American N_AZ_is

Last week Jan Brewer, Arizona's Governor, signed into law an undoubtedly unconstitutional law making people of obvious Hispanic descent victims. I must admit to spending way too much time on Huffington Post making counterpoint after counterpoint to the rabid supporters of this law. While there have been many participants on my side, I doubt that we have changed any minds. They are focused on a tiny percent of theoretical wrong doers and have no compassion at all. (So much for compassionate conservatism. Even Bush wanted to offer amnesty to the "illegal" immigrants.)

First let me explain why I think the law is unconstitutional. Citizens who look to be of Hispanic descent are now subject to being stopped by Arizona law enforcement for any "reasonable suspicion." While most of these "excuse" infractions may be real, I'll be willing to bet that a very low percentage of non-Hispanics will ever be stopped for the same infractions. Once stopped the citizen will be asked to show proof of legal residency. I for one do not carry around any such "proof," unless my driver's license would be considered proof, but I know that it is easy to obtain a driver's license whether illegal or not. Thus a citizen is deprived of their right to be "safe and secure in their person" by what can only be described as a police state activity.

Constitutional or not, what I really don't like is what is says about an already too large of a segment of our population and thus about all of us. The fact that there was no such thing as "illegal" immigration when the constitution was created does not take away our right to police our borders, protecting both our property and our rights, but Arizona is going about it the wrong way. They are making a target of Mexicans, Mexicans who are already so badly treated in their own country that they have risked everything to illegally immigrate to the U.S.

Once here they are often exploited by individual citizens and employers who pay them less than they legally should, while at the same time cheating the U.S. government out of a proper share of taxes and fees, including payments into the Social Security fund, payments that would definitely be made if the worker were a citizen or less exploited. If the "illegal" immigrant is provided with false identification, paid at least the minimum wage, and has all of the appropriate taxes and fees taken from their earnings, they will never be able to gain the benefits that these payments are for. (In fact, it was just written into the Health Insurance Reform bill that the insurance exchanges are NOT available to "illegal" immigrants, as if the insurance companies needed any reason to discriminate.)

Just think, since their Social Security Number cannot be their own and is often supplied by their employer, when the employer bothers to pay FICA on their wages, they will never be able to collect. Should they be laid off, they are not able to collect unemployment.

But the greatest problem I see from this law is that it makes them victims of crimes without recourse. It may very well be true that truly unsavory characters are mixed among the "illegal" immigrants. I am certain that those unsavory characters, who are probably representatives of drug gangs, already have real or forged documents that would pass police scrutiny at any random stop. So the law will do nothing for what I read as the expressed greatest reason for the law. It certainly deprives the non-criminal, except for crossing a boundary without papers, any ability to report these criminals, the exploitive employer criminals, or the white supremacy thugs who prey on them.

Protecting the exploitive employers may be the whole purpose for the law, as if it were needed for that. Since Arizona made it illegal to hire "illegals" a couple years ago, a grand total of two companies have had their wrists slapped.

While their lives are certainly changing more than mine, I never thought I'd live in a police state. Show me your papers, indeed.

The more things change...

Why am I writing this in Life Changing? There are only three things that are supposed to radically change a person: a frontal lobotomy, deep psychoanalysis, or a religious conversation. Since this is somewhat on the topic of religion even though it is more about how human nature is unchanging, hence the title "the more things change ...," this entry is made here. (The full quote is "The more things change the more they stay the same." According to Yahoo Answers, it is a Proverb attributed to French novelist Alphonse Karr (1808-90).)

During a recent "long" drive through Portland, where I didn't stop at my favorite book store, Powell's Books, I happened to listen to at least a portion of a segment on a radio channel that I no longer remember, if I ever knew. (This I do not attribute to age but rather the effect of hitting seek and not noticing the channel it lit upon.)

Anyway, there was this female radio personality interviewing a male representative of the Culture and Media Institute who was waxing long, if not eloquently on the anti-Christian bias of HuffingtonPost's new religion tab. Now, I like HuffingtonPost and its format/forum which generally presents both news and a collection of generally well written blogs about a variety of topics and allows comments to both.

While I can agree that most of the blogs are of a liberal bias and the commenters seem to be a plurality of liberals, I had not actually gone to the "Religion" tab/page to get any impression of its bias, if any. And while I have done so now, I don't think that the HuffingtonPost is all that selective in its "news" so as to be biased or slanted in a way to be anti-Christian. I do think that the news that is current casts religion, and particularly, Christianity in a less than favorable light but this is not of HuffingtonPost's manufacture.

The current stories headlined there are of the potential Catholic coverup of Priests committing long-term acts of pedophilia. Rather than their removal from the situation that allowed such acts, they were believed to be contrite, committed to "sin no more," and forgiven. Another is of the Hutaree, a self-proclaimed Christian Militia. But there are also stories on the "news" of religions, namely: Easter and Passover, as well as acts of faith and charity. Admittedly fewer of the latter than the former but the HuffingtonPost is about presenting all the news and like most news organizations with a more conservative bias, i.e., Fox News, it is also about controversy and traffic, ratings.

For the most part, except for many of the comments, I have found HuffingtonPost's written contributions to be well thought out and worded. Many of them do express the authors' opinions of the facts, generally also well presented, If, as I've already admitted, this is a liberal bias, then it's because the facts tend to support that bias or that the subjects selected naturally have those kinds of facts.

What really got me in the interview was the Culture and Media representative going one step further and saying that HuffingtonPost was attacking prominent Christians, mentioning Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum specifically. His advocacy for anyone who chooses to call themselves Christian is worse than blind, particularly when that reinforces equally strongly their blatant non-Christian actions as role models.

My mother always used to say, "Christian is as Christian does." Pointing out the blatant lies and hypocrisy of such "prominent" self-proclaimed Christians is not an attack on Christianity but rather its only hope for salvation. Allowing anyone to practice uncaring greed, lying to deceive, and portraying those acts as Christianity to the world is horrendously damaging to Christianity. If those public figures want the mantle of Christianity, then they should act like Christians.

Blindly supporting any conservative, who is generally only conservative about their own power and money and not conservative in any other way, because they also "say" they are a Christian, fails to promote either conservatism or Christianity.