Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays

Have a great holiday and a great break. Here is the annual Duncan Family Christmas letter that we send to our friends and relatives:

Merry Christmas from the Duncans!

It’s a snowy day in mid-December as we belatedly sit down to write this year’s Christmas epistle on all things Duncan.

We’ve added another Duncan to the family! She’s a blue-eyed blonde named Elizabeth. The new year started with wedding bells at the Duncan household. Casey came home for Christmas last year and announced that he and Beth were going to get married – on New Year’s Day! Not even Jennifer Lopez could have pulled a fabulous wedding together as quickly as they did.

In August, the always adventurous Josh set out on a journey three exits west of Lincoln on the Interstate to Seward, Nebraska, home of Concordia University. Josh is grasping college life with open arms and has already become involved in theatre with a role in Kiss Me Kate, journalism with his own political column, and with “The Improvables,” an improvisational theatrical group that performs frequently on campus to full houses. And of course Josh continues to pursue his passion for art by majoring in studio art. On the downside for Josh, he was the victim of a serious crime when he came home one weekend to discover that all his property had been taken away in the dead of night – by his sister, Hannah, who wanted his basement suite. She promptly transformed this bachelor pad into a pink girly paradise and Josh had to settle for Hannah’s old room upstairs.

Becca is about to become Rick’s greatest fear – a teenage driver. She passed her driver’s test with flying colors and since then has been begging non-stop for a Mustang. As Rick likes to say, “You can beg for anything, but beggin’ ain’t havin’.” Becca is also now the tallest member of Duncan Clan, but she has rejected a career in basketball to sing soprano in Image, her high school vocal group. She is planning a trip with Image to Florida in March, and has been taking voice lessons from Professor Alisa Belflower at the University of Nebraska. She is also very active in theater, portraying an Amish teenager in the LCS spring musical Plain & Fancy and an Irish-American burro in the school’s fall production of Sacramento 50 Miles.

Rick cannot understand how our country can be in a recession what with Hannah spending money in amounts sufficient to bail out all of corporate America. In addition to confiscating Josh’s bedroom, Hannah has spent the last 13 months dancing in Hollywood, Topeka, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and New York City. Indeed, her dance trip to New York required us to extend our vacation on Sandbridge Beach from 2 weeks to 3 weeks so she could fly to New York City and still have some time to play on the beach. Her reign as Miss Nebraska Pre-Teen came to an end as she tearfully crowned her successor in August.

Katie won her first trophy this year – and it’s a big one. She showed a miniature mare named Melody at the Lancaster County Fair and won Grand Champion. Katie is a member of the Harmony Hill 4-H Club which is a group of girls who love to ride but who don’t own horses. In one of her writing assignments, Katie described her home as, “an acreage that needs, but does not have, a HORSE.” She’s already picked out the name if she gets one: Dreamer. Katie continues to be a songbird filling our house with music everyday and singing at church and in the Deo Gratias choir.

Kelly doesn’t know how she survived the year. Last Christmas she said that 2008 was going to be a challenge with “one reigning, one graduating and one getting married.” But she’s still standing thanks to God’s Amazing Grace. Serving as the Children’s Supervisor in Bible Study Fellowship has been her joy this year. Her most embarrassing moment of the year occurred just days ago at the Nutcracker when she went out to warm up the car and proceeded to lock her keys in the car with the engine running. As always, Rick came to the rescue laughing all the way to the Lied parking lot with the extra set of keys.

Rick had an interesting opportunity to be involved in a “real world” Takings case this year when Lancaster County government, no doubt impressed with Hannah’s seizure of Josh’s room, decided to take a strip of our front yard in order to accommodate more outsiders by widening 82^nd street. After one tense meeting with the land grabbers, Rick did the wise thing and turned the matter over to his lawyer. He loves playing in the waves at Sandbridge Beach with the kids and is already excited about the 2012 presidential election in which he hopes to support either Sarah or Newt and change he can believe in.

We’ll close with the words to the solo Katie sang in this year’s Christmas program:

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring Him a lamb.

If I were a wise man, I’d sure do my part.

So what can I give Him? I’ll give Him my heart.

Question Session

I will be available for a question session next Monday (Dec. 8) at 1:30 -2:30 in Room 113.

RLUIPA and Takings

I had a great question after class today.

When the govt wishes to take a church for public use, does RLUIPA protect the church from what is effectively a forced sale imposed by law?

Well, what is the answer? What is the issue under RLUIPA?

Be prepared to tell me tomorrow!

For a previous post that dealt with this kind of taking, see here.

Recent RLUIPA Decision

ReligionClause blog has an interesting post:

In Third Church of Christ, Scientist v. City of New York, (SDNY, Dec. 2, 2008), a New York federal district court, applying the "equal terms provision" of RLUIPA, enjoined the city from revoking previously granted approval for a church to use its building for catering activities. The city argued that the catering activities were no longer an "accessory use." Rather they had become so extensive that use of the building as a church by the declining congregation's membership was no longer the building's primary use. The court was troubled that this interpretation would permit smaller religious groups to be treated less favorably than larger ones. Ultimately however the court said that it did not need to resolve the issue of "accessory use" because

the Equal Terms provision is squarely implicated by the City's decision to revoke its earlier granted pre-consideration for the Church when other food-service and catering businesses, associated with non-religious groups, operating in the same neighborhood as Plaintiff, also in violation of the Zoning Resolution, were given only a "Notice of Violation."

Finding that the 2nd Circuit had not interpreted the RLUIPA's equal terms provision, the court held that under either the 3rd or 11th Circuits' competing interpretations, Plaintiff would prevail. The court also expressed concern over the City's policy of investigating zoning violations only when a complaint is filed. This can lead to "unfair targeting of unpopular groups." Yesterday's New York Times reported on the decision. (See prior related posting.)