Dear Editor,
It is heart-wrenching to hear and see how children are separated from their parents on the southern border of America. The current administration has been heavily criticized and the separations have been deemed as child abuse in its moral sense. This issue is brutally complicated. It is correct to say, if you breach the law you will be prosecuted and to be prosecuted, children must be taken away from the parent who broke the law, in this case, parents who illegally entered the USA. It is like, if a mother is convicted and sentenced, the child cannot go to jail with her. On other hand, there are thousands of children caged in the processing centres. This is done allegedly to protect the children from perpetrators. The children are assured of better facilities after they have been processed (I don’t like this word). We have witnessed this through news casts. It is morally incorrect to cage children for two reasons; namely, firstly, children will be left to suffer physically such as cold weather and cleanliness, secondly, the children who are separated from the parents will suffer psychological trauma for the rest of their lives. When children are growing up, parents become their moral instructor and a buffer of flight or fight hormone. So, I leave you at this.
But as a Christian my curiosity was on justification of this matter. Attorney General Jeff Sessions quoted, ‘obey the government, for God is the one put it there’ (Rom 13:1). Cardinal Dolan disagreed with the AG on this quote from the Bible by saying, ‘obey the government laws, if and only the government laws are in conformity with God’s law.’ I wonder how many of us agree with the Cardinal? Pope Francis tweeted, ‘children must be able to play, study and grow in a peaceful environment. Woe to anyone who stifles their joyful impulse to hope.’ What baffled me was how we can filter our views by using fragments of the Bible. I am not a Bible scholar, but it is important to understand the Bible in its entirety so that we can truly come to believe in our sacred scripture. We need to be on our guard not to be led astray by anyone misusing the Bible. We live in a complicated world where messages of pros and cons are conveyed in one sentence. If we are not careful we might be the soft targets and victims of abuse of power. Let us use the scripture to bring peace and prosperity to humanity which is the key message of the same. Let us shun that that brings discord and despair to humanity. Having said this, let us not be numb to the subject matter because any damage to humanity anywhere in the world is damage to the entire humanity.
Yours faithfully,
Jerri Dias