Thursday, December 20, 2007
Hard-liners for Jesus
Harold Meyerson has an excellent, hard-hitting piece in Wednesday's Washington Post about the strange-bedfellow nature (and the rampant hypocrisy) in the Republican Party rhetoric about its alleged "Christian" values (under the headline Hard-liners for Jesus).
Meyerson gives several examples, but the most pointed might be on the issue of immigration. He writes:
But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.
The politics and rhetoric of "God's Own Party" often bear very little resemblance to God's own book.
Meyerson gives several examples, but the most pointed might be on the issue of immigration. He writes:
But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.
The politics and rhetoric of "God's Own Party" often bear very little resemblance to God's own book.
