The following are excerpts from a recent Lou Dobbs commentary; the full text is available at http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/22/Dobbs.May23/index.html
There are times when reason carries the mind no further, when the mind is carried from the rational across the penumbra of the absurd. That is where the leadership of the U.S. Senate now resides.
What many once regarded as the world's great deliberative body looks more like a clamorous bazaar in which senators feverishly hawk duplicity and deceit as bright jewels of public policy. Comprehensive immigration reform is just such a bauble, and buyer beware.
Most beguiling among those merchants of mendacity is none other than Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who has been peddling his wares at the Senate bazaar for more than four decades. Kennedy's counterfeit immigration views reach all the way back to his championship of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
In signing that legislation into law, President Lyndon Johnson promised it would not be revolutionary or affect the lives of millions, even as it overturned 60 years of U.S. immigration policy of national origin quotas and led to the creation of explosive chain migration.
Twenty-one years later, President Ronald Reagan signed into law amnesty for more than three million illegal aliens who had entered the country. President Reagan then promised the new employer sanctions would "remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities," and that the law's amnesty provision would allow millions who were hiding in the shadows to "step into the sunlight."
And now, another 21 years later, we hear the same language as the pro-amnesty and open borders advocates demand that American citizens ignore history, reason and the national interest. They are again marketing the same false assurances about border enforcement and insist there will be no social or economic cost to the taxpayer or the nation. More than four decades of disruptive and destructive immigration policy initiatives should be a sufficient history lesson for all Americans.
The essential truth is clear: We cannot reform immigration law until we control immigration, and we cannot control immigration until we control our borders and our ports. This president and the congressional Democratic leadership refuse to recognize that reality and will not honor that truth.
President Bush and Sen. Kennedy pass for political stars in our tortured times, and that is sad enough. But if we follow the course they've set, true tragedy awaits us. And the fault will be ours.
Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following:
"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think."
Sen. Kennedy concluded by saying,
"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.)
Well, while I left the church, many in my family didn’t and I would have the opportunity to frequently look at the church bulletin, and during the 1990s and the early part of this decade, the inappropriate notices in the bulletin slowed down and then for the most part stopped. The bulletin became the non-political forum for church information that it was always supposed to be. But still what went on in the 1980s left a bad taste in my mouth (and of course the Priests scandals which our church was in the center of long, long before it became a big issue nationally). But, again, after the turmoil of the Hunthausen days, things had really improved and the weekly bulletin hasn’t in recent years been used as the tool of the Left Wing radicals as it once was.
But it seems that this is not the case again. This Sunday in the weekly bulletin in my church was a yellow piece of paper promoting the radical leftist agenda on immigration. It was by a group that has the following webpage: http://www.justiceforimmigrants.org.
The yellow insert states that Catholics must pray the following:
The Justice Prayer
Come, O Holy Spirit!
Come, open us to the wonder, beauty and dignity of the diversity found in each culture,
in each face, and in each experience we have of the other among us.
Come, fill us with generosity
as we are challenged to let go and allow others to share with us
the goods and beauty of earth.
Come, heal the divisions
That keep us from seeing the face of Christ in all men, women, and children.
Come, free us to stand with and for those
who must leave their own lands in order to find work, security, and welcome in a new land,
one that has enough to share.
Come, bring us understanding, inspiration, wisdom, and
the courage needed to embrace change and stay on the journey.
Come, O Holy Spirit,
show us the way.
Well, what you need to understand about Catholics is that most of them don’t go to church for political reasons. The Parish they choose, most often they choose merely because it’s the parish closest to them. For them religion is a matter of tradition; it’s not a matter of politics. They go to church to form a spiritual community, not to promote a political agenda.
I know Catholics and I know that like the general community most of them are totally against the radical agenda of the political left. But given the social and spiritual importance Catholicism is to them, they are intimidated (most of them) from speaking out for fear of the social repercussions. It is easier for them to remain silent and just look the other way to what is going on in their name, in their midst. Most people (liberals excluded) strive to live a life as much as possible without conflict and in most cases tend to remain silent and not make waves and rock the boat.
Liberals on the other hand live for conflict and due to that they seem to have an advantage when it comes to promoting their agenda. They are obviously using the Church in an inappropriate way, but they are not being called on it.
But those of Catholic persuasion need to speak out against the renewed radicalization of the local Church. Modern day catholic teaching doesn’t say that the Church is infallible on such issues, and when the church is being used by a radical few (yeah many of them in high places) to do something that will harm America, they practically have a duty to speak out despite the friction and division that would cause. After all they weren’t the ones who started the friction, they weren’t the ones who inappropriately hijacked the church to be used as a tool to promote a political agenda.
On this issue the Catholic Church has become a destructive force. Let’s hope that average Catholics get beyond being timid and take the church back from the radicals. They finally wrestled it away from the Leftists who had such a hold of it in the 1980s. It is critical that they do so now.