Partisans defend every kind of evil when it’s done by their own allies

A child who is put into a cage doesn’t care whether his jailer is a Democrat or a Republican. He just wants out of the cage and he wants to return to his parents.

I haven’t had anything to say about the obscenity of ripping children from their parents and putting them into fenced cages — literal cages — because if you know this is evil, I don’t have to explain that to you. And if you don’t know this is evil, I can’t help you understand something so obvious.

The problem with political partisans is that they are willing to see evil when their enemies do it, but are blind to such things when their allies do the same things.

In the last week or so, pictures such as this one have been shared all over social media in order to attack the border policies of Donald Trump’s administration. The only problem is that the mostly progressive left folks who were sharing it didn’t realize the photos were taken four years ago — when Barrack Obama’s administration was in control.

Putting innocent people into cages — for the “crime” of having been born in one place and not another — is evil. Taking parents away from their children in such cages is a special kind of evil. It doesn’t matter whether the people enforcing this policy are Democrats or Republicans.

Border policies in this country have been openly racist for more than a century. In the late 19th century, racists outright stated the reasons for their desire to close borders. The admitted they didn’t want more Chinese people or even Europeans from “undesirable” countries. (Racists change their mind about which people are acceptable as time goes on.)

Today, policies about who enters the country aren’t supposed to be based on such racist prejudice, but when you listen to people who want to stop immigrants from moving here, it’s very clear that their core motivations are simple. The heart of every argument against free movement of peaceful people across political borders boils down to some form of, “I don’t like you people, because you’re not enough like me.”

They falsely claim that the people coming across the border are rapists and murderers — as Donald Trump famously claimed — but the evidence shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born here.

Some people claim that immigrants are lazy, but many of these people also claim that these “lazy” people are “here to steal our jobs.” Which is it? Are they too lazy to work? Or are you afraid they’re going to work hard enough to take a job you want? You can’t have it both ways. And the notion that you are owed a job protected from competition is antithetical to economic liberty.

Others say immigrants are flooding into this country to “get welfare benefits,” but people who are undocumented in the system aren’t eligible for much in the way of tax-paid social services anyway. What’s more, whatever payroll taxes they pay — when they’re using false Social Security numbers, for instance — are going into a system from which they will never get a penny. In other words, they are subsidizing those of us already here.

The idea that a human being has different rights simply because he was born on the “wrong” side of a political line is insanity. Anybody who takes individual liberty seriously knows that a right is something that belongs to every individual, regardless of his race or gender or place of birth.

Nobody has special rights because he’s born in this country. There’s no rational reason to stop peaceful people from crossing political borders and joining the great and growing market that has made this country powerful and wealthy. Stopping some people because they’re brown-skinned and speak Spanish is just as racist as it was racist for laws in the early 20th century to try to keep out Italians.

Although Trump and Co. have taken hatred of outsiders to new heights, the border rules in place in this country are a bi-partisan travesty. Democrats didn’t fix the racist mess when they had majorities in Congress. Republicans haven’t done so, either. Both sides have blood on their hands.

When U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions tried to defend blind obedience to government officials based on the Apostle Paul’s words in the first part of Romans 13, he seemingly forgot that Paul was arrested by the Roman government because he wouldn’t obey government orders to quit preaching about Jesus. Did Sessions forget that Paul was executed by the Romans for his alleged crimes?

Whatever Paul might have intended to say there — and regardless whether you want to assume Paul’s words are straight from God or not — Paul didn’t live his own life the way these people want us to interpret his words. If you want to claim all people must obey all governments, you have to assume that God supported every evil government that ever existed, including the communists and Nazis and every oppressive regime of every dictator or king.

Most of the people who are talking about this issue today are trying to score political points. They want to attack Trump or they want to find a way to attack Obama. Most are avoiding the real issue.

The real issue is that racist and hateful people have put into place some policies that allow men with guns to stop people at an arbitrary place — which they call a border — and put them into cages if those people weren’t born in the “right” place. If those policies didn’t exist, none of these arguments would be happening.

Quit trying to score points for your political team. Leave peaceful human beings alone to work and be free wherever they choose to move and pay their own way.

If you eliminate these racist and hateful border rules, the rest will take care of itself.