The Jehovah’s Witnesses strongly oppose an ordinance enacted by the northeastern Ohio village of Stratton, population 300. It requires anyone who wants to go door-to-door for any cause or purpose to obtain a permit from the village hall.
That’s not fair, says the religious organization, which is no stranger to disputes over privacy rights versus religious freedoms. It has taken its cause to the U.S. Supreme Court.
During oral arguments before the high court, lawyers for the Jehovah’s Witnesses pointed out that when its followers go door to door, they seek no money and engage only in “pure speech.” They seek only to talk to their neighbors about the Bible, as their faith requires them to do.
If history is any indication, Stratton’s law is in for a rough reception at the U.S. Supreme Court, and deservedly so.
It raises issues almost identical to those the court faced in Cantwell vs. Connecticut, a 1940 case in which the high court overturned a Connecticut statute that required a license before anyone could solicit for religious or charitable purposes. The U. S. Supreme Court found that, by determining which causes were truly religious, the state violated the 1st Amendment’s prohibition against government making law regarding the establishment of a religion.
Stratton tried to dodge that problem by making its ordinance broad enough to cover nonreligious solicitation, too. In so doing, it created a law so sweeping as to cause Justice Antonin Scalia to voice understandable concern over “the breadth of this thing.”
He was not alone. What about people who simply want to talk to their neighbors about poor garbage pickup, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked. Would they need a permit? What about Halloween trick-or-treaters, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wondered. What about a neighbor who merely wanted to borrow a cup of sugar?
Good questions. In its stab at content neutrality, the ordinance’s language sounds determined to cover every form of human encounter.
It requires “canvassers, solicitors, peddlers and hawkers” to obtain a permit before they can engage in “advertising, promoting, selling and/or explaining any product, service, organization or cause” at someone’s door.
Applicants must provide the mayor’s office with their name, address, a description of their activities, the address of every home they plan to visit and some details about what they plan to do when they get there. The permit holder is not allowed to darken the doorstep of any residents who have posted No Solicitation signs or filed a form in the mayor’s office on which they have listed the permit holder among those companies, causes or organizations with whom they do not wish to be bothered.
With its contrived complexity, the ordinance sounds broad enough to cover everyone from political candidates to Girl Scout cookie-sellers. Overtly political and religious activities are precisely the form of interaction that the 1st Amendment was intended to protect.
Government must avoid infringing on the right of citizens to express peaceably their religious or political views, even when one person’s peaceful expression happens to be another person’s pain in the neck.
