Christian Ministry Prevails In Challenge To Ordinance Restricting Donation Boxes
The City of Mansfield, a suburb of about 80,000 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is the latest in a string of municipalities that have enacted regulations restricting the activities of Christian ministries.
This time, the regulations were aimed at the location of donation boxes. The city claimed the unattended donation boxes were “contribut[ing] to visual clutter,” and the city was experiencing “blight due to graffiti and poor maintenance, and the accumulation of debris and excess items outside of the collection boxes.”
The regulations created a “complicated permitting scheme” for the placement of the donation boxes. A federal district court struck down the regulations.
Arms of Hope, a Christian ministry serving children, youth, and single mothers, has been placing donation boxes in Mansfield for donations since 2019. The donation boxes allow it to collect clothing donations for use in its ministry.
After being threatened by the city for non-compliant donation boxes, Arms of Hope challenged the validity of the ordinances based on religious liberty concerns.
In response, the City of Mansfield amended its ordinances to ease the setback, consent, and permitting restrictions in the donation box regulations.
However, Arms of Hope maintained its challenge to the location and color restrictions placed on donation boxes.
Judge Reed O’Connor, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, found that the “zoning provision, setback restrictions, and location-on-lot restrictions … burden substantially more speech than is necessary to achieve the City’s stated interests and unconstitutionally violate Plaintiff’s First Amendment right to speak.”
O-Connor also found the color restrictions to be an “unconstitutional prior restraint” on the free speech rights of Arms of Hope because the city had no “definite standard” by which to judge permissible colors.
Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel at First Liberty, the religious freedom law firm that represented Arms of Hope, said of the court’s decision, “It’s unthinkable that the City of Mansfield would target an organization that helps its most vulnerable citizens. We are grateful that the court recognized the City’s clear discrimination against Arms of Hope, and protected this meaningful ministry.”
This is one of many cases MinistryWatch has reported on that continue to pit municipal governments against the work of local ministries, even though the law seems to be clear and the ministries almost inevitably prevail in their legal challenges to the restrictive ordinances.
Tim Schultz, president of 1st Amendment Partnership, believes that many of these restrictions are motivated by people not wanting a certain activity in their city — often called NIMBY — rather than aimed particularly at restricting ministries from doing their work.
For example, Schultz pointed to halfway houses designed to rehabilitate ex-offenders. These are not generally opposed based on any political ideology, but because neighbors don’t want former criminals living near them — NIMBY.
He explained that smaller municipalities especially don’t have city attorneys who are necessarily well-versed in the law regarding First Amendment religious freedom. The cities are used to laying down a rule, like a zoning regulation that regulates the activities in their jurisdiction, and then it runs afoul of a federal or state law protecting religious freedom. They don’t necessarily consider the broader ramifications of these ordinances, Schultz said.
Schultz praised laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and other similar state laws as important because they take religious liberty into account and require the government to prove the challenged regulation is advancing a compelling interest by the least restrictive means possible, a standard called “strict scrutiny.”
Cases like the one in Mansfield continue to occur and cost Christian ministries time, trouble, and likely prevent them from carrying on their mission for a period while awaiting the court’s decision, Schultz said. They are often able to recover court costs and attorney’s fees.
However, he also noted that because groups like First Liberty, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Becket Fund, and others send letters to municipalities pointing out the strict legal standard, probably hundreds of cases never get to court because the cities “back off.”
Schultz doesn’t know of a cost-effective or efficient way to educate municipalities across the nation about these issues, but said the initial letters that tend to head off lawsuits act as a type of education.
This article originally appeared at The Roys Report.
Kim Roberts is a freelance writer who holds a Juris Doctorate with honors from Baylor University and an undergraduate degree in government from Angelo State University. She has three young adult children who were home schooled and is happily married to her husband of 28 years.