Road safety triangles pit Amish against the modern world
Road safety triangles pit Amish against the modern world
Oliver Burkeman
Guardian News Service
New York
The Schwartzentruber Amish community of Pennsylvania forbids the
use of electricity, motor vehicles and running water.
But its ultra-conservative members have been catapulted into
modern-day America's culture of litigation because they refuse to
fit reflective safety triangles to their horse-drawn buggies.
The 80 Schwartzentrubers are a familiar sight in the Allegheny
mountains, but to motorists using the winding roads after dark
they are frequently an all-too sudden sight.
Their failure to use the orange triangles, which state law
requires on every vehicle that travels at under 25mph, and their
refusal to pay US$90 in on-the-spot fines, has brought them to
court in the town of Ebensburg to defend themselves against 24
traffic violation charges.
To them it is a fundamental matter of religious freedom. They
argue that the triangles represent faith in man-made technologies
over God. Last year one of their number spent several days in
jail rather than pay a US dollars ten fine.
"Police patrol these rural areas, and if they come across an
infraction, they tag you. They went through the warning system,
but now it's loggerheads," Heath Long, the deputy district
attorney for Cambria county in Pennsylvania, said.
Asked if the lack of triangles had caused accidents, Heath
Long, the deputy district attorney for Cambria county, said:
"There certainly have been near-misses."
Schwartzentruber Amish in other states have reached agreement
with the local authorities to use reflective gray tape, which is
permitted by their rules, instead of brightly colored reflective
panels.
"The Amish do not want to jeopardize public safety," Wit
Walczak, of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union, which is representing the community, told the
Philadelphia Inquirer. "Their objection is to this particular
symbol."
The Amish are scattered across 22 U.S. states and parts of
Canada, and adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible and
to the Ordnung, an unwritten set of rules which forbids them to
adopt most modern technologies.