Woman Cites Religious Freedom Law To Defend Her Right To Feed The Homeless
Joan Cheever of San Antonio has been serving meals to the city’s homeless for 10 years. But last week, police officers handed her a ticket with a potential fine of $2,000. Despite having a food permit for the food truck she cooks out of, which she calls the Chow Train, she was cited for transporting and serving it from a different vehicle.
But that hasn’t stopped her from continuing to hand out three-course meals to the homeless. On Friday, she went back to Maverick Park with 50 supporters to hand out food, and this time she wasn’t ticketed. Cheever has argued that she has a right to feed the homeless under Texas’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act because she considers it exercising her religious beliefs.
Her situation has caught the attention of the city council. Councilman Ron Nirenberg called for a hearing on how city police deal with its homeless population, which numbers nearly 3,000, saying, “We need to do what we can to identify smart policy that helps us encourage compassion, rather than discourage it.” Their tactics have come under scrutiny before after an investigation found that in under two years, they had handed out more than 12,000 citations to the homeless themselves for violating ordinances aimed at criminalizing homelessness. Offenses range from “aggressive panhandling” to sitting or lying down in a public right of way.
MORE:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/04/18/3648616/san-antonio-feed-homeless/
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For some reason, people only seem to cite their religious beliefs in this country in order to explain their assholery towards others. It's very refreshing to see that reason used positively. 
... lack the imagination to see how they can be used to justify what they want to supress. They need to be more explicit in their brutality, or more Congress sessions are going to open with Satanic rituals and odes to the Mother. 
-- Mal
