Totally agreed. How can children be “illegal immigrants?” How can those seeking asylum know ahead of time that a U.S. judge will disagree with their request, suddenly rendering them "illegal " and guilty of a crime? It’s a catch 22 for anyone who cares enough to look closely, and so the phrase “illegal immigrants,” as a catchall phrase, quickly becomes meaningless. But that’s how that constuency justifies their views, without recognizing the duplicity. Sad, ironic, sinful, unexemplary, and a moral failure.
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By the way, the whole issue here is illustrative of how Adam came along at a decisive point in history.
“Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth” mandates hunter-gatherer nomadism for humanity generally in chapter 1, while “tend the garden, and keep it” in chapter 2, in the aggregate, forms the basis for food surpluses, private property disputes, the rise of specialized occupations, and city-state civilizations.
It’s no wonder that Adam’s first moral test was to regard the fruit of the garden as God’s gift to him, freely given, and thus to be freely shared.
But the real test lay in asking Adam to go on to respect God’s claim to “private property,” in the form of the one particular “fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
Balancing a respect for private property with a properly generous impulse to “share freely what we’ve been so freely given” would go along way in laying the basis for a good moral policy regarding immigration reform and international development.
Again, it’s a “ten thousand year old plus” argument, over “how much” versus “how little.”
For the most part, poorer people the world over set a better example of genuine generosity than their richer neghbors.
Mea culpa! God, please continue to teach me to be generous and compassionate, to a fault, if need be. And to genuinely love my neighbor.
I didn’t lift the Numbers 31:17-18 out of context. The news media is reporting that only pictures of boys being held by CBP. Girls and young toddlers are being held by HHS. Government is separating young boys from young girls. Even brothers and sisters.
Horrific.
But that’s not the context of those verses.
Patrick, the titles of Senator and Governor are among those which are officially held for life. So it is not at all inaccurate to call him Senator Sessions—though it could definitely be confusing to refer to the Attorney General in that manner.
What I find interesting is that U.S.Senators retain their titles for life but a Congressional Representative, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, does not. Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassadors normally lose their title when they cease their official salaried duties—but a few are given the title for life.
I find Sessions’ statements (and policies) repugnant but there is no evidence that the Bible was “used to set US governmental policy.” I’d say the clumsy appeal to the Bible was purely an afterthought. (I don’t consider Sessions or this administration in general to be particularly “Biblical” in any sense. But that is another topic.) Sessions was trying to give justifications for policy which he thought would resonate with his audience. I seriously doubt that it resonated as much as Sessions thought. Whether or not Session’s tactic was wise or “in the spirit of” the separation of church and state is a different matter from being an actual establishment of religion contrary to the Constitution. Just as someone in the government is allowed to quote some atheist (e.g., Aristophanes, Andrew Carnegie) as justification for something, they can also quote the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, if they so wish—though I often wish they wouldn’t.
To throttle freedom of speech by banning references by government officials to anything with “religious” associations could also be considered “against the Constitution.” (It could also be very difficult to define. Are laws against murder based upon religion and the various sacred scriptures of the major world religions?)
Sessions could have chosen to justify the law by quoting Joseph Stalin or Chairman Mao, who also believed in “strong government” and obeying the laws of the land. Would that have made his speech to law enforcement officers in Ft. Wayne, Indiana any more “constitutional”?
The Constitution itself is a mix of checks and balances, not just a collection of absolute bans. When we obsess on one Constitutional provision, we can easily violate yet another Constitutional provision. Such is the case with the delicate balance between the freedoms of speech and religion with the separation of church and state.
Was Attorney General Sessions establishing Christianity as the official state religion of the United States when justifying a ridiculous and cruel (and very expensive) executive order from the President by quoting from a first century Roman citizen named Paul? I doubt it. And I think a Constitutional challenge would have a tough time of it before the U.S. Supreme Court. I doubt that the FFRF would waste their attorneys’ billable hours in that manner. They would embarrass themselves almost as much as Sessions.
That said, as a Bible-affirming Christ-follower, I would be far happier if this entire Administration avoided making any references to the Bible when trying to justify the things they do and say. I also cringe when various self-proclaimed authorities outside of the government dare to speak for God as to why something happened. For example, I remember a number of “religion celebrities” making bold statements after various natural disasters where they claimed to know that “God sent the hurricane to judge the homosexuals” or “The earthquake was God’s judgment on those people for turning away from God.” I consider such pronouncements blasphemous because I don’t consider such TV evangelists to be God’s annointed prophets authorized to speak on his behalf. (Indeed, Jesus even directly addressed the myth that bad things only happen to bad people.)
I know of no such law. Nevertheless, I hope that Sessions won’t repeat his nonsense.
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Maybe I should send all you guys a sample of a lapel button I created. It reads, “Hey, buddy! Can you spare a dime? I’m studying to be a television evangelist!”
With apologies to all those television evangelists whom I still do admire… : )
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I am also appalled. That is the real issue here. The precise use of the Bible here is secondary.
Do not get caught in a technical debate on separation of Church and State over the cries of children. There will be plenty of time for that. Later…
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It customary to address former Senators as Senator. However Sessions is the AG of the United States, a much higher position than Senator or Governor.
Compare AG Sessions with NIH Director Collins.
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Official Letter of Complaint to AG Sessions from FFRF.
FFRF condemns biblical justification of immigration policy
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is formally objecting to the attorney general’s use of the bible as justification for the Trump administration’s newly draconian immigration procedures.
“Religion has no place in shaping public policy in our secular nation,” FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor write in a letter of complaint to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Under our godless Constitution, which separates state and church, the bible is not a legitimate justification for any action our government takes. In fact, the Supreme Court has said that if a government action lacks a secular purpose (i.e., it has a religious purpose) that action is unconstitutional.”
In his now-infamous June 14 speech in Indiana, Sessions cited the bible (Romans 13) to rationalize the Justice Department’s separation of children from their refugee and immigrant parents. FFRF condemns both the child separation tactic and Sessions’ use of the bible to justify it.
Though a so-called holy book should not be used to justify actions by our secular government, FFRF expressed a lack of surprise that the White House has invoked the bible to defend inhumane policies. “The bible has brought out the worst in America and been used to justify our greatest shames. From slavery, to segregation, to the subjugation of women, the bible has been used as an engine of regression since America’s founding,” FFRF notes in its letter to Sessions.
That is precisely why our Founders adopted our entirely secular Constitution and, when they did so, they did not pray at the Constitutional Convention, FFRF reminds Sessions. The only references to religion in our godless Constitution are exclusionary. The United States was first among nations to adopt a secular Constitution — investing sovereignty in “We the People,” not a divinity.
“President Trump’s child separation policy is doing serious damage not only to parents and children, but also to America,” FFRF writes. “Sessions’ use of religion to justify it is an egregious violation of the spirit of the First Amendment.”
FFRF points out that the bible should not shape public policy — not only because it is a behavioral grab bag full of primitive and outdated ideas and morality, but because we live in a secular nation and under a secular government. Imagine the consternation had Sessions preached instead from the Quran. It is equally inappropriate for the attorney general to preach from the Christian bible.
Ironically, Sessions himself acknowledged his secular duty in the same speech in which he preached from Romans 13. “But I am a law officer, a law officer for a nation state, a secular nation state, not a theocracy; it’s not a church,” he said. Yes, America is not a theocracy, FFRF emphasizes, and that’s why Sessions should stop treating his government office as though it were a pulpit.
In other words, Sessions should stop preaching and harming innocent children, Barker and Gaylor conclude. That’s the province of religion.
The changing demographics of the United States make biblical rationalizations even more unsuitable. Today nearly one-quarter of Americans (24 percent) are religiously unaffiliated, for a total of nearly 30 percent non-Christians. Not only are a huge number of younger Americans religiously unaffiliated, but 21 percent of Americans born after 1999 identify as explicitly atheist or agnostic.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 33,000 members across the country. FFRF’s purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Totally agree. However…
Removing digs at the Bible itself (like this) would make the letter more convincing. Yes we know that FFRF does not like the Bible, but I want them to win on separation of Church and State. That will require a rhetoric that respects Christian beliefs, even as neutrality is defended.
To win, we need a broad consensus. To get a broad consensus, do not make unnecessary enemies.
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It is part theater, playing to your base (and donors).
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We need better than that right now. We need to build bridges.
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@Patrick, one positive thing about this is that just about everyone has denounced Sessions by now for his use of Scripture, including most evangelical leaders. I’m really glad that Trump ended the policy today too. It seems some travesties, thankfully, are beyond him in the long run.
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[Thread bumped 12/14/18]
It’s quite fun to revisit and reread a thread like this one. I think our Peaceful Science community did a good job of exploring the various implications and evaluating the Constitutional issues. A visitor to this forum will be drawn in, get informed, and be well served by this thread.
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That certainly would have been nice.
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