This is an update to something I wrote back on 27 April, as Arizona enacted its draconian new anti-immigrant legislation. In my previous posting, I noted that a group calling itself Secure Arkansas was pushing to place an initiative targeting illegal immigrants on our fall ballot.
Early this month, Secure Arkansas announced that it had obtained the 77,468 signatures needed to place its anti-immigrant constitutional amendment on our ballot this fall. A week later, however, the accounting firm hired by the Arkansas Secretary of State’s Office to count the signatures on Secure Arkansas’s petition concluded that they fall some 10,000 short of the total needed to put this initiative on the fall ballot.
It’s still not clear how it happens that Secure Arkansas would submit a set of signatures to qualify a ballot initiative, when the number falls so woefully short of the number required.
Meanwhile, there’s been lively discussion of this matter on the blog of our statewide independent weekly newspaper Arkansas Times. Some of that discussion has focused on the role that the churches play or should play in addressing potential legislation that unfairly targets a vulnerable group of people. As this thread at Arkansas Times notes, a group of churches in Houston has organized to push back against anti-immigrant hate rhetoric in the Houston area.
And there’s been helpful analysis of the—well, the only word for it is lies—of the outright lies being spread by those who are now trying to use anti-immigrant fears to drive right-leaning voters to the polls in the fall, so that they will vote for the “right” candidates as they also pull the lever to target immigrants. Note the unsubstantiated claims of a contributor to this thread calling him/herself “timeandchance” about the connection of undocumented workers to crime. Despite repeated requests from several bloggers in the thread, timeandchance has never provided any link to what he/she claims are statistics compiled by the Department of Homeland Security.
Google those stats, and you’ll find them all over the internet, never once with any citation of a source. I have to conclude that those spreading this disinformation are knowingly and deliberately disseminating lies targeting a vulnerable minority group for political gain. They’re doing so with full knowledge that, for some people, if you say something loudly and often enough, the information will stick, regardless of whether it’s true or morally grounded.
And there’s been helpful analysis of the—well, the only word for it is lies—of the outright lies being spread by those who are now trying to use anti-immigrant fears to drive right-leaning voters to the polls in the fall, so that they will vote for the “right” candidates as they also pull the lever to target immigrants. Note the unsubstantiated claims of a contributor to this thread calling him/herself “timeandchance” about the connection of undocumented workers to crime. Despite repeated requests from several bloggers in the thread, timeandchance has never provided any link to what he/she claims are statistics compiled by the Department of Homeland Security.
Google those stats, and you’ll find them all over the internet, never once with any citation of a source. I have to conclude that those spreading this disinformation are knowingly and deliberately disseminating lies targeting a vulnerable minority group for political gain. They’re doing so with full knowledge that, for some people, if you say something loudly and often enough, the information will stick, regardless of whether it’s true or morally grounded.
In that vein, I was interested to read Joshua Holland’s report yesterday at Alternet, noting that Republican governor Jan Brewer of Arizona recently claimed that bodies of beheaded people—people presumably beheaded by illegal immigrants—have been found in the Arizona desert. As Holland notes, he’s contacted other Arizona state officials who say they have never seen a scrap of evidence of any immigration-related beheading in the state. Though Holland has called and emailed Brewer’s office for substantiation of her claims, she has not returned his call or email.
As Katherine Fennelly noted at Huffington Post yesterday, in our response to the presence of illegal immigrants in our midst and our willingness to believe heinous lies about these fellow human beings, many of us are confirming the validity of Lawrence Kohlberg’s conclusion that the majority of adults never reach the higher stages of moral reasoning. Most of us never move beyond the “conventional” stage of “law-and-order” moral reasoning to Kohlberg’s final “post-conventional” stage that focuses on our connections to others, concern for their welfare, respect for individual conscience, and adherence to universal principles of justice that transcend our individual prejudice.
And, as I note in my own contributions to several of the Arkansas Times threads about illegal immigrants, I think that one reason many of us are stuck at Kohlberg’s stage of conventional moral reasoning in places like my home state of Arkansas is because our churches keep us there. They have failed to assist us in forming more mature consciences.
Rather than challenge the status quo when it is targeting a vulnerable minority, many of our churches remain conveniently silent—when they are not outright aiding and abetting movements of social hatred. In their response to the anti-immigrant lies now sweeping the nation on the heels of the anti-gay lies that have been used by the same political operatives with the same goal of whipping up election-cycle fervor among the religious and political right, our churches, many of them, are acting precisely as they behaved during the Civil Rights period.
To their shame.
