Posted on 06/01/2009 7:55:29 PM PDT by Abakumov
Religious freedom recently clashed with arrogant bureaucracy in San Diego County, Calif. Religious freedom prevailed.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Or down main street as the case may be.
They certainly shouldn't, but why let the stupid Constitution get in the way of a few mindless bureaucrats? Wishing to control our very faith, one of the Communist goals by the way.
More likely it was to intimidate people in order to encourage them from worshiping their God.
Maybe the Government cold go look for a few Islamic, home koranic studies, but they probably would not be found in violation, because they don't, say Amen or Jesus, or Praise the Lord.
“But if she had 15 cars parked in front of her house . . . “
Fifteen people total. Not likely 15 cars out front. Did each person there drive an individual car? Two were the home-owners (pastor and wife). Some may have walked in.
I could be wrong. I haven’t seen a published figure on how many cars were connected to that prayer meeting.
Neverthelesss, I doubt that car quantity was the REAL issue.
“If the code enforcement officer actually posed the specific questions quoted, he may have just been trying to establish which of various types of “assemblies” defined in the local code, was actually occurring here. “
It would be legitimate, it seems, to ask the code enforcer in question to put in an afidavit his reasons for asking those questions.
The issue is the regularly scheduled activities bringing a large number of cars to the neighborhood, and the use of a vacant lot as a parking lot in a residentially-zoned area. As I noted before, most jurisdictions have specific, permit-requiring exceptions for religious and educational uses in residential-zoned locations — I don’t see anyone here complaining about the special *privileges* accorded to religious and educational groups, so it’s hypocritical to complain about limits and requirements placed on those special privileges. Local laws and regulations govern what the criteria are for triggering violations of a residential zoning code. If local residents don’t like those criteria, they should pressure their local politicians to change them, and if that doesn’t work, vote out the current set of polticians and get new ones.
The fact is that the overwhelming majority of property owners in residential areas DO want restrictions on activities that regularly attract numbers of cars and people that are not consistent with residential use of a property. These restrictions catch a lot of different uses, all of which *somebody* thinks they should be free to undertake, e.g. the practice of renting rooms in a single family homes to large numbers of laborers on an 8 hour shift basis, for sleeping. The zoning codes cannot discriminate between activities based on specific religious beliefs, but courts have routinely upheld permit requirements for religious and educational property uses in residential-zoned areas.
What’s lacking here is any evidence that the specific religious beliefs of the group in question was a factor in the citation. And there may well be more information that we don’t have, such as advertising of the meetings at the church, a pattern of increasing numbers of attendees, etc. I don’t buy that these regularly scheduled meetings were simply the pastor’s “friends”. If a Muslim imam moves into the neigborhood, and starts have a dozen or more of his “friends” from the mosque appear at his home for weekly Koran study meetings, I fully expect that a virtually identical investigation and citation would follow. Again, if the local residents wish to allow this sort of property use in their residential-zoned neighborhoods, without any permit requirements or other restrictions, they should use the political process to change the zoning regulations. And if the pastor wishes to hold regular religious meetings in his home, he should move to a mixed-use zoning area where this won’t be a problem.
Given that the pastor had purchased an adjacent vacant lot and was using it as parking lot for these meetings, I think there’s pretty strong evidence that the car quantity WAS the real issue. I think we can safely assume that nobody else in the neighborhood was maintaining a vacant lot for use as parking lot in conjunction with meetings of any kind being held in their homes.
So he had a vacant lot with what . . . six or seven cars on it. Big deal.
I own a 1/3 acre grassed lot next to my house. Vegetable garden there. It has two out buildings on skids (in our county those are not taxed), and a 26’ house trailer sits there. I have had as many as 20 cars on that lot when we’ve had meetings and the lot still looks mostly empty, certainly not cluttered.
Busybody.
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