Is Gilbert really banning Bible study in private homes? No.
A number of right-wing blogs are all excited about the city of Gilbert’s supposedly having told a small church group it wasn’t allowed to meet in private homes. Sonoran Alliance posting here, World News Daily posting here.
Says WND:
The city of Gilbert, Ariz., has ordered a group of seven adults to stop gathering for Bible studies in a private home because such meetings are forbidden by the city’s zoning codes.
The issue was brought to a head when city officials wrote a letter to a pastor and his wife informing them they had 10 days to quit having the meetings in their private home.
The issue hasn’t hit the Republic or the EVT yet. It’s going to be interesting to watch how the papers handle what could become a case study in how knuckle-headed stuff like this is handled by the press.
Read this ABC-15 news story on the issue, for example, and you see the story is really about something different:
The Oasis of Truth Church was holding services at a home near Riggs and Chandler Heights roads up until November.
A city code enforcement officer noticed signs in the neighborhood directing people to the services. He sent them a letter saying the church was in violation of the Land Development Code.
In other words, the people weren’t “gathering for Bible studies in a private home.” It was a church advertising, and holding, church services in a private home.
There’re obvious reasons why that’s not allowed.
7:01 PM
The University of Phoenix makes another cameo in the NYT today
The long, front-page story is about the proliferation of for-profit trade schools. Many of them recruit students agressively with rosy promises of future employment — and leave them with crippling debt from student loans. At the same time, they get a huge portion of their income from the federal government.
If that reminds you of the University of Phoenix, it’s because that’s how it operates, too. From the Times:
The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year […]. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.
Emphasis added. The University of Phoenix has been the subject of a couple of exposés in the Times in the past. The company agreed to a settlement including attorney’s fees of nearly $80 million under a false claims act suit last year — on top of a total of more than $15 million in fines levied by the U.S. Department of Education in the last ten years.
A major Times story on the school’s scuzzy practices is here.
Reason, the libertarian magazine, did a more favorable look at the school’s operations in 2008. The article was written before the nation’s economic meltdown later that year; the writer’s aperçu that the U of P offers “offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage” would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It’s available here.
7:51 PM