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The rite of hospitality is humanity’s oldest sacred custom.
If a guest shows up at your door, you offer them shelter, food, a place to rest by your fire. In ancient cultures, it was a universally understood moral obligation. To mistreat a wayfarer under your roof was a sure way to invite divine retribution.
The ancient Greeks told myths about gods traveling incognito and how they rewarded people who welcomed them. In the famous story of Baucis and Philemon, Zeus and Hermes shower blessings on two peasants who showed them hospitality when no one else would. The rest of the town, where the gods encountered only rich misers who barred their doors, is destroyed in a catastrophic flood.
The Bible, too, has exhortations about welcoming and entertaining strangers. In the Book of Isaiah, God commands his followers to “deal thy bread to the hungry, and… bring the poor that are cast out to thy house” (58:6-7). The Book of the Hebrews says to welcome strangers, if only because some of them are angels (13:2). And Jesus, in one of the better passages of the New Testament, tells his followers that however they treat strangers and the poor, they’ll be judged as if they treated Jesus himself that way (Matthew 25:31-46).
READ: The astounding hypocrisy of anti-refugee Christians
The seriousness of this commandment is shown by the fate Christians imagined for those who violate it. In Dante’s Inferno, the penultimate circle of Hell—just before the final pit where Satan is imprisoned—is reserved for those who betrayed or committed violence against their guests. The damned are buried up to their necks in eternal ice, unable even to weep because their eyes are frozen shut.
That brings us to Texas.
Food, not bombs
Food Not Bombs is a collective of volunteers with chapters all over the world. They make it their mission to give free vegetarian food to anyone who wants it.
They don’t see this as just a charitable gesture, but the expression of a pacifist and anti-capitalist worldview. As the Houston chapter of Food Not Bombs puts it on their website:
Poverty is a form of violence. We often assume that poverty is inevitable for some people, but with the surplus of food in this country alone, no one should have to go hungry. Poverty is, instead, a way of maintaining the status quo in a society. If everyone had equal access to the necessities of life, as well as equal opportunity to education, work, etc., some very powerful people would suddenly find themselves with a little bit less due to the fact that they no longer control such a large piece of the economic pie.
Food Not Bombs has been serving meals at Houston’s Julia Ideson Library since 2006. For years, they had more or less friendly relations with the city. But, starting in 2021, those relationships turned chilly.
Mayor Sylvester Turner invoked an obscure 2012 law that forbids feeding more than five people in public without the property owner’s permission. He ordered them to stop giving out food at the library. Instead, he said they could set up at an alternative location: a police parking lot.
Food Not Bombs’ volunteers dismissed this. They pointed out that many homeless people have good reason to be wary of the police and wouldn’t show up. A cynical person might hold that there was no reason to change the venue, except to keep the homeless out of sight of middle-class library patrons.
Whatever the reason, the city ordered Food Not Bombs to stop giving out food on the library grounds, but they refused. Police officers started coming each week to write tickets to the volunteers who were giving out food in defiance of the law. They’ve been ticketing them for months.
But the prosecution has run into a problem:
Fifteen Houstonians called for jury duty filed into a courtroom Thursday afternoon. They were there for an unusually high-profile case for municipal courts, known for hearing traffic violations and facilitating weddings.
…Roughly an hour later, the jury pool filed back out—all 15 of them. The lawyers had been unable to fill an unbiased jury.
Too many of the potential jurors said that even if the defendant, Elisa Meadows, were guilty, they were unwilling to issue the $500 fine a city attorney was seeking, said Ren Rideauxx, Meadows’ attorney.
…Roughly 90 tickets have been issued since March [2023] to volunteers with the loosely organized Food Not Bombs, which serves meals to people in need near Central Library. The city has yet to win a single case. The one case that reached a verdict was decided for the defendant.
“Food Not Bombs trial rescheduled after too many jurors objected to $500 fine for feeding homeless.” R.A. Schuetz, Houston Chronicle, 19 January 2024.
A message heard all too clearly
There’s no reason why Houston’s mayor couldn’t have found a compromise. Food Not Bombs was giving out meals at the library for years without harming anyone. If any of the people who came for food were threatening or harassing library patrons, the city could have stationed police there to deal with that problem.
Instead, the city ordered them to move along, and when they refused, sent the police to crack down with a show of intimidation and reprisal. It was deliberately mean-spirited, aimed at punishing people who cast a spotlight on the homelessness problem.
The problem, for the city, is that the message was heard too clearly. Prejudice toward the homeless is all too common—but most would-be jurors, it seems, draw the line at punishing people for helping them. So far, no matter how many tickets the city writes, they can’t find a jury willing to convict anyone over it.
The people of Houston deserve praise for this. I wonder: If you’re philosophically opposed to punishing people for helping the homeless, what would be the more ethical course of action? Tell the truth, and make it that much harder for the city to assemble a jury? Or say what it takes to get on the jury, so you can spoil the prosecution and return a not-guilty verdict?
Getting this kind of rebuke ought to be an “are we the baddies?” moment for the police and government of Houston. If it’s provoked any such reflection, though, there’s no sign of it. Instead, they keep handing out nuisance tickets (and make no mistake, the process is the punishment—even FNB volunteers who are acquitted have to take time off work, find child care, hire lawyers, etc., so they can attend the court hearings).
A meal given to a hungry person is never wasted.
This vindictive prosecution comes from the same NIMBY mentality which treats homelessness as a shameful secret to be kept out of sight. Instead of just housing the homeless, the city wants to punish the people who are feeding them and thereby calling attention to the problem.
I’m an atheist. Unlike those ancient people, I can’t appeal to threats of divine wrath for those who mistreat wanderers and strangers. All I can say is that feeding another human being is the simplest, most basic act of generosity and compassion. A meal given to a hungry person is never wasted. A law that literally makes it illegal for one person to offer food to another is something our ancestors would have recognized—and that we should recognize—as the most depraved kind of evil.