A federal judge has ruled that a southern Oregon city can’t limit a local church’s homeless meal services.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke found that an ordinance passed by the small city of Brookings, on the southern Oregon coast, violated the religious freedom rights of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, KGW reported. He issued his opinion on Wednesday.
The 2021 ordinance limited the church’s homeless meal services to two days a week, and required a permit to serve free food in residential areas. It was passed in response to resident complaints.
The church sued the city in 2022, saying the ordinance violated its right to freely practice religion.
I looked up where this ordinance came from.
From AP
The town has about 7000 residents if you want to get an idea about what I’m percentage of the residents seem to find this to be a problem.
The church website claims they serve 210+ meals a week. Even if we assume everyone comes back for every meal, that’s 35 people.
So if we look to serve the greatest good, it seems helping the homeless helps more people than if they were to help the judgemental NIMBYs.
From the in OPs post:
A church not bathing and protecting the poor really does seem to go against what I feel what most would say a church should stand for. I’m going to side with the church here.
Kudos for doing additional research and sharing it with sources!
I find things like this to be a fun exercise of Google Fu.
They’re usually so thinly veiled attempts at prejudice or racism you can let the facts do all the talking just by following back article links a few steps to get great quotes and numbers to show these people for who they are.
For reference, Brookings is a little podunk town along the coast way down in the corner of Oregon near the California border. It’s highly unlikely that these homeless people are coming in from out of town since it’s far from any large city, so the people that are being attracted to this church already live in Brookings.
My thought as well when looking at the photo in the wiki when I grabbed the population count.
You never know though, those mountains could be full of phantom homeless!
It looks like a nice enough place.
It also looks pretty rich.
City-Data
There are over 60 households with income under 30k, so more evidence the people at the soup kitchen arent outsiders.
Yeah, that plot says it all. The distribution is skewed to be wealthier than the average to the point that there are twice as many families making >200k than making 30k.
trans graph trans graph
A church should stand for whatever the tenants of the religion is. Christian is common in the us and generally holds help the poor as a tenant (as do several others) but tht doesn’t mean they all do.
I agree. I was just saying that it does indeed sound like what a church should be doing and the town is wrong for trying to make them stop doing these things. If the homeless were indeed doing bad things, I’m sure there were existing laws that could have stopped them, but since there were no violations, I presume, they had to invent new laws they would be in violation of.
(Polite correction for you also: a tenant is someone who rents or occupies someone else’s tenements (a house/dwelling/residence), while a tenet is a principle or belief)