Mom's pot roast back on the menu
Comments (1)
Friday, December 1, 2006 | 02:39 PM ET
By Henry Champ
Fairfax County's civic leaders have reined in over-zealous employees who were described as "a bungling bureacracy." At issue was a decision to bar church workers from cooking food either at home or in church kitchens and feeding the homeless during the winter.
Chairman of the Country Board of Supervisors, Gerald Connolly told reporters, "the tradition of church suppers, whether for the homeless or the congregation, goes back hundreds of years. We're not going to outlaw that in Fairfax County."
As our blog reported earlier this week, many churches of Fairfax County maintain a program that operates for four months during the winter. It provides shelter in churches overnight to the two thousand or so homeless people in the county and gives each a hot dinner and breakfast.
Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition welcomed the county's reversal, saying, "I think they realized how absolutely bizarre this [policy] was,"
Newspaper and television websites around North America called the ban, "idiocy" and accused the county — one of the United States' most affluent — of trying to block help to the poor and of efforts to rid the community's streets of the homeless.
Fowl suppers not so foul
At issue, said the Department of Health, was consumer safety, although the department could never identify a single case of food poisoning coming from the charity.
At the same time, Fairfax Supervisor Catherine Huggins has called a meeting for December 11th to discuss a ban on ringing of church bells at St. John's Neumann's.
The bells apparently have recorded a reading of 60 decibels, that's five above the county standard but the same as, or below the standards of nearby Prince William, Montgomery and Arlington counties.
As was the case with homeless food servings, the church says the complaints were few and anonymous.
Stay tuned.
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Henry Champ is CBC Newsworld's correspondent in Washington, D.C., delivering Canadian viewers the latest developments in the U.S. political arena. Recently, he has been a leading Canadian voice on coverage of the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq and the growing concerns over the Canada-U.S. relationship.
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Comments (1)
meremark
Oregon
Same story, different site. A letter to the editor, Albany (OR) Democrat-Herald. The public in their respective hamlets and provincialisms seems to never see the federal-sized coordinated impositions and deprivements, against self-empowerment. Nor does a public 'common sense,' inspect that one reason mental illness is called mental illness is when the afflicted ones feel warm pleasure to inflict pain and torture on others, in that deranged mind making their victims lesser humans.
http://democratherald.com/articles/2006/12/03/news/opinion/1edit03.txt
"Let homeless to use Armory
I was deeply dismayed to learn that the National Guard Armory has denied a request to use its facility as a homeless shelter this winter (“Protection from the cold,” Nov 26). I would be curious to know what their reasoning might be, since I thought the function of the National Guard was to protect people. ... Will we as a community wait until someone else dies from exposure before we declare ...."
Posted December 4, 2006 01:32 AM