▪️EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was first published in American Thinker. You can link to it here.▪️
Someone got wind of a dozen guys getting together at a neighbor’s house and complained to the mayor of the town to “put a stop to it.”
I left out one crucial fact in this scenario: it was a gathering of Orthodox Jews, for the purpose of prayer.
That, it seems obvious to me, was the so-called problem. And we’ll go over why, but first, the particulars.
Below is the opening of a July 22nd Washington Post piece, entitled “Hosting a prayer at your house? You might have to ‘cease and desist.’”
“The Supreme Court agreed last month to hear a case that asks a remarkable question: Can the government require a homeowner to obtain a permit before inviting friends to his house for prayer? [snip]
In January 2021, Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jewish homeowner in University Heights, Ohio, emailed roughly a dozen friends inviting them to his house for a Shabbat minyan. Soon afterward, a neighbor informed the city about Grand’s email, complaining and asking the mayor to ‘put a stop to this.’ Under the city’s zoning ordinance, ‘houses of worship’ require a special-use permit. Acting on the complaint, the mayor called Grand regarding what he described as an ‘urgent matter.’ Later that day, a city official ordered Grand to ‘immediately cease and desist’ using his home as a ‘place of religious assembly’ until he obtained the permit.
Although Grand maintained that hosting a minyan in his home did not make it a house of worship, he complied. He canceled the gathering and applied for the permit the city demanded. What followed was a contentious zoning process. More than 100 people attended a virtual public hearing about it, after which the city’s planning commission tabled Grand’s application…”
And there it remained. In limbo. With lots of bureaucratic back and forth. In the meantime, Mr. Grand has not been allowed to have friends over for prayer. (Keep in mind: this started five years ago.) The mayor even admonished neighbors to snitch on Mr. Grand if they suspect he’s having such a gathering so they could take him to court. Further, it seems the mayor had the police surveil his home. When that happened, Mr. Grand didn’t wait for them to take him to court; he took them to court for, among other things, First Amendment violations.
And there that case had remained, in limbo, in a variety of courts, due to a bunch of technical legal arguments which didn’t even reach the heart of the matter — until those very technical issues caught The Supreme Court’s interest.
Do any of these bureaucratic hurdles or technical legal arguments constitute an undue burden on Mr. Grand’s First Amendment rights?
Seems obvious to me that they do, but I’m not a lawyer. Nor am I a Jew, Orthodox or not, but I stand with Mr. Grand.
“If a municipality can avoid judicial review by insisting [on this or that paperwork] what prevents it from extending that process indefinitely? … [It] ultimately incentivizes bureaucratic gamesmanship. More hearings. More requests for information. More procedural hurdles. All the while, no federal court can address the merits of the case.”
First, the easy “what if” scenario: if these were a bunch of Muslims, does anyone think this matter would have prompted that busybody neighbor to act? I’m confident the answer to that question is “no.”
Secondly: Who cares? Who cares what Mr. Grand was doing with a dozen buddies at his house. As long as they don’t cook meth or disturb the peace, who cares??
What if they wanted to spin 45s in the living room and do the Twist? Or, heaven forfend, barbecue some burgers and drink some beer? Would busybody neighbor have acted then? Perhaps. If the 45s were too loud, the barbecue caught fire, or a bunch of cars cluttered the street. But I find even that’s not credible, for a few reasons, not the least of which is that other neighbors have surely had lots of cars on the street lots of times for get-togethers for the winter holidays or birthdays or graduations, etc., and for some of those gatherings, they have surely made noise with music or barbecue or general frivolity.
Did they need permits? Of course not. So it clearly isn’t a matter of having cars on the street or cooking food outdoors or dancing to loud music.
It’s that they were Jews. Orthodox Jews. Praying.
The surest clue that this is indeed the case lies in how Mr. Grand invited them: via email. Who knows who saw that email or why (Did someone forward it? We don’t know.) But it clearly, quickly, got to the neighbor and that’s when the trouble started, otherwise, how would this neighbor have known to ask the mayor to “put a stop to it” before it even happened? And, crucially, how else would the mayor have known to stop it on “house of worship” grounds?
That’s the tell.
It seems to me this is a layup for The Court: you can’t tell people they don’t need a permit for a holiday gathering but you do need one to pray. Especially since so many gatherings are for religious holidays.
What if an email had gone out mentioning that a Christmas gathering at someone’s home would involve holding hands and saying a prayer? Let’s say it was sixteen or twenty people, not merely a dozen like poor Mr. Grand. What then? Would a hundred people show up for a town meeting then? I doubt it. What of a dozen Christmas carolers? Singing “Oh Holy Night”? Would busybody neighbor call the police on them for worshipping on a neighborhood street? Yeah… no.
Mr. Grand simply wanted to observe his faith, in his own home, quietly, with some friends — while Jewish. Freedom to associate with others of your faith is allowed in this country and one absolutely should not be burdened with having to get a permit to do it. The Court can and should get this one right.