Immigration and the Good Samaritan.

A couple days ago, one of our local newscasters said that the immigration debate had "split the country in two." Well, not exactly. However, Baja Burrito was closed Wednesday afternoon so employees could participate in the march downtown, so now I'm officially engaged. From an editorial in today's WSJ Opinion Journal:

"A secular objection is one that we ourselves have made many times before: It is not the job of ordinary citizens to act as INS agents. More to the point here, though, it should not be the job of INS agents to arrest human-rights workers dispensing water and other basic aid, like the two people snapped up last year in Arizona while driving injured aliens to a doctor.

The Rev. Luis Cortes, a Republican and the president of Nueva Esperanza, the country's largest Hispanic faith-based community development group, told us that the smuggling measure attacks the very underpinning of Judeo-Christian theology, which is to help those who travail and "treat aliens with fairness, justice and hospitality." Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles vowed last month to instruct "the priests of my archdiocese to disobey the [proposed] law." It would, he said, violate "our Gospel mandate, in which Christ instructs us to clothe the naked, feed the poor and welcome the stranger."

Notably absent from these compelling protests are the voices of some influential conservative Evangelicals. A number have said nothing, or, like Chuck Colson, evasively called only for "civility" in this debate. The Christian Coalition, meanwhile, has openly opposed immigration reform proposals--like many in this week's Senate bill--that go beyond strict enforcement measures. On the matter of punishing aid-givers, for instance, the organization apparently believes that the law-breaking of illegal immigration trumps claims to Christian compassion.

We'll leave it to voters to determine the political consequences of such a stance. Suffice it to say that along with many Americans, large numbers of rank-and-file evangelicals (including many Hispanics) are uneasy particularly about the notion of criminalizing acts of charity.

Morality aside, it's stunning that anyone would support--overtly or through their silence--a proposal that would insert government directly into the affairs and faith-based prerogatives of churches. When we allow the government to tell priests, pastors and rabbis whom they can help among the suffering, we give new meaning to the word 'restrictionist.'"

Here's the whole thing.