The attacks are a continuation of the longstanding assault on California’s vulnerable homeless population, spearheaded by the Democratic Party.

On May 12, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, demanded that cities throughout the state adopt anti-camping ordinances that would effectively ban public homelessness by requiring unhoused individuals to relocate every 72 hours.

While presented as a humanitarian effort to reduce homelessness, the new policy victimizes California’s growing unhoused population—approximately 187,000 people—by tying funding in Proposition 1 to local laws banning sleeping or camping on public land.

In his announcement, Newsom pushed local governments to adopt the draconian ordinances “without delay.”

  • GraniteM@lemmy.world
    24·
    2 days ago

    Even if, just for the sake of argument, you assume that these people are living in tents on the streets just because they don’t feel like finding housing, which is already an absolutely massive assumption that I don’t for one instant actually describes reality, there’s still this…

    If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

    —Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

    You can’t just make a problem go away by making it illegal, you’ve got to address the root causes.