Church-State Alert

For those of you who see yourselves as principled champions of the church/state “wall of separation”--by which I mean you think the Catholic Church should keep quiet about euthanasia and human embryo research, you think evangelical Protestants ought to keep quiet about homosexual “marriage,” and anyone of any faith, or no faith at all, like Nat Hentoff, should shut the hell up about abortion--I wonder if you have the same principled reaction to the church-state partnership formed between U.S. Congress members and liberal churches in the “Family Unity” tour now criss-crossing the country.

According to tour organizers, the tour’s objects include activities frankly religious:

“The Family Unity Campaign will consist of community meetings, prayer vigils and rallies across the country for thousands of U.S. citizens whose families have been separated or risk being torn apart by our nation's current immigration mess.” (If you don’t think a prayer vigil is a religious activity, try suggesting one for your kid's class at your next PTA meeting. If you're really a troublemaker, suggest a prayer vigil for the troops).

Take a look at the Family Unity tour schedule, and you’ll notice the venues all have something in common, namely they’re all in churches, (or Temples, or Iglesias, or Tabernaculos).

The Family Unity circus train just stopped in Detroit (not literally, of course, because there’s no train station in Detroit. Saaaay---maybe that's why Detroit's circuses never seems to leave town?):

More than 1,200 people, including three members of Congress, Mayor Kenneth Cockrel Jr. and a dozen members of the clergy supported calls for immigration reform Friday, with some saying that escalated enforcement against illegal residents is shattering families and neighborhoods across Metro Detroit. . . .The event, at the Greater Apostolic Faith Temple, is part of a 20-city tour organized by the members of Congress, grassroots organizations and a battery of faith groups to document the harm they say is caused by the failure of immigration reform and the coincident, increased enforcement. (“Conyers rips deportations”).

The talking point verb of choice meant to to accompany the tour is “rip,” as in “rip families apart.”

Speaking for the government side of this church-state partnership were John Conyers, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, and Illinois Congressman, Democrat Luis V. Gutierrez, leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Congressman Conyers, continuing his side role as Prosecutor General of the United States swore he would hunt down and punish immigration agents responsible for increased enforcement, and then maybe investigate. The article didn't report whether he swore to do this "As God is my witness."

The Family Unity “Ripapalooza” kicked off notably in San Francisco, where abortion hawk and “ardent Catholic” Nancy Pelosi got lots of attention from her address--preached from the sanctuary of a Catholic Church--in which she denounced the deportation of illegal immigrants as “un-American.”:

She said, "Taking parents from their children ... that's un-American."

Now for those of you who are confused by the things Nancy says, (in spite of that endearing tic of hers of repeating everything . . . of repeating everything), I’ll try to clarify:

While she is defintely denouncing ripping parents from children as un-American, she is definitely not saying that ripping a child from its mother is un-American, because saying that, of course, might chill someone’s right to choose. And it also would contradict Nancy's “ardent” Catholicism. Her ardent Catholicism.

(For those of you on the watch for irony, note in the video over Nancy's shoulder the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe--recognized by Catholics, ardent and otherwise, as Patroness of the Americas, and Protectress of the Unborn, and an object of particular devotion to Latin American Catholics--looking on silently as Nancy chatters out of her depthless ignorance about the dignity and divine spark in “every person. . .every person is worthy of respect.”

Query: Does going after some divinely sparked person with the express purpose of separating said person from her closest “family” member by means of a suction tube, a curette, or George Tiller’s hands, qualify as a “raid”?

"STOP THE RAIDS! STOP THE RAIDS!"

Anyway, as I’ve been mentioning a lot lately, while those of us on one side of a great deal of important national controversies are routinely shouted down by the Left as the “Taliban” and “theocrats” for presuming to allow our religious beliefs to inform our political ideas, the fact of Congressmen burning up taxpayer funds playing patty-cake with useful idiot clergy is just fine.

Apparently the distinguishing factor is that, as long as the useful idiots practice “God’s politics”: written by the Lord's finger and delivered as the 2008 Democratic Platform, the wall of separation can be dispensed with.