A pastor determined to live out the Bible’s dictate that we feed the poor was shut down by local police because he didn’t have a permit to serve food.
Twice a month, Rick Wood, a pastor at The Lord’s House of Prayer in Oneonta, Alabama, gets in his truck and drives around Birmingham with more than a hundred hot dogs and bottles of water, handing them out to the homeless. Wood has been serving those in need for the past six years because he wants to put Matthew 25:35-40 — “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” a scripture verse he has plastered on the side of his truck — into action.
But last month, Wood was stopped from handing out food by local police because he was in violation of a new city ordinance, passed in December, that regulates food trucks. The new regulation requires food trucks to get a permit, which can cost as much as $500. Though the ordinance is specifically targeted at retail food vendors, rather than charities, the city nevertheless used it to block Wood.
True, this won’t bring about an epiphany to the progs but it does provide an illustration to maybe begin a conversation with one or two of them.
Bureaucracies need cash flow to provide the big government utopias that leftists crave and they never quite get that the approach to getting this money is rather heartless. If you have any money at all, the government is spending all of its waking hours trying to figure out ways to get to it. Regulatory burdens hurt everyone, whether directly or indirectly, and regulation is the heart of the big dreams of modern American liberalism.
It’s such an unfair way to treat people that the Think Progress folk seem to know in their hearts it’s wrong, even if their little proggy brains can’t figure out why.
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