Subj : Something to ponder To : All From : Heavy Metal Date : Sat Oct 23 2004 01:30 am The City Versus You Roger Paraselsu Coleman, HP at Iron Oak _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ The following article appeared in Green Egg, volume 27, number 110, Autumn, 1995 CE, published by the Church of All Worlds. _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ As High Priestess (or High Priest) of your group, you had planned your ritual for weeks. Your members worked hard and they and some guests came over to share the fruits of everyone's labor. It was a truly magical ritual with warm feeling left for all. But then, a few days later, you look in your mailbox and find a summons from your city Planning and Zoning Board commanding you to a hearing to show cause why you should not be fined $250 a day for operating a church without a variance! The City versus you. Congratulations. You are now a member of a small, but growing group of people who have found that despite your right to worship, your city can try and may succeed in shutting you down. Furthermore, it does not cost them much to this regardless of what it will cost you. After all, ultimately, you are paying their salaries as well as your lawyer's! You are a mere drop of water in the ocean of the city budget. This is what our city tried to do with us, and more. We were threatened with fines and even arrest! The City Manager published our names and addresses in a letter to the editor in the local newspaper. A police captain told my wife, "If you as much as sneeze, we will arrest you". But, we did not stop. We did not get arrested. We did not get fined. It did, however, cost us more than $22,000 in legal costs that required that we take out a second mortgage. At the end of three days of hearings, the Code Enforcement Board spent less than five minutes to word the resolution and voted unanimously that we were not in violation of the code! This is how it works. Your group can be classified as a "church" by your city zoning department and they can try to force you to apply for a variance. If you submit a variance, then you have admitted that you are trying to build a church, and they can refuse you. They may instead try to force you to install sprinkler systems, handicap ramps and have parking for a hundred cars. If you go in front of a Code Enforcement Board with your lawyer, you will probably be able to convince them to leave you alone, but your legal costs can run from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on whether you can find a lawyer who does not have aspirations for a local judgeship! Here in Florida, that is a real concern. Sure, you have the right to worship...if you have the money for defense, and if you can find a lawyer. Zoning ordinances were used to attack Ravenwood Church in Atlanta, many Jewish groups, a Buddhist and a Golden Dawn group in Pasadena, California. Paganism is growing and is becoming more widely known to the public. Someday, we will be accepted as 'just another religion', but now, we face a lot more religious intolerance. Most of it may take the form of a snide comment about your choice of "jewelry", or it may be much worse. Some of it will come from city governments and the court system. Most will not take the time to try and understand your religion, they will simply decide that you are a kook or worse and will consider it their duty to stop your worship. We Pagans have to make a very important decision. That question is this: are we going to accept our religion seriously or not? Are we going to run for the bushes whenever a public spotlight is turned on us, or are we going to stand firm and fight for our rights? It's not an easy question. If you have a job that can be yanked away if your employer hears about your religion, then you may be opening yourself up for trouble. If you are willing to become public as the cost of religious freedom, then welcome aboard! We made that decision then and we would the same today. On March 30, 1994, my wife Jacque called me to say that a city police captain told her that we would be fined and arrested if we continued our worship! A Planning and Zoning official later added that he would fine us if we had "more than five people praying over a birthday cake". I felt faint and sat down when I head her words. I have a responsible job and arrest is definitely not conducive to advancement! What should we do? We discussed it. The more I thought about it, the more angry I got! They can't do this in America! What about the Bill of Rights? OK, then, if we truly believe that, then we should not stop. Just then, we made that decision to fight for our right to worship in peace. We also decided to fight in the open. After all, every thing would become public record anyway. The City Manager made sure of that by publishing our names and address. Besides, we want the public to understand what religious intolerance is all about. We went to the newspaper, to TV and radio, we told our story on Internet and every BBS we came across. We sent letters to every metaphysical shop we could think of! We made buttons saying "Keep Home Worship Legal". We handed them out to Hispanic and Black church members who came out to support us. Southern Baptist ministers testified for us. The local Today newspaper came out for us. During our four times a year trash pickup under the Adopt-a-Road program, people waved and honked. Television remote feed trucks parked on our lawn and gave us positive publicity. Generally, the public was for us, but then came the hearing where the City tried to cut us to ribbons. When the dust settled, the Code Enforcement Board voted. In less than five minutes, we won. But then we came to another crossroads. Do we stop there, count our blessings and take a second job, or do we sue the City? According to our lawyer, even the Federal court is conservative in the Southeast. It is more conservative than anywhere else in the country. Assuming we win, we should not expect to win any bundle of money. We may just recover some of our expenses, and that's all. The bottom line is this: If all we want is to recover our expenses, then we are better off working a second job. It will be the same work and aggravation, but a better guarantee. If, however, we are interested in standing up for principle, then Federal court makes sense. I remembered how I felt when we were threatened with arrest. No one should have to go through that! The choice was clear. We filed suit against the City, basically saying that they did not bother seriously investigating their claim against us. After all, we have not been having public worship on our land as stipulated in the city code, nor have we advertised for the public to come and worship. We had only friends participating in private worship. What is the difference between this and a bar-b-que with invited friends? If the City can make a baseless claim and force us or anyone to spend thousands fighting the battle, then freedom and rights are simply words on paper. Mainstream Christian ministers have advertised public worship in their homes all the time in both the papers and the Yellow Pages with out interference. Our worship was not public. All our public functions are elsewhere in another city. So now we are making an appeal to other Pagans and to those of other religious paths. We are making an appeal for us all to work together to make religious freedom more a reality. Congress went as far as it could in passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). It is now our turn. My wife and I have been spending virtually every waking moment trying to raise enough money for the Federal suit. We are already committed. We will be in court, a date is already set. The only question is, will we be able to fight a strong battle, or will we have too little argument on paper, too few affidavits, too few people there to testify. All it costs is money. What does the Pagan community benefit? If we win, we will have won as a religious movement. We will have shown that we, as Pagans, will lock are arms in partnership and stand up for our beliefs. We will have shown that we consider our religion seriously and are willing to fight for it. We will further the need for creating public acceptance that Neopaganism, Shamanism and Wicca are valid and true religious movements to be taken seriously. Here is another advantage. RFRA has penalties that can be invoked against the officials personally. Even though we are not using that provision, we will have set the stage of showing city officials that RFRA can be used against them. A win here in the Southeast will ripple through the country. Next time a city manager or zoning official decides to go after a small religious group, they will have to know that the next spotlight might be on them. That they may have to hire a lawyer to defend their actions in court. This may not completely stop the zoning abuses from happening, but it should make city officials think twice. It can also set a precedent where the next group that is affected will have a better chance of using RFRA for damages. But the biggest advantage is that it will truly be a win by the Pagan community. Iron Oak is the vehicle, but the community is the force. All of us will have stood for our rights! The Pagan community will have said: We are here, and we have as much right for respect of our religion as any Christian, Jew or any one else! Help us fight our common battle! Buy a Legal Defense fund tee-shirt, help establish community by forming anti-discrimination groups. Let us work together, stand tall and proud together and become the community we want to be. Only we can make that happen, no one will do it for us. If you want to know more about Iron Oak, the suit with the city or RFRA, download the Iron Oak FAQ from AOL, the Pagan Library II, Internet World Wide Web (www) sites: * http://www.digital.net/~ironoak/faq.html * http://www.cog.org/cog/local/councils/ioakfaq.html or from Iron Oak directly at ironoak@aol.com. If you are interested in purchasing a tee-shirt, call (407) 722-0291. You can see them on the web sites mentioned above. _________________________________________________________________ The Church or Iron Oak is a Wiccan/Pagan church in Melbourne, Florida. As part of ATC, Iron Oak is also a 501 (c)(3) tax- exempt corporation. Iron Oak is administered by a Corporate Board, an Administrative Board, and a Council of Elders for ecclesiastical matters. Iron Oak provides a 12 week intro class and a year-long advanced (pre-initiate) class at its Melbourne office at 324 Poinciana (this is not the mailing address). It also has five groves which provide in-depth training in more specialized areas. There are about 20 different specialty workshops at $15 each. The church newsletter is the Voice of the Anvil, a 18-20 page monthly newsletter that costs $15/year. ******************** LREggers@comcast.net ************************************ Le Maison De Metal BBS Lacey, WA. .... I think he's from the shallow end of the gene pool. --- Alexi/Mail+SF-Quick 1.20 & Blue Wave/386 * Origin: Magick...An Interesting Way Of Life! (1:138/5666) .