Just now, an amiga, who once was married to a Mexican man and was homeless in Key West and north Georgia, called me to say she is seeing on TV and reading online that the US government is putting immigrants from Mexico up in 5-star motels, but homeless Americans are not put up in motels and that ain’t right, and she woke up with a splitting headache this morning, and it's still there.
I said I doubt it's 5-star motels, but I agree it ain’t right, and I am writing about the 6 good Christians on the US Supreme Court, who decided today that homeless Americans can be fined and jailed for being homeless, and is your headache leaving? She said, yes.
Yesterday, an amigo down Key West way sent me link to a recent edition of the Key West Citizen, the city’s local newspaper. I opened the link and saw an article about the city having upgraded the public bathroom at Higgs Beach, so that it resembled a spa bathroom. When I lived on the street in Key West in 2000 and later, I was at that bathroom when it opened at 7 a.m. Sometimes I couldn’t wait and had to pee and poop somewhere outside.
I called him and said I had received the link. He said he wanted me to see the article about the city firing yet another professional city manager. I said I did not see that article, but I enjoyed the Higgs Beach bathroom article, because of how important that bathroom was to me when I was homeless, and if I have to come back to Key West and be homeless there again, I will enjoy using the new bathroom at Higgs Beach.
I was homeless for 2 stretches of time: 2000-2005 and 2015-2017. I was homeless because I ran out of money after becoming unable to make a living wage at what I knew how to do. I tried very hard to make a living wage at what I knew how to do, and it just did not work out. I came to wonder if it was karma or something God wanted me to experience? Unlike most homeless people I met during that time, I was not an alcoholic or drug addict and I did not use tobacco. I bathed every day at a cold water public shower. I washed my briefs and T-shirts every day with soap and water and let them dry out in the sun and wind.
On Maui and in Key West, I slept on the ground, in doorways, on beaches, on fishing piers, in churchyards, on the front porch of houses, in someone's old camper vehicle, in spare rooms of friend’s homes, in tents on public land, in the back of a Chevy Blazer I owned for a while, in Key West’s homeless homeless shelter, in a homeless shelter in Birmingham and a homeless shelter in Kansas City, and most recently, on a steel bench in the front lobby of the Key West Police Department, after I was banned from that city’s homeless shelter because of what I wrote about it and its employees and homeless people generally at my blog, goodmorningkeywest.com, which subsequently died and went to internet heaven.
But for inheritance from my father, I would still be homeless, or I would be dead.
Let me back up start over.
Standing in a Key West Church Sunday afternoon soup kitchen line with about 100 other homeless people in early 2001, I heard one of the church members helping with the event say, “If you were saved by Jesus, you would not be homeless.” I said loudly, “What’s wrong with being homeless? Jesus was homeless! Everyone in this line, except for a Jewish man, was saved several times by Jesus, and we are homeless.”
I started eating my meal and a young pastor of the church named Mark, whom I was getting to know, walked over to me and asked why I said Jesus was homeless? I asked Mark if he had read his Bible? He said he had. I said then you know Jesus said he was homeless. Mark asked where Jesus said that? I said, in the passage where a man told Jesus he wanted to follow him, and Jesus said the foxes have their dens and the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. Mark said that did not mean Jesus was homeless. I said of course that’s what it meant. Mark said Jesus could stay with his mother. I asked Mark where in the Bible does it say Jesus stayed with his mother after he started his ministry?
Key West arrested and jailed homeless people until a US District Court in Miami ruled in Pottinger v. City of Miami (1998), that it was cruel and unusual punishment under the the 8th Amendment to the United States Constitution for the City of Miami to use its police to stop homeless people from doing necessary things to survive, such as sleep, cook food, pee and defecate outside, if there was no place inside for them to do it. Key West had a federal courthouse, which was in that same US District Court’s jurisdiction.
In 2004, my friend and personal lawyer Sam Kaufman and I, who had practiced law after clerking for for a United States District Judge in Birmingham, Alabama, convinced the Key West city government that we would bring a Pottinger class action in the Key West federal court if the city’s police did not stop harassing, arresting and jailing homeless people simply for being homeless. The city police stopped doing that. The city built a homeless shelter and the city police only arrested homeless people for sleeping outside at night, who were not at the shelter.
Homeless people banned from the shelter had no place to sleep at night and were arrested and put in the sheriff’s jail on Stock Island, just above Key West. The sheriff’s jail became the city’s second homeless shelter. The city paid the sheriff nothing for housing the city’s homeless and feeding and providing them medical care. The sheriff spent a lot of money housing the city’s homeless people, who were banned from the shelter, or who would not use it. The local courts and probation officers spent a lot of time and money handling cases brought by city police against homeless people for simply being homeless.
Later, Key West city police started arresting and jailing homes people for sitting on a towel or blanket on the ground during the day, which city police said violated the city’s no camping ordinance, which was not applied against local people who were not homeless and tourists who sat on a towel or blanket on the ground. The city only enforced its “open container” (booze) ordinance against homeless people.
I think it’s fair for me to say the Key West city government officials and its police force, whom I knew, were Christians, who forgot or ignored their Savior was homeless, and that he also said:
Matthew 25:31-46
New International Version
The Sheep and the Goats
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
As I passed through Tallahassee on a Greyhound bus headed to Key West in December 2000, the US District Judge for whom I had clerked came to me in a dream and said he was thinking about getting into politics. He had run the Democratic Party in Alabama behind the scenes, except for the. George Wallace faction. In the dream, I told him that I did not think that was a good idea, but knowing him, I figured he was going to do it. I woke up in shock, knowing I was going to get into politics, which I detested.
Below is today's USA Today's article about yesterday’s 6-3 US Supreme Court decision that made being homeless in America a crime. The 6 conservative Christian majority and the Grant’s Pass, Oregon city officials never knew Jesus. Below the USA Today article is a tale about a novel and a non-fiction book I wrote when I was homeless.
In major decision, Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless camps
The decision is the most significant ruling from the court on homelessness in decades. Last year, 40% of homeless people slept under bridges, on sidewalks, in parks, cars, and abandoned buildings.
Maureen Groppe
Bart Jansen
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court ruled Friday that people without homes can be arrested and fined for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a lower court’s ruling that enforcing camping bans when shelter is lacking is cruel and unusual punishment.
The 6-3 decision was the most significant ruling on the issue from the high court in decades.
It comes as record numbers of Americans lack permanent housing and as both Democratic and Republican leaders have complained a 2018 decision by a lower court has hamstrung their ability to address homeless encampments that threaten health and public safety.
“The Court cannot say that the punishments Grants Pass imposes here qualify as cruel and unusual,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, referring to the small Oregon municipality at the center of the case.
“The city imposes only limited fines for first-time offenders, an order temporarily barring an individual from camping in a public park for repeat offenders, and a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail for those who later violate an order.”
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court's liberal minority, said the laws essentially criminalized the act of sleeping.
“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.”
Sotomayor noted that Grants Pass jails and fines people who sleep in public, such as in a car, or for using as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. “For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless,” she wrote. “That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the decision gives “free reign to local officials who prefer pointless and expensive arrests and imprisonment, rather than real solutions.”
“This tactic has consistently failed to reduce homelessness in the past,” Oliva said, “and it will assuredly fail to reduce homelessness in the future.”
Theane Evangelis, who represented Grants Pass, said the decision brought “urgent relief to the many communities that have struggled to address the growing problem of dangerous encampments.”
“For the past six years, the Ninth Circuit’s decisions have tied the hands of local governments,” Evangelis said. “The Court has now restored the ability of cities on the frontlines of this crisis to develop lasting solutions that meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of their communities, while also keeping our public spaces safe and clean.”
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees nine Western states, ruled in 2018 that banning camping in areas lacking sufficient shelter beds amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.
The Supreme Court declined to weigh in at the time on that case from Boise, Idaho, but took up the issue this term after that precedent was used to challenge anti-camping rules in Grants Pass.
Homeless residents of the southern Oregon city of 38,000 had faced fines starting at $250 and leading to jail time for repeat offenses.
Criminalizing homelessness in a city without a homeless shelter
Advocates for homeless people said the rules amounted to criminalizing someone for having nowhere to live. The city lacks sufficient affordable housing. The one shelter for adults requires attending daily Christian services and other rules. Hundreds of residents are unhoused.
"We don't want to be in the parks," said Helen Cruz, a Grants Pass resident who lacks permanent shelter. "We want a place to live."
City officials said without the Supreme Court’s intervention, they would be forced to surrender their public spaces.
The Department of Justice had mostly backed the challengers while also arguing that the appeals court ruling was too broad and didn’t take into account individual circumstances such as whether someone had access to a shelter and refused it.
On any given night in the United States, more than 600,000 people are likely to be homeless, according to the federal government. Last year, 40% of homeless individuals slept under bridges, on sidewalks, in parks, cars, abandoned buildings and other public locations.
The case, which is the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, attracted an unusually large number of briefs filed by outside interests.
Advocates for the homeless hoped that even if the decision didn't go their way, the case would spur elected officials at all levels of government to do more to address homelessness.
For about 6 months, starting April 2001, I slept in a tent on a friend’s land near Helen, Georgia. Birdie McClaine, an orphan who had grown up in a circus company, was a street performer I had met in Key West. After learning I was a writer and had written novels, Birdie told me the storyline for a novel he and dreamed up years before, and he asked if I could write it? I said I had lived half of it the year before, so I guessed I could.
Birdie bought me a tent and a new pair of shoes to replace the sandals I had worn out, which a Key West shoe store owner had given me. I hitchhiked into Helen every day and used a desktop computer in the Helen public library to write the novel, which I saved onto a floppy disc and gave to a man I met in Helen, who was from Alabama and had known my younger brother. My new friend had several copies of the manuscript printed, and much later I had the novel published by a print to order publisher, and it went nowhere.
I would live in my new friend’s home for several months in 2004, when I wrote A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known, now a free read at the internet library, archive.org.
The preface to Birdie’s and my novel explains how I met him and ended up in Helen and is a stranger than short tale in and of itself. The never know what’s gonna happen next roller coaster novel feature's a very good Birmingham trial lawyer, Riley Strange, who had clerked for a United States District Judge, and his two to die for lady loves Mary Lou Snow and Willa Sue Jenkins. Not for the faint of heart or conservative Christians, HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale now is a free read at the internet library, archive.org.
I met the amiga who called me this morning near Helen, Georgia. After she read some of the Heavy Wait manuscript, she started feeling awful and she quit reading it. I said she was feeling awful because she saw herself in Willa Sue Jenkins. After my amiga purged for a while, she read the strange tale and said she really liked it.
Key West grande dame Shirley Freeman, who had been a county commissioner and a previous sheriff’s wife, told me that she read Heavy Wait in one night, she couldn’t put it down.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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