Press Statement Regarding "Call to Prayer" in Hamtramck
Kary Moss, Executive Director
April 30, 2004
In the past week, the ACLU of Michigan has received hundreds of call and emails from around the country from people asking our position on the amended Hamtramck noise ordinance (No. 434) passed by the City Council. The change in the ordinance occurred in response to a request that the City allow a Muslim call to prayer five times a day.Â
We applaud the City for attempting to accommodate religious speech and there are ways that they can do it in a constitutional manner. The ACLU is a strong advocate of both religious freedom and the separation of church and state. We believe that government should remain neutral in matters of religion. It must not suppress the free exercise of religion nor may it promote religion over non-religion.
It is because of the separation of church and state, not in spite of it, that Americans enjoy such a degree of religious freedom unknown to the rest of the world. And Americans take full advantage of their freedom: The United States is home to more than 1500 different religions, with more than 360,000 churches, synagogues and mosques.
Balancing these important constitutional rights is tricky: In an effort to be accommodating to members of the Muslim faith, the City has tried to make it lawful for a mosque to broadcast the call to prayer five times a day which would not have been possible under the original noise ordinance.ÂÂ That ordinance, which we also believe has its own constitutional problems, makes it unlawful "for any person to create, assist in creating â any excessive, unnecessary or unusually loud noise, or any noise which either annoys, disturbsâ."ÂÂ
The new amendment says: "The City shall permit âcall to prayer,â âchurch bellsâ and other means of announcing religious meetings to be amplified between the hours of 6am and 10pm for a duration not to exceed five minutes." (emphasis added).
The city must allow for reasonable "accommodation" of religious speech, as it would for other forms of _expression_, but it cannot single out any religious speech â whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or other -- for favored treatment over other speech protected by the First Amendment.Â
To solve this dilemma, make the original ordinance constitutional, and to accommodate the needs of Muslims, Christians, and members of other faiths, the City should fix the original ordinance and create what are called "reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions."ÂÂ These restrictions need to equally apply to other non-religious protected speech.Â
The City can, for example, limit the hours, duration and maximum noise level, in which calls to prayer and ringing of church bells are permissible. It should do so by adopting specific neutral criteria that covers both religious and non-religious noise. The maximum level of sound permitted under the ordinance should be scientifically measurable and not subjectively based.Â
To reiterate, the City has done its best to be sensitive to the needs of the community. It has, unfortunately, gone too far but it is a problem that needs to be corrected in the interests of all those who live in Hamtramck.
======
Art Spitzer
ACLU
Washington DC
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw
