Fr. James Martin essentially obfuscates the importance of the issue of life with a tweet about Trump’s immigration policy.
Look, treating others with respect and loving our neighbor is something we all must do as Christians. But abortion is murder. Immigration policies can lead to certain people getting killed but it’s not the same as legalizing murder.
The thing is, I’d imagine the left and the right, when it comes to immigration policy, are arguing over degrees. Very few would argue for a complete open border. So most of those on the left would argue for opening the door a bit wider than we currently have while some on the right would say close it over a bit or a lot more. But it’s still an argument of degrees.
But abortion, on the other hand, is an absolute. Killing yes? Killing no? There’s no mostly dead. No gray areas and no give backs. That’s why I think Fr. Martin pushing the term “anti-life” to describe Trump’s immigration stance is, to me, a bit disingenuous (whether intentional or not.) Sure, you could make an argument to make that word choice defensible. But Fr. Martin is clearly borrowing phraseology from the pro-life movement and applying it to this other issue.
Jesuit priest Father James Martin is no stranger to candidly sharing his thoughts on current political affairs. A New York Times bestselling author, Martin recently went viral for his powerful tweets showing support for transgender students’ dignity, and now he’s chiming in on President Donald Trump’s new travel ban that was announced on March 6.
Following news of the amended ban, which still excludes all refugees for 120 days, Martin fired out two tweets that summed up how the POTUS’s policies are still flawed despite the latest version’s updates. The Catholic priest pointed out how banning refugees from countries such as war-torn Syria puts those people at a higher risk of death, and is therefore “anti-life.
Many things put people at a higher risk of death. Allowing people to drive leads to people being killed in car accidents every year but nobody’s arguing to ban all motor vehicles. I know that’s arguing from a logical extreme but that’s actually my point. It’s a matter of degrees. Weighing pros and cons.
My thinking is half the world is on fire. We should do what we can for those suffering. But we need to be careful not to allow those setting the fires abroad into the U.S.. And in many of these countries there’s just not the infrastructure for accurate background checks. So do we allow 100 people into the U.S. from a country where Islamic radicalism is a major cause of suffering when we know that 1 in 100 may be a terrorist or 1 in a 1000 or whatever. To let one terrorist in is to make a bargain. You know that some Americans may die because you let in a terrorist. You hope not. But that’s the bargain you make. The good you do vs. the bad you allow. But one could easily say that’s an “anti-life” position.
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