That’s a little beyond my scope, MEBuckner. My belief is that religious bigotry is wrong, that using constitutional amendments and zoning permit hearings to further one’s religious bigotry is wrong, and that the former happens in Switzerland while the latter occurs here in the USA. It’s outside my purview to examine the souls of this message board’s participants.
Hate groups don’t ban stuff. Governments do. The particular issue under discussion is about a governmental act (referendum) and other government acts (court decisions).
I know - I shouldn’t have gotten all snarky about it, sorry for that.
Well, Dorothea (or Ms. Book, if you prefer), I don’t think you need my permission for anything including calling the Swiss People’s Party Nazis. But since you asked: I wouldn’t. It distorts the debate, invokes the holocaust inappropriately (to the detriment of both the victims of the holocaust and, presumably less importantly, the people the slur is directed at) and it lends credence to the claims of right-wingers that they are being ‘demonized’ while they’re really only voicing what everyone is thinking, but what the liberal/social democratic [insert whoever you don’t like] elites don’t want you to know.
well, to be honest, looking into this some more I’m baffled by the overtness of the anti-Islamism of this referendum, the question being indeed simply whether minarets should be outlawed. Still, we can talk back and forth about separation of church and states but I believe that one may well argue that this distinction involves whether the state should interfere in the content of religious belief, but not so much in where worship takes place. I believe that it was the Swiss People’s Party’s strategy to tackle particularly this issue first because they could most easily make the argument that it’s not a separation of church and state issue. On the (German) wikipedia-site about this controversy, I read that they make an argument that a minaret is not a part of a mosque, the point being that they’re not really interfering with belief or worship, just with a building. But again, while I think this matters strategically and technically, it is a very, very thin layer of icing on a very big pile of steaming shit.
Nonetheless, this reminds me of the debate as it has been going on in some W-European countries about a ban on burka’s, which is generally framed in terms of a security issue (if we can’t see they’re faces than they may be Osama bin Laden) rather than a cultural issue. As with minarets in Switzerland, this too is a complete non-issue since hardly anyone wears these things anyway.
There have been relatively few attempts in the US to block a place of worship because it practices a certain faith, and such cases have been always overturned by the courts. ALWAYS. In a disproportionately large number of what few cases are out there, it’s a community that is predominantly Reform and Conservative Jewish attempting to block Orthodox Jewish congregations. Beachwood, Ohio (95% Jewish) and many predominantly Jewish NYC suburbs have attempted to block Orthodox congregations. I explained the reasons why Jews want to keep out other Jews in an earlier. thread
Like I said before, when a zoning code prohibits a place of worship, it’s always because of the context of the use in relation to the location (zoning district, size, traffic impacts, and so on), NEVER because of the individual faith. NEVER.
One could say that zoning codes are more discriminatory against evangelical and non-denomination Christian congregations than the places of worship of other faiths. Why? Because evangelical congregations are more prone to rapid growth to megachurch proportions; incorporate commercial uses such as bookstores, coffeehouses and broadcast studios; have activities and services throughout the week at all hours; and often provide functions and services similar to that of community centers, with gyms, pools and athletic facilities. It’s NOT because they worship Jesus, but because the externalities of evangelical and nondenominational congregations are usually greater than those of other denominations and faiths.
My MUP, AICP certification, hours in RLUIPA seminars, and experience writing zoning codes are my cite.
Who defines what the culture of the immigrated-to country is, though? If Muslims come to make up a significant minority of the Swiss population (say, 3%), should a proportionate number of houses of worship also be Muslim? That is to say, is it a numbers game?
Or does it depend on ancestry? What about second and third generation Muslims who were born in Switzerland but still hold their religion dear? Should they not be allowed to construct houses of worship because their beliefs are not “Swiss” enough?
Would you react the exact same way if Israel or Egypt or India banned the building of churches?
Also, I would also like to hear your answer about the question upthread about the responsibilities of Jewish immigrants to early 20th-century United States . . . no synagogues for them?
Okay, to take your questions in order:
Yes.
I had numerous conversations with local residents about this hearing, and two things they didn’t mention were Wal-Mart and a concern for Maryland’s family farms. Please don’t pretend that an anti-Islamic bias can’t be at work here.
Muslims in the area just don’t like being held to a different standard. Seizing a place of worship is a pretty drastic step, and they feel like a few Lutheran churches should go down before one of theirs gets seized. Either the buildings themselves are all sacred and off-limits to law enforcement, or none of them is.
One more thing: most zoning codes in the US have provisions that exempt church steeples from height requirements. Every planner I’ve spoken to about this considers a minaret a “steeple” for the sake of zoning, since they provide an identical function. Many zoning codes are being rewritten to include “minaret” with “steeple”. If a bigoted planner, planning commission or city council attempotd to block a minaret in the US, the result would be something like this in the courts:
“So, you allow steeples but not minarets.”
“Yes.”
“Would you require a mosque that reused a church to tear down the steeple?”
“No. It’s a pre-existing nonconforming use.”
“Would you let a church that moved into a former mosque without a minaret to erect a steeple?”
“Yes.”
“Would you say minarets are functionally similar, if not identical to steeples?”
“I guess so.”
“So, why would you prohibit a minaret?”
“Uhhhhh … well … call to prayer, that’s it!”
"How is the impact of a call to prayer different than bells?
“Uhhhhh …”
“What public benefit is served by banning minarets but not steeples?”
“Uhhhhh …”
"How is this not discriminatory against a particular faith?
“Uhhhh …”
“Rule in favor of the mosque. Case dismissed.”
You’re talking about the mosque that was seized for allegedly funneling money to Iran, right?
You think the feds should seize a couple of Lutheran churches that aren’t breaking any laws, because somehow that would be “fair”? Or are you contending that the U.S. government would never seize a Christian church? Because the U.S. government has seized churches in the past, when those churches break the law. (Tax law, in that case.) None of the buildings (Christian, Muslim, or other) is off-limits to law enforcement.
You may call me Dotty. 
I actually agree that it’s a mistake to make analogies between this and that reprehensible group and the Nazis. But to be fair I wasn’t saying that the Swiss People’s Party are Nazis. I was saying that the Nazis used the preservation of (what they took to be) the dominant or traditional German culture as an excuse to persecute minorities and operate a repressive regime. That’s a point that I hoped magellan01 might appreciate–not a crude analogy between the SPP and the Nazis.
(All that said, any google search will reveal plenty of comparisons of the kind you dislike; we are after all talking about a nationalist people’s party, which has taken a rightwing stance toward immigrants and religious minorities, in a country that had an actual Nazi presence earlier in the twentieth century. But, again, that actually wasn’t my point in bringing up the fact of the Nazi’s professed cultural agenda.)
Well, I haven’t got any knowledge of Swiss constitutional law but if the SPP were trying to make this technical case it seems a patently obvious one. How can anyone, on the one hand, ban a building unique to a particular religion while, on the other hand, claiming it is “just a building.”
well, Dotty, the crux is that they’re not saying ‘it’s *just *a building’, but they ARE saying that it is only the building they are addressing, as opposed to actual Muslim beliefs. That is why they make the case that mosques do not need minarets. In this pamphlet, the first thing they say is that ‘Even in the Muslim world, the minaret has nothing to do with the content of religious belief’. But then again, they **do **seem to mostly base their arguments on some sort of very overt fifth-column belief - that somehow these minarets are a front for intolerant Islamism, which they cannot have in Switzerland because they are a tolerant liberal democracy :rolleyes:. It really surprises me that they are so open about this being an anti-Islam thing.
They’re not banning the religion, they’re banning a particular type of architecture. Nantucket does it. Parts of Cape Cod do it. I’m sure other areas in the country do it. Good for The Swiss for want to preserve their culture. And if the shoe was on the other foot, and people in an ME country didn’t want a church steeple, I’d think that is fine, too. It seems all these wonderful cultures across the globe are so rich and beautiful and worthy of respect and preservation. Unless it’s a dominant western one.
They are NOT banning the religion or mosques. Just minarets. Try to keep the analogy straight.
Re Švejk’s last post:
So that the ban on minarets has nothing to do with actual beliefs–except the supposedly intolerant beliefs they want to suppress (intolerantly). Most bizarre.
Well I don’t speak more than a few words of German, but the picture of the pointy minaret tearing through Switzerland is worth a thousand words…er, 1,000 Worte.
Plenty of places have zoning ordnances to limit the types of architecture you can build, no where I know of has such a thing on a national level. The two things aren’t equivalent, as others noted, Switzerland has plenty of buildings that are obviously not made to blend into any sort of national architecture.
Yes, but the particular type of architecture is unique to one religion. So while not a ban on the religion in toto it’s a species of religious ban.
You don’t seem to be thinking about how important it is to protect the equal rights of minorities (religious or otherwise). Or perhaps it’s just that democratic principles don’t matter to you.
It is - but judging by Magellan01’s posts, it’s working :rolleyes:
Wörter, actually.
Oh well, so much for my one year of German in the 9th grade…
There are two types of “violations”, if you will. One is an architectural style that doe not add the the current one. For instance, just a plain warehouse or an ordinary high-rise office building. The other type not only does not add to the existing aesthetic, but actively moves it in another direction. The minarets fall into the latter category, making it more worthy of concern (if one is so inclined) than just a bland building.
So what? They are not banning the religion. They are not banning mosques. They are banning a flourish that conflicts with the Swiss aesthetic. Good for them.
I respect very much the rights of the Swiss people. I’m supporting the position they voted for democratically. I think cultures are valuable and beautiful things. As I said, if an Eastern predominantly Muslim country wanted to ban church steeples, I’d respect that, too. What’s wrong with that?
The McDonalds building and gas station shown in the flicker links were hardly bland (indeed, their garish eye-catching colors by design). Frankly, I have trouble believing you think this is some sort of aesthetic zoning ordinance that just happens to cover the whole country and involves a constitutional referenda. How many other architectural bans are codified in the Swiss constitution?
Plus, as also noted above, the Swiss were hardly facing some huge plague of gigantic Minarets in their cities. There are four in the whole country, and the two we could find pictures of were relatively small and one appeared to have been designed to look vaguely steeple like.