We don’t need 50 immigrant laws across America. We need one comprehensive law that’s just and fair for everyone.
—Scott Douglas
Being a Christian is supposed to be a simple matter. I’m not talking about belonging to a church or identifying with a particular denomination or proclaiming allegiance to any religious doctrine. I’m talking about spirituality, the state of being a Christian, which I will define crudely as doing one’s damndest to follow the teachings of Jesus—or, in more ecclesiastical terms, of aspiring to be Christ-like in one’s approach to one’s fellow human beings and the planet on which we live.
Again, this shouldn’t be hard—or wouldn’t be, if we human beings weren’t so susceptible to appeals to the lesser angels of our nature. Fear. Envy. Sloth. Covetousness. The love of money or fame or power. Too often, these are the emotions and attitudes that drive our daily actions—and always there are those powers and principalities that are only too willing to exploit the lowest common denominator and divert our tendencies to their own malignant ends. And in being so endlessly diverted, we forget too easily the most basic teaching of Jesus, which is that we are supposed to love and care for one another. Period.
In its tone and intent, this injunction is not unlike the language of the foundational document of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, it declares, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see the word “American” anywhere in that equation. In other words, the very concept of America is equated to the notion that all people—not all Americans, but everyone—are born with the same basic rights—not privileges, but rights. And maybe it’s just me, but I think that implied in that is the idea that part of our duty as Americans is to do our damndest to see that these same rights are extended to every person, regardless of race, creed or nationality. That, my friends, is the American Ideal, and to my ears, it goes hand-in-hand with the Christian duties of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, and giving aid to sick, the afflicted and the powerless.
All of this came to mind as I watched Scott Douglas on Monday night’s edition of “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central. Douglas is the longtime executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, meaning he has spent an eternity’s more time than most of us on the front lines of Christian duty. Among other things, GBM provides direct services—food, clothing and financial assistance for such things as rental payments and utility bills—to the needy. It also advocates for much-needed reforms in Birmingham and Alabama; these include improving mass transit, rewriting the Alabama Constitution of 1901 and, most recently, repealing Alabama’s anti-immigrant (read, “racist”) law, known euphemistically by its legislative moniker, HB56.
It is this last involvement that landed Douglas on the Colbert show on Martin Luther King Day. As host Stephen Colbert pointed out in his introduction, Douglas has called immigration policy and law “the civil rights issue of our time.” During the segment, Douglas referenced King’s much-quoted admonition that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, declaring that, “HB56 is a threat to me and all Americans.”
For the uninitiated, it bears noting here that “The Colbert Report” is basically a full-dress parody of the right-wing sophistries parroted daily and nightly by a succession of bloviators on the FOX “News” channel. Colbert himself assumes a persona very like that of the bellicose and bullying Bill O’Reilly, and in that guise pounced on Douglas’ further assertion that “Hispanics are the new Negro,” and his equivalence of HB56 and the Jim Crow segregation laws of the 1950s and early 1960s.
“Are things so good for African-Americans in Alabama that you can now turn your focus to Latinos?” Colbert asked. I am not sure I have ever been more proud to be from Alabama than when I heard Douglas’s reply
“African-Americans can never forget how hard we toiled to gain the rights we now have,” Douglas said. “We know the path we had to trod and we need to be in solidarity with these people as they face this stage of this abuse.”
Like Jim Crow before it, HB 56 is a law that flies in the face of Christian and American ideals. In denouncing such laws and appealing to the better angels of our nature, Scott Douglas did us all proud—most especially those whose lives have been disrupted and families torn asunder by the willful ignorance that Governor Robert Bentley and the Alabama Legislature have made the law of our fair state.
What a way to honor Dr. King. What a way to represent Birmingham. What a way to inspire hope that light will triumph over darkness.
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