.................................................................
Cross-posted @ Cristo Lumen .........
Punishing The Homeless
The willingness of many communities in this supposedly "Christian" nation of ours to get meaner and meaner and meaner in their treatment of the homeless as our supposedly "Christian" President continues to cut programs designed to help these people is a sin of the worst kind in my mind.
I wonder what Jesus would think of this trend in the treatment of the least of us ?
Dallas in the President's home state of Texas is not content with being number 6 on the Top 20 Meanest Cities in America (see below) so they have recently taken some steps in an effort seemingly to move UP the mean list.
................... Good Samaritans say Dallas law punishes homeless ..................
Dallas authorities began enforcing last month a law that prohibits charities from distributing free food to homeless except at city-approved locations and only after volunteers undergo food safety training, provided for free by the city. Violation of the law, enforced by city food inspectors, is punishable by a fine up to $2,000.
"It's OK to sell someone a sandwich, but if I hand a sandwich to a homeless person, I'm committing a crime," said Charles Wellhausen, a volunteer for the Sathya Sai Baba Center, a service-oriented group that follows teachings of the Indian swami.
Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said regulating how the homeless are fed is a growing trend. St. Louis, Fort Myers, Fla., and Miami have passed or are considering similar regulations, he said.
"That's like a form of social Darwinism, if you cut off food to force people to get help, and it really doesn't work that way," he said [...]
Homeless advocate James Waghorne, 48, said the new law will lead to more people eating from trash bins. He said it was an organization like Williams' that helped lift him out of homelessness.
Waghorne, a longtime Dallas resident who worked in automobile sales and financing, spent two years living on the street after an episode of clinical depression in January 2001. He now works in the mental health field.
"It really wasn't so much about the food, but that someone still cared," said Waghorne, president of the Dallas Homeless Neighborhood Association, an advocacy group that documents treatment of the poor.
He noted that just as the city began to enforce the feeding regulations, it barred the homeless from staying overnight at the city's overburdened Day Resource Center, prompting the county to predict increased numbers at the jail.
"This isn't an issue of trying to get the homeless into services, but it is a program to get the homeless out of downtown and out of Dallas, Texas, altogether," Waghorne said.
(emphasis mine)
Here's.........
America's 20 Meanest Cities. The top 20 "mean cities" toward the homeless, as ranked by the National Coalition for the Homeless:
- Sarasota, Fla.
- Lawrence, Kan.
- Little Rock
- Atlanta
- Las Vegas
- Dallas
- Houston
- San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Santa Monica, Calif.
- Flagstaff, Ariz.
- San Francisco
- Chicago
- San Antonio
- New York City
- Austin, Texas
- Anchorage
- Phoenix
- Los Angeles
- St. Louis
- Pittsburgh
So as the policies of this administration continues to increase poverty and homelessness a correspondingly increase in meanness towards these people also grows. I thought God shed his grace on America as the song goes... not meanness. Shouldn't cities in this Christian nation of ours like Dallas be attempting to move down this list... not up it ?
God Help Us.... ALL!
More on all this cross-posted >>>>> here.