RNA - After blocking the building of a mosque and getting rebuked by a federal judge for discrimination, officials in Bernards have not agreed to settle this case, to avoid what could be a multi-million-dollar judgment. They have not apologized.
Instead, they remain defiant. Outgoing mayor Carol Bianchi declared that the planning board she chaired made "responsible" decisions "with bias toward no one," and officials "stood up in litigation against a force of high-powered New York attorneys, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the media for what we believe in."
Please. You've lost the core legal argument, and beyond all the technical details, there's an underlying bigotry that this town still needs to confront.
Granted, the many decent people in Bernards can't be blamed for the crazies who vandalized the Islamic Society's mailbox with the word "ISIS," or those who claimed during hearings that the mosque would be used for animal sacrifices, or questioned whether it would place "a burden on police forces."
But why isn't Bianchi denouncing all that?
The hard truth is that some of those with the clearest fingerprints of bias continue to run this town.
Bernards is headed by a township committee whose members take turns as mayor and deputy mayor. Of the five people just sworn in, three were part of a powerful clique that used private email to discuss how to exclude the Islamic Society's president ("a fool") from a 9/11 memorial ceremony - "We owe that to our dead residents," wrote one of them, John Carpenter.
He's now deputy mayor, and one of the people he sent this to, Carolyn Gaziano, is now mayor. Another, John Malay, is a committeeman and former mayor.
In an email to Malay, Carpenter also called Obama a "beast" and "man-child" who was "raised by idiots and coddled by affirmative action." Malay wrote that "Islam owes its size and in[fl]uence to a tradition from Day One of forced conversion through violent means."
Their use of personal email wasn't accidental, either. In one exchange, Carpenter sent a mosque-related email to Malay's township account, and Malay chastised him. Carpenter replied, "oops."
Paula Axt, who shared an anti-Islam video and referred to Obama as a Muslim, remains on the planning board. All these officials now argue in this lawsuit that they should be allowed to search their own private emails for any more examples of bigotry, rather than letting an independent outsider do it. We should trust them. That's laughable.
Note that Carpenter also voted to change a key zoning ordinance to effectively block this mosque. The new rule, which grandfathered in churches, required six acres for a house of worship, instead of three - meaning that once denied, the mosque could no longer re-apply to build on the four-acre plot it bought.
It was only after the Islamic Society sued and the Justice Department launched an investigation that the planning board offered to waive this new zoning rule - and not unless the mosque satisfied all other requirements, including a discriminatory, unconstitutional, Muslim-specific parking rule that was the subject of the federal judge's recent scolding.
Some cited the denial of an application from the Presbyterian church down the street as evidence of equal treatment. It wasn't at all comparable. Unlike the mosque, that proposal violated several zoning rules and was in an historic district, where the church sought to tear down and rebuild a 100-year-old house.
Here's what is comparable: After nearby Bridgewater changed an ordinance to block a mosque from being built, it settled a lawsuit for $7.75 million, for what a federal judge called anti-Muslim bias. Because Bernards changed more than one rule to block the mosque, it could be on the hook for even more.
Good people of this town, time to step up and put a stop to this bad behavior, before you're forced to pay for it.
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