As folks freeze to death in Milwaukee, Ohio pastor charged for offering shelter
As folks freeze to death in Milwaukee, Ohio pastor charged for offering shelter | Opinion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you’ll have to explain your anger at some point.
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.
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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.
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.
I hate this god damn country so fucking much.
Don't lose heart - it's not all this way.
But yeah, we can't hold out faith in it any longer either :-(.
Fwiw, did you notice the silver lining? Pastor willing to go to jail (or whatever, I haven't read the details that closely yet, but let's presume - anyway it's likely true) rather than give up on his beliefs. He will die on this hill, so that they do not have to:-D. Yeah, fuck the system that made him do it, but still it's quite inspiring that people like him exist that will fight against it:-).
It is. It throws me a bit sometimes. So used to seeing religion being nothing more than a tool of the powerful against the weak aligned with the government against us. The government makes our life hell, the shamans teach us that it can't be otherwise.
And then once in a rate while a religious leader puts themselves in harm's way for someone else and I don't know what to make of it. How can you spend 99,999 being awful and 1 day being good? Makes no sense.
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.
It might be part of the culture, but there is a class of people with substantially more wealth who are able to direct legislation to cause people to be charged like this pastor. The vast majority of people I think anywhere on earth would believe you should help the needy, but the average people don't have a say like the wealthy class does, and this class has it's own distinct culture which praises greed and growth.
But I was told democrats and republicans are not the same.
It’s the entire world
All it took was a couple opinionated headlines eh?
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…
I understand where you're coming from, but it's not an either-or situation. Many conservatives hide behind religion to do heinous things. But there are plenty of religious people who don't fall into this "conservative" definition and do heinous things as well.
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?
You’re an asshole.
You know that, right?
Woah, check your survivorship bias there mate.
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