I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard it with my own
ears. It wasn’t the call to keep our
country safe from immigrants. That’s old news. Or the presumption that we can
judge entire populations by the actions of a few. Call them terror countries.
That’s old news. Not the assumption that real Americans worship at altars
adorned with flags and guns and crosses. That’s old news, too.
What I heard this week was even more unbelievable. It came
from the creature who rests on piles of gold in his lair like the great dragon
Smaug, but flies out into the world to destroy everything in his path. The
creature who revels in setting our country aflame.
We must close our country’s gates to those “who support
bigotry and hatred.”
Unbelievable.
He meant, of course, brown people from warm places where
Jesus isn’t everybody’s friend. Places where muezzins call from minarets. Where
God’s name has two syllables. Where prayer and fasting are required of
everyone, not just monks and nuns. It doesn’t even matter if they were born here, like the Orlando shooter. If
their parents were immigrants from those places, that’s enough. The problem is immigration, and
it needs to be stopped. Then we will be safe.
I am a Norwegian Lutheran from Minnesota. Nothing could be
more bland. Yet if my grandfather were immigrating today, he would undergo
extreme vetting. In Norway in 2011, bombs went off. Young people
on an island were gunned down. All of it politically motivated. All of that in
a pale country were God goes by the right name. A terror country.
But if we lock the doors of our country, we also lock people
in. People like Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, James Holmes, and Dylann Storm. We lock in
all the violence and terror festering under the flag.
Are bigotry and hatred foreign imports? This summer, the Gay
Men’s Chorus of D.C. got on a bus and rode to Raleigh, NC to join with the
local chorus. In a public square, they sang:
Teach
every child to raise his voice
And
then, my brothers, then
Will
justice be demanded
By
ten million righteous men.
Make
them hear you.
There is video of the men standing in the dappled shade of a
large tree. The director gracefully waves her arms, extracting exquisite singing
from the united choirs.
But the singing isn’t all that is heard. From off screen,
someone shouts Leviticus 20:13. When he isn’t loud enough to drown out the
singing, someone else joins him. “Abomination!” Then louder, “They shall surely
be put to death!” Over and over again it crashes through the music. “Death!”
Surely we don’t need to be worried about importing bigotry
and hatred. We have plenty right here.
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