christian churches as much as other religions. No doubt things may be different in different parts of the country, but my personal experience in doing these cases is that there is a lot of anti-Christian sentiment out there among the people who show up at public hearings. And opponents are smart enough to know they can’t just come out and say they don’t like Christians, so it is always cast in terms of too much traffic, “incompatiblity” with the character of the neighborhood, and the like.
Right now in my area it is almost impossible to build a new church. That’s partly for economic reasons, but also it is very difficult to find property where you are not immediately going to get substantial opposition if folks find out you want to use the land for a church. So most new churches have to meet in movie theaters or school auditoriums or cafeterias, or make arrangements with established churches to use their facilities during off-hours. Right now our local governments here are somewhat open to letting public school facilities be rented on Sundays for religious services (which they pretty much have to do because they let secular groups use the facilities at other times). But the atheist movement is very busy in various states trying to create judicial precedent that this somehow violates “separation of church and state.”
I should clarify that, yes, it is unusual for the Justice Department to get involved, because the primary mechanism in these cases is the right for the religious group itself to file a civil rights suit in federal or state court. But the Justice Department did get involved in the first RLUIPA suit here (soon after the law was passed) and that was on the side of a Christian group that wanted to set up a farming commune on agricultural land. The fact is that they could have done it if it they were a secular group or company (for example, they could build houses for the agricultural employees) but such use was prohibited if there was any “religious” use involved. In that suit it was pretty easy to predict the outcome. I forget exactly when that was, but I think it was during the Clinton administration.
Oops, sorry, checked and it was 2003–during Bush II.
Religious gatherings of all sorts often create crowds and traffic issues. A test of legitimacy for the opposition is whether the challenged place of worship would draw the same objections regardless of its religious affiliation. Jim helps us sort things out by reminding us that some of these arguments are used cynically and opportunistically to impede the growth and expansion of Christian facilities.
It’s impossible to prove, but I have little doubt that DOJ in any administration would intervene on behalf of religious groups other than Muslims (including Christians) in similar situations. The timing and procedural trigger point of the situation might vary, but I would think the institutional instinct at DOJ would be to lean hard on use of local zoning laws against religious groups if the motivation were not clearly objective concern over legitimate local issues.
Something is rotten in Georgia about this. I seen the same tactic of so called concern about traffic and crowds used against Wal-Mart in suburban Portland by liberal community activist and unions. Especially questionable is other houses of worship near by get a pass. Like Wal-Mart the union prevailed blocking Wal-Mart but a larger Yuppie shopping center, The Streets of Tanasbourne and a Whole (Paycheck) Foods nearby. I hate how zoning laws are twisted to support political agendas.
I hope the Christian workmen in Georgia won’t help build a place to worship a false god like Allah, or Zeus, Isis, Artemis, or Baal.
Quoted in ‘Christian TEA Party-Tough Evangelical Activist’, by J. Lepera, p. 53, from SpiritImpact org :
“Believing in some concept of a monotheist god versus a pantheist spectrum of gods does not make any difference. Whenever you create a god from your imagination, rather than accepting His revealed image, you are guilty of worshiping a false god.â€
See John 4:22.