A tiny Texas town is experiencing a major uproar over proposed Muslim cemetery

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published 21 July 2015

Some residents of a small town in Texas are fighting a proposed Muslim cemetery, and a few are even threatening to pour the blood of pigs on the property in question.

Farmersville is 40 miles northeast of Dallas, and home to about 3,000 people. The Islamic Association of Collin County wants to operate a cemetery in undeveloped land off Highway 380, and several vocal residents are demanding that the plan not go through. "We used to grow onions here," Mont Hendrick told CBS DFW. "We sure enough don't want to be growing bodies." Patricia Monroe said she was more worried about the town's water. "The bodies are generally above the water, we get rain just like we did it's going to be in our drinking system."

Another resident, Troy Gosnell, said he was concerned because he wouldn't know the cause of death of anyone who is buried. "When somebody dies they bury them at that time," he said. "They don't know whether they were shot, diseased, or anything else." Some residents are threatening to put pig heads on the property so Muslims, who abstain from eating pork, won't want the land. Local Islamic leaders said these concerns are offensive and unwarranted. "They are fearful of what they don't understand, and hopefully it's an opportunity for us to come together and learn a little bit more about each other and hopefully dispel some of those misconceptions," said Alia Salem with the Council on American Islamic Relations of Dallas. The town's planning and zoning commission needs to approve the project, and then it will be voted on by the city council.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.