Rep. Dave Brat, the Virginia Republican who upset House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary thanks in part to his promises to fight immigration reform, told conservative radio host Rusty Humphries last month that the DREAM Act represents “the cynical use of language that only George Orwell could come up with.”
Brat said that the DREAM ACT — which would enable undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to earn legal status if they meet certain requirements — would, along with church-state separation, threaten the “pillars” of American success.
The congressman contrasted the DREAM Act with the teachings of Martin Luther King, whom Brat said “had a true dream of a better day for all of us under the law.”
This, he explained, was because King “came out of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” which got him to talking about how the fact that “the faith doesn’t get discussed in school anymore,” that “there’s hardly any free markets left” and that “the rule of law is under threat, it’s called the ‘DREAM Act,’” are sending America in the “wrong direction.”
All of this led Brat to dispute church-state separation, arguing, “If you want a total separation of church and state, get rid of law and get rid of love, because that’s in the tradition.”
The ‘DREAM,’ unfortunately, is the cynical use of language that only George Orwell could come up with where logic is just flipped on its head, so you call something that’s illegal a ‘dream.’ So, when Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream,’ he had a true dream of a better day for all of us under the law.
He had a Ph.D. in theology — everybody forgets this — he came out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which started way back when, but roughly with Moses, and in the U.S. Congress, when the speaker looks out, guess who the first face he sees staring him eyeball-to-eyeball? Moses. So the dream can never be, and nothing in the longer-term religious tradition, you can’t violate the law and have a sane culture over the long run. So you have to first of all have foundations that matter, a spiritual foundation or legal foundation, then we finally were fortunate enough to have a free-market foundation, and all of that made us the richest country on the face of the earth.
So now we’re threatening, all these pillars are under attack, the faith doesn’t get discussed in school anymore, the rule of law is under threat, it’s called the “DREAM Act,” free markets are in just free-fall, there’s hardly any free markets left. So we’re going the wrong direction.
