Author: Alan Bean

Evangelicals call for immigration reform

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By Alan Bean

Evangelical organizations from the left-leaning Sojourners to the right-leaning Focus on the Family, have joined in a plea for immigration system.  If you’re curious, you can find a list of all the signatories here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Critics will note that there are few concrete policy proposals mentioned in the brief list of principles released by the Evangelical Immigration Table.  But the fact that conservative religious leaders are calling on political leaders to “welcome the stranger” is noteworthy.  Here’s the statement: (more…)

Mississippi can’t kick the private prison habit

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By Alan Bean

Geo Group, the private prison firm that lost three prison contracts in Mississippi earlier this year because of gross violations that turned facilities like the juvenile prison at Walnut Grove into hell holes, has been disciplined again.  This time, Geo is accused of failing to protect the safety of corrections workers at its prison near Lost Gap MS.

You would think that Mississippi officials might be getting the idea that private prisons aren’t such a good idea.  Not so.  Christopher Epps, Commissioner of the MS Dept. of Corrections, immediately announced that all the three private prisons previously run by Geo Corp would be turned over to the Management & Training Corporation of Centerville, Utah.

According to the Associated Press, Epps is hoping for a better result.

“The Mississippi Department of Corrections is looking forward to a great partnership with MTC,” Epps said in a statement Thursday. “There is a need for different types of prisons, including state and regional as well as private facilities in Mississippi. MTC will be held to the same high standards as set by MDOC and I feel extremely confident that MTC will do a great job.”

Epps told reporters he thought Mississippi would get better terms if the three prisons were sold as a package deal.  In other words, Mississippi is trying to do corrections on the cheap, and that’s the problem.  The only way private prisons can turn a profit is by cutting corners.  If they were really held to the same standards as state prisons they would have to hire as many corrections officers as MDOC and pay them comparable salaries.  The private prison industry would also have to invest in a safe working environment for their employees, something that Geo Corp clearly failed to do. (more…)

When God changes the rules

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By Alan Bean

In a recent post, I responded to a Curtis Knapp, a Baptist pastor in Kansas who believes the federal government ought to be executing homosexuals in accordance with the twentieth chapter of Leviticus.  I suggested that when the Bible is read through a Christological lens, the admonitions of Leviticus can be taken seriously, but not literally.  They are still in the Bible, but they are trumped by the higher vision of God revealed in Jesus (and in many parts of the Hebrew scriptures as well).

I gave a single example from the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus clearly distinguishes his message from the “eye-for-an-eye” demands of the Mosaic law.  But there are plenty of other examples.

In a captivating post called “When the atheists are right” law professor (and Friends of Justice board member) Mark Osler, points to the story of the Prodigal Son.  Responding to a Christian father who thought it was his duty to consign his dead son to hell, Osler introduces an alternative take on grace and the character of God.

And there, in the Book of Luke, is the story of the prodigal son — the younger of two, who demanded his inheritance and then squandered it through “dissolute living.” He hits bottom, having run through the money, and resolves to return to his father and repent. However, before he has a chance to say anything, his father runs to him, puts his arms around him and kisses him. There is love there, before repentance, even in the apparent absence of repentance. There is love before all; that is what Christ directs us to do.

The Elder Brother’s rejection of the Prodigal was solidly rooted in precept and principal, but it couldn’t be squared with the gracious heart of God.

Fred Clark’s Slacktivist blog uses Peter’s vision in Acts 10 in which a sheet containing animals which were “unclean” according to Levitical law accompanied by the spoken command: “arise, Peter, kill and eat.”

And what he understood was that his vision was not about dietary laws regarding “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.” What Peter understood about Peter’s vision was that it was about Gentiles — about outsiders, about those people whom the laws of Moses said were law-breakers, unclean, an abomination.

Here is what Peter himself said about his own vision:

You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.

In Acts 10, God changed the rules.  Peter wasn’t informed that his interpretation of the dietary rules was wrong or that the ancient wall between Jew and Gentile was based on a misunderstanding; he was informed that a new vision of faith in action had burst upon the world.  If Peter interpreted his vision in light of the Jew-Gentile divide, we should apply it to the current antagonism between gay and straight Christians.

The Sunday after Barack Obama came out for marriage equality, Dallas pastor Freddie Haynes made a bold stand in the pulpit of Friendship-West Baptist Church in which he asked why Christians are so eager to major in areas that Jesus minored in.  Jesus majored in deliverance and compassion; judgment was a minor issue (unless he was talking about preachers).

This morning, my wife and I encountered these familiar words from Luke 13.  The setting is the healing of a woman who had been crippled for eighteen years.  Jesus’ religious critics are appalled that a Rabbi would heal on the sabbath, a clear violation of biblical teaching and rabbinic tradition.

Jesus replies,

You hypocrites!  Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

In other words, the cold word of the law melts when brought into contact with the compassionate heart of God.  The lesson: whenever we find a disconnect between the clear word of scripture and the grace of God revealed in Jesus; we go with Jesus.  Every time.  All the way.

David Barton’s therapeutic history

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This isn’t really about Thomas Jefferson

Faux historian David Barton has written a book about Thomas Jefferson that portrays the deist slave holder as a Christian patriot who espoused enlightened views on slavery and race.  But Barton’s primary aim is to expose a cynical liberal academy that lies to the American people.  This quote from the book’s blurb is typical:

America, in so many ways, has forgotten. Its roots, its purpose, its identity―all have become shrouded behind a veil of political correctness bent on twisting the nation’s founding, and its founders, to fit within a misshapen modern world.

The time has come to remember again.

Evangelical historians Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter learned about David Barton’s book from their students at Grove City College.  What they were hearing sounded strange enough to warrant a careful reading of Barton’s book.  (more…)

Anti-immigrant sentiment on the decline nationwide

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By Alan Bean

As the summer heats up, anti-immigrant rhetoric has been cooling considerably.  Or, to be more precise, mainstream politicians are beginning to understand the downside of siding with the haters. 

In an interview in which he was predictably critical of Barack Obama, Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, tried to pull his party back from the brink on the immigration issue:

“It’s the one thing that separates us from the rest of the world is to say embrace our values, learn our language and work hard and dream big and create what you want to create because it helps all of us.  You have to deal with this issue, you can’t ignore it and so either a path to citizenship which I would support and that does put me probably out of the mainstream of most conservatives or … a path to residency of some kind.”

In Vermont, Massachusetts, New York and the District of Columbia, public officials are in full-scale revolt against the now-mandatory Safe Communities program.

California legislators are close to passing a TRUST Act which would “require police to continue to detain only those immigrants for deportation purposes who have a serious or violent felony conviction under state law”.  TRUST is a somewhat desperate acronym for “Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools”.

TRUST is hardly a radical piece of legislation; it simply means that, in California, the kinder, gentler version of Safe Communities will be enforced instead of the “deport everybody” approach that has been in vogue in many jurisdictions over the past couple of years.

In Texas, the state Republican Party dropped much of the mean-spirited, anti-immigrant language from its platform in the course of its state convention in Fort Worth.  According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the new statement begins like this:

 “Because of decades-long failure of the federal government to secure our borders and address the immigration issue, there are now upwards of 11 million undocumented individuals in the United States today, each of whom entered and remain here under different circumstances,” the document states. “Mass deportation of these individuals would neither be equitable nor practical.We seek common ground to develop and advance a conservative, market-and law-based approach to our nation’s immigration issues.”

This “Texas Solution” calls for a temporary worker program “to bring skilled and unskilled workers into the United States for temporary periods of time when no U.S. workers are currently available.”

In addition, “the program would require participants to pay fees and fines, pass a criminal background check, prove they can afford private health insurance and waive rights to apply for public financial assistance.”

This new immigration policy is hardly a panacea for proponents of comprehensive immigration reform, but it’s a vast improvement over the  “what part of illegal do you not understand?” approach that has dominated conservative politics since the advent of the Tea Party revolution.

According to Bud Kennedy, a Star-Telegram columnist who attended the Republican Convention, the new GOP platform is driven by demographic reality.

“I’d start telling Hispanic voters about Republicans, and they’d say, ‘I’m pro-life, too, but you want to deport my grandma,'” said Norman Adams of Houston, celebrating the Texas party’s 180-degree turn away from its position of removing all illegal immigrants and slowing legal immigration.

“They can’t say that anymore.”

Texas has always been a one-party state.  It was once impossible to win statewide office if you ran as a Republican, and the same is now true for Democrats.  But with the Hispanic slice of the electorate growing by 2% with every new election cycle in Texas, the GOP mainstream is beginning to read the writing on the wall.
 
Tea Party reaction to the state GOP’s softened stance on immigration was predictable–they think the new policy represents a de facto amnesty for “illegals”.
 
It doesn’t, of course.  The presence of non-citizens would merely be tolerated under the proposed policy, there would be no fast track to citizenship, and beneficiaries of the new regime would have to relinquish their right to public assistance.  In short, we are talking about a permanent class of second-class citizens.  But, as Kennedy suggests, people who live in fear that Grandma could be deported at any moment may be happy with half a loaf.
 
If Texas Democrats want the enthusiastic support of Texas Latinos, they need to move to the left of state Republicans on immigration, something they have been reluctant to do.  Democrats know white conservatives will control Texas politics for at least another decade, so they are reluctant to sell themselves as the party of inclusion and diversity.  The blue party was hoping it could win Latino support by largely ignoring the immigration issue and allowing the GOP’s nativist and xenophobic platform to drive Latino voters into the democratic party by default. 
 
The Texas GOP may just have taken that option off the table.

Why American immigration policy is in chaos

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By Alan Bean

It is difficult to make sense of American immigration policy because our immigration policy makes no sense.  The Obama administration swept to victory in 2008 on promises of comprehensive immigration reform.  When efforts to follow through on this promise were met with hysterical references to amnesty and calls for wholesale deportation, Obama ramped up a Secure Communities program ostensibly designed to identify and deport undocumented residents with criminal records.  Secure Communities (also know as S-Comm) led to record levels of deportation (upwards of 400,000 per year) as the number of people entering the country, legally and illegally, dropped to a 40-year low.  Mass deportation did little to silence Obama’s critics on the right but sparked claims from the Latino community that the spike in deportation was separating undocumented parents from their  citizen children while targeting people who posed no threat to public safety.

In response to criticism from a sector Obama can’t afford to ignore, ICE officials were ordered to focus on keeping families together while deporting only “the worst of the worst”.  In December, immigration prosecutors initiated an extensive review of the nearly 300,000 deportation cases pending in the nation’s 58 Immigration Courts to ensure that the new policy was being carried out.  As a result, the deportation machinery has slowed considerably. 

Conservatives are calling Obama’s new policy a de facto amnesty for illegal aliens; Latino critics complain that thousands of harmless people are languishing in immigration prisons while public officials dither.

Now, according to this article in the Tucson Citizen, some are alleging that the judicial logjam in the nation’s immigration courts has been caused by conservative officials within the Homeland Security establishment who take their cue from conservative Republicans demanding that every undocumented person must be deported regardless of criminal history or family circumstances. 

In other words, as the President attempts to arbitrate the contradictory demands of conservative Republicans and Latino activists there is no sign that a coherent immigration policy will emerge any time soon.  By nature, Obama is a conciliator eager to meet his opponents in the middle.  As the fall election approaches at freight train speed, however, no one is in the mood for cutting pragmatic deals.  If Obama doesn’t go to the wall to back up his kinder-gentler version of Secure Communities he could lose the enthusiastic support of the Latino community.

New policy slow to clear deportation backlog

on Jun. 09, 2012

Tucson Citizen

Federal immigration officials have closed less than 2 percent of the more than 230,000 cases they have reviewed in the past six months in their effort to reduce backlogged immigration courts and focus more attention on deporting serious criminals. (more…)

FBI hears from critics of controversial deportation program

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The controversy over the federal government’s Secure Communities program is heating up.  If this briefing from “Uncover the Truth” (a website dedicated to monitoring Secure Communities), the FBI community is split on the issue, with one group upset over the federal mandates that have been imposed on local law enforcement, and the another group supporting the status quo.  Is Secure Communities a legitimate program or a classic example of mission creep and Big Brother bureaucracy?  This issue has created an interesting coalition between civil rights advocates and small government, privacy rights people. AGB

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Contact: Jessica Karp, NDLON: jkarp@ndlon.org , 917-855-7682

Controversy Over “Secure Communities” Deportation Program Widens as FBI Role is Scrutinized At Bi-Annual oversight meeting, Advocates Call on FBI to alter program to protect public safety

Buffalo, New York–Today, immigrants’ rights and privacy advocates are addressing the bi-annual meeting of the FBI group charged with managing the nation’s criminal databases. Their topic is the controversial “Secure Communities” deportation program. The advocates say the FBI makes the program possible by automatically forwarding all arrest fingerprints to DHS for an immigration background check. And they say the FBI should change that policy in response to growing calls from governors, police chiefs, and communities across the country–including New York City, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, and Vermont, where Secure Communities was recently activated over strong local opposition.

Said Jessica Karp, Staff Attorney and Soros Fellow with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network: “We know from documents received through the Freedom of Information Act that Secure Communities has generated fierce debate within the FBI between those who support states’ right to opt out and those who want to keep the program mandatory. Top FBI officials have described their position as ‘being caught in a nuclear war,’ saying, ‘[a]ny way we go will contradict one of our partners.’ We hope today’s meeting will show the FBI that the right way forward is clear—it must end its facilitation of this ill-conceived and mismanaged deportation program.”

Sonia Lin, Attorney and Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Cardozo School of Law Immigration Justice Clinic, says: “The FBI is supposed to partner with state and local police to promote public safety. But Secure Communities was imposed on states and local agencies without their consent. It undermines community policing, diverts local resources, and turns local law enforcement agencies into gateways to deportation. The FBI has the authority—and the obligation—to rethink its involvement in this deportation dragnet.”

Travis Hall, a PhD candidate at New York University studying biometric programs, said: “There are many ways to set up biometric databases–they can either increase detrimental forms of surveillance and encroach upon privacy rights, or they can be used to bolster security and be privacy enhancing. This depends a great deal on the values embedded into the technologies during their design and application. Right now the Secure Communities program is a textbook case of ‘function creep’, when information collected for one purpose is inappropriately used for another. It is my hope that the FBI will take into consideration the concerns of privacy and immigration rights activists in setting the standards and policies that structure their collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information.”

How many innocent people have we sent to prison?

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I can’t read stories like this without thinking of the Tulia defendants, the Colomb family, Alvin Clay, Curtis Flowers and Ramsey Muniz, innocent people Friends of Justice has featured in narrative campaigns.  Some of these people are now in the free world; others are still locked up.  This story in The Nation asks the obvious question: If so many people can prove their innocence, how many innocent people are still locked up?  Can it possibly be as high as the 136,000 suggested below?  And how did they come up with that number?  Read on.  AGB

How many innocent people have we sent to prison?

By Liz Webster
The Nation

When Beverly Monroe met her new neighbors in the free world after spending seven years in a Virginia prison for a crime she didn’t commit, she spoke candidly about her past. “I said I’d been through a crisis,” she says. “People immediately think a divorce or you lost your husband or something like that, which is all terrible enough.” (more…)

Would God kill homosexuals if he had the chance?

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By Alan Bean

Pastor Curtis Knapp is probably a great guy. I have been a Baptist pastor in Kansas and I know the type: kind, gentle, fun-loving, infinitely polite. In a recent sermon, Pastor Knapp suggested that the government, if it understood its divine mandate aright, would put gay people to death. He wasn’t advocating vigilante violence, mind you; only the government is authorized for this kind of malice.

Now he says he was misquoted. Or quoted out of context. Or quoted by people who, were they as drenched in the biblical world view as his congregants, would have realized he loves gay people and wants them saved, not slaughtered.

On the other hand, Pastor Knapp still thinks God, if he had his way in this wicked world, would have gays massacred en masse. The Almighty said as much in plain black and white in the 20th chapter of Leviticus.

That passage (I call it the ‘killin’ chapter) also calls for the summary execution of adulterers, idolators, father-cursers, and sinners engaged in various kinds of incestuous coupling. Even sex with a menstruating woman is liable to punishment–for the man and the woman.

When people talk about “the angry God of the Old Testament” this is what they have in mind. You could spend a lifetime in most churches and never hear a single sermonic reference to Leviticus 20; but pastor Knapp ain’t no kangaroo preacher who bounces over the tough texts.

How should Christians interpret this kind of passage? The normal practice is to pretend the “texts of terror” don’t exist. If you don’t get around in the Bible much, that works pretty well.

But there are always folks intent on reading the Bible clear through. Some of them even make it to Leviticus 20. “Oh my God,” they say, “I’ll have to talk to the preacher about this.”

But the conversation rarely takes place. Parishioners fear, rightly, that the preacher won’t have a comforting or enlightening answer, so they try to forget about it.

Creative exegetes find clever ways to domesticate passages like Leviticus 20. Perhaps this is just hyperbole, the intentional overstatement of the truth. God doesn’t want us to kill homosexuals; He just wants us to know he hates them (and idolators, and adulterers and father-cursers, and . . .)

I’m not sure this helps much. If God thinks homosexuals are an abomination, why shouldn’t there be open season on the non-straight?

And if sexual orientation isn’t a choice, it must express the creative will of God. Does God make people gay and then hate them for it? Is this commendable, or even logical?

In all likelihood, the author of Leviticus believed that everybody is born straight because that’s the way God planned it. The perverse insistence on going against your natural inclinations constitutes a conscious rejection of God which must not be tolerated. This view of creation is then attributed to the Creator.

Unfortunately for adherents of the “biblical worldview,” this understanding of sexual orientation is just plain wrong. If some people are born gay, either God messed up, God isn’t in control, or God wants it that way. Either way, God must bear the ultimate responsibility.

This issue comes down to the character of God. Is God the perfection of love, as the Bible insists, or is God a weird alloy of love and hate, good and evil who must be obeyed even if he doesn’t make sense because . . . he’s God?

A proper understanding of incarnation is helpful here. According to the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), Jesus was fully God and fully human, even if we can’t understand how that could be so. To be fully human, Jesus had to be born into a specific culture at a specific time, and the tenor of his teaching would reflect that fact. Jesus spoke and acted as a first century, Second Temple, Palestinian Jewish peasant because that’s what it means for God to empty himself of divinity and take on human flesh.

God speaks to us through the Scriptures. But here too the logic of Chalcedon applies. The Bible is utterly of God and utterly human. Being human, the Bible reflects the perceptions and thought processes of the epoch in which it was written. It is the product of a pre-scientific world. As an inescapable consequence, the Bible doesn’t give us a scientific take on creation.

To say that the Bible must be right because it is God-breathed is like saying that Jesus, although he appeared to be human, was really God wearing a clever disguise. We can’t have it both ways. Incarnation and inspiration are both self-limiting realities. God comes to us clothed in human limitation and yet is never less than God.

You aren’t suppose to understand this, and you certainly don’t have to believe it; but that’s what orthodox Christian teaching boils down to.

So, what if the scientists speak of evolution over billions of years and the Bible speaks of fiat creation over a six-day period? Which is right? Almost half of the American population believes that buying into evolution means giving up on God. But evolution is just another form of incarnation; a completely natural process that is entirely the work of God. God doesn’t just give the evolutionary process a nudge now and then; God inhabits the evolutionary process.

Which brings us back to texts of terror like Leviticus 20. A Christocentric (Christ-centered) interpretation of Scripture means reading Leviticus through the mind of Christ. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality. Jesus counseled his disciples to forgive their enemies and wouldn’t back down from the hard implications of this teaching even when nailed to the rough wood of a Roman cross: “Forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Jesus didn’t reference Leviticus 20 either, but he did address the death penalty.

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Matthew 5:21-22)

How would Jesus respond to Pastor Knapp and the twentieth chapter of Leviticus? “You have heard that it was said in ancient times, ‘hate the homosexual’, and ‘when a man lies with a male as with a woman they shall be put to death.’ But I say to you, love everyone. If you look down on your homosexual brother or sister, you are liable to judgment, and if you call your brother a ‘fag’, a ‘fairy’ or a ‘dyke’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Did Jesus really believe in hell? I don’t know, but he talked about it all the time and, inevitably, the hell-bound are the unforgiving, the uncompassionate, and the hard of heart. If the biblical worldview is the vision of Jesus (and I believe it is) there can be no place for sermons that pander to the worst impulses of the people in the pew.

God is good all the time. We are all helpless sinners, even the best of us. We are all saved by the infinite grace revealed in the eyes of Christ the Savior. Thanks be to God.

DC says no to “secure communities” immigration checks

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By Alan Bean

If you’re wondering what this “secure communities” business is all about, you probably aren’t Latino.  If so, you have nothing to worry about.  Forget about it.  This doesn’t apply to you.  Unless you believe in equal justice.  In that case, read on.

Secure Communities began as a pilot program in late 2007.  The idea was to hold criminal suspects in detention until their fingerprints could be checked against FBI and DHS records.  In case of a match, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) puts a detainer on the individual until immigration status can be verified and a preliminary decision made about deportation. 

In theory, only serious criminals are selected for deportation, but the rules governing the Secure Communities program are vague and susceptible to multiple interpretations.  Public officials who want to use Secure Communities as a cover for racial profiling and the harassment of heavily Latino neighborhoods are free to do so.

Secure Communities was voluntary at first, but the Obama administration, eager to dodge the impression that it is soft on illegal immigration, has become increasingly enamored of the program.  Safe Communities is now mandatory and universal compliance will be demanded by 2013.

US immigration policy lurched in a conservative direction in 1981 when Ronald Reagan took a strong stand against Haitian asylum seekers.  But the real change came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1996.  The implementation of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) made deportation much easier while shifting decision-making authority from the judiciary to petty government officials.  The post 9-11 creation of ICE as a component of Homeland Security set the stage for Secure Communities.  The United States now deports seven times as many people as we did in 1994, just prior to AEDPA and IIRAIRA.

Although half of the roughly 400,000 people deported annually in recent years have criminal records, many are guilty of nothing more than driving without a driver’s license (an understandable violation if you are documented). 

How safe has Safe Communities made America?  Deporting bad actors will always be a popular idea, but when entire communities are transformed into virtual police states, community trust is seriously eroded.  Nobody wants to talk to the police, even the victims of violent crime or potential eyewitnesses.

Secure Communities policies were softened slightly earlier this year, but critics were uniformly unimpressed with the miniscule changes.

As this story suggests, the erosion of community trust is emerging as the major reason people across the nation are fighting mad about Secure Communities. 

Secure Communities Immigration Checks Resisted In District Of Columbia

Elise Foley
Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — District of Columbia council members said they plan to act swiftly on Tuesday to defy a federal immigration enforcement program the city will be forced to join the same day. (more…)