The Zoning Board of the City of Brotherly Love held its regularly scheduled monthly meeting on Tuesday, November 29, 2022, at 6 p.m. The Board had the authority of granting exemptions from a most recent local ordinance that forbade the construction of new buildings designed for meetings of 50 or more persons within a particular residential zone of the City named Opa Rocka. This prohibition was based on. the inordinate noise and traffic congestion caused by such meetings." Exemptions were allowable at the discretion of the Board."

As always. board meetings started with a prayer. The obligation to give the prayer rotated from one board member to the other, and the content of the prayer was not defined. Members of the board happened to be either Christians or Jews, or they were atheists. The member who gave the prayer that night was a Christian, and he prayed for the Lord's blessing of the board and its deliberations.

The first item on the agenda was the application for an exemption from the prohibition by a local Islamic Center that wanted to build a mosque for its population heavily concentrated in Opa Rocka. The Center, through its attorney, argued that it has the right to build a house of worship as part of its freedom of religion under the Constitution. The City Attorney opposed the application, based on the argument that this was the first such application, and that the circumstances were not convincing enough to create a precedent. After all, the traffic disruptions were substantial, and the muezzin, the man who calls Muslims to prayer from the minaret of the mosque, could wake up or importune people of other faiths or no faith, as the call to prayer is to be delivered five times a day to remind Muslims to come to prayer, which is mandatory for them, and to leave worldly matters behind.

The meetings of the Board in City Hall are open to the public for the limited purpose of listening to the proceedings and participating by making statements of up to five minutes in an orderly manner. Hassan, an American citizen of the Islamic faith, was given that opportunity. He expressed his dismay at the disrespect for his faith that he saw expressed in the statement by the City Attorney and asked whether this noise argument was not also true for church bells ringing on Sunday mornings to call the Christian faithful to religious services. He raised his voice in a rage and accused the City Attorney of Islamophobia. When he did not stop at the 5-minute mark but continued to speak, the Chairperson of the Board, after repeated warnings, asked him to leave the room. She based herself on her authority, stated in a published policy, to "interrupt, warn, or terminate a participant's statement when the statement is too lengthy, personally directed, abusive, offensive, obscene, or irrelevant" and "request any individual to leave the meeting when that person does not observe reasonable decorum."

Giving no reasons, the Zoning Board voted 5 to 4 to deny the application for the exemption.

The attorney for the Islamic Center is incensed. He sees a variety of violations of the Constitution to the detriment of his client in the various actions taken, ranging from the prayer given to the exclusion of Hassan to the denial of the exemption. Is he correct?

PS It is to be noted that the attorney is aware that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down as unconstitutional the application of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act to the states, and that is no state religious freedom restoration act in the state of the City of Brotherly Love.