Vietnamese Buddhists See Bias in Temple Rejection

Vietnamese Buddhists fighting for years to establish a permanent home in Garden Grove suffered another setback this week when the City Council rejected their plan to build a temple at the site of an abandoned medical center.

City officials argued, as they had in the past, that the proposed temple would be inconsistent with the “spirit and intent” of the surrounding residential areas, while neighbors voiced concerns over traffic and noise.

Some temple members say they’re the victims of religious discrimination.

“We came here, we escaped Vietnam, for the freedom of religion,” said Allison Monglan Dao, a newscaster for a local Vietnamese radio station who argued in favor of the Chua Quan Am temple at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. “But it seems there is a lot of hostility toward us here.”

More than 100 supporters squeezed into City Hall to prove the project’s importance to a Buddhist population that has grown by the thousands in Garden Grove.

The city is already home to at least three other Vietnamese Buddhist temples.

The congregation’s struggle for a permanent house of worship began in August 2001 when its leaders were holding services in a Garden Grove home zoned only for residential use. City code enforcement officers caught wind of the gatherings, however, and eventually put a stop to them.

Temple members believed they had found a solution in the form of the abandoned 1.8-acre medical center on Chapman Avenue at Nutwood Street, which they bought in 2003. They used it for weekend services until neighbors complained and, once again, the city shut them down, noting that the site was zoned office/professional.

In early 2005, temple representatives appeared before the city’s Planning Commission asking permission to build a 15,500-square-foot temple on the property. It was denied, and they lost their appeal to the City Council in March. The temple plan was scaled back by 2,500 square feet in November and resubmitted to the Planning Commission, only to be denied again. At Tuesday’s meeting, the members appealed that decision.

“We tried using a smaller place, and they wouldn’t let us stay,” temple disciple Tuan Dang said, referring to the home previously used. “Now, we’re trying a bigger place, and they still won’t let us stay.”

“It’s not the religion we’re against at all,” Patty Steinhoff, who lives 12 houses south of the proposed temple, told the council. “It’s the building. It will not fit in.”

Steinhoff and other neighbors, who have collected more than 100 signatures opposing the project, voiced frustration over the number of times temple leaders had appealed to the city for permission to build. “It just keeps coming up again and again and again,” she said at the meeting. “We will tie this thing up for years if we have to.”

Opponents insisted that the fight wasn’t over religion at all. “I have no bias whatsoever to the Buddhists,” neighbor Tony Rector told the council.

Temple supporters maintain that’s exactly what it’s about.

Vien Nguyen, 41, said she came to the United States when she was 9 and first learned about the U.S. Constitution while watching ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” children’s cartoon program. Her favorite song from the TV show, she said, began with the words “We the people.”

“I never doubted that my family and I were included in ‘the people,’ ” said Nguyen, an information technology manager. “Just let us build our temple.”

Now that the council has again rejected their plans, temple members find themselves torn between fighting the city and simply finding another site.

Though the temple has not yet considered legal action, its leaders say, several religious institutions in similar circumstances have won lawsuits citing the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, federal legislation forbidding government to impose a “substantial burden on the religious exercise of a person” through land-use regulation.

A number of temple followers at Tuesday’s meeting said they didn’t understand why the fight had dragged on for so long. After all, Chi Do of Garden Grove said, the use of the site as a temple would have some parallels to its previous use as a medical center. “It would simply be a conversion,” he said, “from healing of the body to healing of the soul.”