Whose responsibility is it to protect unhoused when it’s freezing outside? An Ohio pastor opened his church to the homeless and was charged by city.
Ambiguous title. The pastor didn’t ask for money from the freezing people. He took them in for free. The city then criminally charged him for violating zoning rules:
Chris Avell, pastor of Dad’s Place in Bryan, Ohio, was arraigned in court last Thursday because he kept his church open 24/7 to provide warmth to the unhoused.
Ohio law prohibits residential use in first-floor buildings in a business district. Since the church is zoned as a Central Business, the building is restricted from allowing people to eat or sleep on the property.
I dunno. It seems pretty clear that charged in this case means the government sicced the dogs on him for being a… checks notes… good Christian.
No wonder we have so many Bad Christians when the good ones are punished for their deeds.
This is what the gospel of Jesus meant that the life of a true Christian was the hardest.
The people who actually follow the gospel are generally vilified by the majority of Christians for making the rest of them look bad or something.
If these people get angry at someone performing a good deed because that makes then look bad, they’re going to hell.
If even the least absolutist christian sect, the church of England, teaches that as they did to me during my childhood, then those fuckers aren’t even close to being Christian. They’re just wearing a crucifix.
Fucking posers.
Hey now, since when does being a good Christian mean… checks notes… taking care of the oppressed, hungry & needy? Oh, well shit. :-P
I wonder if there’s a first amendment defense to be made here. The pastor was following his religious tenets by sheltering the poor in the church in their time of need.
So private sector does gov job, in caring for citizens and gets in trouble. As if the gov wants to criminalize kindness.
criminally charged him for violating zoning rules
Well fuck’em.
If its criminal to do the right thing for your fellow humans, do crime.
I believe it was Marcus Garvey that said all immoral laws must be disobeyed.
So by this logic church patrons would have to leave the premises to eat a snack, participate in a church meal, or even eat one of those wafers they sometimes hand out.
Yup. Serve the body of Christ? Straight to jail. Your sermon is so boring someone dozes off, believe it or not, jail.
Of course, this doesn’t really happen, through the magic of selective enforcement the only people getting the boot are those preventing the homeless from freezing to death, ruining the plans of the local administration.
A pastor would not be “serving the body of Christ”, since transfiguration is a Roman Catholic heresy
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You’re not familiar with communion?
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Yet another evil created by zoning laws.
I don’t know, we don’t want a shooting range next to a preschool or something. Zoning does some good.
Since when did we care about children getting shot at school?
Zoning is there to prevent wasting those targets by accident /s
Oh come on. This is absolutely a government overreach… yes, regulations can be good. They were not in this case.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation, but it seems to me the problem here isn’t the zoning laws, but draconian enforcement during an emergency.
Usually in times of hardship, anyone with half a brain knows not to strictly enforce laws like this that were clearly not intended to stop churches, businesses, or private individuals from helping people.
It’s like charging someone for violating zoning by taking in neighbours whose homes were destroyed. In normal times, there are laws against turning yourself into a boarding house without a permit, but nobody reasonable would enforce that after a tornado.
The problem is moronic enforcement.
The regulation/law could have been written better. That’s why I called it overreach. They could have written an emergency clause or wrote an emergency regulation/law that specified overruling certain laws.
That’s what I meant by overreach. I’m generally pro regulations when it comes to safety which is what the sleeping and eating one I assume was written about.
Seems like a shooting range next to a school could be a deterrent.
Hmmm, which school to shoot up? This one next to a bunch of folks with weapons and ammo within arms reach practicing marksmanship or any of these other ones without that?
Wouldn’t a daycare/private preschool and a gun range both be the same light commercial zones?
There might be regulation keeping you from owning a gun range near a school, but I don’t think zoning helps
Not this zoning.
he building is restricted from allowing people to eat or sleep on the property.
Okay… so any business in the ‘business district’ is restricted from allowing people to eat or sleep on their property.
If I was a lawyer, I’d record people eating in their business district buildings and present that to the court right next to the law that says they’re not allowed to do it.
I would fight tooth and nail to ensure whatever judicial overreach is screwing over poor people also screws over rich ones.
No eating in the business district means no break rooms. And if Christian churches are in the business district, I’d imagine this means no communion wafers either.
How many of those businesses work people so hard/overnight so they are sleeping in their offices? Its Ohio so probably not many but its probably still happened.
If it’s a business, why don’t they pay taxes?
Yep, and what boundaries constitutes a church, synagogue, mosque or place of worship these days, and why is one religion tax free, yet a philosophical movement is not? To whom is respon$ible for making these institutions exempt of taxation? I for one would be a proud supporter of a church that actually upholds the tenants of biblical teachings, and also follows in the footsteps of those morals, but it’s all just a sad sad part of modern day capitalism. This Pastor is a hero and should be heralded as such.
Not that I particularly care if churches are or are not taxed but arguing that religion is philosophy just is empirically wrong. Philosophy is rarely passed generation to generation but religion is almost always is. No one would call an 8 year old a Hegellian but they would grasp the idea that the 8 year old is Muslim and should be given hallel food. A Marxist solider who dies in combat isn’t going to get a Marxist funeral. A Platoist is not going to request a Platoist leader to provide them comfort in their final moments. No one is bringing their family to weekly Russellian services where they sing about the glory of set theory. No desperate person has begged their local Utilitarian thinker to pray away the Utility Monster.
I am an atheist btw so don’t try it.
You’re right. The only difference between philosophy and religion is the cult aspect. So why are we rewarding the culty versions that indoctrinate children into being unable to think for themselves rather than actual philosophical movements? Its backwards as fuck. Religon is much of why humanity is so stupid. It requires faith. Faith and critical thinking cannot coexist when the faith involves meaning of life stuff.
I use Arch Linux, btw.
Technically you are correct, but this is far from the first instance of this kind, probably already even in 2024. I knew immediately what it meant b/c of that context… sigh, unfortunately:-(.
Still, thank you very much for clarifying - Lemmy is shared world-wide, and not everyone may have picked up on that, especially non-native speakers. You are preventing misunderstandings hence promoting Truth, exactly as that pastor would have wanted:-).
And here I was told that the government doesn’t need to take care of these things because churches and charities will pick up the slack…
Did you even read the headline? If you could peek over your bias for a second you could see that the article is saying the government is charging a pastor for providing shelter. Big miss here chief lol
Mate, I think they were sarcastically saying that one of the reasons there aren’t government run programs to help people is the claim that churches and charities will do that instead. In this case a church attempted to do so and was instead punished, which is quite ironic if they are supposed to help those in need.
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Oof. Talk about a big miss. Lol
well this is fascinating. I would love to know what you THINK they meant. I can’t seem to frame it your way.
I would love to know what you THINK they meant.
“That’s my secret, captain. I never think.”
So you’ll have to explain your anger at some point.
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Going through this guy’s comment history is a trip. Almost every comment is in the past 24 hours. Almost all poor takes or overly aggressive. Takes all kinds.
If this goes to a jury trial, everyone on that jury should fucking nullify.
If you don’t know, jury nullification is an implicit property of jury trials. The court can’t make you show your work or tell you that your verdict is wrong, so you can give any answer you want. That means if someone is up for something you think is bullshit, like helping the homeless or enjoying marijuana in their backyard, you can just say Not Guilty. The court can’t do shit to you so long as you don’t scream “NULLIFIED FUCKERS” as you’re doing it.
That said, everyone involved in pushing these charges along should probably be voted out of office or run out of town. They’re trying to kill people, just slowly and via exposure.
They’re trying to kill people, just slowly and via exposure.
Yes, that’s part of it. But what they really want is to scare the rest, for you and me and everyone else to see these headlines and feel what we’re feeling.
Every single one of these headlines where big government brings down its full weight onto people that help others, everyone from this pastor to people who leave water in the desert to people who help ladies get abortions to even a single miscarriage that they know will offend sensibilities (Brittany Watts), are psychological pre-enforcement for an authoritarian government.
Every single one screams: step out of line with society, and look what will happen to you too.
It’s two birds with one stone. Clearing out the visible proof of their own inhumanity and raging mismanagement of this country’s wealth and power by letting the poor and unhoused freeze to death is only one part of it; they absolutely want that message to hang out there, unacknowledged in the freezing air, of what happens to people when they fall out of favor with society’s masters.
Just to add, if you’re selected for jury duty you should stop taking about it the day you receive the summons. Nobody needs to know what you think about nullification during that time and being in favor of it will get you removed from a bunch of courthouses. It’s the jury version of saying “bomb” in an airport.
So just make sure you know your local laws about unanimous decision vs majority decision. In the first, you can just be the stick in the mud. Question everything. In the second you actually have to convince 4 other people to vote with you.
Just to add, if you’re selected for jury duty you should stop taking about it the day you receive the summons. Nobody needs to know what you think about nullification during that time and being in favor of it will get you removed from a bunch of courthouses
I guess I know how I’m getting out of jury duty next time
DAs are fully aware of juror’s ability to exonerate defendants just because they don’t agree with the law.
It’s unlikely something like this would go to court unless the community has some massive hate-boner for the homeless.
All it takes is 1 person to vote not guilty and all the effort has been wasted getting a conviction.
A lot of places have moved to majority voting for non felonies. And most everywhere will not give you a jury trial unless there’s more than X amount of prison time involved.
A lot of misdemeanors are literally just the defendant, the judge, and the prosecutor, going over the plea deal the prosecutor got the defendant to agree to in a room with just the two of them.
Can you give me more information on this?
I thought accused criminals were entitled to a jury by their peers. I understand that a lot of people may wave their trial by jury, but I don’t know if it’s possible to have that choice taken away from you.
Some states let you decide, I think California is like that. Other states, like Arizona, just will not provide a jury or defense lawyer if they aren’t going to sentence you to enough jail time.
Of course you still have to tell employers, loan agents, and rental housing offices that you were convicted of a crime. So you’re going to lose your job, housing, and credit. But they say it’s constitutional because you’re not going to jail.
Now let’s talk about debtor’s prison. Because you probably just got a fine from that sham trial. If you can’t pay the fine with no job, no apartment, and no credit, they will arrest you and jail you on contempt of court with no trial.
The unhoused are supposed to die quietly, he got in the way of that.
Some heartless bastard abusing the regulations. I’m sure there are good reasons for those regulations being in place, but if they are going to abuse people like this with them, something is very, very wrong. At the absolute least don’t enforce those laws when the weather is deadly, and best pass a new ordinance suspending those laws/regulations during deadly weather. Too many of us have absolutely zero empathy for our fellow humans.
I’m not sure that those regulations are there for a good reason. I’m sure that those regulations are there because somebody wanted them and this is not an unintended consequence of them.
In fact I’m almost certain that the abusive anti-human use of this law is something dreamed up when the law was first penned to paper.
“not a bug but a feature”
They’re violations of feeding/housing people in a business. There is not a good reason for them. Unless you consider protecting the prices of the housing market to be a good reason.
As much as I despise religion, the problems of our country are not caused by religion. They are caused by conservatives.
Usually those conservatives are religious and wield their religion as a weapon, but the core problem has always been conservatives.
When a religious person is not conservative, their non-conservative behavior is punished by the conservatives.
While this is true, religion goes a long way in priming people to believe in total BS without questioning it or using critical thinking.
This. By weaving their politics directly into religion, they get to benefit from the inherent suspension of disbelief that religion requires. No amount of proof or evidence will sway a conservative because the blind faith that all proof and evidence is fake is the key point of conservatism.
Not really it’s mostly the “news” poisoning people. In this case Fox “news”.
Our Chinese friends aren’t much into religion and they don’t seem to have much issue buying into the same propaganda.
What are they conserving? Is it class hierarchy and capitalism? We’ll never know…
When doing the right thing, or even doing right by your conscience, is a crime… you live in a place and time in which politicians haven’t been tarred or feathered and run out of town on a rail in too long
The “pro-life” party strikes again
I am really confused here. Look where Milwaukee is in relation to Ohio. (For non USians, it’s under the second E in Milwaukee.)
It’s 262 miles from Milwaukee to the Ohio state line by car.
Pastor is in Ohio.Hears reports of people dying in Milwaukee. Pastor offers shelter to people in Ohio. Pastor is charged.
Thank you.
Because he should’ve offered shelter to people in Milwaukee /s
The situation is abhorrent though, some Kafkaesque level of reality
The newspaper is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They’re contextualizing it for local readers.
Didn’t read your part for non USians so was searching on the left side of the chart. Still wanted to say thanks though for adding it :p
Can they just charge the other pastors who ‘play’ with little boys?
I hate this god damn country so fucking much.
Eh, it’s really a cultural problem among the people in it.
Anyone who thinks the disparity in wealth should grow instead of shrink is part of the problem.
Greed is something democrats and republicans can routinely unite on because they’re both in on it.
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You’re an asshole.
You know that, right?
Woah, check your survivorship bias there mate.
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