I’ve seen this a couple of places and generally, I wouldn’t care because religious idiots preach about stupid stuff all the time, but this one was preached directly at President Trump and the preacher in question was just wrong. Absolutely, completely, totally wrong.

What the hell else is new?

This came from Bishop Mary Anne Budde in an interfaith service at the Washington National Cathedral. In it, she says the following, in part: “And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”

Except they ARE criminals! If they are here illegally, their very presence makes them criminals! This is just bullshit.

I get the sentiment, I just don’t care. If we are to be a law-and-order nation, which I strongly think we should be, then “mercy” has little place in the sense that she was preaching. People make decisions, people live with the consequences of those decisions. Crying about mercy after the fact, when the people involved knew, full well, that they were breaking the law, is absurd. There are actions and there are consequences for those actions. Begging for mercy is irrelevant.

I get that a lot of people on the far left don’t  care. They’re running on pure fee-fees and I couldn’t care less. A crime is a crime and a crime has been committed. We do not and should not overlook criminal behavior, even if they have been valuable members of society since they got here.

That’s why I have never and will never support a “path to citizenship” by people who are violating the law in the first place. Every second of every day that they are here, they are violating the law of the land. It isn’t something that happened just once. It is a constant thing.

I understand the difficult of this for a lot of people because they’re not thinking, they’re just feeling. That is not a good thing. There’s nothing brave about breaking the law. There’s certainly nothing brave about encouraging it, which a lot of religious people, especially Catholics, do. There is a long history of the Catholic church purposely sheltering criminals, so long as they have the “right religious beliefs”. That ought to make them an accessory to the crime. Too bad they don’t wind up in jail too.

None of this impresses me. I’m really sorry if it impresses you. The first thing that we ought to expect from anyone permitted to live in any country is that those people will respect the laws and traditions and culture of the country in question. These people started off violating that from day one.

Send them all back. I know that’s difficult, but do it anyhow. We need to send a strong message to people who are considering breaking U.S. law and entering the country illegally. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here, the law is the law. If you don’t like it, maybe you should do it right in the first place. Wouldn’t that  be nice?