A Christian legal advocacy group is threatening to sue an American retirement village for banning residents from holding Bible studies.
The Missouri facility had previously reserved a common space for a group of Christian residents to hold their study. The Christian Post reports that after proceeding for months without any issue, management ordered them to stop because other residents had purportedly complained that they were offended by the study.
The senior living centre’s operators also claimed that Bible studies were prohibited under government guidelines that banned the practice in federally funded buildings. The American Centre for Law and Justice (ACLJ) says “that is the exact opposite of the law which states that not only are Bible studies allowed on federally funded property, but it also expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion in regard to providing facility services.”
“The Department of Justice has made it clear that ‘someone could not, for example, be excluded from reserving a common room for a prayer meeting when the room may be reserved for various comparable secular uses,’” ACLJ senior counsel Abigail Southerland explained. The ACLJ sent a demand letter to managers outlining how they were in breach of the law and saying that if the senior living complex does not “quickly reverse course for our client, we will file a federal lawsuit to protect her religious liberty.”
Ms. Southerland observed that older people are often victims of violations of their religious rights. “Unfortunately, many of the most vulnerable among us, such as our senior citizens, experience violations of the very freedoms that our law is enacted to protect,” she noted.
A Virginia couple who were threatened with eviction from their retirement village if they continued to hold Bible study meetings won the right to resume holding their study in a community room. A Florida woman filed a federal complaint after her homeowners’ association barred her from continuing to host a Bible study in the social room of her own condominium complex and reached a settlement allowing her to carry on with the study.
