ACROSS THE LINES - Archive (2006-2020)

Widespread conservative indifference to Donald Trump's personal failings raises fundamental questions. If a President pursues policies we like, and advances our party's agenda, why should we care if he (or she) is of questionable personal character? When it comes to Presidents, does personal morality matter?  And if it does, how? Immersed, as I have been, in the study of early American history, I thought I’d seek answers to these questions by turning to the men who led the American revolution and framed the U.S. Constitution. Like many people in the late eighteenth century, the founders of the United States conceived of human societies as composed of many bodies – individual bodies, ecclesial bodies (“the body of Christ”), political bodies, and so on. The struggle to establish, maintain and restore right order in these many bodies dominated every dimension of life in the early American republic - from the practice of medicine, to disputes over church doctrine and polity, ...

I closed my last post   by asking:   at what point should our moral qualms about a politician's character outweigh our other reasons for lending them our support?    Given the current environment, it's very hard to entertain this question as a matter of principle, without getting dragged down in partisan politics.  To assist us in this endeavor, let's imagine, for just a moment,  that Donald Trump is President ... and a Democrat.  Imagine that Donald Trump, the Democrat, defeated an unpopular Republican in the 2016 presidential election - for convenience, let's say Newt Gingrich.   Imagine that President Trump (D) has a Congress controlled by Democrats, and is attempting to pursue an almost entirely blue political platform. Imagine he is nominating liberals to the Supreme Court, pursuing single-payer healthcare legislation, advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, and so on.  Imagine, in short, that his Presidency seems  to...

In  my last post , I shared my struggle with the question of whether, as a pastor, I should post about politics in the age of Donald Trump.  Many of the responses included comments like this: "How can people who call themselves Christian support that man?"  I have decided to take this question literally, and, as a spiritual exercise, I will try to answer it.  In reading these answers, I suspect some of my liberal friends may find their blood boiling.  But I am not trying to articulate these arguments because I agree with them.  Neither am I denying that less noble reasons also drive many people - including many Christians - to support Trump.  Those I will address on another occasion. In this post, I am simply  trying to articulate some of the reasons that good, Christian people I know and love support Donald Trump . Perhaps you know someone  perfectly decent and honorable like this, too - a cousin, a grandfather, an old friend from ...

For the past many weeks, I have posted things "privately" to my Facebook account, so that only I can see them. On occasion, I have placed security settings on other posts so that only my wife,  Jennifer , can see what I'm thinking. This helped me feel like I was getting things off my chest, without stirring up unnecessary controversy among my friends. I have been conflicted because a number of people I love and respect feel I would do better to refrain from posting anythin g "political," given that I have returned to the position of pastor at a church that people of many different political persuasions call home. Other people I love and respect - including many from that same church - have thanked me for speaking out, and have encouraged me to continue.* As I browse my private posts of these last few weeks, I see a pattern: I have refrained from commenting about matters of policy and political opinion, and have instead commented on those occasions where I ...

On Monday President Obama became the first U.S. President to  speak the word "gay" in an inaugural address.   And with the alliterative phrase "from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall," he wove new colors - the colors of the rainbow flag, if you will - into the tapestry that is the history of the United States. But President Obama failed to break another inaugural silence, one that masks another form of denial that is as embedded in the American psyche as has been the denial that some of our citizens are gay.  By failing to utter in his inaugural address the names of our nation's closest neighbors, Obama joined with those who preceded him as President to indulge the popular fantasy that the United States is an island unto itself. The words which cannot be spoken by U.S. Presidents, it seems, are "Mexico" and "Canada."* I am reminded of the wooden cut-out map that American children are given to help them le...

A newly-released video of immigrant rights activists Daniel Alfaro and Angel Navarrete contesting the legitimacy of DUI checkpoints in Escondido should serve as a caution to us all. When Mr. Navarrete is stopped by Escondido Police, he demonstrates that he is sober, clearly meeting the purported "test." But when police ask him to produce a drivers license, he refuses to do so, asking instead a series of quintessentially American questions: "On what grounds are you asking me to produce identification?" "Am I being detained?" "Am I free to go?" Police officers persist in asking for his license, and when he refuses, they break his car window and drag him from the car. These checkpoints are just one of the reasons Escondido has earned the reputation as a hotbed of local anti-immigration sentiment and enforcement. Local police erect random and mandatory stops for all vehicles, obstensibly to check sobriety, but along the way identif...

Here are just a few nuggets from a recent National Journal Article on Latino Gains in California: Three in five Californians are now ethnic minorities. Latinos now make up 38 percent of the state, which nearly surpasses non-Hispanic whites (40 percent). 51 percent of Californians younger than 18 are Latino. In the introduction to his 2005 book, North to Aztlan: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States , Richard Griswold del Castillo wrote, “Since 1848 the Mexican people have been engaged in the slow-going process of repossessing the lands that they lost to the United States as a result of war.” "Reposession" may be too strong a word - Mexicans moving to the Uniteds States are not doing so as a part of some imgagined "reconquest," but rather as an expression of quintessentially American aspiration.  Still, the newly released results of the 2010 Census display that the pace of this demographic transformation is picking up. What does the Foundatio...

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Friday, January 28, 2011 At the dawn of a new decade, California is about to launch an unprecedented experiment. In the coming year, a commission of citizens – not the Legislature – will redraw the state’s political map. There is a great deal at stake in San Diego. California’s new Citizens Redistricting Commission will redraw the boundaries of the five congressional seats, four state Senate seats and eight Assembly seats representing residents of San Diego County. Independently, a commission of San Diego city residents will create new City Council districts and for the first time apportion the city’s population across not eight districts, but nine. And the five members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors ... well, they still draw their own districts, a textbook case in the power of incumbency. Aggregate population numbers from the 2010 Census, recently published by the U.S. Census Bureau, will provide the basis for redistr...

As an advocate for comprehensive immigration reform and a champion of immigrant rights, I am often asked how I can sanction the breaking of U.S. law. Clearly, the 12 to 15 million people living in the U.S. without documents broke the law when they entered the U.S. without authorization. Or, as is the case with an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the undocumented, they broke the law when they overstayed their visas. So, some people will ask me, “What is it about the word ‘illegal’ that you don’t understand?” The question merits an answer, but first requires a brief history lesson. When Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, one of the most contentious provisions was the one calling for employer sanctions. The U.S. Chambers of Commerce and other influential business lobbies opposed any such provision … until, that is, a simple phrase with a key word was inserted. The word was “knowing” and it appeared this way in the legislation: “It is unlawful for a person...

A little more than a week ago, a 36-year-old woman I’ll call Sonia Rivera answered a knock on the door of her downtown San Diego apartment. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told Rivera they were searching for a Mexican man suspected of criminal activity, who an informant had told them could be found at their address. After failing to find the subject of their search – Rivera insists she does not even know the man – the ICE agents asked Rivera to provide documents proving her legal residence in the United States. Unable to do so, Rivera was taken into custody, along with her three sons. The next day Sonia Rivera and her two teenage sons were deported to Mexico. Her youngest son, an 8-year-old U.S. citizen, was released into the custody of relatives residing permanently (and legally) here in San Diego. Another “mixed-status” family had been torn apart by the deportation of its undocumented members. Sonia Rivera and her family were victims of what Immigration...

Published in the San Diego Union Tribune , January 29, 2010 As they do to people living elsewhere across the United States, the coming months present to those of us who call San Diego County home a once-in-a-decade opportunity to take an honest look at ourselves. I refer, of course, to the 2010 Census. From the time that Congress first mandated “the enumeration of the inhabitants of the United States” in 1790, Americans have understood that there is nothing more basic to our democracy than the notion that every individual counts. The decennial census gives us a chance to consider whether our democracy really works for all of us. But this will be a difficult year to obtain an accurate count all of the region’s residents. Because San Diego County is home to so many immigrant, refugee and cross-border households, it has been ranked by the U.S. Census Bureau as the 11th “hardest-to-count” county in the United States. Gaps of language and literacy are the most obvious obstacles to...

Published on San Diego News Network , August 10, 2009 Earlier this spring President Obama urged an enthusiastic crowd of university students in Istanbul, Turkey to “build new bridges instead of new walls” around the world. I’m guessing Mr. Obama avoided this rhetorical flourish during his visit this week to Mexico. After all, as he sat down in Guadalajara with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, contractors for the Department of Homeland Security were putting the finishing touches on 670 miles of double barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Right here in San Diego border walls now cut through the Tijuana Estuary , an internationally-recognized coastal preserve, and prohibit public access to Friendship Park , a historic venue where for decades residents of the two nations have gathered peaceably at the international boundary. And in eastern San Diego County, DHS contractors are blasting their way through the Otay Mountain Wilderness to build ...

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune , August 16, 2008 The Department of Homeland Security will soon erect a secondary fence across Friendship Park, eliminating public access to a historic place where for generations people from San Diego and Tijuana have gathered to visit through the border fence. The seeds of Friendship Park's destruction were planted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Never mind that the 9/11 terrorists did not enter the United States illegally from Mexico. The psychic needs of an aggrieved nation matched nicely with the desire to limit undocumented Mexican immigration. Post-9/11, the idea that “securing the border” was a matter of national security became axiomatic for politicians of all ideological persuasions. The Bush administration institutionalized the axiom in 2003, when the newly created Department of Homeland Security took operational control of the Border Patrol, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (renamed Immigration and Customs E...

Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Barack Obama’s home church on the south side of Chicago, knows a thing or two about preaching. It’s clear the aptly-named Reverend Wright understands there is a place in the pulpit for righteous anger. A “jeremiad” is a spoken or written work lamenting the state of society and cautioning the powers that be to change their ways. The name is derived from the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, who foretold the collapse of the Kingdom of Judah for having broken covenant with God. Reverend Wright has come under attack for two jeremiads in particular. In a 2003 sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright preached this: “The government gives them drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God bless America.’ No, no, no, not God bless America. God damn America, that’s in the Bible, for killing innocent Americans. God damn American for treating our citizens as less than human.” Critics – white critics, to be more...

The humorist Art Buchwald died on Thursday, having spent the last year of his life wisecracking about his impending death – often live on television. “I hope I see you next week,” he told George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week on March 12, 2006. “We’ll say, ‘Something’s wrong with the camera – he’s still going!’” But Art Buchwald cracked more than jokes as he died – he also put a few more cracks in a crumbling cultural consensus about how we should prepare for death. The death-watch began last January when Buchwald made the unorthodox decision to forego the kidney dialysis that his doctors told him could prolong his life. “It was a tough decision,” he told Diane Rehm of National Public Radio that same month. “But I don’t want pain. I don’t want to be kept alive for the sake of living. I don’t want Alzheimer’s. I don’t want cancer.” And he added: “I’m very happy with my choices.” Even more striking was the emotional posture that Mr. Buchwald assumed after making his decision. As...

To many the work of a pastor may appear easy – even some church-going people seem to think that preaching on Sunday is all the job requires. In fact pastors must exercise many skills, from fundraising to counseling, from public relations to office administration. Pastors, I have heard it said, are the last generalists in a largely specialized professional world. What makes professional church work most difficult, though, are the people. At a gathering of pastors I once heard a colleague wisecrack, “You put that many people together in one place and they’re bound to stink after a while.” The rest of us laughed and shot each other knowing glances. Good pastors know that sometimes they stink up the joint, too. Last Thursday a Denver man, Mike Jones, announced on a Colorado talk-radio program that Ted Haggard, the lead pastor of New Life Church, a 14,000-member church in Colorado Springs, paid him for sex and used methamphetamines across the course of a three-year relationship. Jon...

Five years after the only September 11 that will ever seem to matter, the world is awakening to the potential consequences of the Bush Administration’s apocalyptic reaction to the events of that most horrible day. Public opinion in Europe and the United States is growing toward consensus: President Bush’s all-or-nothing “war on terror” is itself a grave threat to global stability in the 21st century. The 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were so horrifying the early tone of absolutism adopted by the Bush Administration seemed natural enough. Nobody blanched when on September 14, 2001 President Bush intoned, “every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” In his greatest fit of hyperbole, President Bush declared that the aim of America’s war on terror was to “to rid the world of evildoers”? This desire is understandable, even admirable, as a visceral reaction to the events of September 11. Who would...

Terry Schiavo died one year ago this Friday, thirteen days after the removal of the feeding tube that had sustained her since 1990 in what her doctors diagnosed as a “persistent vegetative state.” As all but the most media-averse will remember, Schiavo’s husband, Mark, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, disagreed bitterly about removing the feeding tube. Their dispute – which had been played out in the Florida legal system for over a decade – exploded in the court of public opinion last spring, when finally the Schindlers’ appeals were exhausted, and Mark Schiavo was granted legal authority to order the tube removed. The plight of Terry Schiavo and her family sent shivers of recognition across America – almost everyone could imagine their own family torn over what to do if a young loved one were cut down by illness or accident before having spelled out explicit end-of-life instructions. Schiavo’s tragedy also captured the public imagination because her family’s differences ...