All types of discrimination in America are frowned on by either liberals or conservatives.
Racism, sexism and other types of discrimination still exist, but not without vocal resistance from broad swaths of society.

Except for one. Classism.
You can still discriminate against people for being too poor and few will complain.

For instance, in uber-liberal San Francisco you can still find this.

“I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society,” Keller wrote, saying that he arrived in San Francisco only three years ago. “The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.”

Poor guy. As someone who has lived in San Francisco since 1992, I can tell you for a fact that I think people like Keller are doing more harm to San Francisco than the homeless.
Keller was rightly roasted for his letter, but it's just a letter. It's not important. What is important is what happened a month before.

“They’re herding us like cattle,” he said.
Within weeks, McKinney’s “neighborhood” has grown from a couple of dozen sporadic encampments to San Francisco’s most visible tent city. At least 100 tents stretch over a dozen blocks, side streets and alleys. Many tents, even the popup pup tents, house two people and at least one dog. Even jaded San Franciscans are stunned by the sight.
Like the Super Bowl 50 signs, skewered on social media as “cheesy,” “vulgar” and “unnecessary,” the new homeless encampments keep reminding San Franciscans that the upcoming parties for the largest sporting event in the nation are not for everyone.

In a back-handed way, Keller is right: we do live in a free market society, and your worth as a human being depends entirely on your financial wealth.
Cities across America are making laws that punish the homeless in ways that they wouldn't do to stray animals.

Vice News obtained NCH's third and latest report, which is set to be published later this month. The outlet reports that, incredibly, at least 33 municipal bans on publicly handing out free food have been enacted across the U.S. between January 2013 and April 2014, reflecting a sharp increase in communities with such restrictions.
That troubling number is likely less surprising to anyone whose been following the issue of food sharing at a national level. Many cities have been actively stepping up their fights -- not against homelessness, but against homeless people.

It's amazing to think that cities will tolerate people feeding homeless dogs and cats, but not homeless people.
Liberals give frowny faces over this kind of law, but there is little mention about an equally important statute - the criminalization of sleeping.

Laws against camping, lying down and begging in public places can quickly get expensive for those who live outside, and the criminal justice system awaits those who cannot pay.
But what about taxpayers? What does it cost to enforce laws that target the homeless?
A lot, according to a new study released by the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law Tuesday. The report, “Too High a Price: What Criminalizing Homelessness Costs Colorado,” found that six cities spent a combined $5.1 million on enforcement from 2010-2014. Denver spent more than $750,000 in 2014 alone.
To complete the study, the college’s Homeless Advocacy Policy Project added up the policing, court and jail time costs associated with laws that target homeless populations, like curfews and camping bans. A total of 351 such laws exist across the state’s 76 largest cities. Denver spends an average of $645 on each citation it issues.

Of course criminalizing homelessness is about as effective as criminalizing pot. Plus, giving a homeless person a criminal record for the crime of sleeping is a sure fire way to make certain that they can't stop being homeless.

Having a criminal record makes it harder for individuals without homes to access education, employment and, rather cruelly, housing. Jail time also often means missed appointments for public benefits like Social Security and Medicaid.
“Criminalizing homelessness anchors un-housed individuals in perpetual poverty,” the study says.

To the Obama Administration's credit, there is finally a little push-back on the federal level against the trend of criminalizing homelessness, and even the courts are getting involved.
But these aren't actual solutions. Real solutions require much bigger changes.
For example, anyone who lives in the San Francisco area knows that many homeless people are mentally ill and incapable of taking care of themselves.

More than 124,000 – or one-fifth – of the 610,000 homeless people across the USA suffer from a severe mental illness, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They're gripped by schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression — all manageable with the right medication and counseling but debilitating if left untreated.

In a normal, healthy society that has actual human empathy, we would recognize that these people are victims. They require compassion and help.
But as Keller pointed out, we don't like in a normal, healthy society with actual human empathy and compassion. We require these disabled people to heal their mental illnesses while pulling themselves up by bootstraps that they can't afford. And if they can't do that, well, they will be punished.

According to a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, which includes the anecdotes above, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 inmates with several mental illness in 2012—on par with the population of Anchorage, Alaska, or Trenton, New Jersey. That figure is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals in the same year—about 35,000 people.

Three times the number of mentally ill people on the street are behind bars. It's medieval. it's certainly not civilized. In the 50's people were shocked that mentally ill people were "warehoused" in asylums. So we turned those mentally ill people out onto the streets.
Now we are back to warehousing the mentally ill, but this time as criminals. Thus we've gone back to treating mental illness like they did in the 18th Century. Very few people, even liberals, make a big deal about this, because classism is simply accepted in America today.

Being homeless in America today is like being in the "untouchable" caste of India. They are so far down the social scale that they are virtually invisible, even to liberals.

The homeless are just the most obvious example of classism.
There are other, more subtle examples, that sometimes it takes a foreigner to see clearly.

Another characteristic of the new upper class -- and something new under the American sun -- is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using "redneck" in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to "flyover country" and consider the implications when no one asks, "What does that mean?"

It's quite possible when you read this that you were puzzled about what his point is, and that's the point. It's the soft hypocrisy of liberalism in America today.

I'm a British immigrant, and grew up in a northern English working-class town. Taking my regional accent to Oxford University and then the British civil service, I learned a certain amount about my own class consciousness and other people's snobbery. But in London or Oxford from the 1970s onwards I never witnessed the naked disdain for the working class that much of America's metropolitan elite finds permissible in 2016.
When my wife and I bought some land in West Virginia and built a house there, many friends in Washington asked why we would ever do that. Jokes about guns, banjo music, in-breeding, people without teeth and so forth often followed. These Washington friends, in case you were wondering, are good people. They'd be offended by crass, cruel jokes about any other group. They deplore prejudice and keep an eye out for unconscious bias. More than a few object to the term, "illegal immigrant." Yet somehow they feel the white working class has it coming.

It's almost Bizzaro World how so many extra-sensitive liberals who would never, ever tell a racist joke, and are careful to use the very latest, socially-approved euphemisms for race and sexual preference, have no problem at all stereotyping working poor, working-class white people (i.e. prejudice).
What is even more enlightening is that this very same prejudice doesn't apply to rich white people, who might also be just as racist or ignorant, but are still free of that stereotype by virtue of their wealth.
So the crime of the redneck isn't having white skin. His crime is being poor.

The problem with classism in America today isn't a legal one, it's a cultural one. But unlike racism and sexism, we are not prepared to recognize that classism is a problem.
Hell, most of Americans are in such denial that they fail to even acknowledge the existence of class itself. So the idea that people shouldn't be discriminated against for being poor is a concept that is so far outside of their reality that they don't even recognize it as discrimination.

I use the example of poor whites, not because they are more likely to be the victims of classism, but because discrimination against minorities is automatically assumed to be racism, when that might not be true.
Does that matter? Yes, if you want to eliminate prejudice.
If a large portion of prejudice is being misidentified and mischaracterized, then it would go a long ways toward explaining why the fight against discrimination has such slow progress.

It's sad that discrimination is alive and well, and invisible, in America.