Out in the cold
A small news item from Williamsburg, Kentucky.
A homeless shelter in Williamsburg will no longer accept women as a way to stop people from having sex.
Allow me to do an editorial tweak of that sentence: In an effort to prevent people from having sex on the premises, a homeless shelter in Williamsburg will now turn away homeless women.
The director at Emergency Christian Ministries said people are having sex at the shelter and they cannot accept that.
“It seems like these last days it’s getting worse … the ungodly type,” Director Billy Woodward said.
About 10 to 12 women were asked to leave the shelter over the past two weeks.
Of course. Using a similar line of reasoning, Tim Hunt told a group of women scientists that women should be in separate labs. Using a similar line of reasoning, some states force women to wear concealing tents whenever they go outside. Using a similar line of reasoning, some Islamist student groups try to impose gender segregated seating at their events. The reasoning is that men are the people, and women are the devilish distraction, so of course it’s women who have to be shut out, including shut out of actual shelter when they’re homeless.
Woodward said in some cases, they will not accept children either.
“Right now, no because of the female factor,” Woodward said.
However, Woodward added he would accept a male child if his father and he were homeless.
Because men and boys are people, who have needs. Women and girls are not people, and don’t have needs.
Also if somebody has to be turned away from the only homeless shelter in town, it totally makes sense that it should be men, since men are so much more vulnerable to rape and violence than women are.
Woodward said he made his decision based on the Bible. He said what was happening at the shelter was sinful.
He told us he is not saying women are the cause of the “sex problem.”
“It takes two to do that,” he said. “We are not biased or prejudice whatsoever.”
He says he’s not saying women are the cause of the sinful shelter-sex, but he’s turning them away from shelter anyway. So all he’s saying is that women don’t matter.
I’ll refrain from muttering about mangers and inns.
i’m surprised he’s not turning them away for being homeless. Come on. I mean, what would Trump do?
Trump would probably close the shelters, tear them down, and build a casino, but WWJD:
And they’ll know we are Christians by our . . . uh, what was that word again?
Aren’t homeless shelters or hostels supposed to be gender segregated? They have common areas, of course, but washing and sleeping facilities are always sex segregated…or so I thought. And even if they aren’t, that sort of separation could easily be established without people being turned away.
One might well wonder if Billy Woodward has any reason to believe, or know, that sex is ‘being had’ on the premises. Perhaps the idea that it might be POSSIBLE for ‘having’ to occur is enough for him to panic.
Big questions raised about the safety and propriety of this religious shelter too. Are women safe there? Is the ‘sex’ being ‘had’ (if any) actually rape or prostitution? Is the the shelter a nest of predators, whose actions are unsupervised so long as they toss in a few ‘Hallelujahs’ between felonies?
Maybe it’s just that Woodward isn’t getting any and it’s pissing him off that these, what i can only imagine he thinks of as losers, are getting some. I mean why aren’t these women giving themselves to him? He’s providing the shelter. Well he’ll show them by god! Oops! What a giveaway!
It’s taken me a couple of hours to get my jaw off the ground after reading this. The unchristian, petty minded, vindictive, uncaring, assholishness (assholyness?) of this is truly appalling.
A shelter of this type should be a safe space in every sense of the word. Best practice is to segregate families or women with children from single men. Single Women are sometimes accommodated in the family area, but often have a separate area again. Consideration should also be given to the issues raised by drug abuse and mental illness. Anyone running a shelter should be setting up in such a way that these issues are considered and physical design and operational practice address these needs.
Disclosure, the company I work for has been involved in the design of a number of such shelters run by secular charities. Everyone involved would be appalled by the actions of Woodward.
He’s willing to turn away *girls*. So it’s not that he’s worried about sex.
He wants to stop rape, but not by removing the *rapists*. The rapists get to have a roof over their heads. No, it’s the victims who have to be left outside.
It’s like expecting people not to bring in drugs or alcohol, really. Men are people, and face the temptation to fall into vice when there are vaginas around.
Seriously, if a homeless shelter won’t let a man bring in his 7 year old daughter, then they aren’t trying to prohibit voluntary sex, they are choosing to shelter rapists.
I suspect most of the adult women were not having sex, either.
“We are not biased or prejudice[d] whatsoever.” Classic.
At the risk of being dismissed as a pointless nit-picker for noting the bleeding obvious, when the circumstance is that men fucking women* is seen as problematic and the solution is merely seen as the banning of women and not the banning of men, I note that such a solution is obviously not only less than optimal, but also clearly biased.
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* There’s no mention of lesbianism, so presumably women fucking women is not the putative problem.
@ 9 John Morales
At the risk of substantiating that which you anticipated, your observation is an explicit restatement of Holms’ point.
However, it is correct and we all agree ;-)
@ 11 Rob
http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0212/2376/products/8101_ANDSOSAYALLOFUS_WHT_large.jpg?v=1421335700
Ha!