Fremont wins fight against woman’s Buddhist temple
The U.S. Supreme Court told a Fremont woman on Monday she must comply with the East Bay city’s orders to remove a Buddhist temple that she built on her hillside land without a permit.
MiaoLan Lee bought the 29-acre property in 2010 and added new structures and remodeled older ones, including several buildings she converted into the Temple of 1001 Buddhas. After Fremont officials found in 2021 that the temple and several other buildings posed fire hazards and other dangers and ordered Lee to take them down, she accused the city of ethnic and religious discrimination and said some white neighbors had been allowed to keep buildings they had added without permits.
But a federal judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Lee had failed to show the city was motivated by discrimination, and noted that she remained free to pray elsewhere on her property. Those rulings became final Monday when the Supreme Court denied review of Lee’s appeal.
In her appeal, Lee’s lawyers said city officials had “targeted her religious structures and artifacts, openly mocked her religion, questioned the sincerity of her faith, and imposed draconian compliance mandates before ultimately ordering demolition of Lee’s religious structures.”
At a December 2019 meeting where she was seeking building permits, her lawyers said, Fremont’s deputy community director, Wayne Morris, accused her of “using the Buddha as a protective shield” and asked whether she thought “Buddha is OK with the construction.”
Fremont officials also falsely accused Lee of refusing to cooperate with searches of her property, and sent police squads in riot gear to conduct searches while she was asleep, her lawyers told the Supreme Court. They said the temple and other buildings that the city ordered to be removed were safe, adequately lit and in better condition than neighbors’ buildings that the city left undisturbed.
Fremont’s lawyers responded that Lee had not offered any plausible evidence that the city’s order “to remove Buddha statues from a condemned building was motivated by antireligious animus.”
In a 3-0 ruling last July, the 9th Circuit court said Lee “nowhere squarely disputes that she built numerous structures without permits, in violation of the municipal code.” Though some of her neighbors’ buildings also lacked city permits, the court said, “none were of the size and scale” as Lee’s temple.