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.
criminally charged him for violating zoning rules
Well fuck’em.
If its criminal to do the right thing for your fellow humans, do crime.
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
I don’t know, we don’t want a shooting range next to a preschool or something. Zoning does some good.
Oh come on. This is absolutely a government overreach… yes, regulations can be good. They were not in this case.
You mean like here in maryville, tn, where the new Smith and Wesson factory and test range shares a property line with Middlesettlements Elementary School?
Nothing quite like kids hearing gunshots outside at school.
And it wasn’t just “allowed” by zoning laws. The city basically did backflips to get the plant to move here. They even convinced the city of Alcoa to cede the land to the city of Maryville without telling Alcoa why they wanted it.
Bunch of shady shit all around, but the whole county basically sucks Smith and Wesson’s dick now. They even had a big festival on the day the plant opened to celebrate it.
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.
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.
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.
well this is fascinating. I would love to know what you THINK they meant. I can’t seem to frame it your way.
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.
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.
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.
