Faith Is The New Gates

Dominos Pizza founder Tom Monaghan is starting a Catholic city:

For Tom Monaghan, the devout Catholic who founded Domino's Pizza and is now bankrolling most of the initial $400 million cost of the project, Ave Maria is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to spreading his own strict interpretation of Catholicism. Though he says nonbelievers are welcome, Monaghan clearly wants the community to embody his conservative values. He controls all the commercial real estate in town (along with his developing partner, Barron Collier Cos.) and is asking pharmacies not to carry contraceptives. If forced to choose between two otherwise comparable drugstores, Barron Collier would favor the one that honored that request, says its president and CEO, Paul Marinelli. Discussing his life as a millionaire Catholic who puts his money where his faith is, Monaghan says: "I believe all of history is just one big battle between good and evil. I don't want to be on the sidelines."

The ACLU, naturally, is having the vapors, as on this Tucker Carlson interview with Florida ACLU poobah Howard Simon:

Tucker, before you jump to the quick and not very well informed conclusion that that is just anti-Catholicism, I want to tell you that it was about 10 years ago when the United States Supreme Court correctly ruled that a group of Hasidic Jews in upper New York state, in a town called Kiryas Joel, could not receive government funding because that town was organized around pervasively sectarian religious principles. And when you‘re required to conform to religious principles, that town is not fitting for governmental authority.

This is not Catholicism—this is not a story about Catholicism. It‘s a story about any religious group trying to exercise governmental power.

Except it's not; it's a corporation exercising its right (or, in Minnesota, "right") to sell land to whomever it wants to.

I'm in no danger of moving to "Ave Maria" - leaving aside that I'm a committed protestant, it's in fecking Florida, where the cockroaches fly through the fecking air, for crying out loud (in fact, I'm trying to picture the notion of a Presbyterian town; you could buy contraceptives at the pharmacy, but people would debate endlessly over the propriety of applauding at sports events, concerts and in church; every year during Black History Month, the emergency rooms would be overrun with elbow and hip sprains from people trying clap or gyrate to any form of music).

Simon's point about the Hassidic community hinged on the federal money the Hassidim received - which would not apply to Ave Maria except in the form of government services like the Post Office. Which makes me wonder why the USPS serves Utah...

Posted by Mitch at March 3, 2006 08:02 AM | TrackBack