Since
it's purchase in early 2002 by four women Central House has been
through a lot of changes. At first the vision was a housing
cooperative welcoming of transsexual women and non transsexual women.
During that phase many came and went and much was learned.
In June of 2002 Gallae Central House Inc. was formally
incorporated as a New York non profit corporation to manage the house
for the original partnership that purchased it. Because one of
the original four women was not a Cybeline, this was done on a secular
basis. We would have legally been entitled to pursue a tax exempt
status as a charitable organization since our stated goal, mission and
efforts were all aiding transsexual women in early transition.but we
decided not to do so at that time.
In late 2003 with the transfer of ownership interest from
the sole non member of the Cybeline faith to a woman who was an active
Cybeline priestess the focus was shifted towards a religious convent
under the direction of the Maetreum of Cybele with some emergency
housing help for those women in need. Many took advantage of that
phase and gradually the focus was shifted more and more as the house
became the Phrygianum or convent home of the priestesses of Cybele.
In October of 2003 we formally published the first part of our
organizational model that was based on our historical research and
which we had already put into practice. In June of 2004 we took
another quantum leap forward (or backward in the reclaiming sense) with
our publication of the Rule of the Women of Cybele. With the
cooperation of the head of a Benedictine order of nuns, our
research lead us to the discovery that the Rule of the Benedictine
Women was a survival of the earlier Montanist Rule that was a direct
gnostic Christian adaptation of the original Rule of the Women of
Cybele. This remarkable document was a spiritual guide to living
together as a feminine religious convent community and predated
the Rule of St. Benedict for men by approximately 600 years! Our
Cybeline Rule used the results of years of research with the base model
that had survived as Rule of the Benedictine nuns to restore a
historically appropriate "Rule" for our own religious faith and became
structure of living at the Catskill Phygianum, a Cybeline Convent as
had existed for thousands of years until the Catholics murdered in
their sleep the last remaining Cybeline priestesses in Rome at the
beginning of fifth century CE. That it was with the cooperation
of Bendectine Catholic nuns we restored our own Rule seemed strangely
appropriate given the history.
In 2005 the decision was made to formally incorporate the Cybeline
faith, the four then current owners signed over their interest in
the
property to the newly incorporated Maetreum of Cybele as the official
home of the religion and the centre of the world wide Cybeline revival.
Emergency housing help was still part of the mission but only one
of the original owners still lived on the property. At this
time, although we would have legally been entitled to do so years
before, we applied for tax exempt status for our Cybeline Convent home.
It was granted in March of 2006.
Late in 2006
one of those emergency cases along with a rebel priestess attempted a
wholesale coup of the entire organization and using extremely abusive
behaviour eventual forced the last original owner and the head of the
faith to move off the site for her own safety and health. In the
process the tax exempt status of the property was challenged by the
town and then denied outright.
Recent Freedom of Information requests uncovered an openly religious
bigoted, gynophobic and transphobic misrepresentations of the facts by
the Town Attorney for Catskill who just recently, in flagrant disregard
of New York and Federal law once again denied our legitimate mandated
property tax exempt status. In doing so he deliberately
misrepresented facts out of time sequence to make his case, apparently
spent untold hours personally researching my own background and
writings, openly insulted and questioned my own credentials as a
scholar of religious history and demanded proof of my prior ordination
(which was supplied and then ignored). He also reproduced,
without permission, copyrighted material I had authored including even
the notice of copyright indicating he was aware he was breaking
copyright law in the process. He first misrepresented himself as
a tax examiner to ask my permission to verify the number of buildings
on the property and showed up with a Code enforcement officer and
safety inspector and WITHOUT PERMISSION, (I had carefully granted
permission only to walk the
grounds) bullied his way into the house and then passed judgment on
what was and wasn't religious icons and representations although he
apparently lacks any background as a religious scholar to do so
especially in the case of a non Judeao-Christian tradition. In
the process he essentially violated the civil rights of freedom of
religious practice to every Cybeline on the planet and violated the
Constitutional right of equal treatment under the law of all religious
practices. These are serious legal breaches of ethics.
Copyright violations, religious freedom violations,
Constitutional violations. His deliberate misrepresentation of my
written works out of time sequence in order to further his own bigoted
ends of denial of our rights is icing on the cake. He attempted
to use our charitable acts (included under law as legitimate parts of
recognized religous practice) as justification we were in violation of
religous use of the property! He went a step further and claimed
that our intention, as a faith devoted to the Divine Feminine principles, of
allowing the use of the property by groups dedicated to women's rights
and spirituality also a violation of our religous nature! Under
this fiction alone every single religious group that has more than one
AA meeting, boy scout or girl scout troup meeting or any meeting that
includes non members of that faith is NOT entitled to tax exempt
status. We DEMAND that if our own tax exempt status is not restored for both 2007 and 2008 that every
single other religous exempt group within the jurisdiction of Catskill
that fails this measure by allowing other groups to use their property
have their exempt status also removed.
I just received notice that demands access to our RELIGIOUS
CONVENT HOME for an illegal "fire inspection" under the fiction that
our home is a "place of public assembly" which can only be interpreted
as further legal harassment by the Town of Catskill at his direction.
The Town of Catskill is well aware that our public religious
ceremonies take place in our open air Temple/Grove and the the
Phrygianum itself is a Convent and religious retreat, spiritual centre
and place of healing, not a place of "public assembly" under any
definition of Federal and New York law, lacking far short of the 100
person capacity mentioned in the Town of Catskill's own definitions and
not by any even far fetched interpetation of the legal meaning a "place
of public assembly" as such. Our home is organized under
almost identical principles as a Benedictine Convent. We use the
term "convent" as the Town of Catskill is well aware since they
researched two separate listing and copied those listings by two
different Pagan organizations calling us a convent and have it on their
own record.. When they denied renewal of our tax exempt status in
2007, the written opinion by the Town Attorney acknowledged they had
the burden of proof we failed to meet the standards and yet when I
appealled the decision, they openly refused to provide me with that
proof or a copy of the legal "opinion" (opinionated would be more
accurate) so I could refute those allegations which I could have done
so on the spot given the open and deliberate mistatements and
misrepresentations they contained.
In the summer of 2002 a local bigot addressed a Catskill town meeting
held in Palenville demanding our being run out of town as a minority
religion making a number of ridiculous and slanderous accusations.
He demanded harassment of us by the Zoning inspector at the time
which was pointedly not denounced by the Town. The summer of 2003
several local bigots threatened openly and publicly to burn us out who
then physically attacked us on our own property in the middle of the
night. The summer of 2004 a gang of teenagers repeatedly
vandalized our property and one night attempted to break in, breaking a
window on our front door in the process. Later that fall this
same group young terrorists then also openly and publicly threatened to
burn us out on Halloween. Catskill itself has a history of having
openly harassed a lesbian couple's Pagan Bookstore in the late 1990's
out of business, Palenville has seen in the recent past ugly racial
bigotry and attempts to run out of the hamlet a gay couple who operated
a Bed and Breakfast as an openly gay affirming one around the same
time. We have already stood up to bigoted terrorist thugs, we
will not fail to do so when the next group hides their bigotry under
the banner of the law falsely.
NOTICE TO THE TOWN OF CATSKILL: We will NOT
be driven out or stand for unequal and openly bigoted treatment or
harassment under the law. Catskill and Palenville are BOUND by
the Constitution of the United States and it's laws and we will stand
on those rights.
As we enter the year 2008 we look towards a future of being a centre
not only of the Cybeline faith, but one available for women of all
faiths as well as a place of safety and healing from the ravages of the
patriarchy on the collective souls of the women of the world. It
has been a long struggle but the vision has remained and now is being
reborn.
Blessings,
Rev. Mother Battakes, Cathryn Platine
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