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Thursday, June 06, 2002

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

EBENSBURG, Pa. -- A Cambria County judge today ruled against a conservative Amish community that refused to mount state-mandated orange symbols on their plain black buggies because they feel the emblems are garish and an affront to their faith.

	Read the judge's opinion

But the attorneys representing the Amish -- a faction known as Swartzentruber Amish -- said even before this afternoon's ruling that they would appeal Judge Timothy Creany's ruling to state Superior Court.

Twenty-one members of the 80-member community, who moved in 1997 from eastern Ohio to northern Cambria County farms, have been cited by state police for refusing to attach the commonly used slow-moving vehicle emblem -- a reflective orange-and-red triangle -- to their buggies. But what was a traffic law violation for police turned into a religious freedoms issue when attorneys from Reed Smith Shaw & McClay and the American Civil Liberties Union took up the case this year at no charge.

	For more background on Pennsylvania's current open records and open government laws visit our First Amendment Forum.

The lawyers argued that the symbols were anathema to the Amish and required them to trust for their safety in man-made emblems and not in God.

After a courtroom battle of experts, waged during hearings in April and May, Creany concluded in his ruling that the gray reflective strips the Swartzentrubers agreed to mount on their buggies as an alternative to the orange triangles were not as good for daytime use and were not as readily recognizable as warnings of slow-moving traffic.

In the end, Creany ruled, prosecutors showed that highway safety -- both for the Amish and the non-Amish -- trumped the religious-rights argument. And he rejected the gray tape as an alternative, saying that the "safety of the traveling public, both those within the Amish community and those in the communities surrounding them, cannot be served by the alternative which the Amish suggest is less burdensome on their religious beliefs."

More details in tomorrow's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.