City of Oakland orders church to pay $3,500 plus $500 per day to continue to worship God
by: J. D. Heyes
NaturalNews.com
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
In what is yet another sign of government’s war on Christianity, a Baptist church in Oakland, California, has been threatened by city officials to tone down its choir practice or face heavy fines for being a noise “nuisance.”
As reported by CBS San Francisco, lovers of Gospel music think of it as “joyful noise” and acknowledge that it’s anything but quiet.
“The music of the church reveals the life of the church, the enthusiasm of the church,” Michael Wright, pastor at Solid Rock Baptist Church, told the local affiliate.
Oakland officials are seeing it differently, however.
CBS San Francisco states:
Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in West Oakland recently received a letter from the city threatening a $3,500 nuisance fee and a $500 a day fine unless it toned down its choir practice.
The letter states in part, “…this activity may constitute a public nuisance due to its impact to the use and quiet enjoyment of the surrounding community’s property.”
In other words, the First Amendment rights of Pleasant Grove must be trampled on in order to ensure that others who live nearby are guaranteed a right that is not listed in the Constitution: a right to “quiet.”
“Kind of hard to believe because we’ve been here about 65 years in the community and all of a sudden we get some concerns about the noise,” Thomas A Harris III, the pastor at Pleasant Grove, told the local affiliate.
Priced out of their own neighborhood
The Rest…HERE
