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.

I’m continually amazed at how filthy public restrooms are. I saw this one at the Baja Fresh restaurant in Fairfax, VA — near Fair Oaks mall. Click on the pictures for bigger versions (but versions which are still blurry because these are iPhone pictures).

Now, I understand that a public restroom isn’t going to be as clean as my bathroom at home. It can’t be; too many people use the thing.

But I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to expect that the public restroom will be in at least as good a state of repair as my bathroom at home. At Baja Fresh — and I don’t really mean to single them out; I just happened to notice that the place was a disaster — we find:

1. The toilet paper holder is hanging from only one screw, and cracked and broken tiles are peeking out from behind it
2. The bottom of the mirror has been de-silvered from water getting trapped under the hanger
3. The electrical outlet is cracked and loose — and the GFI capabilities probably no longer work, because the ‘reset’ button has been jammed in there, and broken
4. The light switch is caked with filth
5. There’s some kind of air-freshener holder whatsit on the wall, with nothing in it; and there are obvious scars on the wall from where similar things had been installed and removed over the years
6. The grout in the wall tiles was white — except where it neared the floor, where a lack of cleaning had left it black. Not dingy: black. Dingy grout you can find near the sink.
7. The sink is pulling away from the wall; the space thus created between the wall and sink has been filled with more and more grout, which is of course filthy.

Most of this isn’t really that big a deal. I didn’t need an electrical outlet in there, and the light was already on, for instance. What’s unsettling is what it says about their attention to detail, and the pride that the employees, owners, and management of the place seem to take (or rather that they seem not to take) in the operation.

It’s particularly interesting in that Baja Fresh is a conspicuously clean place; the cleanliness is part of their brand image, as they try to project an aura of freshness about the whole restaurant. The orders to keep the place clean and ‘fresh’ looking don’t extend to the men’s room, though, and so it undermines a lot of what they’re trying to do, and leads me to wonder whether they might someday also be tempted to take shortcuts with the food.

1. You can now rate Tinotopia posts by assigning a number of stars to each post. Help those who come after you easily find the choicest pearls of wisdom from Tino!

2. Most posts now carry a short list of possibly related posts at the bottom, based on the text of each one. This seems to only be working on posts made within the last year or so, for reasons which are not clear.

That is all.