Religious Rights Vs. Municipal Laws

When the Rev. Wiley S. Drake goes on trial this week on criminal misdemeanor charges of housing homeless people without a permit, the issue will be no less than religious freedom, he says.

For the city of Buena Park, the issue is his alleged defiance of municipal laws.

Twelve jurors in Fullerton’s Municipal Court will be asked to decide whether Drake committed five misdemeanors by allowing about 30 people at any given time to camp in the parking lot of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park.

For more than a year, the city has insisted that Drake is violating anti-camping laws. His alternative, they say, is to apply for a permit to build a permanent shelter and submit a manual of shelter guidelines for city officials to approve.

Drake and his attorney characterize the trial as a collision of the laws of God and man.

“It’s all about it being against the law to be poor and homeless,” Drake said. Homelessness constitutes an emergency just as compelling as flood or earthquake, Drake says, and his religious duty compels him to tend to it.

“These people find themselves on the street due to a flood of financial problems, a flood of drug addiction, a flood of sin,” he said.

City officials say they resent Drake’s portrayal of them as anti-homeless.

“Our position has been from Day One that what he’s trying to accomplish is a fine thing,” Assistant City Prosecutor Gregory P. Palmer said. “He is just going about it the wrong way. His use of his property has a tremendously negative impact on his neighbors. We would have the same exact issues if it was a cement plant instead of a church. . . .

“I think he’s trying to hide behind his religious arguments because they don’t have merit.”

But before arguments on the case itself begin, Municipal Judge Gregg L. Prickett today will decide another question: Will Court TV be allowed in the courtroom to broadcast the trial nationwide?

Drake, who relishes publicity and isn’t afraid to admit it, hopes so.

“I like to tell stories,” he said. “I’m always open to publicity. I just believe that everything should be open and aboveboard.”

The spotlight is not new for the 53-year-old Arkansan with an American-flag tie and two pagers and a cell phone on his belt.

At the Southern Baptist Convention last month in Dallas, Drake led the charge against the Walt Disney Co., urging a boycott of the company because it had extended benefits to the partners of gay employees.

Drake also received publicity in 1994 when he unsuccessfully ran for a City Council seat with a campaign slogan of “bringing God into City Hall.” He blames his current legal trouble on what he says is lingering resentment at City Hall about that campaign.

On Monday, the issue of whether Drake’s trial may be televised was heard in Prickett’s courtroom.

Palmer argued that the camera will turn the trial into a “circus” and prompt attorneys to add embellishments that the court otherwise would be spared. Worse, Palmer said, is that witnesses might be reluctant to testify.

The city, Palmer said, has “as much right to a fair trial as the defendant.”

Defense attorney Jon Alexander told the judge Monday that he welcomes Court TV. He and Palmer are both “gentlemen,” he said, not inclined to the histrionics of the O.J. Simpson trial.

“In fact, I think the stigma from that trial might even be vaporized,” he said.

Prickett said he would think about it overnight.

Drake, meanwhile, says he is undaunted by the threat of a $1,000 fine and six months’ jail time on each of the five misdemeanors. (Four other charges were either settled or dismissed.) He would like nothing better, he has said, than to “go to jail for Jesus.”