RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Apostle James might not have thought much of Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein or Bill Clinton or even Barack “He-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong” Obama. They are just some of the political prodigies who change their policies as often as Lady Gaga changes her clothes—about five times a day.

James has a juicy jibe for such political pendulums. He calls them “double-minded,” warning his readers that “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” If you are going to swing from policy to policy like Tarzan the Ape Man, at least clarify and justify your political flip-flopping.

A little over a decade ago, the Democrats were singing in four-part harmony to President Trump’s “we need another brick in the wall” anthem. “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants into this country,” belted out Barack Obama.

Cue prima donna Pelosi, 2008: “Do we have a commitment to secure the border? Yes.” Why? “Because we do need to address the issue of immigration and the challenge we have of undocumented people in our country. We certainly do not want any more coming in.” Solo from Chuck Schumer, Georgetown, 2009: “Illegal immigration is wrong. A primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.”

In 2013, each of the 54 Democrats in the Senate voted for $46 billion in border security, which included 700 miles in border fencing. Blaring through their Marxist megaphones they pleaded the plight of low-skilled American workers whose wages were hit by cheap immigrant labor. The burden on America’s welfare state would be intolerable, they wailed.

So what are the sirens luring the Democrats to the perilous shores of open borders? Why now? Why so radically? Why display this double-mindedness in such a short span of time?

Commentators from conservative Dan Bongino to leftwing The Atlantic posit two political explanations. First, more illegals means more votes for the Democrats. Second, given the contagion of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, “Democrats hate the wall because Trump loves it” as the National Review puts it bluntly.

There is an economic explanation: globalists like George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates (the latter duo helped found the border-busting FWD.us) have made a Faustian bargain with their Democratic hangers-on. The UN and the EU are in the vanguard of an open borders agenda and the Democrats are keen to keep up with the globalist Joneses (or, in this case, Merkels) and pro-migrant Pope Francis. If not for Trump, it the US would have possibly signed up to the UN global compact on migration in December 2018.

Maybe the Democrats were lying like Pinocchio on steroids when they said a decade ago they believed in border security and immigration control. Maybe they never really changed their position but simply used taqiyya—the Islamic doctrine of deception—to consolidate their position with gullible voters.

The Democrat ideological pedigree would surely predispose its activists to share Marx’s vision of nation states collapsing and workers of the world uniting in the new egalitarian heaven on earth.

Islam, in some sense, shares the Left’s doctrine of open borders. Especially potent in the West over the last decade, Islam’s dream is a universal Caliphate that will bulldoze national borders and unite the Umma—the international Muslim community—under the rule of Shariah. Moreover, Muslims are seeking to migrate to Western countries to push their proselytizing agenda. “Muhammad mapped a migration master plan centuries before Merkel,” is how I put it.

A boundary demarcates a nation. Tear down borders and you wipe a nation off the map—never mind casting cartographers into outer darkness! Marriage between a man and a woman demarcates a family—the basic unit of society. Destroy marriage and you destroy the family. If a family can mean anything—from serial orgies to sologamy—a family will ultimately mean nothing.

Just before the Democrats changed their position on geographical boundaries—they did a 180 on the boundary protecting marriage and family. The anarchist U-turn on marriage by the Democrats defies a number of the above explanations that explain this flip-flop with political or economic explanations.

Above all, Trump wasn’t the tectonic factor when Democrats made a seismic shift from heterosexual to gay marriage.

In September 1996, US Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The law defined marriage as a strictly opposite-sex institution. Not a single Republican senator voted against the legislation; in the House of Representatives only Republican Steven Gunderson voted against it.

Democrats strongly supported the legislation (Nancy Pelosi an exception among leading Democrats) with House members voting in favor by a nearly two-to-one margin (118-65) and Senate Democrats surpassing that mark (32-14). President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law.

By the time America’s first legal same-sex marriage took place in 2004, the Democrats had dramatically reversed their position. In the same year, House Democrats vigorously opposed the Marriage Protection Act by a 176-27 margin. Darel Paul in From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites brought America to Same-Sex Marriage documents the “tremendous collapse of support within the party’s House caucus for a traditionalist definition of marriage, from 64% in 1996 to a mere 13% in 2004.”

He notes: “In the 1990s even the most liberal Democrats avoided clear public endorsements of same-sex marriage” but by “2004 all three minor Democratic candidates for president were calling openly for national same-sex marriage.”

There is a fundamental parallel between the volte-face on immigration and on marriage by the Democrats. Both have to do with distinctions—and making distinctions is a biblical imperative that goes back to the archetypal story of creation in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.

I first spotted this when studying intermediate Hebrew. I was memorizing Genesis 1 in Hebrew but hit the brakes when I reached verse 4b: “And God separated the light from the darkness.” ‘Separate’ was a funny verb! But it recurred again and again in the chapter. Later I discovered commentator and biblical scholar Dennis Prager’s stunning exposition on distinctions in the Torah, explaining how separations are God’s signature tune in creation. God himself creates separations or distinctions or barriers or boundaries, says Prager.

The deep-rooted problem with the Democrats is not political, economic or even Donald Trump. It is spiritual. Radical secularization has led to a radical removal of all boundaries—beginning with feminist bulldozing of the boundary between man and woman and culminating paradoxically with the gender fluidity non-existence of this boundary—much to the outrage of some radical feminists.

Laws are predicated on boundaries. If Democrats no longer believe in markers that distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, lawful from lawless, order from anarchy, electing them as lawmakers can only be self-defeating at best, suicidal at worst.

There is, of course, one great benefit to be had from a complete erosion of borders and boundaries—whether in the area of immigration or in the realm of the family.

In biblical religion, God’s boundaries in creation keeps order in place: the sea and the land; light and darkness; day and night; human and animal; etc. The separations serve to sustain creation and prevent it from backsliding into primeval chaos.

In the religion of Leftism, the great monster of chaos is a prelude to the Leviathan of the State emerging and subduing the chaos with a view to establish its own idolatrous hegemony.

If this is the ultimate goal of the Democratic Party, the Chuck Schumers and Nancy Pelosis of this world might not be so double-minded or unstable after all. On the contrary, they will be pursuing their master plan of achieving totalitarian State control with remarkable and ruthless single-mindedness.