“That’s like putting your faith in half a condom”
Posted Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 7:56 am
Great LA Times opinion piece by Pat Morrison (Oxy graduate, btw) on the immigration debate and the prospect of building a 700-mile fence along the 2,000 mile southern border.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:41 am
Her writing seems to be a bit more animated than her radio show; case in point: your choice of sentence for the headline… You know that’s gonna get some wierd google keyword searches
She seems to emphasize more of the financial costs and logistics of this idea (which are totally valid). However, my concern is also what a fence communicates, how it communicates it, and that so many Christian conservatives are for it.
Maybe I’m a little naiive, but regardless of our politics, I would hope the Church is working more on loving the “alien among us” than protecting our borders. This seems like a no-brainer to me–am I being a bit naiive?
September 21st, 2006 at 1:39 pm
For me, Eddy, I think all the emphasis on border security as an equivalent to national security is the same as the French building the Maginot Line after WWI to defend against a WWI-type strategy, leaving them defense-less for the Blitzkreig strategy that Germany attacked them with in WWII.
Building a fence at the border doesn’t protect our borders, nor does it serve as a real deterrent for illegal immigration. It only ensures a more physically-fit undocumented workforce. It would be more difficult - and more expensive - for woman & children to come across an increasingly militarized border, but healthy men who could endure the desert terrain could still make it.
Putting a partial fence along the border doesn’t accomplish anything for national security or for immigration reform. It is a bad plan.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:29 pm
I love Pat Morrison. She’s a voice crying in the wilderness. She and Hugh Hewitt used to part of Life and Times, an LA based PBS show that tried to get something honest and open going on. Pat is still trying to do it. Hewitt has become a bizarre and leading right wing nut case. Those right wingers can’t resist wacky self-righteousness. I guess it comes with power. Acton Institute stuff no doubt.