Two Towns Found Guilty of Religious Discrimination

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Two Towns Found Guilty of Religious Discrimination

March 17th, 2016

Awake Goy

Non-members of Mormon sect were treated badly by leadership of towns in which the majority of the residents were members of the sect.

Two towns found guilty of civil rights violations because of religious discrimination against some residents of the towns.

Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah are two towns located on the Utah-Arizona border. Most residents of both towns are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a sect of mainstream Mormonism. A jury found those towns guilty of violating the constitutional rights of non-FLDS residents by denying them basic services such as housing, utility and policing services.

In a civil rights lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, leadership of the towns was accused of ostracizing and harassing non-FLSD members. The Department of Justice won the lawsuit against the towns on February 29, 2016.

In its verdict, a federal jury found that the two towns and their joint water company discriminated against non-FLSD members in various ways. Police officers treated non-FLSD members unfairly when providing police protection, arrested non-believers without probable cause and made unreasonable searches of their property. A former FLSD member said police ignored hundreds of complaints of vandalism on his property because he was no longer a member. A woman who was denied a water connection said she had to haul water to her home and take away sewerage for six years.

Six eligible residents were awarded damages of $2.2 million; however, the towns will only have to pay $1.6 million because of a negotiated settlement. The judge will decide what other punishments to impose on the towns.

Attorney Vanita Gupta, head of the Department of Justices’ Civil rights Division, said, “When communities deny their residents critical services simply because of where they worship, they violate our laws and threaten the defining values of religious freedom and tolerance that are the foundation of our country.”