Angry Pastor’s Curse Has Ontario’s Council Exploring Limits on Free Speech at Meetings

If things go awry in Ontario, you can blame a bureaucratic jinx.

At a City Council meeting Tuesday -- on 06/06/06 -- elected officials and an audience packed with Miss Ontario pageant winners were stunned by a local pastor’s doomsday rant.

John Sabbath, who has had a beef with the city since his grant request for his Internet-based ministry, www.livinchrist.org was denied years ago, strode to the microphone and told City Manager Gregory Devereaux that a higher power had put a curse on him.

And his wife. And his children -- although Devereaux doesn’t have kids.

The hex announced by the pastor, who also said that a former city employee was cursed, has prompted a debate about the parameters of public comment at Ontario City Hall.

Mayor Paul S. Leon contends the hex talk was a threat -- and besides, “we don’t have jurisdiction over curses.”

Meanwhile, City Atty. John Brown is exploring the limits of public comment at the meetings, where a free-for-all tone has sometimes exasperated elected officials and tested the boundaries of the 1st Amendment.

Last week, Los Angeles City Council members asked the city attorney to draft a law that would crack down on distasteful language at meetings. The action was prompted by a man who chronically used a racial epithet. San Bernardino County supervisors rarely blink anymore at colorful testimony -- they once watched a woman get arrested for playing an accordion instead of discussing nuclear waste.

In Ontario, among the county’s largest cities, Brown is charged with determining what comments might be so disgusting or hateful that the council could interrupt the speaker by, for example, turning off the microphone.

The move has spurred questions inspired by past Ontario council meetings: What about that speaker who accused a councilman of trying to kill him?

Sabbath, who runs the Liv in Christ Christian Center, registered in Ontario, from a mobile home park in Chino, has become a regular visitor to the evening meetings, which often draw gadflies, including a man whose public comment was to stand at the podium with his mouth taped shut.

Sabbath, in a Roman collar and black overcoat, has seethed over a $200,000 request for his nondenominational ministry that the city denied.

“I experienced physical pain as if I had been stab in the chest,” he complained in a letter to President George W. Bush that contained typographical and spelling errors. Sabbath provided copies of the letter.

It wasn’t the devil who provoked Tuesday’s tirade against Devereaux, Sabbath insisted.

“I have the authority of God to tell people what’s on them, and there’s a curse on him. There’s a day of reckoning, and his day has come,” the pastor said.

The curse begets sickness and disease, he said. “I do have the power to set him free, but he has to talk to me. I have the power to bind and the power to set him loose.”

The promised plague has yet to produce consequences for the city manager, though some finance employees did give him a mini voodoo kit.