Why Glenn Beck Was Right - A Case for Being Kind to Children

Sometimes we are our own worst enemy.

Take last week, for example, when I witnessed some of my fellow evangelicals chastising Glenn Beck for trying to alleviate at least some of the suffering of the thousands of children caught in the middle of the border crisis. Children being used as pawns by lawless governments on both sides of the Rio Grande.

By doing so, I believe we sadly aided and abetted the Left’s branding of our ranks as “haters” and “racists” and “cold-hearted.” This time our Leftist trolls in the mainstream media weren’t needed. We trolled ourselves. Needless to say this wasn’t one of our movement’s finest hours.

Glenn Beck speaks on his television program July 8, 2014 where he announced that he would be delivering food, water and toys to children along the border. (Photo: TheBlaze TV) 

Everyday at least 49,000 adults in the federal penitentiary system given life sentences without the possibility of parole are fed, clothed, and provided for with public money from the U.S. taxpayer. These are grown men and women who have likely committed the most unspeakable acts of man’s inhumanity to man, and no one taken seriously in our civic discourse argues to have these people starved, stripped, and left to fend for themselves rather than have taxpayers foot the bill to care for them.

So if we wouldn’t advocate abandoning adult violent criminals with the taxpayers’ money, why would anybody seriously oppose caring for mere children with private money? I thought we were in favor of having private charities return to doing the relief and charity work that government has proven since the Great Society it cannot?

[sharequote align="center"]Why would anybody seriously oppose caring for children with private money? [/sharequote]

I mean what great global marketing of Christianity this turned out to be: criticizing one of our country’s best-known media personalities for showing charity to suffering children. I can't imagine why the rest of the world wouldn't sign up tomorrow to join the Church of Jesus Christ and follow such an example.

Brilliance!

Obviously Stephen Covey can officially rest in peace now. His services are no longer needed. Apparently we’ve hired the same consultants that helped the GOP lose the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. We clearly don’t need any more help with branding, for we have officially reached messaging nirvana.

Note the sarcasm.

And no, Beck and others showing momentary mercy to these children is not what’s incentivizing them to come. Permanent welfare state programs, and the “perpetual vacancy” sign posted by the beltway ruling class in both political parties, is what’s incentivizing them to come. Beck and others should be applauded, not shunned, for shaming the statists by mobilizing the private sector so quickly while government grandstands for its sycophantic media on the sidelines.

Boys await medical appointments in a holding area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center on Wednesday, June 18, 2014, in Nogales, Ariz. CPB provided media tours Wednesday of two locations in Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, that have been central to processing the more than 47,000 unaccompanied children who have entered the country illegally since Oct. 1. (AP/Ross D. Franklin, Pool) 

Yes, I agree our border is being invaded by the Cloward-Piven immigration strategy. Which means the clear motivation for both the lawless Latin American regimes sending us their undesirables or the victims of their own corruption, as well as the lawless regime in the White House, is to so overrun the system with dysfunction the American people eventually give in to their statist schemes in order to make it stop. Contrary to what some folks probably being funded by George Soros are claiming, there is no Biblical case for what has come to be known as “amnesty.”

True, the Mosaic Law says in several places we are to be kind to the “alien” or “sojourner” among us. But “sojourner” doesn’t mean “squatter,” or someone who just shows up on your property and after a while gets to claim it for themselves. It means someone who is “passing through.”

Furthermore, the same Mosaic Law that required showing kindness to the “alien” (or foreigner), also required that alien to conform to the commands and customs of the culture in order to stay. In this case that even meant leaving your very religion behind in order to assimilate, for there was only one God in Israel and His name was (is) Jehovah. You could come from a pagan land, but if you wanted to bring your pagan language and pagan religion with you, then you had to go. There wasn’t an “Edom-Town” or a “Little Philistia” in Israel.

Not to mention the fact one of the primary institutions God gave the Israelites when He ordained their government was…wait for it…wait for it…private property with secure borders. In fact, that property and those borders were so sacred that if you sold the land given to your family/clan/tribe and it resulted in you becoming a debtor, there were built-in mechanisms that required those debts to be forgiven and the land to be returned in due time—lest your family/clan/tribe descend into a cycle of dependency.

That’s why they didn’t have a welfare state in Israel.

Anybody attempting to make a Biblical case for amnesty is either ignorant of what the Scriptures say, or purposefully distorting the Scriptures for their own political profit. Either way they’re wrong.

However, there’s also no Biblical case to be made for refusing to alleviate the suffering of others when you have the means to do so. Such a notion runs contrary to everything the Bible teaches. Let’s not allow our well-deserved resentment of the Obama Regime’s lawlessness make us a movement that validates our opponents’ slander of our character—especially because it’s their policies that created this crisis in the first place.

Surely we can walk and chew gum at the same time, capable of both protecting our sovereignty while also showing compassion to the children caught in the cross-fire of feckless globalists.

We’re better than this. Or at least I hoped we were.

If we’re not, go ahead count me out of trying to save an America that thinks this way. For an America that thinks this way can’t be saved.

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Steve Deace is a nationally-syndicated talk show host and Washington Times columnist. You can “like” him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter @SteveDeaceShow. He is also the author of the new book “Rules for Patriots: How Conservatives Can Win Again.”

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