Naval officer battles town’s limits on nightly taps ritual
Lawyers for a naval officer who broadcasts taps nightly from speakers outside his home in tribute to the military told a Pennsylvania borough council president to expect legal action if officials don’t stop trying to restrict the practice.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania said in a letter Wednesday that a cease-and-desist order against Lt. Cmdr. Josh Corney is unconstitutional.
Corney is complying with a demand from the borough last month that he play taps on Sundays and certain holidays only, but he wants that rule overturned.
“When the borough singles out Lt. Cmdr. Corney’s ‘Taps’ performances on private property for censorship as a ‘nuisance,’ while allowing other similarly loud or louder, longer-lasting religious or commercial musical performances on private property to continue, it is engaging in content-based discrimination,” his lawyers wrote.
The lawyers said they will seek a federal injunction if the borough doesn’t reverse itself by Friday. Messages seeking comment weren’t returned by the council president, Doug Young, or by the borough’s solicitor.
Corney, 38, on active duty and stationed in Maryland, has been deployed overseas eight times, including to Iraq and Afghanistan. He said it was seeing Americans killed while serving their country that inspired his musical gesture.
“I thought to myself and prayed to God that if he brought me home, I would do something to remember the sacrifices that our men and women made for myself, my family and my country,” he said.
After moving into a home on 5 acres in Glen Rock, a town of about 2,000 residents where he lived as a boy, he made the taps broadcast his first priority in April 2015, setting up three amplified speakers in the front of the house. He picked a slower, hymn-like 57-second version of the tune, which is traditionally played at the end of the day.
At first, he had to put on a CD every night, but eventually established a fully automated system that was timed for 7:57 p.m., coinciding with bedtime for his six young children and ending just before a nearby church’s bells chimed.
He says it’s sometimes possible to hear the recording in the middle of town, about a quarter-mile away, but not always.
“A nearby church is permitted to play amplified recordings of hymns twice a day, church bells are allowed to peal at regular intervals, and a local restaurant has been granted permission to amplify its live outdoor musical performances,” Corney’s lawyers wrote to Young.
They said other common noises louder than Corney’s taps include lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, chain saws and “the exuberant cries of children playing a raucous game.”