Homeless? Need a hand up? Nah, wut u kneed iz mor GEE-ZUSS!!!

This is a real problem, y'all.

(Because, like an immature 7th-grader, I can never get of this.)

Portland, like many cities across this great nation of ours, is experiencing a homelessness crisis. It’s a problem with many facets, faces, and stories. There are no easy, pat solutions. If there were, we would’ve long ago solved homelessness and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Everyone would have a roof over their head, a steady income, and be free of substance abuse and mental health issues.

Welcome to The Shining Fucking City on the Hill ©, eh?

Sadly, that’s far from being the case. But that’s never stopped mental, moral, and religious dolts from thinking that they have a quick and straightforward answer to a problem that has stifled brilliant and capable people for decades. They haven’t been able to solve the constantly shape-shifting game of “Whack-a-Mole,” that is homelessness, but bravely into the breach steps our intrepid hero, Jeff Weigand, who knows what the problem is.

Yes, according to our self-ascribed resident expert, the sole cause of homelessness is… wait for it…SIN.

Yes

Hemant Mehta

brings us this tale of arrogance, misplaced religious faith, and sheer, unmedicated lunacy. Worse, even though this feels like a practical joke, Weigand is dead serious. And I have another notch in my well-marked-up Staff of Idiocy ©.

I have no problem with those who seriously endeavor to follow the teachings of their faith tradition. Those folks want to make the world a better place, and they’re willing to put in the effort because they feel called to do so. More power to them, eh?

Then there are those who should spend their days on a court-ordered Thorazine regime before they can infect anyone else with their ridiculousness.

Ho-lee Schitt.

On April 4, the Dane County Board in Wisconsin (which includes the city of Madison) proposed giving a $231,005 grant to Porchlight, a non-profit organization that helps the homeless by providing them with shelters, food, access to telehealth, and more. Seemed like a no-brainer. In fact, only one board member, Jeff Weigand, stood up to oppose the proposal.

He explained that his problem was that Porchlight wasn’t addressing the root cause of homelessness, therefore this grant was just putting a short-term bandage on the wound.

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

There was a follow-up from fellow supervisor Anthony Gray: What do you think is the root cause of homelessness?

Weigand, clearly expecting this question, responded with a smile: “Sin.”

And in Madison, a town of generally reasonable people, you had to know that at that point, a collective “WTF???” groan went around the room in a New York minute.

Sin is the root cause. Please record it… Sin is the root cause.

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. So thank you for asking the question.

We should note for the record that Weigand was utterly sober. Nor was he high on weed or any other intoxicants. No, he was straighter than Mike Johnson’s porn detection app, even though his answer made no sense in any shape, manner, OR form.

Sin? Seriously? That’s like blaming traffic accidents on highways or plane crashes on air. There’s no way to logically connect a broad concept like sin, which isn’t a precise or concrete concept, to something as difficult to pin down and thus address and/or eliminate as homelessness.

To even attempt to address homelessness in terms of sin being the single root cause requires an epic degree of arrogance unlike anything known to Mankind. Who in their right mind would try to pull off such a ridiculous causality argument?

Our boy Jeff Weigand, that’s who.

And Hemant Mehta was having none of it. Frankly, neither am I.

It’s not just a pointless answer. It’s a completely impractical one. (Look at the reaction of the lady behind Weigand immediately after he finishes his speech. She speaks for everyone.)

For starters, even if you believe in that biblical nonsense, there’s literally no way to resolve the issue. How do you fix sin?! Blame Eve all you want; you can’t force her to un-eat a piece of fruit. Which means that Weigand presumably wants taxpayer dollars spent on converting people to Christianity rather than helping them with any pressing needs. Not only would that be illegal, the board would be turning its back on helping the community—the one job members were elected to do.

Suppose they did put money towards fixing the “sin” problem, though, somehow. What should the community do in the meantime when it comes to assisting people with mental health struggles, homelessness, or “being mean”? Nothing, if people like Weigand had his way. They’ve done enough.

Is a switch going to magically flip on after one week of the Sin Initiative and solve all the problems? Of course not. The most Christian states in America have the highest gun death rates, worst health care, and least education. More Jesus has never been the solution to anything.

MOR GEE-ZUSS!!! is hardly the answer to this problem, not when an issue as multi-faceted as homelessness has defied myriad effects to solve it over the years. Brilliant social scientists and politicians have worked together to design programs to create incentives to get people off the streets and into stable housing and treatment situations. Despite these efforts, the problem has defied all efforts to resolve it.

Sure, part of the problem is that some people don’t want to get off the streets, and that will continue to be a tricky part of the issue, no matter what. But even for those in the throes of substance abuse or mental health issues, relapsing and returning to the streets is a real problem under the best of conditions.

For a hyper-religious cretin like Jeff Weigand to come along and claim that solving homelessness is easy, that all the homeless need is MOR GEE-ZUSS!!! to cleanse their sins away, and whatever’s been ailing them will magically disappear is…well, just dumb. I could wax poetic at some considerable length about how dumb that is, but why? His idea is simplistic, silly, and just plain dumb; why beat a horse that expired long before I could dispatch it?

Weigand is also making a crass and misguided assumption that the unhoused people who could benefit from Porchlight’s generosity are struggling because of sin, as if they brought this upon themselves. The sad truth about homelessness is that it’s not often the result of personal failures but rather larger systemic problems. At the local level, giving a grant to a non-profit that helps the homeless is one important way to address concerns. (Building affordable housing, for example, is another.)

Elected officials have an obligation to use the resources they have to help the people who need it. They should be basing their decisions on data. For a county supervisor to pretend that a lack of religion is the biggest problem everyone faces is an admission that he has no business in elected office. He should be wasting a church’s time, not wasting a seat that could go to someone who actually cares about the people in Dane County.

When non-profit news outlet Madison365 asked Weigand to explain his callous thinking, he told them his own church (which he refused to name) helps the poor and addresses sin.

He also casually pointed out that the help is not unconditional. Anyone who wanted food, clothing, or housing assistance had to learn about Jesus first.

Like so many self-righteous, misguided Christians who believe that their “solution” is the “one and only” solution for whatever ails humanity, Weigand compounds his mistake by making assistance conditional. By requiring that those who need assistance first learn about Jesus, he and his Church treat those in need of a hand up as “less than” and unable to think for themselves.

And so, they need MOR GEE-ZUSS!!!, whether they know it or not.

There’s nothing like some force-fed Christianity to make the down-and-out straighten up and get their shit together, eh?

“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,” he said.

He said no one the church helps has to believe in God, but does have to attend a Bible study.

“If we’re going to physically give you help, we’re going to do a Bible study with you,” he said. “You don’t have to believe it, you can sit there and 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.”

Good on you if you’re inspired to help people experiencing homelessness turn their lives around. That’s a wonderful thing to be doing, and Lord knows there’s plenty of that work to be done. But you're taking advantage of the vulnerable when you turn it into just another cheap attempt to evangelize those already in a challenging situation.

If you offer religious instruction to those who come to you for help and they accept, that’s one thing. That makes it voluntary, and no coercion is involved. But when you condition your assistance on subjecting a person to religious indoctrination, that’s forced indoctrination, and it’s reprehensible. Requiring someone in need of assistance to attend a Bible study is not compassionate or Christ-like. It’s forcing someone not in an equal position to submit to your dictates to obtain help.

It’s spiritual coercion; precisely what Jesus would do, eh?

Or not.

Anthony Gray, the supervisor who asked Weigand what the root cause of homelessness was, lashed out against his cruelty in a follow-up interview:

“It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth time that it dawned on me what he was actually saying,” Gray said in an interview Monday. “Once I figured it out, I realized how vile and disgusting it was to blame homelessness on the unhoused … I knew that if I opened the door for him … he would stop talking in dog whistles and speak truth.”

Gray, who called himself “a practicing Episcopalian,” said he disagrees with Weigand’s view of both sin and the causes of homelessness.

“The reason people are homeless is because they don’t have homes,” he said. “The reason people have mental illness is because they’re sick … blaming the victim is the coward’s way out.”

Damn right. Gray gave Weigand the opening he needed to fall right into a trap of his own making. Trying to explain Christian logic to people who aren’t predisposed to say “Amen” never goes over well.

“Sin” explains nothing. It only blames an individual for a complex problem when there may be many facets that need to be addressed to integrate that person back into society in a healthy manner.

Self-righteous Christians like Jeff Weigand see the homeless as just another population ripe for evangelizing when, in fact, they’re wholly unequipped to deal with the issues facing the homeless community. They lack compassion, knowledge, and any sense of what might drive an individual into homelessness.

This isn’t an opportunity to harvest weary and vulnerable souls for Jesus Christ. These aren’t sick, misguided people who only need MOR GEE-ZUSS!!! to set them on the path to wholeness once again. They may be individuals with complex issues requiring even more complicated and in-depth solutions that are well beyond the knowledge and capabilities of Weigand and his God Squad.

Another Dane County supervisor, Dana Pellebon, added that Weigand neglected what may also be a racial component of the county’s homeless problem. Many of the unhoused in Dane County are Black, and it wouldn’t take much to attribute a religious element to that. I’m sure Weigand could find a way to do that.

Thank goodness everyone else on the Dane County Board had a heart and voted in favor of the grant. (It’s not the first time something like this has happened either. In 2023, Dane County officials voted to make their county a sanctuary for trans and non-binary people. Weigand was the only supervisor to vote against it.)

It’s not just the other officials who rejected Weigand’s thoughtless comments. Dozens of local religious leaders penned an open letter denouncing his words:

Supervisor Weigand, we write to you, in the spirit of Pilate’s wife, to call on you to be more careful with your words concerning the community’s oppressed and marginalized. It has come to our collective attention that you indicated in your official capacity that “sin is the root cause of homelessness.” Not only is this statement deeply hurtful and divisive in our community, it is simply wrong and certainly contradicts the teachings of Jesus Christ.

… Jesus did not see unhoused people as sinful and problematic, rather he continually characterizes theologies like yours that infer that only bad and sinful people are unhoused, as problematic. 

As an atheist, I try to be careful about judging those who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, even though I was an Evangelical Christian in junior high school. I have a pretty fair grounding in the Gospel, fair enough that I can speak to what is and isn’t Christ-like behavior.

While I realize everyone has the right to their own interpretation of Christ’s teachings, a few things are pretty solid and beyond interpretation. Things like love, charity, acceptance, compassion, inclusion, understanding, and tolerance are but a few of the things to be found in the Gospel that are basic to Christian beliefs. By their very nature, those things aren’t measures by which to judge others. They’re not standards by which Christians can ascertain others to have fallen short and, as such, to be “poor” or “unworthy” Christians.

(Because I don’t want this to be an exercise in theoretical drudgery, here’s a gratuitous photo of Sydney Sweeney doing Sydney Sweeney things. You’re welcome. I am, after all, a man of the People. - courtesy Popoholic)

Christians hardly qualify to refer to themselves by that appellation if they lack love, charity, acceptance, compassion, inclusion, understanding, and tolerance. I don’t know what one might call them, but “Christian” seems wildly inappropriate.

I’ve said many times that while I may not believe in a Christian god, I admire those who sincerely and faithfully endeavor to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. This world would be far better, more peaceful, and more compassionate if more Christians did that. The same holds true for Jews and Muslims concerning the teachings of their faith traditions.

At their most basic, these faith traditions are about peaceful coexistence and making the world a better and more compassionate place. Who can’t get behind that?

Jeff Weigand could take a lesson or six from that.

As for the rest of us, we’d do well to remember that Weigand is what happens when we vote for Christian Nationalists. We end up with intolerant and intolerable American Taliban mullahs in positions of power, people who believe it’s their responsibility to force their KKKhristianity upon the masses.

It’s what Jesus would do, don’tchaknow?

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