I am a shitty Christian. Not really sure what it is about me, maybe I just don’t have that herd instinct or the genetic makeup for organized religion. I don’t have the ability to suspend disbelief (or at least serious skepticism) about claims like resurrection and heaven and transubstantiation. I am confident and comfortable knowing that when you’re dead, it’s over. You cease to be and become just a memory to those who knew and loved you. It’s one of the reasons life is so precious.
That said, I must own to the fact that I hold a host of mid 20th century middle class whitebread American Christian values and like it or not, they serve as guideposts in life. I don’t always do the right thing — but like Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography in 1964, I like to think that ‘I know it when I see it.’
Helping strangers in need is one of those values. When faced by people who are sick or wounded or starving or distraught or thirsty or oppressed, and I can help, I am generally moved to help them. Sure, I find it easier to look away and dodge whatever responsibility I might have for helping. After all, how much can one person really do to make a difference. Overwhelming need and need at a distance, removed from direct in my face raw urgency, that is pretty easy to let slide. But in my face need, urgent need, that will often prompt an honorable response. The better angels of my nature take control, at least for a moment.
Good news for those in need, there are a whole lot of folks out there in America whose Christian instincts are way better and stronger than mine. Some of them in Arizona and Texas have been provoked to leave water in the desert or stop along the roadside to provide aid to immigrants in obvious desperate need. Lately, in Trump’s America, the bizarro land in which we now live, the acts of a Good Samaritan can and will get you arrested and charged with multiple felony counts of ‘harboring’ .
Take Teresa Todd for instance. Ms. Todd is a city and county attorney in Marfa, Texas. She is the subject of a federal investigation after allowing three distressed migrants pleading for help to shelter in her car on a night in Feb 2019. Her kindness saved a young El Salvadoran woman’s life www.npr.org/… In my America, we give people like that recognition, we laud their behavior. In Trump’s borderlands we criminalize that conduct. We punish them and charge them as felons.
Thousands of immigrants have died along the southern border from exposure and dehydration in an effort to reach the US. Some of the people living there have taken the small and noble step of leaving water in plastic jugs out in the desert along migrant trails, in the hope that fewer will die. Those acts of kindness and Christian charity are now felonies in Trump’s America. inthesetimes.com/...
When the Samaritans come to trial I’m sure they will find good legal counsel. Some brilliant legal scholars will jump at the chance to prove that acts of human kindness and Christian charity are not crimes in America. Common sense and recent legal precedent are on their side.
If the owners of Hobby Lobby can deny their young female employees birth control as part of their ACA employee health care package on the grounds the doing so violates the employer’s religious freedom and if wedding cake bakers can deny same sex couples service on those same grounds and physicians can deny treatment to transgender patients on religious grounds then surely, Good Samaritans who feed the hungry, shelter the sick or leave water in the desert can also be free to exercise their beliefs on religious grounds. Can’t they?
As Mr T likes to say, ‘We’ll see what happens’ —
I’m confident that no one will be convicted of these crimes, but worry that some might fear the cost of doing the right thing and choose like I often do to, ‘sit this one out’ and that consequently, more unnecessary deaths in the desert may be the result.
I raise my voice, small and weak as it is, to thank those who stand up and do the right thing — and I urge all Americans to join me. This is an awful policy. Kindness is not a crime. Oh, and if your listening Mr. Trump, you don’t want me on the jury in any of these cases.