c. 1998 Religion News Service

WAITE HILL, Ohio _ Jehovah’s Witnesses currently have an easy time going door-to-door in the village of Waite Hill, Ohio _ but they’d say it was somewhat more difficult, or at least time-consuming.

Like other communities, this 200-home Cleveland suburb community has an ordinance on the books that allows residents to say whether they want anyone knocking on their door offering something for sale.

Their names, updated periodically, are kept on file at Village Hall.

So when the Willoughby Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses decided recently to canvass the village and encourage its 480 residents to read the Bible, it asked for a list of those willing to have their doors knocked on.

Police Chief Arnold Stanko sent the congregation a copy of the ordinance, and attached a list of residents who have not asked to be excluded from solicitation.

It was a short list. One name. And that person travels a lot and might be away for the winter, said Stanko.”Everybody else in the village declined to be solicited,”he said.

Mayor Arthur D. Baldwin II, who updated council members on the canvass request, said of the Witnesses:”These are good people. They believe fiercely in what they are doing.” But compliments are not what the Witnesses _ known for their persistent door-to-door proselytizing _ are after. They want access.

Dan Falewicz, an elder in the Willoughby Congregation, said solicitation ordinances such as Waite Hill’s”are for people who are commercially going door-to-door to sell something. We are not selling anything.””We try to encourage people to look into the Bible, understand what it says, and how to apply it to our everyday life,”said Falewicz, who is manager of the Jehovah’s Witnesses Assembly Hall in Willoughby, Ohio.”We feel this ordinance may not actually apply to us,”he added.”That’s why we wanted to see the exact wording, and if there is some way we can work with the city to let us do what we normally do in other cities.” Falewicz emphasized that church members going door-to-door do not sell the Watchtower, the denomination’s main periodical printed in more than 100 languages.”We don’t sell the Watchtower,”he said.

However, donations are accepted.”If people want to donate something to help with the church’s worldwide work, they are more than welcome to,”he said.

Falewicz said he was disappointed the church has been effectively shut out by Waite Hill’s ordinance, and that the matter would be turned over to the church’s legal department in New York.

The legal question of door-to-door solicitation by Jehovah’s Witnesses was dealt with by the U.S. Supreme Court more than 50 years ago in a case involving the city of Struthers, Ohio, said Kevin O’Neill, an assistant law professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University.”The court struck down an outright ban on all door-to-door leafletting,”he said. O’Neill said it appeared Waite Hill had gotten around the Supreme Court decision by delegating power to ban solicitations to individual homeowners.

Barry M. Byron, Waite Hill law director, said the village’s ordinance has been in place for years.”It tracks a federal court decision that says you can’t restrict people from soliciting unless your residents said they don’t want to be solicited,”Byron said.

IR END MIO