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When the church doors open, only white people will be allowed inside.
That’s the message the Asatru Folk Assembly in Murdock, Minnesota, is sending after being granted a conditional use permit to open a church there and practice its pre-Christian religion that originated in northern Europe.
Murdock council members said they do not support the church but were legally obligated to approve the permit, which they did in a 3-1 decision.
“We were highly advised by our attorney to pass this permit for legal reasons to protect the First Amendment rights," Mayor Craig Kavanagh said. "We knew that if this was going to be denied, we were going to have a legal battle on our hands that could be pretty expensive.”
City Attorney Don Wilcox said it came down to free speech and freedom of religion.
“I think there’s a great deal of sentiment in the town that they don’t want that group there," he said. "You can’t just bar people from practicing whatever religion they want or saying anything they want as long as it doesn’t incite violence.”
After permit approved for whites-only church, small Minnesota town insists it isn't racist
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday December 22 2020, @11:21PM
From a religious point of view, however, it's just shit. There's exactly one source for racism of a sort in viking era northern Europe, at first glance - and it's not really what you think. The 'black' people it refers to are just brunettes; brunettes are slaves, redheads merchants and farmers, blondes nobles says one rather humorous bit of surviving text. But we know that red hair was actually more common among slaves, at least in Iceland; and blonde hair is very common in northern Europe, but most common among the Finns, the Poles, and the Saami who were still tribal at the time; while the nobility at the time would have been a tiny minority overwhelmingly composed of local 'big men' or migrated southerners - in both cases likely to be brunette.
Anyone taking that tale literally is just boneheaded.