Klansman Keebler Elf Uses Scripture to Justify Separating Families
https://i.imgur.com/hhrHNIm.png
Jeff Sessions cites Romans 13, a Bible passage used to defend slavery, in defense of family separations
Julie Zauzmer and Keith McMillan
washingtonpost.com
June 15 at 5:49 AM
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children.
“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”
Government officials occasionally refer to the Bible as a line of argument — take, for instance, the Republicans who have quoted 2 Thessalonians (“if a man will not work, he shall not eat”) to justify more stringent food stamps requirements.
But the verse that Sessions cited, Romans 13, is an unusual choice.
“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”
The other, Fea said, “is in the 1840s and 1850s, when Romans 13 is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong. I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”
In May, Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy in which the Justice Department would begin prosecuting everyone who crosses the Southwest border. Part of the policy shift meant that migrants traveling with children or unaccompanied minors end up detained instead of released; U.S. immigration law charges adults with a crime, but not the children, which means they’re held separately.
The Associated Press cited U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures from two weeks in May in which more than 650 children were separated from parents. Reports from the same month that the government lost track of 1,475 children sparked a national outcry; those reports were later disputed.
Sessions has said “we’ve got to get this message out” that asylum seekers or anyone else immigrating through unofficial means is not given immunity. He appealed to “church friends” later in Thursday’s speech in Fort Wayne, emphasizing that non-citizens who enter the United States illegally are breaking the law.
On the same issue, other religious groups and individuals have cited the Bible as well, to take the opposite side.
“Overwhelmingly, Scripture causes families to be kept together,” said Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. “Overwhelmingly Scripture causes us to defend families. As Evangelicals, we have a doctrine to be a pro-family-values people, you know. The Bible calls us to be pro-family, and I personally find it deeply lamentable that we are separating children from their parents at the border or anywhere.”
Likewise, on Thursday afternoon, the Migrants and Refugees Section at the Vatican tweeted a verse of Deuteronomy:
Quote:
“The Bible teaches that God ‘loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt’ (Deuteronomy 10:18-19).” -Pope Francis
At a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Wednesday, the nation’s Catholic leaders strongly condemned the administration’s immigration policies as immoral, with one bishop going so far as to suggest that Catholics who help carry out the Justice Department’s policies are violating their faith and perhaps should be denied Communion.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a briefing Thursday that she hadn’t seen Sessions’s comments, but she backed his line of thinking.
“I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,” she said. “It’s a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.”
Fea, the American history professor, said that after the Civil War, historians don’t see many references to Romans 13 because the essence of the passage — submission to authority — is regarded as un-American.
“America was built and born on rebellion and a sort of radical resistance to authority,” Fea said. “Whenever Romans 13 was used in the 18th and the 19th century — and Sessions seems to be doing the same thing, so in this sense there is some continuity — it’s a way of manipulating the scriptures to justify your own political agenda.”
The chapter itself can be interpreted in varying ways.
“Romans 13 says that the purpose of government is to pursue what is good, and it says that the government should not be a terror for those who are doing good,” said Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization for World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals.
“You cannot read Romans 13 without reading Romans 12,” Salguero said, pointing to the prior chapter, which in part suggests that love must be the guide instead of evil.
“Laws are good, and order is good, but that doesn’t mean that separating families from each other is a good law,” he said. “There are good laws, and there are bad laws, and separating families from each other is a bad policy. We’re not against the law, we’re against bad laws and bad policies.”
Besides, as Soerens points out, the person in the Bible whom Sessions referenced ran afoul of the law.
“The fact that the Apostle Paul, who wrote Romans, wrote several epistles from jail suggests that he was occasionally on the wrong side of an unjust law,” Soerens said.
The evangelical polling group Barna found that evangelical Christians’ attitudes toward immigration seem to be warming somewhat. In 2016, Barna found that 42 percent of evangelicals agreed with the statement “We allow too many immigrants into the country,” compared with 30 percent of American adults overall. By the next year, just 23 percent of adults overall and 31 percent of evangelicals agreed.
Willie Nelson: 'Christians should be up in arms' over Trump family-separation policy
Willie Nelson: 'Christians should be up in arms' over Trump family-separation policy
By Justin Wise
TheHill.com
06/15/18 05:31 PM EDT
Willie Nelson, an outspoken critic of President Trump, is slamming the administration's zero-tolerance policy separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying "Christians everywhere should be outraged."
"What's going on at our southern border is outrageous," Nelson told Rolling Stone. "Christians everywhere should be up in arms. What happened to 'Bring us your tired and weak and we will make them strong?' This is still the promise land."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in early May that the Department of Homeland Security would separate undocumented children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border from the adults accompanying them before those adults are prosecuted. The policy is carried out even if a migrant is seeking asylum.
It has resulted in a sharp influx of children being separated from families at the border in recent weeks. The Associated Press reported on Friday that nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents from April 19 through May 31, according to figures obtained from the Department of Homeland Security.
The overflow of children has also led the administration to begin erecting a "tent city" in Tornillo, Texas that will hold 450 beds for children.
Democratic lawmakers have forcefully condemned the policy, which Trump on Friday blamed on Democrats.
Nelson, who grew up just five hours from the Mexican border, has aimed harsh criticism at Trump. In January, he announced his new album would feature a Trump-inspired song titled, “Delete and Fast-Forward."
Nelson also has previously advocated for pro-immigration policies. He told Rolling Stone in 2014 that helping immigrant children is "a good opportunity for us to show a little bit of humanitarianism and take care of those kids."
Even Laura "Pickles" Bush herself is against this bullshit.....
...nevermind the fact that there would be no refugees from Central or South America without the manipulations of that region by the BCE/CIA. You married into this shit Pickles, but thanks for your opinion, I guess.....
washingtonpost.com
Separating children from their parents at the border ‘breaks my heart’
by Laura Bush
June 17 at 8:45 PM
On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents. In the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers or foster care. More than 100 of these children are younger than 4 years old. The reason for these separations is a zero-tolerance policy for their parents, who are accused of illegally crossing our borders.
I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.
Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned.
Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation, on being the nation that sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by natural disasters or famine or war. We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.
People on all sides agree that our immigration system isn’t working, but the injustice of zero tolerance is not the answer. I moved away from Washington almost a decade ago, but I know there are good people at all levels of government who can do better to fix this.
Recently, Colleen Kraft, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. She reported that while there were beds, toys, crayons, a playground and diaper changes, the people working at the shelter had been instructed not to pick up or touch the children to comfort them. Imagine not being able to pick up a child who is not yet out of diapers.
Twenty-nine years ago, my mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, visited Grandma’s House, a home for children with HIV/AIDS in Washington. Back then, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the disease was a death sentence, and most babies born with it were considered “untouchables.” During her visit, Barbara — who was the first lady at the time — picked up a fussy, dying baby named Donovan and snuggled him against her shoulder to soothe him. My mother-in-law never viewed her embrace of that fragile child as courageous. She simply saw it as the right thing to do in a world that can be arbitrary, unkind and even cruel. She, who after the death of her 3-year-old daughter knew what it was to lose a child, believed that every child is deserving of human kindness, compassion and love.
In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis? I, for one, believe we can.
Ann the Man channels "her" inner Alex Jones.....
And now a word from Captain Hikaru Sulu, United Federation of Planets......
‘At Least During the Internment …’ Are Words I Thought I’d Never Utter
By George Takei
foreignpolicy.com
June 19, 2018, 9:00 AM
https://comehomeamerica.files.wordpr...orge-takei.jpg
Imagine this scene: Tens of thousands of people, mostly families with children, are labeled by the government as a threat to our nation, used as political tools by opportunistic politicians, and caught in a vast gray zone where their civil and human rights are erased by the presumption of universal guilt. Thousands are moved around to makeshift detention centers and sites, where camps are thrown together with more regard to the bottom line than the humanity of the new residents.
That is America today, at our southern border, which asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants alike are seeking to cross. But it is also America in late 1941, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, when overnight my community, my family, and I became the enemy because we happened to look like those who had dropped the bombs. And yet, in one core, horrifying way this is worse. At least during the internment of Japanese-Americans, I and other children were not stripped from our parents. We were not pulled screaming from our mothers’ arms. We were not left to change the diapers of younger children by ourselves.
Photos of children in cages and camps today so strongly evoke the wartime past that former First Lady Laura Bush drew a stark parallel in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history,” Bush wrote. She reminded us that there are dark consequences to such camps for their residents: “This treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned.”
When a government acts capriciously, especially against a powerless and much-reviled group, it is hard to describe the terror and anxiety. There is nowhere to turn, because the only people with the power to help have trained their guns and dogs upon you. You are without rights, held without charge or trial. The world is upside down, information-less, and indifferent or even hostile to your plight.
And yet, with hideous irony, I can still say, “At least during the internment …”
At least during the internment, when I was just 5 years old, I was not taken from my parents.
My family was sent to a racetrack for several weeks to live in a horse stall, but at least we had each other. At least during the internment, my parents were able to place themselves between the horror of what we were facing and my own childish understanding of our circumstances. They told us we were “going on a vacation to live with the horsies.” And when we got to Rohwer camp, they again put themselves between us and the horror, so that we would never fully appreciate the grim reality of the mosquito-infested swamp into which we had been thrown. At least during the internment, we remained a family, and I credit that alone for keeping the scars of our unjust imprisonment from deepening on my soul.
I cannot for a moment imagine what my childhood would have been like had I been thrown into a camp without my parents. That this is happening today fills me with both rage and grief: rage toward a failed political leadership who appear to have lost even their most basic humanity, and a profound grief for the families affected.
How do political leaders convince themselves of the virtues of such a policy? History shows it doesn’t take much. After Japan dropped its bombs, the political scapegoats were obvious. As America geared up for war, the administration needed some way to show that it was being tough on Japan, as it had little military success at the early going to trot out. Being tough on Japan easily translated into being tough on the Japanese here in America. No matter that most of us weren’t even Japanese nationals; nearly two-thirds of those imprisoned were U.S. citizens, after all. But as the Wartime Relocation Authority made clear, “a Jap is a Jap.” That was their own “zero-tolerance” policy.
But how to justify the sweeping internment of 120,000 people, when none of us had actually done anything wrong?
It was Earl Warren — the same man who as chief justice would forge a famously liberal Supreme Court — who helped move that along. Warren was the attorney general for the state of California at the time, and he had designs on the governorship, which he won in late in 1942. Warren took the absence of evidence of sabotage or spying on the West Coast by any Japanese-American as justification to declare that this was evidence that we must be planning something truly hidden and deeply sinister.
It was a lie, and a big one, but it was one repeated enough, and said with enough conviction, that rest of the country went along with it. We were the murderers, the thugs, the animals then — and since you couldn’t tell the good from the bad, you might as well round up everyone in the name of national security.
Whenever I draw parallels between today’s border actions and the internment camps of World War II, I am flooded with comments “reminding me” that it was a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who signed Executive Order 9066 and set the internment into motion. This only underscores my point, however: The United States’ flirtation with authoritarianism is not tied to any political party. Even people of good heart and conscience can be swept up in the frenzy. Earl Warren was a Republican, and while he ultimately came to view his role in the internment to be one of his greatest follies, at the time neither he nor others in government — with rare exceptions, like Ralph Carr, the governor of Colorado — saw anything wrong with what he’d done.
But unless we act now, we will have failed to learn at all from our past mistakes. Once again, we are flinging ourselves into a world of camps and fences and racist imagery — and lies just big enough to stick.
Once again, we are flinging ourselves into a world of camps and fences and racist imagery — and lies just big enough to stick.
There are at least two big lies right now. The first is that there’s a law on the books passed by the Democrats, and that the Justice Department has no choice but to enforce it. This lie passes the buck and confuses the public, offering a diversionary talking point to dutiful lieutenants willing to toe the White House line. Like FDR, Donald Trump has wide latitude in setting the priorities of law enforcement, and there is no law that says we must have “zero tolerance” for children at our borders, just as there was nothing that said all persons of Japanese descent, even children within orphanages, were to be rounded up and relocated.
The second lie is that those at our borders are criminals, and therefore deserve no rights. But the asylum-seekers at our borders are breaking no laws at all, nor are their children who accompany them. The broad brush of “criminal” today raises echoes of the wartime “enemy” to my ears. Once painted, both marks are impossible to wash off. Trump prepared his followers for this day long ago, when he began to dehumanize Mexican migrants as drug dealers, rapists, murderers, and animals. Animals might belong in cages. Humans don’t.
I wish that those, like me, who lived through this nightmare before didn’t have to sound the alarm again.
But as my father once told me, America is a great nation but also a fallible one — as prone to great mistakes as are the people who inhabit it. As a survivor of internment camps, I have made it my lifelong mission to work against them being built ever again within our borders.
Although the first camps for border crossers have been built, and are now filling up with innocent children, we have a chance to ensure history does not repeat itself in full, to demonstrate that we have learned from our past and to stand firmly against our worse natures. The internment happened because of fear and hatred, but also because of a failure of political leadership. In 1941, there were few politicians who dared stand up to the internment order. I am hopeful that today there will, should be, must be, far more people who speak up, both among our leaders and the public, and that the future writes the history of our resistance — not, yet again, of our compliance.