[Vision2020] Legal harrassment of a religious denomination

[Melynda Huskey]

Daniel Bakken wrote:
> I attend New St. Andrews College and work at First Step Internet (which hosts this fine list). I work with atheists, agnostics, Mormons, and Christians of other denominations.
> If you have our internet service, you have probably talked to me on the phone, and I hope my advice was professional and polite,regardless of what your religious, racial, or sexual identity might be. 
As a matter of fact, I think I talked with you yesterday night, Daniel, 
and if that was you, you were very helpful and courteous in helping me 
figure out what the heck was messing up my computer (me, as it turned out).
> These legal assaults on my fellow students, following hard on the
> heels of the Skattaboe building zoning complaints, are sickening. I am
> your neighbor, and it hurts deeply to see this harassment cloaked in
> legal technicalities targeting only my school and church. Religious
> discrimination veiled in false appeals to justice is still
> discrimination.
Let's not forget, though, that while one complaint (my dad's) was able 
to find an extraordinarily high number of boarding houses in one church, 
there were two other complaints filed within recent weeks which were 
*not* directed at Christ Church  residences, but at other homes renting 
rooms to large numbers of students.

Why are people complaining about boarding houses?  Because parking on 
their streets is being monopolized by the cars of boarders, because the 
students are unpleasant neighbors--noisy, messy, inconsiderate, rude.  
Because they're tired of having their lawns driven over, the gutters 
filled with trash, and their neighborhoods disrupted by having a 
non-conforming commercial enterprise smack-dab in the middle of it.  It 
really doesn't matter where the boarders come from.  It's what they're 
doing, and where, that's the issue.

Now, having said that, I'll readily agree that Christ Church has made a 
cottage industry out of boarding students, and that all kinds of folks 
in Moscow recognize the negative consequences of that--particularly as 
it relates to a pattern of arrogance about the "pagans" of our fair 
city, and the "wall building" that Christ Church is all about. 

Suppose the Nazarene Church, or Whitepine Baptist, or the Impact Church, 
or the Rock Church, or the True Gospel Lighthouse, or St. Mary's, or 
Trinity Lutheran, or First Presbyterian, or First Methodist, or 
Pullman-Moscow Friends Meeting,  had made an enormous public display of 
contempt for "pagan" citizens, and used the newspaper and their blogs 
and websites and press releases and phony complaints to express that 
contempt in a rich and elaborated manner, and prayed for God to squash 
people who disagree with them like bugs, and mocked and sneered at and 
tried to humiliate others every day as a matter of religious practice.  
Well, if it looked like they were deliberately violating city zoning 
codes (again) for their own convenience, and harming neighbors for their 
own profit, people might feel a certain justification in complaining 
about them.

But they didn't.   And so they don't.  Religious persecution would be 
filing complaints against people which specifically targeted their 
religious affiliation or practices.  It isn't really filing complaints 
against people who appear to be violating neutral city ordinances which 
apply to everyone.

Thanks again for helping me with my computer last night.

Your neighbor,

Melynda Huskey