September 19, 2023
I have made it a policy that this blog will never stray into politics, since my gentle readers need not come here for that. But I wouldn’t blame them if they think of this particular post as skirting pretty close to the edge of the political world.
You see, last night I was half-watching the New England Patriots on the television as I was folding laundry, when my eyes (and ears) beheld a new ad for the Presidential campaign of Florida Governor Ron Desantis. The ad was unveiled by his Super PAC and was aimed at that cohort of the New Hampshire Republican primary voting population that believes that this country has too many refugees fleeing persecution in their home countries.
Well, rest assured, people in that cohort: DeSantis is going to do something about it.
According to the ad, Desantis “intends to allow for deadly force to be used against anybody cutting through the border wall.”
That left me with a few theological questions.
For instance,
– Is there a minimum age at which asylum-seekers fleeing persecution will be killed, or does “anybody” include babies, small children and their mothers?
– Will there be any sort of due process before the killing, or is the plan simply to dispense with such frivolity and get straight to the killing?
– Who, exactly, will be doing the killing? And what, exactly, will be their standing orders?
– Do they literally have to cut through the wall to be killed, or will they be killed simply for crossing into the U.S.?
– What will we do with the bodies once we’ve killed them? Leave them where they were shot? Bury them in open pits?
– Will the same rules apply at the Canadian border? Or at international airports?
– And, since Desantis frequently invokes the Bible in his public appearances, I ask this: In the Gospel according to Matthew, wasn’t Jesus a refugee? And in his ministry, didn’t he say something like “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me”?
Asking for a (non-political) friend.
