✉️ Support for Eloheh Indigenous Center

ATTN: Yamhill County Board of Commissioners 

535 NE Fifth Street 

McMinnville, OR 97128 

January 24, 2026

RE: Support for Eloheh Indigenous Center's Appeal for Religious Accommodation

Dear Commissioners,

I am writing to urge you to grant Eloheh Indigenous Center's appeal for religious accommodation regarding permit restrictions on overnight gatherings. I write as an Oregon small business owner, a disabled combat veteran who deployed to Iraq with the 25th Infantry Division, a professed member of an Episcopal monastic community, and someone with substantial experience in civil rights litigation. I understand both the weight of religious freedom protections and the consequences when institutions—however well-intentioned—impose restrictions that disproportionately burden protected religious practices.

The permit restrictions Yamhill County has imposed may be facially neutral, but their effect is to make Indigenous spiritual practice nearly impossible on land owned by Indigenous practitioners. This is precisely the kind of disparate impact that religious freedom law exists to prevent and which I fought to secure. When regulations assume religious practice looks like an hour in a building on Sunday morning, they encode a culturally specific—and historically dominant—model of worship as the regulatory baseline. Every tradition that doesn't conform to that model then bears the burden of proving their practices are "really" religious enough to merit accommodation.

I've spent my adult life working with communities that institutions fail to understand: combat veterans, the religiously marginalized, people navigating systems designed without them in mind. I know what it looks like when regulations written for the majority inadvertently crush minority communities. The pattern is always the same: the rules aren't written to target anyone specifically, but they're written by people who can't imagine that legitimate practice might look radically different from their own experience. Then when the burden falls on communities already operating at the margins, those communities are told they're asking for "special treatment" when they're simply asking to practice their religion.

Indigenous spirituality is land-based, ceremonial, and temporally extended in ways that don't map onto the Christian liturgical week. Sweat lodges aren't something you do for an hour. Seasonal ceremonies follow the rhythms of the earth, not the convenience of county scheduling. This isn't exotic or marginal—this is how the majority of human religious practice has worked for most of human history. It's only "unusual" if you assume European Christianity is the standard against which everything else gets measured.

Randy and Edith Woodley are not fly-by-night operators. They are respected educators, authors, and community builders with decades of work serving Indigenous communities. They've built something remarkable at Eloheh: teaching spaces, sustainable agriculture, a gathering place for ceremonies that have survived centuries of legal prohibition and forced assimilation. The infrastructure exists. The community exists. The religious tradition they're practicing is ancient. What doesn't exist—yet—is regulatory accommodation that recognizes Indigenous spiritual practice as equally legitimate as the dominant religious culture that shaped Oregon's legal landscape.

As a veteran, I know something about sacrifice in the name of American ideals. One of those ideals—enshrined in the First Amendment and protected by federal religious freedom law—is that the government does not get to decide which religious practices are legitimate based on whether they conform to majority expectations. Religious freedom is meaningless if it only protects people whose worship looks familiar to those writing the regulations. The entire point of constitutional protection is to prevent the tyranny of the majority from crushing traditions that don't wield political power.

This isn't complicated. Eloheh needs the ability to host overnight gatherings for traditional ceremonies on their own land. The county has the authority to grant this accommodation under federal religious freedom law. The question is whether you will exercise that authority in a way that respects the full range of religious practice in Yamhill County, or whether you will require Indigenous practitioners to conform their ancient traditions to regulations designed around Sunday church services.

I've been in legal battles with institutions that claimed to support religious freedom but balked when that freedom was claimed by people whose practices made them uncomfortable. I've seen how easily "neutral regulations" become instruments of exclusion. I've watched government entities defend restrictions that effectively erased entire communities from public space, all while insisting they weren't discriminating against anyone. It's exhausting, it's expensive, and it's unjust—especially when a simple accommodation would resolve the conflict without compromising any legitimate county interest.

You have an opportunity here to demonstrate that Oregon's commitment to religious pluralism extends beyond the familiar and comfortable. You can show that Yamhill County understands religious freedom as something more than a talking point—that it's a substantive protection for communities whose worship doesn't conform to the majority's expectations. You can grant this accommodation and send a clear message that Indigenous spiritual practice is as legitimate, as protected, and as welcome in Oregon as any other religious tradition.

Or you can force Eloheh into prolonged litigation to vindicate rights they shouldn't have to fight for in the first place. You can make them spend resources on legal battles instead of on the educational and spiritual work they've been doing for three decades. You can become one more institution in a long American history of using neutral-sounding regulations to make Indigenous religious practice functionally impossible.

I urge you to choose the former. Grant the accommodation. Recognize that religious freedom means something or it means nothing. And if it means something, it has to mean protection for traditions that don't look like the ones that shaped your regulatory assumptions.

The hearing is February 12. I hope you'll use it to demonstrate that Yamhill County takes religious freedom seriously enough to protect it when it's actually tested—when it's claimed by people whose practices challenge your assumptions about what "real religion" looks like. That's the only test that matters.