"Imagine for a moment that a municipality would first enact and then enforce a local ordinance that limited the number of times each year that homeowners within its boundaries could invite guests into their homes. Imagine further that – as a method of traffic control - the municipal government also limited the number of guests that its residents could entertain at any one time. Not only that, but this ordinance also prohibited the residents and their guests from playing or listening to acoustic instruments or sharing a pot-luck dinner. Under this ordinance, it was a further violation for a homeowner to allow a newspaper to publish an article about a gathering at his/her home and such homeowner risked prosecution if he/she dared to maintain a website that announced such get-togethers. It also provided stiff penalties if any guests voluntarily chipped in to make up a gratuity to be given to those playing the acoustic instruments.
"One will not find the foregoing events in the text of George Orwell’s 1984. Nor in a law school hypothetical. It is not fiction. These events actually took place – not in 1963 Communist East Germany – but, rather, in the first decade of the twenty-first century in the Township of O’Hara, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
"Fortunately, the protections afforded to the citizens of this nation –including the residents of O’Hara Township- by the United States Constitution, assure that they will not be deprived by their government of their personal liberties. These protections demand that this sort of egregious abuse of power by the municipal government of O’Hara Township not only be nullified, but emphatically condemned. "
OK, I suppose it sounds a little dramatic. But those three paragraphs are part of the introduction to a Federal civil rights complaint recently filed by my husband and I against O'Hara Township, a tiny suburb just north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We filed the complaint because we strongly believe that no municipal authority should be able to use a zoning ordinance to prohibit any homeowner from engaging in activities that are protected under the US Constitution. And we are certain that inviting people into our home to share live acoustic music and a potluck supper cannot possibly be prohibited without violating our rights to assembly and free speech as laid out in the First Amendment even if we expect people to throw a few dollars into a basket to help us pay the performer.
This blog is intended to be a place where we can tell the story of how a poorly-written ordinance allowed a local municipality to take legal action intended to encourage my husband and I to stop inviting our friends to gather not more than 7 or 8 times a year in our home to enjoy legal activities of our choosing. No, after more than 30 house concerts held in our living room, there have been no complaints of noise, property damage, littering, intoxication (we don't serve alcohol), cars blocking fire hydrants or driveways, or any other impacts that are above and beyond what one might expect for a party with 20 or 30 people in attendance. So how, one might ask, did all of this get started? And how did it get to the point where we felt we needed to make it into the proverbial "Federal case?"
Stay tuned...
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7 comments:
Go for it.
Music is the root of freedom of association. Music is the root of communication - will the world be denied that?
I've read through some of the stuff, including your complaint and the zoning ordinance, which is, as you've mentioned, very poorly written. It seems to disallow a lot of reasonable and typical use of residential property, which, it seems like, interferes with the freedom of assembly--here is a bit from
http://fact.trib.com/1st.assemble.html
"On October 14, 1774, the Declaration and Resolves of the First Contintental Congress declared, among a list of other demands,
"[t]hat the inhabitants of the English colonies in North-America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English consitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following RIGHTS:
Resolved, N.C.D.8. That they have a right peaceably to assemble, consider their grievances, and petition the king; and that all prosecutions, prohibitory proclamations, and commitments for the same, are illegal."
Later, the declarations of rights of the newly formed states of Pennsylvania (1776), North Carolina (1776), Massachusetts (1790), and New Hampshire (1784) included guarantees for peaceable assembly and petition.
That Pennsylvania should be the first state to recognize the right to peaceably assemble is no accident. The founder of the colony William Penn was arrested in 1670 on Gracechurch Street, London, for delivering a sermon to an orderly assembly of Quakers in the street in front of his assembly hall. The hall had been locked by London officials and Penn had been forbidden to preach in any building. He was charged with unlawful, tumultuous assembly that disturbed the king's peace. The judge in the case tried to force the jury to return a verdict of guilty for William Penn and his supposed co-conspirator William Mead. This was a bitter memory for those who believed in religious freedom and the right for people to assemble peacefully. '
Keep up the good work--it isn't just about house concerts!
Well, I never got to do any protesting in my youth when it was in fashion, so I guess I will make up for it now. Cindy has secheduled me for a non-concert on Saturday, Oct. 21 at 8:00 PM. Come out and bring your toothbrush and your lawyer's phone number in case they bust the place and hustle us all to jail.
Mike Agranoff
http://www.MikeAgranoff.com
My two cents: No doubt this has been said before, but there could be a problem with saying: "...even if we expect people to throw a few dollars into a basket to help us pay the performer." To avoid being thought of as a business, I think it's a good idea to explain that the money goes directly from the attendees to the musician. That way there is absolutely no employer/employee relationship between host and musician. To think of it as throwing a few dollars "...into the performer's basket" is safer and, in our experience anyway, more realistic.
My hat's off to you for going through with this; keep up the great work!!!!
Yep, you bet Peter. We say "help us pay the performer" because there are times when there's a small crowd and we ourselves will add something extra to the basket rather than letting it suffice. But there IS an implicit contract between us and our living room performers even if there's no paper to support it: they are coming with an expectation that we will pay them to entertain, just as if we hired them to play for a wedding or a graduation party or a bat mitzvah. Actually two of our house concerts WERE bat mitzvah parties where the only difference in how we operated was that we catered the food, didn't put out a basket, and had a tent up in the backyard to accomodate a larger crowd. Other than that it was pretty much the same: chairs set up in the living room, two sets, etc. and my daughters got to choose the performer.
Some people hire performers as "background music" but we prefer to have the music be the raison d'etre for the party. And zany songwriters like Lou and Peter definitely qualify as a good excuse to host a party in my book!
Cindy
I heard about this from a PFSS Board member who got it from the yahoo Singout board. I applaud your courage in tackling this problem by suing. It couldn't have been an easy decision.
As you note, I think the intro to the complaint is overblown & overly dramatic & may alienate the more likely conservative judges in Western PA. Too bad the ACLU declined to help.
Good luck with your suit. And keep singing.
Michael
Phila., PA
Plaintiff's Personal Injury Lawyer
& singer-songwriter/guitar/piano
Thanks so much for sharing this information.
I've created a website to promote house concerts, and I believe this fight of yours will affect a lot of people.
However, I believe you will prevail.
Fran Snyder
www.concertsinyourhome.com
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