Yakup's Barbers

ATLANTA – Residents have long called for transparency in the matter of the Peachtree-Pine Shelter and Mayor Kasim Reed has been crystal clear: The City does not support Peachtree-Pine and plans to replace it with something far better for its occupants and for our communities.
The City of Atlanta takes the challenge of homelessness very seriously and we have positive, hopeful results to show for our efforts.

The Regional Commission on Homelessness recently announced that we have reduced homelessness in Atlanta by 50 percent.

In any conversation, that kind of performance matters. But that critical piece of information was left out of an August 1 column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by a writer trying to portray the City as callous and hardhearted when it comes to homeless individuals.

The opposite is true. For example, under Mayor Reed’s leadership, the City of Atlanta signed on to President Obama’s White House Mayor’s Challenge to End Veterans Homelessness in 2012. As part of a national campaign with 14 cities, Atlanta exceeded the goal of re-housing 100 chronically homeless veterans in 100 days. We were the first city in the nation to achieve that goal.

There are too few individuals and organizations willing to take on the micro-aggressive fascists who seek to ban and repress those who occasionally tell racist, ethnic or sexual jokes, or make “inappropriate” comments. One can say that such comments are not nice and walk away, but liberty, in part, means tolerating the speech of others that you disagree with. It is particularly disheartening to see even some libertarian organizations buckle under to political correctness and the speech police owing to the fear of being sued by those who care more about their power and pocketbooks than the Constitution. The offensiveness of a joke or comment is totally subjective, and once government is given the power to restrict some speech, it quickly morphs into political speech restrictions — e.g., dissenters on global warming alarmism.