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The United States Constitution and Jehovah’s WitnessesAwake!—1987 | October 22
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Preachers or Peddlers?
As the second world war approached, the public preaching work of Jehovah’s Witnesses was the focus of much opposition. Municipal ordinances requiring solicitors and peddlers to obtain permits were wrongfully applied to the Witnesses’ preaching work. Realizing that this application of such laws violated their constitutional rights, the Witnesses challenged these ordinances by going about their preaching work without first obtaining permits. (Mark 13:10; Acts 4:19, 20) As a result, many Witnesses were arrested.
If the lower courts ruled against them, the Witnesses paid no fines but went to jail instead. They kept appealing the cases as high up in the court system as possible so as to build up a bulwark of favorable decisions that would stem this unconstitutional interference with their work. As time went on, the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly struck down these ordinances as being either unconstitutional in themselves or as applied, and the convictions of Jehovah’s Witnesses were reversed.
In addition to permit ordinances, license-tax laws were used to restrict the preaching work of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Viewing such a tax as a temporal restriction on the divinely commissioned preaching activity, Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to pay it. Again, many Witnesses were arrested, and again, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the freedoms of speech and worship.
The Court stated that the privilege of freely disseminating religious teachings by the printed page “exists apart from state authority. It is guaranteed the people by the federal constitution.” Simply put, the State could not take away what the Constitution had already given.
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The United States Constitution and Jehovah’s WitnessesAwake!—1987 | October 22
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WHAT does the Constitution mean to you? To illustrate, suppose that in your community you wanted to distribute on the streets and from house to house printed information that you felt was of concern to the people. But what if you learned that to distribute such material was a violation of laws designed to ensure public peace and good order? Or what if you had to get a permit to do so, and officials would not issue one? Or you had to buy a license and doing so would be an economic burden for you?
This was the position in which Jehovah’s Witnesses found themselves back in the 1930’s and 1940’s. They wanted to distribute printed matter containing their religious views. However, in many communities local laws and ordinances were used to hinder them. Thus, appeals were made on the basis of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and of the press. But in order to secure these constitutional rights, they had to take such matters to the courts.
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