A former Arlington Councilman who pastors a church here intends to use digital cameras to photograph license plates of adult business customers which happen to be within the same neighborhood as his church.
Rev. Jim Norwood, pastor of Oakcrest Family Church, is remembered, according to published reports, for raising issues like gays cruising city parks and a racy stage production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but he's now looking to drive adult business customers away by making their visits public enough.
A church volunteer is said to trace the adult customers' license plate numbers to the cars' owners, with an Internet service that searches such a database for a fee that The Los Angeles Times said could cost them about $15,000 a year, paid for by church donations.
I'm hardcore about being against pornography," Norwood said in another interview, "because I know firsthand what it can lead to."
Norwood and his church are "opening a Pandora's box of issues that skirt ? but from this vantage probably don't violate ? an assortment of Bill of Rights items," wrote Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist O.K. Carter of Norwood's plans. "...He's both charismatic and intelligent but unabashedly not a live-and-let-live kind of guy... His church members intend to track identities and addresses of the customers from license-plate photos and mail to vehicle owners a card that says they had been seen in the area."
The cards reportedly will include a message about church counseling and classes on "sexual addictions," a photograph of the targeted customer's license plate, and an invitation to stop at the church the next time they're in the area.
Carter wrote that Norwood's strategy raises questions such as pushing the envelope on freedom of religion. "Freedom of assembly is also involved, too, as are nuances involving the invasion of privacy and injury to reputation potentially involving some degree of malice," he wrote. "Financial injury to the business involved... might end up on a court docket."
Attorney Steven Swander, who represents one of the adult businesses Norwood has targeted, told the Times the church's tactic is intimidation. "Are they doing it really to communicate their message," he said, "or are they trying to blackmail people, in a way, by embarrassing them?"
Norwood doesn't exactly buy the concept. "I want these people to know someone is noticing them," he told the paper. "If they're going to come to my neighborhood, I have a right to go into theirs."
The battle is said to have roots in Kennedale's expansion four years earlier, annexing about 58 acres of unincorporated land, a move that brought five adult businesses the city tried to force to leave, prompting a federal lawsuit, the Times said. Three businesses settled and agreed to close or leave or, in one case, add a pizza parlor "to dilute the impact of its primary line of business," the paper continued.
Not all Norwood's opponents are exactly hardcore porn lovers, however. "What other people do is not his business," contract engineer Roger Vallez told the Times. Vallez also said he didn't mind adult video stores - he was interviewed coming out of one - but he drew the line at nude clubs in his neighborhood. "There ought to be a place in the middle of nowhere for those places," he told the paper.
