"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.