A retired Pennsylvania school teacher got an opportunity to move to the Philippines to teach English. After failing to offload his old pickup truck online, in an effort to sell everything off before moving, Will Cramer decided to throw a For Sale sign in the window to let passersby know it was on the market. One day his 1987 Chevrolet had a ticket under the wiper stating he’d run afoul of a local ordinance forbidding “parking a vehicle in public for the purposes of selling it.”
“I was retiring, and I was finally going to move to another country, so there was urgency to sell my truck,” Will Cramer said. “I wanted to sell some of my items and not take them with me. I didn’t want to store them.”
Initially Cramer went ahead and paid the fine, but his check was returned because the city said it was owed an additional late fee. Incensed by the ridiculousness and bureaucratic nonsense of the situation, he set out to do something about it. Cramer has teamed up with Institute for Justice, a non-profit law firm, to sue Nazareth over the ordinance, claiming it is a violation of his First Amendment rights.
“People have put For Sale signs in car windows for as long as cars have been around, and there is no legitimate reason for the government to ban doing so,” said Bobbi Taylor, one of the attorneys representing Cramer.
“Americans have a First Amendment right to truthfully advertise things they are selling, and that includes putting a For Sale sign in their car window.”
Nazareth instituted the law in 1991, according to Leheigh Valley Live, explicitly to prevent an entrepreneurial car enthusiast from selling cars in front of his house. A resident at that point would buy mechanics specials, fix them up, and sell them, according to Council President Daniel Chiavaroli. He went on to say that he did not want the streets to be used for commercial purposes, and that parking on the street in Nazareth is a privilege, not a right. That guy sounds like he sucks.
It’s worth noting that Cramer’s residence does not have a driveway, and he was still using the truck for transportation when it had the sign in the window.
As luck would have it, Cramer did end up selling the truck to someone who saw the sign in the window. Now that the truck is gone, he’s still fighting this tyrannical municipal overreach. I, for one, hope he wins. Dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance to come back here and tell Nazareth, Penn. that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom?