Stories about refugee and immigrant families being split up at the border make me wonder if this is still the United States my teachers taught me about in school. You know, the one with a Statue of Liberty welcoming the poor and huddled masses. My ancestors were among them; none came over on the Mayflower. But maybe US Atty. General Jeff Sessions did.
Spouting Bible verses like a Puritan, Sessions has claimed the moral logic of St. Paul's letter to the Romans to support his taking kids away from their parents. He says the government is ordained by God, like race differences and slavery. So render onto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Because I had heard rumors of even some Republicans objecting to what seems pure cruelty, Friday morning I watched Fox News. How was this affecting conservatives and their “family values?” There I learned that the impassioned reporter, who had pressed White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders—“You're a parent! Don't you have any empathy?”—was from (gasp) Playboy. This name-drop segued to a blonde Fox news person, who scowled as an Anglo immigrant spokeswoman complained about “liberal news” boo-hooing for the kids. They were, she explained, fed every day and went to school in a remodeled Wal-Mart, and thus were clearly "well cared for.”
Perhaps they even get Bible verses taught them—the same way Native American children were in the 19th century, when taken from their tribal parents and placed in boarding schools to become "civilized.” Natives themselves once grown described the separation as trauma.
So how "civilized" will bully US policy become? How religious will our separate state remain? UPI reports that a coalition of legal rights organizations submitted on Thursday a complaint to an international committee of the OAS (Organization of American States), asking it to "immediately stop a human rights and humanitarian crisis perpetrated by the U.S. government in the Texas-Mexico border."
Yes, they called us perps. And there's a reason Jesus called religious hypocrites, who belabored the law and forgot its spirit, "white-washed sepulchers."
—Rickey Gard Diamond
