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Why is it Illegal to Feed the Homeless?

100px-Seal_of_Fort_Lauderdale,_Florida

Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Weekend Contributor

Did you know that somewhere in America, it is illegal to feed the homeless in public?  It can’t be true can it?  It is true in Fort Lauderdale, Florida after the recent passage of an ordinance by the city council.  The real scary part of that news is that Fort Lauderdale is not alone in taking this anti-compassionate stance!

“Over 30 cities across the nation have outlawed or are considering criminalizing the provision of food to homeless people. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, over 20 cities have devised laws against giving food to homeless people since January 2013.” Nation of Change

While I can understand this stance if these cities are adding health guidelines to make such feeding attempts safer, I am shocked that over 30 cities have outlawed it or are considering outlawing the practice of giving food to the hungry and homeless.  Are public picnics next on the hit list?

Why would any city want to stop the feeding of the homeless in public?   Just who are these brigands who are trying to destroy the city of Fort Lauderdale by having the audacity to feed the hungry?

“In an act of compassion and civil disobedience, a 90-year-old man and two pastors in Fort Lauderdale openly defied a new city ordinance barring anyone from feeding homeless people in public. After police intervened and charged them with a crime, 90-year-old Arnold Abbott and Pastor Dwayne Black returned several days later to break the draconian law again. Although Abbott received another citation, police decided not to place him in custody.

Last Sunday, Arnold Abbott, Pastor Dwayne Black of The Sanctuary Church in Fort Lauderdale, and Mark Sims of St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church in Coral Springs fed homeless people in a public park in South Florida two days after the city passed a new ordinance outlawing the provision of food to vagrants in public. After getting arrested, the two pastors and elderly homeless advocate each face a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail.

“One of the police officers said, ‘Drop that plate right now,’ as if I were carrying a weapon,” recalled Abbott. “It’s man’s inhumanity to man is all it is.”

On Wednesday evening, Abbott and Pastor Black remained undeterred as they served a four-course meal to nearly 100 homeless people at Fort Lauderdale Beach. After police officers recorded the simple act of kindness on their video cameras, they escorted Abbott away from the crowd to fingerprint him and issue another citation. Wary of public backlash, law enforcement officials chose not to place Abbott in handcuffs and haul him off to jail again.” Nation of Change

The City of Fort Lauderdale claims that they don’t want hungry and homeless people fed in public because they claim it will only keep them from trying to get out of the cycle of homelessness.  Of course, one has to wonder if the real reason might be related to the tourism trade that brings in big dollars to Fort Lauderdale.  After all, it seems that this latest ordinance to ban the feeding of the homeless in public is just one of the anti-homeless ordinances passed by the city fathers of Fort Lauderdale.

“Backed by the Chamber of Commerce, the recent city ordinance is the fourth law Fort Lauderdale has passed this year against the homeless. The other laws ban homeless people from panhandling at traffic intersections and outlaw sleeping or storing their belongings on public property. According to Pastor Black, the recent food-sharing ordinance passed after a long meeting past midnight after many people had gone home.

“It’s a pubic safety issue. It’s a public health issue,” Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler rationalized. “The experts have all said that if you’re going to feed them to get them from breakfast to lunch to dinner, all you’re doing is enabling that cycle of homelessness.”

One of these so-called experts is Ron Book, a city lobbyist who commended the Fort Lauderdale commissioners for passing the ordinance. Book told the commissioners that feeding impoverished people on the streets merely sanctions homelessness. Book added, “Whatever discourages feeding people on the streets is a positive thing.” ‘ Nation of Change

I just love it when experts turn out to be lobbyists pedaling their bosses wares.  Mr. Abbot has made it his life’s work to help the poor and this isn’t the first time he has fought with Fort Lauderdale over feeding people in public.   He won a court case against the city in 1999 over this same issue and Fort Lauderdale may be looking at another court case over this issue.

While I do understand that large groups of homeless people can impact the look and feel of any city, the realities of how many of these people end up on the streets is no mystery.  However, it seems that Fort Lauderdale would rather punish the poor and the people trying to help them rather than attempt to help solve some of the problems that leads people into the streets.

Mr. Abbott and the ministers have taken it upon themselves to treat these homeless people as humans and strive to provide them with a meal.  Fort Lauderdale gets an early Grinch award for punishing the modern-day Samaritans who are doing the job that Fort Lauderdale refuses to do.  Kudos to these individuals who are risking themselves to help the less fortunate.

I think it is time for the Mayor and the City Council to start rolling up their sleeves and helping feed and house and treat the homeless.  Or get out-of-the-way.  What do you think?

 

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182 thoughts on “Why is it Illegal to Feed the Homeless?”

  1. “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.”
    Martin Luther King “Letter from Birmingham Jail,”

    1. When I lived in St Louis the Homeless would help me in the ice with my Husbands wheelchair when I didn’t have a car up to the service station to get some air and get him cigarettes. I would give the homeless man a cigarette and a couple dollars and a sandwich and a soda too. Larry Rice Center was right up the Street and those guys stayed to themselves but there was always new guys coming in. And I agree about the Ft. Lauderdale Mayor making them sound like vermin. Say what you want.

  4. Perhaps a lot sooner than one might think.

    “Anecdotal evidence by leaders of prolife groups such as Created Equal and Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust said in interviews that not only do they see more college students willing to say they support post-birth abortion, but some students even suggest children up to 4 or 5-years-old can also be killed, because they are not yet “self aware.””

    “This is the whole problem with devaluing human life at any stage—it will naturally grow to include other groups of humans; in this case, born humans as well as preborn humans,” Harrington said. “[I] talked with one young man at the University of Minnesota who thought it was alright to kill children if they were under the age of 5 years old, as he did not consider them persons until that age.”

    http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/19896/

  6. See what I mean? Preening self-righteousness with threats to expulsion from the in-group for straying from dogma.

    Instead of a reasoned discussion on what is best for these homeless, there is mockery and misrepresentation.

    As ever.

  7. The US has a serious problem of ethnic and social hygiene which can only be remedied by a robust policy of mandatory euthanasia of those for whom the respectable people have no use.

  8. rcocean,
    I believe we have those that would like to bypass the cumbersome legislative process and simply rule by majority opinion. Of course this would place the security of natural rights subordinate to whatever morality happens to be in vogue. If you want hypocrisy, just put the moral relativists in power and allow them to administer to the will of the Black Friday majority.

  10. In the left’s moral rigidity, they demand to harm the poor and the homeless by feeding them instead of solving their problem.

    It’s not a lack of food that troubles the most of these people. But really, the left doesn’t care what their real problem is, or what steps might actually alleviate it.

    Instead the high status lefties rush to judgement, and the herd quickly follow. This, even though in the long run they make the people they pretend to be trying to help worse off.

    Because they care only about status. Not the poor. This man is merely playing to the cameras.

  12. You seriously think that there are enough facilities to handle the number of homeless that suffer from mental illness or drug/ alcohol addiction? Do you know you can’t just commit the mentally ill against their will unless they’re a threat to themselves or others?

  13. Sounds like a good law to me. We need to truly help the homeless by getting them off the street and into drug rehab or medical attention. Many of them have mental health issues that need to be addressed. As usual, you have a lot of grand-standing lefties who don’t really care about the homeless, but wish to feel good about themselves.

  14. I wish to know where the food that is being fed come from. Is it safe Next is this a 501c3 doing the feeding or is this just concern citizen using their own money ? I smell an irregularity in the details.

  15. My opinion is that the Obama admin is telling local communities to stop this so that the homeless wild rely on the government the admin took out the vrefit for charity giving

  16. Paul I answered the question @ 7:47 and 7:58. Perhaps they were not the answers you were looking for.

  17. Sometimes people are as crazy (or as poor) as they want to be. If you feed them, they will come. It is an old scam:

    In that curious source of our domestic history, the “English Villanies” of Decker, we find a lively description of the “Abram cove,” or Abram man, the impostor who personated a Tom o’ Bedlam. He was terribly disguised with his grotesque rags, his staff, his knotted hair, and with the more disgusting contrivances to excite pity, still practised among a class of our mendicants, who, in their cant language, are still said “to sham Abraham.” This impostor was, therefore, as suited his purpose and the place, capable of working on the sympathy, by uttering a silly maunding, or demanding of charity, or terrifying the easy fears of women, children, and domestics, as he wandered up and down the country: they refused nothing to a being who was as terrific to them as “Robin Good-fellow,” or “Raw-head and Bloody-bones.” Thus, as Edgar expresses it, “sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers,” the gestures of this impostor were “a counterfeit puppet-play: they came with a hollow noise, whooping, leaping, gambolling, wildly dancing, with a fierce or distracted look.” These sturdy mendicants were called “Tom of Bedlam’s band of mad-caps,” or “Poor Tom’s flock of wild geese.” Decker has preserved their “Maund,” or begging —“Good worship master, bestow your reward on a poor man that hath been in Bedlam without Bishopsgate, three years, four months, and nine days, and bestow one piece of small silver towards his fees, which he is indebted there, of 3l. 13s. 7½d.“ (or to such effect).

    Then sometimes, it is cheaper to turn the truly mentally ill loose to save money! That is also an old scam:

    Bethlehem Hospital formed, in its original institution, a contracted and penurious charity;1 its governors soon discovered that the metropolis furnished them with more lunatics than they had calculated on; they also required from the friends of the patients a weekly stipend, besides clothing. It is a melancholy fact to record in the history of human nature, that when one of their original regulations prescribed that persons who put in patients should provide their clothes, it was soon observed that the poor lunatics were frequently perishing by the omission of this slight duty from those former friends; so soon forgotten were they whom none found an interest to recollect. They were obliged to open contributions to provide a wardrobe.2

    In consequence of the limited resources of the Hospital, they relieved the establishment by frequently discharging patients whose cure might be very equivocal. Harmless lunatics thrown thus into the world, often without a single friend, wandered about the country, chanting wild ditties, and wearing a fantastical dress to attract the notice of the charitable, on whose alms they lived. They had a kind of costume, which I find described by Randle Holme in a curious and extraordinary work.3

    And there is the most wonderful poem at the link:

    https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/disraeli/isaac/curiosities/chapter190.html

    FWIW, I stole a copy of this book from my father. He stole it back. Then, last Christmas, I stole it back from him. I think he has finally given up on it.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  18. Is it not unjust to jail someone for living their faith? What about the expression of one’s Christian beliefs?? It was OK when Hobby Lobby did it, but not for those who feed the hungry? Rank disgusting hypocrisy.

  20. It is NOT unjust to jail someone for up to 60 days for feeding the homeless on the street? You seriously don’t recognize this? This is sad.

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