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.
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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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.
So private sector does gov job, in caring for citizens and gets in trouble. As if the gov wants to criminalize kindness.
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.
criminally charged him for violating zoning rules
Well fuck’em.
If its criminal to do the right thing for your fellow humans, do crime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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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well this is fascinating. I would love to know what you THINK they meant. I can’t seem to frame it your way.
The unhoused are supposed to die quietly, he got in the way of that.
