c. 1997 Religion News Service
RICHMOND, Va. _ The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed suit against the City of Richmond on behalf of two churches and the homeless over the city’s plan regulating feeding sites for the poor.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday (Aug. 19), is the latest development in the fallout from a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The act barred government from restricting religious practices unless it had a compelling reason to do so, but with the High Court’s June ruling, governments need meet a much lower standard in restricting church activities.
At issue in the Richmond case is a city zoning ordinance limiting feeding programs for the poor and homeless outside the downtown district to no more than 30 people and no more than seven times a year. Churches that want to feed more people and more frequently must apply for a hearing for a conditional use permit and pay a $1,000 hearing fee.
The ACLU is representing two black Baptist congregations, the Virginia Coalition for the Homeless and eight people who are either homeless or used to be homeless but still need the meal programs.
According to the ACLU, the city ordinance, adopted July 29, violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution because it discriminates against the poor and violates the churches’ right to feed the poor.
A similar suit filed last fall in Richmond by an ecumenical group of five churches also charges First Amendment violations against its weekend meal program for the homeless. That issue bubbled to the surface after people living near the churches complained about the homeless in their neighborhood drawn to the free weekend meals.
A previous ordinance, under which the Stuart Circle Parish, the name of the five-church ecumenical program, banned the feeding programs outside the downtown district but was rewritten to place the issue in the hands of zoning officials who, in hearings on whether to grant the $1,000 conditional use permits, would hear testimony from complaining neighbors.
Oral arguments on the first suit are slated for Oct. 10 in U.S. District Court even though the ordinance has been replaced. No trial date has been set for the second suit.”With meanness of spirit and no rational basis, the city has seen fit to compel the withholding of food from precisely the persons who need it most: persons who are poor and hungry,”the ACLU said in the new suit.
One of the congregations, Trinity Baptist Church, feeds 30 to 40 homeless people a week. A second, Thirty-First Street Baptist Church, feeds 150 to 200 homeless and poor each day.”Every hungry and homeless person whom (the churches) might not feed by reason of the ordinance here at issue would constitute a living rebuke to them for abandoning their fundamental religious obligations.
“With each such person not fed, their (the churches’) capacity freely to exercise their religious beliefs would be woefully compromised,”the suit said.
Kent Willis, director of the Virginia ACLU, said neither church has been charged with a zoning violation, but they have a reasonable fear of being shut down.
Elizabeth B. Stutts, assistant city attorney, said the new ordinance doesn’t put any new restrictions on the churches and actually gives the churches “the ability to do what they couldn’t do before.”The city is giving additional rights to the churches. If anything, we’ve discriminated in favor of churches.”
MJP END BRIGGS
