A Permit to Have Friends Over
by
In Ohio, the current standard is that your friends can come over to party without a permit but not to pray. That can’t be right.
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. It seems obvious to me that this 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?
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 the police showed up, Mr. Grand didn’t wait for them to take him to court; he took them to court for, among other things, First Amendment violations.