Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Jesus Vs. Tea Party/Christofascists on Immigration



This blog has noted before that the GOP/Tea Party effort to kill Medicaid expansion - which effort is added and abetted by the "godly Christian" Christofascists - flies directly in the face of the Gospel message which calls for aid to the poor, the sick and the hungry.  A similar total disconnect exists between claimed reverence for the Gospel of Christ on the part of the Christofascists/Tea Party and their opposition to meaningful immigration reform.  Thankfully, even though it opposes the Affordable Health Care Act because of contraception coverage, the Roman Catholic Church is not on the same page as the white supremacists in the Tea Party and its evangelical Christian  allies.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the hypocrisy of these anti-immigration reform forces.  Here are excerpts:

Last week, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, made an urgent request to House Speaker John Boehner on behalf of the Catholic Conference of Bishops. He asked Boehner, a Catholic, to pass stalled immigration reform legislation, calling the current immigration system “a stain on the nation’s soul.”

But on Wednesday, Boehner told reporters immigration reform isn't going anywhere fast. "We have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill," Boehner said, all but guaranteeing that reform will be pushed into 2014 and the chaotic politics of the mid-term elections.


Dolan and the bishops are just one piece of an unprecedented coalition of religious leaders—from Southern Baptists to conservative Catholics to religious progressives—who have combined their efforts this year to convince Congress to pass immigration reform.
Together and on their own, they have prayed for members of the House and Senate, held press conferences, staged fasts, and button-holed representatives, both in Washington and at home in their districts, all in an effort to press what they see as the Bible's critical teachings—the country's moral obligation to accept immigrants while also respecting the rule of law.

[T]hey have run into a buzz saw of resistance from Tea Party groups and talk radio hosts, all threatening to run primaries against Republicans who support reform, especially with a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants.

One motivation for Republicans might be self-preservation alone. After Sen. Marco Rubio led the way for the Senate's comprehensive reform bill that included a path to citizenship, Tea Party groups in his home state who were among his earliest supporters excoriated him for supporting "amnesty" and vowed to defeat him in his next primary election. Rubio now says a comprehensive bill, like the one he helped to write, is the wrong approach.

"It just goes to show the Tea Party tail is wagging the Republican dog. Everybody is for this. There are maybe five conservative journalists, Heritage Action, and one national Tea Party group that opposes it. Republicans can't stand up to those people?"
Among the Republican constituencies that do support reform, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the agriculture industry, the high-tech industry, and the Catholic Church, Sharry says evangelicals may be the most important. In 2012, 50 percent of GOP primary voters were white evangelicals

[F]or the future of his own party, and most especially his church, Land says immigration reform needs to pass, even if it has to wait for the next president, who Land believes will support immigration reform whether they're a Republican or a Democrat.  "If Republicans nominate someone who is not pro-immigration reform, they won't win. It's just that simple," Land says.

While it is encouraging that some evangelical Christians support immigration reform, it speaks volumes that the Tea Party opposes any form of meaningful immigrations reform because 85% of the Tea Party is composed of, you guessed it, far right Christians.  Just this evening I commented to the boyfriend that I really did not want to identify as "Christian" because the term has become such a negative: hate, bigotry, racism, and hypocrisy are now the hallmarks of being a Christian.  As for the "good Christians," they remain far too silent just like the "good Germans in the early 1930's.  Inaction ultimately makes one an accomplice in evil.


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