An Open Letter to Jeff Sessions
Before today, I could not imagine anyone sinking low enough to use the Bible to justify taking children – frightened, traumatized children – away from their parents in order to warehouse them in conditions that most people wouldn’t accept for their household pets.
You have stated – as have many Republicans over the past week – that people who cross the border into the US illegally have broken the law, and have to be held responsible for their actions. Exactly what crime are these children guilty of? What laws have they broken? Why are they being treated as criminals? Why are they being punished for the actions of their parents, for decisions their parents have made over which they had no control?
We’ve heard your “pResident” state that people who are entering the country illegally are “animals”. Is that why you are on board with caging children in conditions that animal rights activists regularly protest against? Is that why you think this abhorrent practice is somehow justified?
You’ve said that our laws must be obeyed. That’s pretty rich coming from someone who perjured himself by denying, while under oath, contacts with Russian operatives – contacts which you only acknowledged when confronted with irrefutable proof that they’d taken place. As I recall the Bible, sir, and Christian teaching as a whole, “bearing false witness” is against one of the Big Ten – and as I also recall, there are no neat little Biblical loopholes that explain how bearing such false witness is perfectly acceptable if you’re a traitor to your own nation.
Might I remind you, sir, that you enthusiastically supported the candidacy of a man who is under investigation for crimes against our country? Where was your holier-than-thou Christian conscience when he lied repeatedly to the citizenry, when he bragged about grabbing women by their genitalia, when he handed classified information to the Russians during a closed-door meeting with them in the Oval Office? Where was your outraged moral rectitude when he called Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people”?
To put it bluntly, sir, you are a hypocrite of the highest order. Of course, using the Bible and Christian doctrine to excuse abhorrent behaviour is not new – the Nazis did it when they declared Jews as subhuman non-Christians and shipped them to extermination camps.
In the past week, I have heard Republicans say that people who have broken the law and are imprisoned are also separated from their children. We all know that people who are imprisoned do not have their children put in prison as well. They are not denied knowledge of their children’s welfare or their whereabouts. In other words, even the worst rapists, murderers, drug dealers and thieves currently held within our prisons are given more humane treatment than the parents of children whose only “crime” was seeking a better life for those children who are now being held in deplorable conditions.
There is no law that dictates the separation of children from their parents. There is no law that decrees that parents, “legal” or “illegal”, should be denied knowledge of their own children’s location, or refused any information about their children’s well-being.
Quoting the Bible in order to support such inhumane treatment of our fellow human beings is not only despicable – it is beneath contempt. And if you were as familiar with the Bible as you claim to be, you would know that without being told.
There has been much outrage from the GOP of late about there being a “special place in hell” for anyone who speaks out against a “pResident” who has lied on a daily basis, who praises people like Kim Jong-Il as trustworthy and worthy of respect, who has done every single thing possible to please Vladimir Putin – our sworn enemy – to ensure that “Russia first” is the priority all Americans should accept.
I can tell you, sir, that if a “special place in hell” exists for those who have lied, those who have aided and abetted our enemies, those who have condemned innocent children to the unspeakable emotional torture of being taken away from their parents, there will be no room left in hell for anyone other than Republicans.
Your behaviour, your actions, and your rhetoric have been as anti-American as possible. And now you’ve gone a step further by attempting to convince Christians that tearing children away from their parents is sanctioned by the Bible – rhetoric that literally spits in the face of Christian teachings, and can only be construed as an attempt to deliberately lead moral Christians away from the god they profess to follow.
This is the point at which one would normally ask the obvious question: Have you no shame, sir? But it’s a question that has been repeatedly rendered moot. The truth is that you, and your entire party, have shown that you are incapable of feeling shame. You continue to defend a man who lies on a daily basis, an unapologetic racist who claims that he is upholding a law with respect to illegal immigrants that simply doesn’t exist.
I only wish that I could be there when people like you, who claim to be following the teachings of Christ, are called to account for your actions by the god you pretend to worship. I’d be interested to hear you try to convince your lord and saviour that you were acting in his name when you tore innocent children away from their parents, and denied those parents even the most basic facts about where their children are and how they are being treated.
If there is a “special place in hell” for anyone, surely it is reserved for people like you, who have twisted Christian teachings into something so abhorrent, something so vile, something so disgustingly self-serving, it defies any sense of simple common decency.
I actually don’t believe in hell, Jeff – and yet I take great joy imagining you roasting in its fires for all eternity.
Yours truly,
Nance Greggs
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