Why, why, why.
Obama goes to Texas to chat with Rick Perry about immigration.
Obama delivered remarks after he met in Dallas with local elected officials, faith leaders and nonprofit leaders to discuss how to handle the flood of illegal immigrants, many of them unaccompanied minors from, crossing the southern border.
Why? Why did he meet with “faith leaders”? What have they got to do with anything? Why not limit it to nonprofit leaders, some of whom could well be religious? Why give “faith leaders” a seat at the table? Why can’t the government just stop doing this?
Asking for a friend.
Like it or not, churches have the ability to mobilize volunteers in a way that other organizations can’t or won’t. They have a long history of feeding and housing people in need.
Whether or not they choose to do so is an entirely different matter. Given the general cruelty of the right-wing Protestant churches, I’d say that the likelihood of getting a substantial commitment from any of them is low. But the liberal Protestant churches are a different story — and maybe the Catholic church as well. Especially those who believe it’s their mission to alleviate human suffering. Matthew 25, and all that.
Sorry, I’m not going to criticize him for this. There’s an enormous problem, and deliberately shunning a group that could help is madness.
Agreed. But not sure this article is an example really.
If someone followed the suggestion “Why not limit it to nonprofit leaders, some of whom could well be religious?”, I suspect it would be reported much like “Obama delivered remarks after he met in Dallas with local elected officials, faith leaders and nonprofit leaders to discuss”.
dmcclean – *laughing helplessly* – yes, you’re probably right. I even had that thought while typing, but kept on anyway.
It might be partly because churches are active in helping asylum seekers.
This is probably indeed primarily coming from the angle of thinking that churches are good at mobilization. That’s important given that the government itself is unlikely to do much about the situation. My Republican Senator wants to “send them back where they came from” (approximate quote), for example. This would seem to be a “we need all the help we can get” situation here. But I understand entirely where you are coming from.
The current wave of illegals has been a boon to the Catholic Church.
Most church basements have fully equipped kitchens as well as washroom facilities for both men and women.
The local parishes with the direction of the diocese receive endless funds from Washington in exchange for housing the migrants.
For example, over the past few years close to 500,000 Somalis have been resettled in The States and the majority of these were, at one point, housed in the basements of numerous Catholic churches.
It’s a very widespread practice/programme involving hundreds of millions of dollars.
And since the vast majority of Latinos are Catholic, it also puts a lot of butts into those empty pews…
The Church gets overflowing collection baskets and the corporations get shitloads of cheap labour.
Well, the USCCB (US Conference of Catholic Bishops) currently holds the federal contract for attending to all unaccompanied immigrant migrants in the country, so they’d have to be represented; they provide housing for detainees and then shuffle them to various family members if available, or group home, or back to detention while awaiting determination of their case.
And unfortunately, in little towns like *neck, where I live, the dominant social services are run ONLY by religious organizations. The main religious organization runs the food banks, the only year-round homeless shelter, evection prevention programs, the Medbank, etc. And since our glorious local leaders have seen fit to eliminate all county funding to non-profits, that gap is going to be filled by the churches.
Which was the intent—the head of the county council stated point blank that churches should be taking care of social services, not the government. And in this case specifically, the local branch of the USCCB would be coordinating with other programs in the area if there was an unaccompanied minor immigrant.
If you ask me, the question is not why he did it—he did it because there are federal contracts, because in some areas the only social services are run by faith coalitions, etc—the question is HOW. How is it that churches are still taking the lead over non-profits in providing services?? Obama will continue to meet with faith leaders as long as they are the primary stakeholders in a community…so how do we get them to NOT be the primaries?