Clothes dryers being a long way off being invented in the 1770s, America’s founding fathers never thought that such a basic thing as hanging out laundry should be enshrined as a constitutional right. Maybe they should have.
Seems a bit silly to be allowed to have a right to bear arms but not to bare laundry. 
Getting pegged for letting it all hang out
Ian Munro in Southington, Connecticut
May 10, 2008THIS New England morning has unfolded into an idyll of spring sunshine and soft breezes. It is, quite simply, one perfect day - ideal for drying laundry and, as it happens, for civil disobedience.
That is how it adds up in Sharon Vocke’s backyard, where clotheslines are banned, as they are in much of the United States.
It is a prohibition she routinely breaches when she hangs her laundry on her line, homemade of course, since there is little joy for Hills hoist retailers here.
Mrs Vocke’s line is rigged with a pulley system and slung from her porch to the garage in this affluent pocket of sweeping, unfenced gardens and sprawling homes.
Electric clothes dryers represent about 6 per cent of domestic power consumption, according to official estimates, and while the world searches for responses to global warming, Mrs Vocke points to her backyard, wind and solar power.
“It takes me about six minutes to violate my neighbourhood covenant and it’s worth every second to have my clothes smell nice and to know I am not harming the air we breathe,” the 46-year-old said recently in a submission to Connecticut’s General Assembly Energy and Technology Committee.
The committee was considering a law giving homeowners the right to use clotheslines despite neighbourhood fears that displays of underwear would undermine property values. But as with similar proposals in Vermont and New Hampshire, the reformers failed and bans stay in place.
In Vermont, Richard McCormack sponsored an unsuccessful “Right to Dry” law.
“I did not get a definitive ‘right to dry’ in the state of Vermont,” said the state senator. “What I did get was an energy conservation bill that includes the statement that the Government recognises that voluntary energy conservation is a good thing and that it recognises there are impediments to it.” But an explicit statement, that citizens had a right to use clotheslines, was struck out.
Last September, the town of Poughkeepsie in New York State passed a “laundry law” imposing $US100 ($106) fines on anyone caught drying on front porches.
“I wonder if this is all a commentary on our consumer-oriented American traits,” Mrs Vocke said. “I don’t know how common this is - just the fact it was ever written into our [neighbourhood rules] really bothers me.”
Line-drying advocates will persist. Alexander Lee, a New Hampshire lawyer who created the lobby group Project Laundry List in 1995, said people were anxious to reduce energy consumption and, while solar panels were expensive, anyone could afford a clothesline.
Mr Lee said the estimated 6 per cent of domestic power consumed by electric dryers did not account for commercial laundromats or 17 million homes with gas-powered dryers.
Bans on clotheslines are relatively recent, and seem to be based on the opinion they are unsightly and a mark of poverty.
“In the last 30 years, it’s increased exponentially,” Mr Lee said. “Really, it’s since World War II, since people started moving into homeowners associations which introduced lots of prohibitions.”
Martin Mador, a lobbyist and author of Connecticut’s “Right to Dry Bill”, will try again next year.
In rejecting the Vermont bill, Senator McCormack’s colleagues said clotheslines were too trivial to be bothered with, to which he responds that is why communities should not be banning them.
“It’s very hard getting Americans to get with the idea of saving energy,” Senator McCormack said. “I so love my country. But I look at [it] from time to time and say to myself, ‘This place is insane’.”
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/getting-pegged-for-letting-it-all-hang-out/2008/05/09/1210131264435.html
