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Bryant Protects Old
Order Amish Horse sense Amish gallop into politicking but try to rein in zoning flap
Sunday, April 06, 2003
By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
NITTANY, Pa. -- The Amish have their specialties. Ward heeling isn't one of them.
Truth be told, Katie Ann King said, her husband and probably lots of his fellow Old Order Amish around this idyllic edge of eastern Centre County would just as soon have nothing to do with politics.
"But they just want to get this thing settled," she said.
This thing is a local zoning flap that bars the Kings and some other Amish families from keeping a horse, standard equipment for Amish life, on their smallish pieces of property.
And in the run-up to a what could be a critical meeting April 21 of their thinly populated township's three supervisors, the Amish have been politicking.
A handful got together with counsel two months ago for a living room summit to plan strategy.
They hit the pavement with petitions and came back with at least 188 signatures.
Now, they're handwriting thank-you cards to supporters, hoping to draw out a crowd and fill the fire hall at nearby Hublersburg -- the venue to which Walker Township supervisors moved the April 21 meeting, figuring that their own boardroom would never hold the turnout.
"Everybody got together in King's house to plan this. There were 10, 12 Old Order there, two or three 'English,'" said local attorney James Bryant, using the Amish argot for the non-Amish. "You had all these men crowded in there, the women serving coffee. They had township maps, all these tax maps."
It was Bryant who publicly recast a prosaic zoning spat as a religious rights issue -- in part because he saw this as infringement on Amish culture, in part because he had a feeble zoning case, he said. And when supporters gathered in King's smallish one-story house to plot strategy, it was the kind of grass-roots session that Bryant, an iconoclastic cross between a barrister and a bohemian, relished.
Three years ago, when state regulators threatened to end a long-standing compliance dispute by arresting officers of a tiny local water authority, Bryant stymied the commonwealth by having 55 townspeople sign up as co-presidents.
This time through, he wrote to Walker Township zoning officers in December, telling them in a good-humored rant, "Shame, shame, shame ... I intend to start a media blitz and indicate that Walker Township is a collection of anti-Christian bigots, and those will be the nice things."
One early step was to engineer the petition drive that Bryant insisted "could've gotten a hell of a lot more signatures, if we wanted."
"Here was this meeting, all these Amish people at King's house with all these maps. It was like a political meeting, a ward meeting," Bryant said as he sat, feet on his desk, at his law office in Millheim, a postcard of a town two valleys away. "This one Amishman was figuring it all out, just like a chess player. It was like Sun Tzu's 'Art of War.'"
Registering public sentiment was a key, Bryant said.
"Government," he said, "can't stand heat."
Whether all this counts for anything, nobody's guessing.
The supervisors will consider a Bryant-authored zoning code revision that would allow the Amish to keep their horses -- the motor for their horse-drawn buggies, typically only one for nonfarm families -- on properties where zoning currently bars them.
The substitute zoning ordinance that Bryant offers allows horses across the township, including the multiresidential areas where they're currently outlawed, and limits residents to a lone horse if they have fewer than two acres. Bryant tries to make the change more palatable by limiting the size of manure storage areas, requiring that they be set back from neighbors' land and emptied "so as not to constitute a nuisance."
The supervisors, though, aren't saying publicly which way they expect things to go.
Supervisor Charles Snyder, for instance, won't even hint. Board Chairman Keith Harter said he hadn't decided.
"There have been no decisions. There've been no deliberations whatsoever," said State College attorney David Consiglio, Walker Township's assistant solicitor.
Instead, it will be up to Bryant and clients to sell the supervisors, Consiglio said.
"I think what they're going to present is a little more clarification, what they have and why it's good for the township," he said.
All this was a little-noticed township zoning code spat the better part of a year ago.
Construction worker Daniel King, 26, and his new wife had just moved onto their 0.8-acre plot, purchased from a non-Amish seller. King wheeled his carriage into the garage and stabled his horse in his backyard shed.
Down the street, Daniel Beiler, 30, already was keeping his horse on the five acres where he lives alone.
And then came the township zoning officer, telling Beiler and King that they were afoul of township zoning code that bars horses from areas such as the little village of Nittany, zoned for multiresidential use.
That was the law when they moved in -- although King insists he didn't know that. And it was common-sense law, Consiglio said last winter, aimed at keeping horses and kindred problems such as odor and flies out of the villages that are 3,300-population Walker Township's residential centers.
Break the law, and it's a $500-a-day fine.
But bar him from keeping his horse, Daniel King says, and he'll have to pack up and leave this open end of Nittany Valley where the first Amish settled 28 years ago.
In time, more Amish will follow, he forecast.
Consiglio says the code doesn't discriminate against the Amish. Bryant differs, writing in a petition to the township that the law leans on the Old Order, "who are required by their faith to use horses for transportation to and from worship."
"They look at it as a necessity. That's how they travel," said John Curtin, Walker Township resident, real estate broker and carrier for the Amish petition drive. "To most of the people, a horse is a pet or a hobby. To the Amish, it's a necessity."
The issue could be raised elsewhere as economics force more Amish off farms, into towns and into church-approved trades.
The tight weave of Amish religious and community rules allows King to ride a van to construction jobs a half-hour away, in State College. But it bars him from doing anything but walking or taking a buggy to Sunday church services that, depending on who is hosting them, can be a dozen miles away. Incomprehensible as the logic is to the SUV-riding non-Amish world, it's compliance to the admonition of Romans 12:2 to "be not conformed to this world."
The horse and buggy "has become really a sacred symbol that captures the essence of their religious faith," Donald Kraybill, nationally recognized expert on the Amish and professor of sociology and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, told the township zoning hearing board last summer
So, King and Beiler went to loggerheads with the township.
"They are to pray for their rulers, to respect rulers, to pay taxes," Kraybill told the zoning hearing last summer. "But ... if it ever comes to an issue of their personal conscience or their religious conscience, to always obey God rather than man."
The Amish case has its problems.
The horse ban had a home in Walker Township before the Kings and Beiler did.
And when the township zoning hearing board ruled against him last summer, King -- under pressure from church fathers to keep courtrooms at arm's length -- never appealed the decision.
What's more, while King told the zoning board last summer that boarding his horse would be "very unhandy or difficult," Amish minister Henry Swarey offered to keep it "until he gets straightened out."
But that keeps King, because of the dictates of his religion, from being a full-fledged member of society, Bryant says.
"Why couldn't they keep a horse on their property?" he asked last week. "Anybody else can keep their Wagoneer in their front yard."
All in all, people have been friendly, Katie Ann King said as she stood in the family driveway last week, hosing dust from the family buggy. And it's been interesting, she conceded.
But all in all, she and her fellow Amish aren't at ease with drifting too far into legalities and government.
"People would like to see it over," she said.
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Tom Gibb can be reached at tgibb@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1601.
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