Feeding The Homeless BANNED In Major Cities All Over America

What would you do if you came across someone on the street that had not had anything to eat for several days?  Would you give that person some food?  Well, the next time you get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the homeless where you live.  Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in major cities all over America.  Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on those that want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become "out of reach" for most average people.  Some cities are doing these things because they are concerned about the "health risks" of the food being distributed by ordinary "do-gooders".  Other cities are passing these laws because they do not want homeless people congregating in city centers where they know that they will be fed.  But at a time when poverty and government dependence are soaring to unprecedented levels, is it really a good idea to ban people from helping those that are hurting?

This is just another example that shows that our country is being taken over by control freaks.  There seems to be this idea out there that it is the job of the government to take care of everyone and that nobody else should even try.

But do we really want to have a nation where you have to get the permission of the government before you do good to your fellow man?

It isn't as if the government has "rescued" these homeless people.  Homeless shelters all over the nation are turning people away each night because they have no more room.  There are many homeless people that are lucky just to make it through each night alive during the winter.

Sometimes a well-timed sandwich or a cup of warm soup can make a world of difference for a homeless person.  But many U.S. cities have decided that feeding the homeless is such a threat that they had better devote law enforcement resources to making sure that it doesn't happen.

This is so twisted.  In America today, you need a "permit" to do almost anything.  We are supposed to be a land of liberty and freedom, but these days government bureaucrats have turned our rights into "privileges" that they can revoke at any time.

The following are some of the major U.S. cities that have attempted to ban feeding the homeless....

Philadelphia

Mayor Nutter recently banned feeding homeless people in many parts of Philadelphia where homeless people are known to congregate....

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has announced a ban on the feeding of large numbers of homeless and hungry people at sites on and near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Mayor Nutter is imposing the ban on all outdoor feedings of large numbers of people on city parkland, including Love Park and the Ben Franklin Parkway, where it is not uncommon for outreach groups to offer free food.

Nutter says the feedings lack both sanitary conditions and dignity.

Orlando

Last June, a group of activists down in Orlando, Florida were arrested by police for feeding the homeless in defiance of a city ordinance....

Over the past week, twelve members of food activist group Food Not Bombs have been arrested in Orlando for giving free food to groups of homeless people in a downtown park. They were acting in defiance of a controversial city ordinance that mandates permits for groups distributing food to large groups in parks within two miles of City Hall. Each group is allowed only two permits per park per year; Food Not Bombs has already exceeded their limit. They set up their meatless buffet in Lake Eola knowing that they would likely be arrested as a result.

Houston

Down in Houston, a group of Christians was recently banned from distributing food to the homeless, and they were told that they probably would not be granted a permit to do so in the future even if they applied for one....

Bobby and Amanda Herring spent more than a year providing food to homeless people in downtown Houston every day. They fed them, left behind no trash and doled out warm meals peacefully without a single crime being committed, Bobby Herring said.

That ended two weeks ago when the city shut down their "Feed a Friend" effort for lack of a permit. And city officials say the couple most likely will not be able to obtain one.

"We don't really know what they want, we just think that they don't want us down there feeding people," said Bobby Herring, a Christian rapper who goes by the stage name Tre9.

Dallas

Dallas has also adopted a law which greatly restricts the ability of individuals and ministries to feed the homeless....

A Dallas-area ministry is suing the city over a food ordinance that restricts the group from giving meals to the homeless.

Courts dismissed Dallas’ request for a summary judgment last week, saying the case, brought up by pastor Don Hart (in video above) may indeed be a violation of free exercise of religion, as protected by the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the blog Religion Clause reported.

In the court filing, the ministry leaders argue that their Christian faith requires them to share meals with the homeless (Jesus did!) and that the requirement that even churches and charities provide toilets, sinks, trained staff and consent of the city keeps them from doing so.

Las Vegas

A few years ago, Las Vegas became the first major U.S. city to specifically pass a law banning the feeding of homeless people....

Las Vegas, whose homeless population has doubled in the past decade to about 12,000 people in and around the city, joins several other cities across the country that have adopted or considered ordinances limiting the distribution of charitable meals in parks. Most have restricted the time and place of such handouts, hoping to discourage homeless people from congregating and, in the view of officials, ruining efforts to beautify downtowns and neighborhoods.

But the Las Vegas ordinance is believed to be the first to explicitly make it an offense to feed “the indigent.”

That law has since been blocked by a federal judge, and since then many U.S. cities have been very careful not to mention "the indigent" or "the homeless" by name in the laws they pass that are intended to ban feeding the homeless.

New York City

New York City has banned all food donations to government-run homeless shelters because the bureaucrats there are concerned that the donated food will not be "nutritious" enough.

Yes, this is really true.

The following is from a recent Fox News article....

The Bloomberg administration is now taking the term “food police” to new depths, blocking food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city’s homeless.

In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can’t assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans.

Can you believe that?

The bureaucrats are officially out of control.

In America today, it seems like almost everything is illegal.

One church down in Louisiana was recently ordered to stop giving out waterbecause it did not have a government permit.

Well, I don't know about you, but I sure am going to give a cup of cold water to someone if they need it whether I have a permit or not.

It is as if common sense has totally gone out the window in this nation.

Over in New Hampshire, a woman is being sued for planting flowers in her own front yard.

This is the kind of thing that makes me glad that I have moved to a much more rural location.  People in the country tend to be much more relaxed.

Sadly, those that love to micro-manage others continue to get the upper hand in America.  Back in January, 40,000 new laws went into effect all over America.  The politicians continue to hit us with wave after wave of regulations and laws with no end in sight.

All of this is making America a very unpleasant place in which to live.

Economic Collapse

Jimmy Carter supports same sex ‘marriage’ as he launches his new Bible

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, March 20, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Former president Jimmy Carter has been strongly identified as a “Born Again” Christian and as a liberal Democrat for nearly five decades. He is once more blending those roles as he promotes “his” latest book, his own study Bible.

The NIV Lessons from Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter contains the full text of the New International Version of the Bible and the former president’s prayers, reflections, and asides.

During his book tour to promote a study of the Scriptures, Carter mentioned he supports same-sex “marriage.”

President Carter told Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, senior religion editor of The Huffington Post:

Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things – he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies. (Emphasis added.)

However, he said he drew the line, “maybe arbitrarily, in requiring by law that churches must marry people.”

“If a church decides not to, then government laws shouldn’t require them to,” he said, adding his own church accepts “gay members on an equal basis.”

When Raushenbush pressed him about whether he believed the Bible is God’s word, Carter answered, “the basic principles of the Bible are taught by God, but written down by human beings deprived of modern day knowledge. So there is some fallibility in the writings of the Bible. But the basic principles are applicable to my life and I don’t find any conflict among them.”

“There are many verses in the Bible that you could interpret very rigidly,” Carter said, “and that makes you ultimately into a fundamentalist.”

“Fundamentalists,” he wrote in his 2005 book Our Endangered Values, tend “to demagogue emotional issues” and “are often angry and sometimes resort to verbal or even physical abuse against those who interfere with the implementation of their agenda.” Carter applied this term to figures as divergent as the Ayatollah Khomeini and Pope John Paul II, to atheist neoconservatives and his fellow Baptists.

He contended the “mandated subservience of women by Christian fundamentalists” contributes to the Islamic practice of female genital mutilation.

Carter wrote that he exchanged harsh words with the late Pope John Paul II during a state visit over what Carter classified as the Pope’s “perpetuation of the subservience of women.” He added, “there was more harshness when we turned to the subject of ‘liberation theology’.”

The former president, who has released recordings of the Sunday School classes he teaches and written previous books about the Bible, disassociated himself from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000. He and former President Bill Clinton attempted to realign the Baptist faith in a more liberal direction by calling for a new Baptist convention in 2008. The formation of this new Baptist body, he wrote, constituted an “historic event for the Baptists in this country and perhaps for Christianity.”

Carter, whose single term in office was marred by turbulence at home and abroad, has denounced those who disagree with his political views in strident terms.

Pro-lifers, Carter wrote, “do not extend their concern to the baby who is born.” He instead suggested the nation support contraceptive sex education, taxpayer funding of international “family planning,” and embryonic stem cell research.

In addition to nuptial vows, Carter encouraged the military to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2007, and in 2010, he told the website Big Think it was time to elect “a gay person” as president.

The new study Bible, published by Zondervan,


Life Site News

The president wants to track you

Consumers love their iPhones, Androids and BlackBerrys. With built in GPS navigation, these handy little gadgets can point the way to the nearest gas station with a low price or the highest-rated restaurant within a few blocks. Results can be personalized based on the user’s location at any given moment, a feature so handy that many never leave home without their mobile.

Under federal law, even the most basic cellphone must collect location information so that 911 services can respond appropriately. The Obama administration wants the ability to seize this data for its own purposes. Last month, the Justice Department filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit insisting the government had the right to gather 60 days’ worth of tracking information from a cellphone without a warrant issued on probable cause.

By claiming this detailed information is relevant to a criminal investigation, there would effectively be no limit to the state’s ability to know someone’s every move. In the case at hand, federal agents sought the travel history of certain customers of T-Mobile and MetroPCS, but a federal magistrate ruled that the government’s hunch that these individuals might be involved in crime was good enough to merit release of basic subscriber information, such as name and address, but “a higher standard of proof” had to be met before the court would compel the release of location information.

The administration appealed this decision to a district court, arguing the location information represented “third-party business records” entitled to no privacy protection whatsoever. The judge saw this as a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The most troubling aspect of the Justice Department’s pursuit of this case to the next level is that the Supreme Court has already shot down its effort to allow warrantless installation of GPS trackers on automobiles. Tracking a phone potentially reveals far more information than merely following a car, since the phone usually doesn’t stop at the parking space or garage.

Knowing where an individual goes over a two-month period paints a very revealing look at a person’s life. The data could expose a person’s friends, associates, political leanings, religious affiliations, hobbies and even vices like gambling. Such a dossier could as easily be misused to blackmail political enemies as it could be used to crack an organized crime ring.

In a free society, government is not simply entitled to this information. A neutral third party decides whether law enforcement has a real case against the person whose privacy would be violated.

Unfortunately, the administration has too often chosen to trample on the right of citizens to be free from the prying of nosy bureaucratic busybodies. President Obama’s lack of leadership on privacy is most apparent in the hands-on investigations conducted at airports by the Transportation Security Administration. If Congress doesn’t have the courage to step in and tackle this issue, the courts should shut the door once and for all on these attempts to create a surveillance state.

The Washington Times

Syria's leadership making mistakes, says Russia

Syria's leadership is making "a lot of mistakes", Russia's foreign minister has said, in a further sign Moscow may be hardening its stance on Damascus.

Sergei Lavrov said President Bashar al-Assad's regime had "responded incorrectly" from the start, when the protests were peaceful.

He also said Moscow was prepared to support a UN resolution backing its envoy Kofi Annan's peace plan.

It comes a day after Russia called for a daily humanitarian ceasefire.

Earlier on Tuesday, US campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused elements of Syria's armed opposition of carrying out serious human rights abuses, including kidnapping, torture and execution.'Continuing efforts'

"We believe that the Syrian leadership responded incorrectly to the very first manifestations of the peaceful protests," Mr Lavrov told Kommersant FM radio in a pre-recorded interview.

"The Syrian leadership - despite the numerous promises it has made in response to our calls - is making a lot of mistakes. Unfortunately this is why the conflict is so acute."

Russia is a key ally of Syria and, along with China, has twice thwarted attempts to agree to a UN resolution condemning Mr Assad's actions.

But observers believe Moscow's patience with Damascus has been wearing thin.

Mr Annan, the UN-Arab League special envoy on Syria, has spent the last few weeks meeting all sides in the conflict - putting forward proposals to try and bring about an immediate ceasefire by both sides, access for humanitarian aid and the beginning of political dialogue.

Mr Lavrov, speaking at a news conference after meeting his Lebanese counterpart, said the UN Security Council should support the proposals, "not as an ultimatum, but as a basis of continuing efforts" by Mr Annan to find a solution to the crisis.

Following talks with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Monday, Mr Lavrov's ministry put out a statement urging the Syrian government "and all armed groups who oppose it" to agree to ceasefires "without delay".

The ministry said it supported the ICRC's demands for a daily pause in fighting to evacuate the wounded from the worst affected areas and allow in food and medicine, and urged the Syrian authorities to give the organisation "access to all detained persons in Syria following the protests".

Meanwhile, HRW has called on Syria's main opposition coalition, the Syrian National Council (SNC), to condemn the abuses carried out by some of its supporters.

According to HRW, abuses include kidnapping for ransom, detention, and torture of security force members, government supporters, and people identified as members of pro-government militias, called Shabiha.

HRW has frequently accused Syria's government of abuse over the past year of conflict.

The UN says more than 8,000 people have been killed in the year-long uprising, while tens of thousands of people have fled their homes.

BBC

Lindsey Williams & Chris Waltzek

University: Classes No Longer Cancelled For Christian, Jewish Holidays

New York’s Stony Brook University has decided to no longer cancel classes for major Christian and Jewish holidays in an effort to ensure that some religions aren’t given special treatment and to “afford equal support and equal respect to students and faculty from all faiths.”

Jewish students would be impacted on Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur, Passover and Holy Week. Christian students would be impacted on Good Friday. The Christmas holiday is protected under a union contract and occurs when classes are traditionally not in session.

The university had considered allowing faculty to schedule exams on Saturday and Sunday – a time when many students attend worship services. However, that decision was tabled after reaching a compromise with students.

“As a secular university, as a state-funded university our priority must be to maximize instructional opportunities for our students,” said Charles Robbins, vice provost for undergraduate education. “First and foremost, it’s important to note that while I respect everyone’s concerns, the reality is it’s a relatively small number of people who are upset.”

Robbins told Fox News the university’s decision to stop cancelling classes for Christian and Jewish holidays offers “equal protection under the regulations to everybody and no one is getting quote, unquote, special treatment.”

Robbins, who has a background in social justice, said many religions, including the Muslims and Buddhists have never had their holidays officially recognized by the university.

“Now all segments of our population will be equally recognized,” he said. “It really is the American fair thing to do.”

However, Stonybrook University’s 24,100 undergraduate and graduate students are not as religiously diverse as the vice provost said. According to a report in The Jewish Week, 26 percent consider themselves Roman Catholic, 24 percent consider themselves other Christian, eight percent are Muslim, five percent are Jewish, and five percent are Hindu.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, told Fox News that the university’s board of trustees should conduct an investigation into the matter.

“The goal here is radical secularism being shoved down the throats of the people at Stony Brook,” he said.

The university’s decision led the school’s Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic and Asian Christian chaplains to write a letter encouraging them to reconsider.

“We’re not taking an adversarial position against the university administration,” Rabbi Joseph Topek told Fox News. He heads the university’s Interfaith Center and wrote the letter with “a heavy heart.”

Topek said the new policy “becomes less respectful of religious diversity instead of more respectful.”

“Rather than ‘respecting all religions equally,’ as we were told the new calendar would do, it will surely be perceived as an attack on student and faculty religious identity and observance,” the letter read. “We fear that this will be seen as making Stony Brook a less tolerant community that seeks conformity over diversity.”

But Robbins disagreed and said the new policy is anything but disrespectful. He said students may still attend and participate in their religious activities. They will also have the ability to make up any class work should they be absent. Faculty members will also be instructed not to assign exams on religious holidays.

“We’re giving more students the ability to practice their faith in any way that they see fit,” Robbins told Fox News.

Donohue also took issue with the university’s contention of religious fairness.

“There are thousands of religions but this country was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethos,” he said. “No one should be apologetic about it. It’s just a matter of giving due tribute to the heritage and the legacy of western civilization. So that argument doesn’t work either.”

A number of faculty and students are outraged over the decision.

“You really have to choose between my faith and my school work and I don’t want to be put in that position,” Aaron Gershoff told CBS News.

Norman Goodman, a professor of sociology, told The Jewish News the policy “stinks.”

“It was done without any input except from the administration – and it was done in secret. It does not take into account the variety of needs of faculty and students and it shows no respect for religion.”

Fox News

Iran oil ban to break EU faster than Euro