Monday, October 09, 2006

A bad idea?

The Orlando Sentinel says challenging the city’s new restriction on feeding the homeless and hungry is a bad idea.

Its position is based on a bunch of mistaken assumptions about what the legal issues will be.

Although the Sentinel does slap the city’s hand over its failure to get to the core of the homeless quandary, its editorial misses the main point of sharing food in Lake Eola Park. It’s a freedom of speech issue – and somehow I expected a newspaper to grasp the concept of free speech.

Many of the people who are using their own resources to help the homeless want to spark a public discussion of the larger issues about the growing problem of homelessness in our community. If they are pushed to an abandoned parking lot under the expressway, they will be deprived of their ability to communicate with other city residents.

There are other mistaken assumptions in the editorial, too. You’ll all see what the issues really are when the lawsuit is filed. That’s right, it hasn’t been filed yet. The Sentinel is only guessing about what legal issues will be raised.

Seems to me it’s a bad idea to publish an editorial without first establishing the facts.

Read the Sentinel editorial here.

1 Comments:

At 10:25 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Your blog is so inspirational. I want to be a social justice attorney, one day. I am a student, still in my third year of undergrad at the University of Florida, hoping to go to law school and one day work to fight poverty. Where do you practice and what are some things that your firm does to help? Please respond to me via e-mail at g8rkait@Ufl.edu, if you have time.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home