For God's sake, this man is not building a gulag.

No. The walls are to keep people out. But what about the people inside who don't want to be there?

If a group formed a commune of vegetarians on its own nickel, do I have a right to go there and demand meat?

If you were living there and suddenly wanted a hamburger, went someplace, bought some with your own money, and cooked it in your own kitchen, would the vegetarians have the right to kick you out?

Not sure what "claimed tax money" means. I understood that this was going to be privately funded.

And the service roads leading into it? And the public sewers leading out of it? Come on. We're not talking about an island.

Your idea below about children having a choice as to whether or not to live there is ludicrous.

Not really. Children get to be 12 and 13. They get to be 15 and 16. At that point, they need a community that will allow guided exploration, not stunt it or drive it underground.

Aside from real threats to their well being, like physical abuse, what power should you have about what values they will be brought up on?

I never referred to exercise of control over families and households, where religious values are traditionally taught. But municipalities are not families. They are a unit of civil government.

Does your worry about such kids' choices apply to other religious communities in various cities and towns?

Yes, insofar as they are cloistered and isolated.

Do you lie awake at night worrying about whether the son of a rabbi has a choice about being Jewish or not?

I don't have to. He does. This is the nature of Judiasm. Furthermore, Jews have not sought to zone an area in the US as Jewish, where non-Jews must conform to Jewish law, although certain Jewish communities have sought, and won, special consideration during their religious holidays. Not that that bothers me: the whole country closes for Christmas, after all.

Should the ACLU be forcing Mennonites to install cable TV to make sure their children are properly informed?

Again, not necessary. See my reply to Sam, below. Also, Mennonites are not Amish. Same tree, different branches. Lots of Mennonites have cable. They don't censor it for their neighbors, though.

And how about non-religious ideas? How about the kids marching carrying Palestinian flags? Any problems there? Didn't think so.

How about kids marching carrying American flags? Nationalism is nationalism. By selecting the Palestinian flag as an objectionable symbol, you indicate that you think this is "wrong" nationalism. I suggest to you that Palestinians have as much right to self-determination as any other people. The fact that many of their leaders have, tragically, chosen violence as a vehicle does not change that.

Again, I see the usual concern for infecting people with religious ideas, but the idiotic secular ideas that have wrecked half the world? Who cares?

May I remind you that the terror inflicted by religious zealotry is the single longest thread of terror in human history? This includes the present day. We in the US have not experienced that terror in all its gorey magnificence because our Founders, suspicious of religion, put the Amendment that prohibits governmental establishment of religion and protects free speech First. We could lose this if we refuse to guard it.

At some point it gets very difficult to interpret some of these objections as anything other than hostility to a certain form of religion.

Yes: hostility to an established form of religion, regardless of what it is.

Let the guy build his town. It's no skin off my nose. The ACLU and the Left will crush it, as I'm sure they would have done for the hundreds of religious communities that founded this nation.

The ACLU wouldn't have had to crush any of them. They did it themselves. They adopted the Constitution.

To hear you talk, you'd think Pennsylvania had been named after a writing implement.

You forget your history.

William Penn was a Quaker who established Pennsylvania as a refuge for people of all religions. All religions. Quakers, you see, were being hung in Massachusetts, which was zoned Congregational. Boston law enforcement officials patrolled homes to make sure that people were in church on Sundays. Roger Williams established Rhode Island because he was expelled into the wilderness by the religious leaders of Massachusetts for unorthodoxy. Catholics were persecuted in England, and so Lord Baltimore founded Maryland for them, but Protestants were not welcome there. Virginia and the rest of the South were dominated by the Church of England. And Jews? There were no established Jewish congregations in British America until after the Revolution, when George Washington himself wrote a famous letter to Moses Seixas known as "To Bigotry No Sanction", after its most luminous phrase.

Pennsylvania, in the vision held by William Penn, was the antithesis of what Mr. Monaghan seeks to build in Florida.