Freedom of religion gets "the second amendment treatment" from local government:
A San Diego pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a county official and warned they will face escalating fines if they continue to hold Bible studies in their home.
The couple, whose names are being withheld until a demand letter can be filed on their behalf, told their attorney a county government employee knocked on their door on Good Friday, asking a litany of questions about their Tuesday night Bible studies, which are attended by approximately 15 people.
"Do you have a regular weekly meeting in your home? Do you sing? Do you say 'amen'?" the official reportedly asked. "Do you say, 'Praise the Lord'?"
The pastor's wife answered yes.
She says she was then told, however, that she must stop holding "religious assemblies" until she and her husband obtain a Major Use Permit from the county, a permit that often involves traffic and environmental studies, compliance with parking and sidewalk regulations and costs that top tens of thousands of dollars.
And if they fail to pay for the MUP, the county official reportedly warned, the couple will be charged escalating fines beginning at $100, then $200, $500, $1000, "and then it will get ugly."
The easiest way to effectively destroy a constitutional right and to get away with it in the courts is to regulate it to the point of being useless in the name of public safety, environmental protection and other issues that aren't directly related to the right itself. That way, the courts can wash their hands of any responsibility for buying into sophistic arguments that are just transparent justifications for what are clearly violations of constitutional liberties.
The Supreme Court has a very bad track record on the fourth amendment, and has only recently shown some signs that it recognizes some basic individual right in the second amendment, so I'm not hopeful in the least that they would rule this to be an attempt to violate the rights of this pastor and his bible study members to assemble and worship. Heller should have been decided simply on the basis of Heller's team saying "The Constitution says: 'the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' DC has a blanket ban on the possession of firearms for self-defense. Res Ipsa Loquitur." Yet it took the courts a great deal of hand-wringing to decide that, yes Virginia, a functional blanket ban amounts to a violation of the second amendment.
On paper, America is the freest country on Earth, but only if you don't read the fine print. There is nothing quite so blatant as the weasel clauses of the Communist constitutions which say that no rights may be used against the state or community, or Article 29 section 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rather, the systematic whittling of most of our "paper rights" is hidden in the fine print of local ordinances and court rulings which allow "reasonable" restrictions on rights that are neither reasonable nor necessary for the preservation of public order or to ensure that one set of rights doesn't entail a violation of another. There is very little that meaningfully separates the United States from any other industrialized state in terms of actual liberty.
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