Property Restrictions and Religion: View From Switzerland

From the Religion Clause blog:

Swiss Voters Approve Ban On Minarets

Swissinfo.ch reports that voters in Switzerland today approved an initiative supported by the right- wing Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union imposing a ban on the construction of minarets in the country. The final tally showed that 57.5% of the voters and a majority of the cantons backed the initiative. The government, and most political parties, churches and businesses had all opposed the ban. A government statement after the vote said that the Federal Council respects the decision of the voters. New minaret construction is now banned. The four existing minarets will be permitted to remain. Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, who strongly opposed the ban, said the initiative was really a proxy for opposition to perceived creeping Islamicisation and sharia law. Opponents fear the vote will fuel extremism and tarnish Switzerland's reputation in the Muslim world. Switzerland has around 350,000 Muslim immigrants (4.5% of the population), mostly moderates from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey. It is estimated that there are 160 mosques and prayer rooms in the country, mainly in empty factories and warehouses.

UPDATE: The London Telegraph has more detailed vote results: 57.5% in favor (1.534 million people), 42.5% against (1.135 million people), with 22 of the 26 cantons in support of the initiative.

Minarets are "distinctive architectural features of Islamic mosques. Minarets are generally tall spires with onion-shaped or conical crowns, usually either free standing or taller than any associated support structure." See Wikipedia.

NYT editorial here.

"The Creed in the Deed"

The PropertyProf blog has a very interesting post about deed restrictions involving both religious and political creeds. Here is a link. Here is an excerpt in which the professor discusses using property conveyances as a means of expressing deeply held beliefs:

Isn't amazing the intersection of our deeply held values with the tangible things we hold. This strikes me as very similar to the article Al Brophy wrote several years ago on covenants against Yankees: Whistling Dixie: The invalidity and unconstitutionality of covenants against yankees,10 Villanova Environmental Law Journal 57. One of the covenants uncovered by Brophy and Gnosh in that article was this one:

The property shall never be leased, sold, bequeathed, devised or otherwise transferred, permanently or temporally, to any person or entity that may be described as being part of the Yankee race. "Yankee" . . . shall mean any person or entity born or formed north of the Mason-Dixon line, or any person or entity who has lived or been located for a continuous period of one (1) year above said line.

Brophy's account traces the unlikely tale of a recent southerner who had not forgotten the war (at least as late as 1998) who attempted to enforce a covenant against yankees in the sale of certain property in Georgia. Like this case, certain church members used the courts (or so I am told) to enforce these creeds against apostates of the faith. Church folk, like Southerners after the war, are greatly invested in their larger normative beliefs, and for some, the best way of expressing it is through the material intrusions of this world -- like property.