Constitutional Challenges to Religious Land Use in Chicago

January 22, 2003

Source: The Wall Street Journal

http://www.becketfund.org/press/KortenOpEd-012203.html

On January 22, 2003 The Wall Street Journal printed an editorial by Patrick Korten that stated, "at the urging of groups like the National League of Cities, the American Planning Association, and the International Municipal Lawyers Association, many local zoning ordinances have morphed into instruments for sharply restricting, or even excluding altogether, new churches, synagogues or mosques... With rare unanimity, Congress acted to stem the tide by passing the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), which requires that local zoning laws treat churches on 'not less than equal terms' with other assembly uses and sets a high standard (what the courts refer to as 'strict scrutiny') for judicial review of ordinances that burden the free exercise of religion... Last week, a constitutional challenge to RLUIPA's land use provisions reached the federal appeals court level for the first time in C.L.U.B. v. City of Chicago. An association of Chicago-area churches complains that the city's zoning laws now make it all but impossible to put a new church in a residential neighborhood anywhere in the city... The trial court judge wrote that such behavior 'may be egregious and may even have risen to the level of dishonorable' but he refused to apply the new law's tougher standard."