Our Christian Rights

[tex071487]

Lately i have been told my the manager of the Mobile Home Park that i could not pass out tracts. So i called the CLA and they sent me our rights as Christians to witness to anyone and anywhere. We as Christians need to learn the rights that The Constitution gives us. The CLA will help.

GIBBS LAW FIRM, P.A.
Attorneys and Counselors at Law
5666 SEMINOLE BOULEVARD, SUITE TWO TELEPHONE: (727) 399-8300
SEMINOLE, FLORIDA 33772 FACSIMILE: (727) 398-3907

Thank you for contacting the Christian Law Association about whether an apartment
complex or trailer park manager can prohibit you from making door-to-door visits to invite
individual tenants to religious meetings. Please consider this Memorandum as representative of
your legal position and share a copy with the apartment complex or trailer park manager or
anyone else you feel should be privy to this legal information.
LEGAL OPINION MEMORANDUM
I. Question Presented
Can an apartment or trailer park manager prohibit a non-resident or a resident from
making door-to-door visits to invite tenants of the trailer park or apartment complex to religious
meetings?
II. Summary
As long as the individual tenants being visited do not object at the time of the visit or post
a no-solicitation sign on their individual door, another tenant or a non-tenant may knock on the
door at any reasonable time. It is each individual resident who retains the right to determine
whether he desires the visit. The complex or trailer park manager may not make that decision
globally for all residents. Either a tenant or non-tenant may visit apartment complex or trailer
park residents and invite the occupants to a religious meeting. A court should protect the visitor?s
freedom of speech in an area that is generally open to the public. A court should also protect the
individual residents? freedom to determine for themselves whether they wish to receive
information of their choosing. The right to restrict door-to-door communication belongs to the
tenant or resident and not to the trailer park or apartment complex manager.
III. Legal Analysis
IV. Courts have acknowledged that allowing residents and non residents to make door-todoor
visits to tenants even in private trailer parks or apartment complexes is protected
by the right of free speech.
The United States Supreme Court in Martin v. Struthers, 319 U.S. 114, 146-47 held:
Freedom to distribute information to every citizen wherever he desires to receive it is so clearly
vital to the preservation of a free society that, putting aside reasonable police and health
regulations of time and manner of distribution, it must be fully preserved.
In Walker v. Georgetown Housing Authority, the Massachusetts Supreme Court held that
?the constitutional right of the authority?s tenants to receive communications may not be
abridged by the blanket prohibition of campaigning and soliciting.? 677 N.E.2d 1125, 1128
(1997). The court recognized that it is up to individual residents, even if they are not owners, to
decide whether door-to-door communications are welcome. This court cited to the United States
Supreme Court case, Martin v. Struthers:
For centuries it has been a common practice in this and other countries for persons not
specifically invited to go from home to home and knock on doors or ring doorbells to
communicate ideas to the occupants or to invite them to political, religious, or other kinds of
public meetings. Whether such visiting shall be permitted has in general been deemed to depend
upon the will of the individual master of each household, and not upon the determination of the
community. Martin v. Struthers, supra, 319 U.S. 141, 63 S.Ct. 862, 87 L.Ed. 1313. Id. at 1127.
Note that this early Supreme Court decision specifically pertained to door-to-door
communication with the purpose of inviting residents to religious meetings. It is traditional to
allow the residents themselves, whether owners or tenants, to decide who they want to listen to at
their doorstep. It is not the manager?s responsibly to infringe on the tenant?s right to choose
what messages he wishes to hear.
Another California Appellate decision in Smith v. Silvey, 197 Cal. Rptr. 15, 19 (1983), also
recognized that it is up to the residents, not a mobile home park owner or apartment manager, to
dictate which house-to-house distributor?s ideas they will listen to.
Silvey?s right to ?contact? the residents of the Park through the medium of printed literature or
even personal visits is a constitutionally protected right of expression in the absence of protest by
the recipients. The burden of restricting the ?house-to-house distribution of ideas? falls on the
homeowner; that is, no governmentally imposed restriction should occur until after the caller has
been warned by the householder that the latter does not want to be disturbed.
V. The rule that ?it?s up to the tenants to decide who they will allow at their doorstep?
does not change whether the apartment complex or trailer park is private property or
public housing. The same rule of ?it?s up to the residents and no one else to decide whether to have
communication at their doorstep? applies globally?whether to public housing (Walker) or
private (Smith), whether to private apartments (Walker) or trailer parks (Smith). The court in
Walker would extend the same guidelines that governed its ruling for the public housing complex
to private developments.
A technical distinction that its ways are not accepted public ways but rather appear to be private
ways open to the public makes no difference. The constitutional right of the authority?s tenants to
receive communications may not be abridged by the blanket prohibition of campaigning and
solicitation.
Id. at 1128.
Even if the apartment complex or trailer park is private, the streets and sidewalks leading to the
tenant?s door are open to visitors to individual living quarters. Therefore, your church visitation
team has a right to knock on the tenants? doors. Only if the tenants themselves object or post no
solicitation signs can the visitors be prohibited from knocking on the door again.
VI. Both residents and non-residents have the right to engage in door-to-door
communication.
Neither Walker nor Smith limited the right to door-to-door communication to other
tenants or residents of the same complex. The opportunity to visit tenants or residents of the
complex extends equally to non-tenants and nonresidents.
Since the 1930s, courts have protected the rights of religious people who are too poor to
own a printing press or other publishing accoutrements for the dissemination of information and
have permitted such persons to disseminate their views by means that are affordable?such as
the distribution of free literature, visitation from house to house, and other free speech activities
in the public forum areas of city streets and parks. Cases upholding these rights for decades have
included Schneider v. State, 308 U.S. 147 (1939), Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940)
and Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105 (1943)?to cite only a few in this long line of cases.
Conclusion
Church visitations to private apartments and trailer parks may only be prohibited when
the tenants themselves choose to object individually to a particular visit. The apartment complex
or trailer park manager may not make a blanket prohibition on behalf of the entire complex.
However, if an individual tenant opposes the church visitor?s presence on his doorstep, the
visitor must leave immediately and must not return to that particular address again. If the visitor
returns, the tenant or resident of the apartment or trailer could have the visitor arrested for
trespass. Even when one particular tenant objects, church visitors may continue to visit all other
residences in the apartment complex or trailer park when the householders have not objected. It is the responsibility of each individual tenant or resident, not of the complex manager, to object
to a visit.
Please feel free to share this information with any complex owner or manager. If you
have any questions, please contact us.

Sincerely,
Gibbs Law Firm, P.A.
KrisAnne Hall
Admitted in Florida

[John81]

Good to know. Thank you for posting that.

[Wilchbla]

Wow! This is great to know. No only if the judge knows this if your landlord takes you to court. Judges don't always follow the law.

Wil