Chaldean Christians who escaped persecution from Muslims in their home country Iraq by fleeing to Sterling Heights, Michigan, now are fighting a proposed 21,000-square-foot mega-mosque in their neighborhood.
Seven residents responded with a lawsuit that the American Freedom Law Center now is appealing to the full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The civil-rights case against the city and its mayor contends the American Islamic Community Center proposed the mosque to “plant the flag” in a community of Christians who fled Iraq because they or family members were subjected to violence and abuse from ISIS.
AFLC’s new petition states review by the entire Court is necessary because a three-judge panel “committed precedent-setting errors of exceptional public importance and issued an opinion that directly conflicts with Supreme Court, Sixth Circuit, and well-established precedent of other federal courts.”
The city initially rejected a proposal for a mosque in the residential neighborhood. Muslims then sued and the city complied with their demand to ignore local ordinances and regulations and permit the mosque through a consent agreement.
The civil-rights suit by residents then followed.
AFLC said the decision to enter into the Consent Judgment was made during a City Council meeting held in February 2017.
“During this public meeting,” AFLC said, “the mayor enforced a content- and viewpoint-based speech restriction that prohibited private citizens, including our clients, from making any comments that the mayor deemed critical of Islam, in direct violation of the First Amendment!”
Subsequent court rulings were “fraught with egregious errors,” the legal team said.
The brief said there are at least two primary reasons justifying a review by the full court.
“First, it is well established that ‘[a] federal consent decree or settlement agreement cannot be a means for state officials to evade state law … municipalities may not waive or consent to a violation of their zoning laws, which are enacted for the benefit of the public.’
“Second, the city’s prior restraint on plaintiffs’ speech at the city council meeting, which was convened in part to discuss whether the city should enter into the challenged consent judgment, operated as an unlawful content- and viewpoint-based restriction in a public forum.”
The brief said the three-judge panel’s “contrary conclusion conflicts with [precedent requiring that] speech restrictions be content-neutral.”
Someone simply could sue to invalidate local ordinances, the brief argued, then city officials could authorize a nuclear power plant in a residential neighborhood.
“There are serious and harmful policy implications created by the panel’s opinion. If an application for special zoning couldn’t get approval through the planning commission, the party seeking the special zoning could simply ‘sue and settle,’ relying on the fact that potentially costly and controversial litigation would force the city council to exercise this super-zoning-authority the city claims it possesses. That theoretical nuclear power plant could become a reality.”
The city’s is accused of violating both the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
WND reported in 2017 that a spokeswoman, Nahren Anweya, expressed the view of the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians in Sterling Heights.
“The mayor and the corrupted personal interests behind him have outraged a community which is comprised of the largest minority Assyrian/Chaldean Christians from Iraq,” Anweya said. “This minority group consists of more than four generations of refugees and genocide victims under radical Islam.”
The lawsuit alleges the city violated the U.S. Constitution in the following ways:
- Adopting an ad-hoc rule that limited speakers wanting to address the Consent Judgment matter to just two minutes, thereby severely limiting a private citizen’s right to express his or her views at this public hearing, even though the city allowed other speakers addressing less controversial matters that evening to speak at great length.
- Prohibiting certain views based on their content and viewpoint; that is, no one was permitted to mention religion or even hint at it when discussing the consent judgment matter, and certainly no one was permitted to make any statement that might be deemed critical of Islam.
- Directing the city police to seize individuals and escort them out of the meeting if the mayor opposed what they were saying about the Consent Judgment matter.
- Ordering the citizens out of the public meeting when it came time to actually vote on the Consent Judgment. This last action also violates the Michigan Open Meetings Act, according to the filing.