The Bad Landlord

Imagine for a moment, a hypothetical landlord. He owns an apartment building with 50 tenants.

One day, this landlord hears the the government is remodeling the Food Pyramid. The new pyramid specifically says people can eat pork. Nothing in the law being passed forces anyone to eat pork, it just specifically calls out that eating pork would fulfill your needs for items from the "meat group". Eating pork is okay, it says, implying there's no shame in it.

But this landlord, he feels that eating pork is not okay. It's against his religion. So he decides to protest it. His protest is, however, a little odd. He calls up the government and says "if you officially say pork is okay, I'm going to lock all my tenants out of the building. I will turn them out on the street."

Leaving the legality aside for a moment (If we must, we can assume all his tenants were on month-to-month, so he's within his legal rights, but still certainly disrupting 50 lives.)

• Would that seem reasonable to you?
• Does that feel like he's protesting, ...or threatening/blackmailing?

Don't get me wrong - I think the guy has every right to not eat pork himself, and to discourage others in any socially acceptable way. (I am a vegetarian, after all.) I just don't think that kicking out tenants for this bizarre reason is justified. He's turning people out on the street because the government is doing something he doesn't like, something that is totally unrelated to those people. So, no, it doesn't seem reasonable to me, and I'd certainly think a lot less of that landlord after that.

In fact, I'd have to question his motives. Perhaps he's just sick of being a landlord, and wants to do something else with that property. So, he's grabbing at this "convenient" excuse to push everyone out of his building. I think whether or not he's going to keep being a landlord to these people is unrelated to some government food pyramid. And if I were one of his tenants, I'd be angry as hell. Even if the government bowed to his coercion, I'd start looking for a new place to live. I'd lose my ability to trust that landlord.

Would it make any difference if a few details were altered?

• If instead of 50 tenants, he had 68,000?
• If instead of a landlord, he were the head of the Catholic Church in Washington DC, and the "tenants" were the homeless and ill people the church charities were taking care of?
• If the local government paid the church over 2 million dollars a year to care for them, and had been doing so for years?
• If instead of it being "eating pork is okay" that he's so upset about, the message were "gays and lesbians getting married is okay"? (Eating pork and gay sex are equally "abominations before the eyes of the lord" in the old testament, after all.)

To me, none of that would excuse any of it, in fact, every point there seems to argue that church is acting more disgracefully than the bad landlord.

US Catholic Church now playing political hardball, critics say

The church's role in politics came into sharp relief this week when the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the Washington, D.C., diocese threatened to cease its charitable activities if the D.C. city council went ahead with a plan to allow same-sex marriages.

I don't have any sympathy for the church in this one. No one's trying to force the Catholic church to perform gay and lesbian weddings. If they were, then the church could argue that it's religious freedom was being imperiled. Under the new DC city council decision, any given church can still refuse to marry anyone, for any reason. If they don't like your politics, your sex life, your public statements, if you aren't part of their church, they can refuse to marry you.

Marriage is a thing shared by many religions, and even atheists can be married, so I don't see why any one religion should be able to set a general rule that excludes some group of people from being married by the other religions, or by a justice of the peace.

The Church is just behaving like the bad landlord in my example, threatening to disrupt the lives of thousands of people, if the church doesn't get it's way. Nothing would drive me away from religion faster than the church playing games with my life. Well, except perhaps the church using the threat of intentionally making my life worse as a way to coerce the government into keeping someone else's life from getting better. I would feel used. I would feel like all the church tells me about salvation and righteousness and loving your fellow man was a big fat lie. I don't live in D.C., and I'm not Catholic nor homeless nor gay, and I feel sickened by this.