When the Dane County Board in Wisconsin proposed giving a $231,005 grant to Porchlight, a non-profit organization that provides homeless people such things as shelter, food, access to telehealth, one board member, Jeff Weigand, stood in opposition to the idea. 

Although he did not disagree with the need to address homelessness, he was against the piecemeal approach that addressed the conditions that exist while not what needed to be done to address the root cause.

He was correct in explaining,

“For every dollar that we invest in providing someone a temporary place to sleep, we should be investing an equal amount, or putting an equal amount of energy, towards finding solutions towards the root cause.”

Few would disagree with this if it involved addressing the results of systemic racism, low wages, artificially created inflation due to corporate greed, and eliminating both the overt, but clever, and not so obvious forms of employment discrimination. 

However, when asked for specifics, Mr. Weigland summarized all the root causes of homelessness to one thing, the single syllable word 

 “Sin.”

As he said when voicing his opposition to the proposal, 

“When God created this world, there was no sin. He created a perfect world. Man ruined that by sinning, and we’ve seen the depravity and the decline of our world ever since then. So when we talk about the root cause, if you really want to go back to why we have mental health issues, to why we have greed, to why we have people being mean to other people, it’s sin.

And until we address that issue, we’re going to continue to see this issue of homelessness and a whole slate of other issues in our society. “

And just like that, what should be done can be avoided in the name of Jesus by giving a complicated problem through the ages a simple label without definition allowing sufficient wiggle-room to dance around anything even in a crowded room.

It is like calling a Drag Queen reading a book to children in a public library and not some Bible Study group in a private home or a church basement “evil” without defining what the evil actually is so it can be whatever you want as you need to use it.

Who determines the controlling sin and how will we recognize which of the many of the major culprits  as one man’s floor being another man’s ceiling, there will be degrees of sin and we may end up allowing the problem of homelessness to continue since we have yet to address the correct sin.

He certainly cannot mean all the possible sins committable by humanity.

How simplistic is it to reduce the problems that create homelessness to its being as simple as because of sin the homeless brought their condition upon themselves and no one else had anything to do with it. 

Helping the homeless in any state, country, or municipality should be based on the resources they have to help the people who need it with their decisions based on data. 

The basis of the board member’s decision is that his own church helps the poor while addressing sin because  no one the church helps has to believe in God, but they do have to attend a Bible study.

“That’s the model that I think works the best because the church individuals, people one on one, can determine the difference between someone that wants to continue to make poor decisions, and someone that doesn’t, someone that truly wants to turn their life around. If we’re going to physically give you help, we’re going to do a Bible study with you. You don’t have to believe it, you can sit there and check the box. But we are going to because we believe that that’s the true solution. We’re also not going to turn someone away if they have a physical need. If you have a physical need, come on in. We just ask you sit through this Bible study. If you don’t want to listen, that’s fine.”

So if you are hungry, but don’t want to get a Bible lesson and be told it is all your fault and yours alone since you are such a sinner in the eyes of God, there is no county public help for you because you just will not repent.

The provision passed in spite of the one vote in opposition in Jesus’s name.

So, if you weren’t happy with just looking at the homeless as lazy people who choose not to work, you can now also judge them as sinners in the holding tank until they die and can burn in hell.

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Local control making it the most free state in the country, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law that prevents cities or counties from creating protections for workers who labor in extreme and dangerous heat on their own. And Florida gets hot. 

Although there are no federal rules regulating when it’s too hot to work, there is one that protects workers from extreme heat without saying exactly what those protections are,  people in agriculture, construction, or, basically, any job that requires workers to be out in the noonday sun like mad dogs and Englishmen in Florida have been asking for rules to protect them from heat especially as summers are becoming recognizably hotter each year. They want things like paid rest breaks, water, and access to shade when temperatures soar. 

With the new law, the state legislature can override the elected officials of the state’s counties who want to take actions related to their communities when the heat and humidity become dangerous. Individual counties cannot decide their own rules regarding water, shade and rest. 

Years ago, Arkansas or Missouri, could have even been both, passed a law that no individual municipalities could pass an ordinance protecting diversity but had to abide by the state-wide discrimination laws regardless of a community’s make up. It was directed toward recognizing Gay people as American citizens but could be applied to any group if done discreetly.

2023 was a very hot summer, so the timing of this new law seems a off unless deliberate.

When  California required employers to provide shade, rest breaks, and access to cool, clean water for outdoor workers back in 2006, heat-related workers compensation claims dropped.

However, after Austin and Dallas created ordinances that required employers to provide paid water breaks to outdoor workers, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a “preemption” law blocking local jurisdictions from making such rules so as to avoid a “patchwork” of differing local rules. It is an all or nothing thing, a thing easily handled by establishing relevant state-wide rules. But having all people suffer rather than find ways to alleviate the problem for everyone, seems to be the thinking. 

Studies have shown that with regular breaks, shade, and water access most workers can stay relatively safe up to a heat index of about 83 degrees Fahrenheit with risks building quickly beyond that. 

And, then there is the humidity on top of that.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farmworker organization based in south Florida has agreements with major companies they supply requiring them to provide safe working conditions, including water, shade, and rest breaks on a schedule dictated by heat conditions where he are. 

Whenever we hear of some football player in high school dying from the heat at a pre-season practice and are saddened by it just remember, if the high school teams were in DeSantis’s high school athletic league, this would be an acceptable gamble. Otherwise, some teams would call off practice because of heat and humidity levels while some didn’t have to, and that would be too patchworkish.

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