June 6, 2009

D-Day and Zoning

I think that, if you were to have told one of the brave people storming Normandy Beach that their children and grandchildren might be barred from a peaceful religious assembly in their own home, they would be shocked. But that is exactly the sort of situation modern zoning laws have led to. The trouble all started when we assumed that government knew best where homes and businesses and places of worship should and shouldn't go. Now we're facing tramplings of two fundamental First Amendment rights: the right to freedom of assembly, and the right to not have a religion of "no religion allowed" established.

It all started out innocently enough, I suppose - people didn't want stores right next to their houses. Although, when you put it like that, it actually sounds like just the sort of thing that our convenient and commercial age would enjoy. But I digress. Perhaps, to be more fair, they didn't want a coal power plant next to their house, more understandable. But once government got to say what sorts of buildings and businesses and land uses could and could not be next to each other, it started affecting everything. The law that seemed nice when it meant you wouldn't end up with an airport next to your church, turned out to not be so nice when the government took it to mean that the government can now determine where your churches can and cannot be.

I do say "your churches", though really I could be meaning anything from a Buddhist temple to a mosque to a synagogue to, if hypothetical "right-wing fundamentalists" did have half the power they are supposed to have, meetings of skeptical and atheistic societies. The lack of outcry to the Conneticut Supreme Court's decision in February 2008 that Buddhists couldn't build a temple on land they had purchsed reminds me of that poem by Martin Niemöller about the Holocaust, in which the speaker does nothing as other people's freedoms are abridged, then finds there is no one to stand up for him or herself.

Do we still have time to turn this around? Zoning laws, until now, weren't widely regarded as a large issue or talking point or threat to freedom. It's hard to come up with a rally against zoning laws; far easier to come up with a rally using zoning laws as a club against some developer or landowner. The latest incident, in which San Diego county officials are calling a home-based Bible study against land use laws, may serve as a rallying point against the anti-freedom nature of these zoning laws. I implore our nation not to regard this as "those Buddhists' problem" or "those Christians' problem", or even to rejoice that some people are losing their freedom to peaceably assemble and believe what they choose, instead of what they are coerced into believing. I encourage all Americans, whatever they believe or do not believe, to believe in this: that if we let them come for the Buddhists and the home Bible studies, eventually they will come for all of us.

We call the people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II "the greatest generation", and for good cause, for they are worthy of honor, for their bravery and sacrifices in defense of freedom. Now let us do our part, and honor them by taking up their cause, and defend freedom in our own day, by insisting that zoning laws shall not undo what the Bill of Rights did.