Mashable’s Gina Piccalo writes today about the split among evangelical conservatives on the issue of immigration reform. While some evangelical activists have cited biblical values to support comprehensive immigration reform, others — such as Phyllis Schlafly, David Barton and Bryan Fischer — are busily trawling through the Bible for passages to justify their opposition.
Piccalo interviews Americans for Legal Immigration’s William Gheen, who it turns out also takes a Christian nationalist view of his opposition to immigration reform. Gheen conveniently escapes any theological difficulty when it comes to dealing with the thousands of Central American child refugees on the southern border by claiming that the violence they are escaping is a hoax:
"Illegal immigration is the antithesis of Christianity,” says William Gheen, Raleigh, N.C.-based president of Americans For Legal Immigration. “It’s a gross mischaracterization of Christianity to apply it to tolerating the mass lawlessness, death and damages involved in illegal immigration.”
…
When asked about those children crossing the border in search of refuge from gang-related violence and death, Americans for Legal Immigration president Gheen said immigrant children are coached by money-hungry smugglers who give them “cheat sheets” with fabricated stories of woe, crafted to ensure their amnesty. “There’s no mass slaughter of children in any of the host countries,” Gheen said. “There’s no documentation of any mass slaughter...The children are reciting lines. This is being orchestrated.”
Gheen sounded the same note in an interview Tuesday with VCY America, linking immigration reform proponents with the “anti-Christ culture flooding up through the united states in our movies, in the TV shows, in the minds of people where they hate Duck Dynasty or anything associated with Christians.”
He said that immigrants’ rights groups are anti-Christian because “they don’t like laws, they don’t like borders”: “They like to equate Christians with Nazis and Klansmen and all sorts of stuff like that because Christians try to show any type of restraint on behavior. And they don’t want any restraint on any behaviors, whether it’s criminal or not. They don’t like laws, they don’t like borders. It’s anything goes, people do whatever they want.”
