St. Anthony Village, MN – The U.S. government sued a small Minneapolis suburb on Wednesday, accusing it of religious discrimination after local leaders denied a Muslim group the right to open a center in the municipality.
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The Justice Department filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis against St. Anthony Village, where council members voted 4-1 in 2012 to deny a request by the Abu Huraira Islamic Center to create a place of worship in the basement of the St. Anthony Business Center.
“Religious freedom is one of our most cherished rights, and there are few aspects of that right more central than the ability of communities to establish places for collective worship,” Molly Moran, acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.
The complaint argues the municipality treated the group’s application for a conditional use permit on less than equal terms than other, non-religious, conditional use permits for assembly.
The denial of the permit unlawfully prohibited religious use because the zoning code for where the building is located allowed “assemblies, meeting lodges and convention halls,” the Justice Department said.
St. Anthony Village, northeast of Minneapolis, said in a statement the decision to deny the permit was not based on religion, but rather on its limited supply of industrial space where jobs can be created.
We don’t need more Islamic centers. We enough from the pictures coming out of Syria/Iraq
And from the deafening silence from the 1.2 Billion Muslims around the world protesting this
What we might use is another speech from Obama in Syria University making nice to Muslim world and apologizing for the barbaric America.
What a sick and twisted liberal. thinks he can talk to Animals who have no respect for Human live
Why can’t we say it like it is, why is an Islamic state center a religious institution.
This is how ISIS gets stronger. They eschew their hatred of Jews and Americans and we let them in our neighborhood. Before you know it they will set up within 5 miles of your community. Stop them now.