Tinotopia

According to this Washington Post story, Muslim women are having a hard time of it in homeless shelters:

When Muslim women are sent to shelters that serve the general population, they are often exposed to lifestyles that challenge their faith, such as drinking, abusing drugs, eating pork and undressing or bathing in front of others [...]

This seems kind of interesting. I’m pretty sure that all homeless shelters ban drugs and alcohol, not just on ideological grounds but in the interest of keeping order. And most Americans — particularly women — aren’t exactly bullish on the ides of undressing and bathing in front of others.

And as far as pork goes: why haven’t we heard anything about homeless Jews having problems with pork served in homeless shelters? Jews in the U.S. tend to be rather under-represented among the down-and-out, but I’m sure that there are more than a few homeless Jews, and that some of those are observant at least to the point of not eating pork. Interesting that the Post has never felt the need to run a story on the front of the Metro section about that.

The real gem, though, comes from one Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Stoops said most shelters are privately run. The largest shelter organization is Catholic Charities, he said, followed by the Salvation Army and the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions. Traditionally, Stoops said, many Christian-oriented shelters — he called Catholic Charities an exception — have offered clients “soup, soap, sleep and salvation.”

Stoops added: “I’ve always found that to be offensive. Shelters in this country need to get with this century.”

Well, then, maybe you should RUN YOUR OWN GODDAMNED SHELTERS instead of being ‘offended’ by the nature of the help that other people provide.

Some Islamic leaders have begun to raise money to establish more shelters that cater to the Islamic community. There are now just two serving the Washington-Baltimore area, according to local mosque leaders. The leaders said they were unaware of any in Northern Virginia.

I wonder whether Mr. Stoops is offended by these shelters. Conspicuously unanswered by the Post is the question of whether these shelters will admit non-Muslim women, and, if they do, whether they require residents’ adherence to Islamic principles.

This story from The Muslim Link suggests that the al-Mumtahinah shelter in Baltimore, at least, does discriminate on the basis of religion:

The center will be monitored by a “house mother” to ensure religious obligations are met, and to encourage the cleanliness of individual living spaces.

Emphasis added. That kind of seems like an important point, doesn’t it? I mean, the story complains, in its first paragraph, about Christian-run shelters ‘hold[ing] prayer meetings or services at odds with [the Muslim women's] own religious beliefs’. Do the Muslim shelters hold prayer meetings which would be at odds with the religious beliefs of Christians? Are Christians even eligible for admittance? Are Jews?

If Muslims want to run homeless shelters that are only open to Muslims, I don’t have a problem with that. If the Salvation Army wants to make Bible-study classes and prayers a condition of staying in their shelters (which, according to the Post‘s story, they don’t), I also don’t have a problem with that.

But it does seem like a failure of the Post to write a story about how hard it is for Muslim women to be homeless because most homeless shelters are run by Christian organizations, without even touching on the question of whether the Muslim-run shelters are open to all. It’s probably safe to assume that these shelters are in fact not open to non-Muslims, because if they were, the Post would certainly have trumpeted that fact.

So it is possible to get information out of Washington Post articles, but only if you inspect them as you would have done Pravda in 1965.