Bernards-mosque.jpg

The site where the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge proposed to build a mosque. (Meghan Shapiro Hodgin | NJ.com)

By now, many people have heard about the New Jersey suburb that made itself infamous for bigotry by refusing to allow a mosque to be built in town.



Not Bridgewater, which just settled a lawsuit for $7.75 million, for what a federal judge condemned as "anti-Muslim prejudice." We're talking about Bernards Township, its genius neighbor that then tried to do the exact same thing.



Here, the small Muslim group striving to build the mosque is lead by a Ph.D. economist who is also a former mayor and school board member, and has lived with his family in the Basking Ridge section of the township for almost 40 years.

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Apparently, the people of Bernards are willing to allow Mohammad Ali Chaudry to represent them, but don't like the idea of him praying in their neighborhood.



The newest twist is that the Justice Department is investigating, and the town is facing a federal civil rights lawsuit. Neither the current mayor nor the lawyer for the planning board will get on the phone to talk about it.



But we're glad the feds got involved, because this has gone on far too long already. The Islamic Society spent more than $450,000 on its proposal, which was dragged out over 39 public hearings and nearly four years before being rejected. The process was conducted with all the absurdity of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, in which obstacle after obstacle gets thrown in the way.

RELATED: Dept. of Justice to investigate denial of mosque in Bernards Township



The lawsuit accuses the town of breaking a statute unanimously passed by Congress in 2000, protecting houses of worship from being unduly burdened by land use regulations. Based on a few telling facts, it looks like that's exactly what happened here.



The zoning laws were suddenly changed after the mosque was proposed, but churches were grandfathered in. The planning board came up with an entirely new standard for parking, arguing that the formula for church parking - one spot for every three people - doesn't apply to mosques, only to churches. Seriously.



An ordinance called for a 50-car parking lot with a maximum of 150 worshippers, but the board insisted on 107 spaces for the mosque - then, after the Islamic Society agreed to 107, said such a large parking lot raised all kinds of new objections.



That's not even considering the cruder displays of bigotry. A planning board member tweeted an offensive joke about Islam, the lawsuit alleges. Crazies at the hearings questioned whether the mosque would be used for animal sacrifices, or if it was big enough, because Muslims have a lot of children.

One volunteer firefighter told Chaudry, "Eleven brothers died on 9/11 and now you want to put a mosque next to my house with the insignia of the people who did that."

Photographs from police reports show the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge's mailbox after it was vandalized twice, most recently by a big thinker who tried to use stickers to convert "ISBR" into "ISIS."



Yet the mayor, Carol Bianchi, still insists that this is an "inclusive and warm community." She said in an email that she backs the board's ultimate rejection of the mosque and trusts its members "made their decisions based solely on land use considerations."



Right. Opponents may couch their objections in land use terms, but that's not likely to fool the feds. Town officials now have two choices: Allow this mosque to proceed, pay the reparations and put an end to this nastiness, or fight it out in court -- costing taxpayers millions more.



Leaving aside the legal considerations, there's a fundamental problem of moral leadership here. Locals who have stayed silent should ask themselves: Do we really want to be the face of bigotry in the United States?

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