shoving your religion down someone's throat?

My friend Missy is doing a paper on revitalizing downtown LA. We started talking about the homeless. As with many urban areas in the US, there are many homeless people who live down there. According to a recent court case about homelessness, the most in the country. Here are some quotes from an article about this.

In her ruling, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw said that Los Angeles' Skid Row has the highest concentration of homeless individuals in the United States. She said that about 11,000 to 12,000 homeless people live in Skid Row, a 50-block area, bounded by Third, Seventh, Main and Alameda Streets."Because there is substantial and undisputed evidence that the number of homeless persons in Los Angeles far exceeds the number of available shelter beds at all times, including on the night" the plaintiffs were arrested or cited, "Los Angeles has encroached upon" the plaintiffs' 8th Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment) protections "by criminalizing the unavoidable act of sitting, lying or sleeping at night while being involuntarily homeless," Wardlaw wrote.

For now, I am not going to talk about all the issues of homelessness. I would like to quote a friend of the plaintiff’s in this case.

Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, hailed the ruling "as the most significant judicial decision involving homelessness in the history of the country. The case stands for the proposition that in America homelessness is not a crime."…

"I think what community leaders need to do now is deal with the problem, not by criminalizing homelessness, but by developing shelters, mental health programs and jobs," Rosenbaum said. "That's not only humane,(emphasis mine) it is economically and socially wise. Once they do that, so many other social problems in the community, will be alleviated, including the high population in the county jail and pressure on emergency health services and foster care, he added.

What is that all about? I have no idea what the word, “humane” means from an ACLU standpoint. This is an organization that has systematically attempted to get all references to religion out of the public square. They are also the plaintiffs in many lawsuits, like Kitzmilller vs.Dover School District, that hold (my summary paraphrase) that strict Darwinian evolution can absolutely not be questioned in the classroom, because even questioning that all of life is a product of random, purposeless chance smacks of religion.

OK, say I agree. Then why are you trying to shove your religion down my throat by making a moral value judgment that it is the government’s role to help the homeless? “Humane?” What benchmark of morality are you basing that word upon?

According to one take on the Darwinian theory, the most healthy organisms reproduce and respond to the environment and random mutation through adaptation. While, “survival of the fittest” is not an accurate assessment of this process, it certainly is used by Darwinist’s in the vernacular. So, what would be in my best interest, or the interest of my little subset family of the species homo sapien sapien, to use “scarce” resources that we possess to help homeless people? Do you see where this is heading?

Helping the homeless, those in poverty, those who are at risk, these are all hugely religious actions based on religious benchmarks. Atheists do caring and compassionate things too, but there is no logical explanation using the Darwinian model that would explain their source for the moral behavior. I have read attempts (an example) by Darwinan theorists or atheists, and they are not even close.

Is helping the homeless bringing religion into a state issue? Of course it is. Let’s just be honest and admit we put our “religion” into our politics and in the public square all the time.