Debate Follows Bills to Remove Clotheslines Bans - NYTimes.com:
Like the majority of the 60 million people who now live in the country’s roughly 300,000 private communities, Ms. Saylor was forbidden to dry her laundry outside because many people viewed it as an eyesore, not unlike storing junk cars in driveways, and a marker of poverty that lowers property values.
In the last year, however, state lawmakers in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have overridden these local rules with legislation protecting the right to hang laundry outdoors, citing environmental concerns since clothes dryers use at least 6 percent of all household electricity consumption.
Laws that stop people from drying clothes in their own backyards is surely big government gone mad, and must be one thing that liberals and conservatives (however defined) could agree to fight. For liberals it is an issue of human rights, the freedom to dry clothes. And for conservatives it can be seen as an issue of conserving a tradition thousands of years old.
I wonder who were the petty fascists who sought to introduce it in the first place?
Hat-tip to Notes from a Common-place Book: Fight For Your Right to Dry!, who also has some pretty good things to say about this particular piece of bureaucratic idiocy.
2 comments:
Just for clarity on where the rules come from -- it's not government, but private "Housing Association" covenants that cover what people can do in private housing developments. They have rules about lawn care, and the colors you can paint your house, and all sorts of things. One reason, among about a million others, I'd never consider living in that kind of development.
Alas, our "liberals" and "conservatives" are not interested in human rights or conserving anything any more—they're all Progressivists with different mechanisms on how utopia ought to be achieved!
Post a Comment