Iowa State Daily Editorial Board: Tim Davis, Jamey Hansen, Tim Frerking, Chris Mende and Keesia Wirt.

Preferred Risk Insurance Company, an insurer of some 40.000 churches, is dropping the coverage of two predominantly black churches that have been recently burned down.

Tom Farr, Preferred Risk’s general counsel said the reason the churches were dropped was not because the churches were destroyed by arson fires but that the churches were dropped because they had made claims that were too high.

Farr said that Preferred Risk often reviews policies that have high claims and drops approximately 12 churches a year when it does its policy reviews. In other words, Preferred Risk regularly drops churches because their claims are too high and their premiums are too low to cover the claims.

Farr made this claim in defending the decision to drop the churches from coverage: “Should we alter our normal business practices because of the race of the insured or because the media are watching? I think the answer is clearly no.”

The real issue here is not the race of the church members or the watchful eye of the media, but rather the fact that since these people’s churches have been set on fire, which made two insurance claims of about $190,000 and $55,000, they are being dropped from coverage.

In essence, the issue really is that these two Tennessee churches are being dropped from coverage because they were destroyed by arsonist(s). Quite obviously, if they hadn’t been destroyed, they would not have been dropped from coverage.

While this practice may be legal, it seems to be going against the very idea of having insurance. And while we understand Preferred Risk’s displeasure at having to rebuild these churches from scratch, it seems downright unfair to drop them from coverage because of an arson claim.

After all, the churches did nothing wrong and undoubtedly had insurance for the very purpose of covering terrible catastrophes such as this.