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

By David McElroy · June 18, 2018

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.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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