Last week Doug Watford wrote a letter to the editor claiming
the left wants what he, Trump, and Fox News refer to as “open borders.”
Accustomed as I am to that silly claim, I would not respond but for an
adjective Mr. Watford used.
“Soidisant.” He referred to me as a “soidisant columnist.” That
is the first time in my 70 years I have come across that term. My computer’s
spell check underlines it in red, insisting it never heard of the strange word.
However, Goggle has. It’s a hyphenated French word
pronounced swade-zan(t), combining soi, meaning “self,” and disant, which means
“saying.” Self-saying.
Translated to English, the word conveys characteristics like
supposed, pretend, and pseudo. It’s an odd thesaurusistic find for a writer who
often resorts to soi-disant facts to argue his case.
More than not, I’d rather not respond to letters to the
editor. My time writing this weekly column would be a complete waste if, at
least now and then, folks like Mr. Watford did not feel compelled to respond. I
don’t want to do anything to discourage them.
Still I wonder, when conservatives can derive sufficient
numbers of fact-based criticisms from my columns, why do some of them make it
up?
It happens when we liberals advocate for Bible-based justice
for immigrants and refugees. The issue gets jammed up in the right-wing echo
chamber’s recycling machine driving the creation of alternative facts. It
begins when the President Tweets his proforma lies. Fox News reports his Tweets
as though they are true. Rush Limbaugh embellishes. People like Doug Watford
repeat them in letters to the editor. Thirty percent of America nods their
heads, “Yup.” The cycle is complete.
Trump and Watford attempt to convince people that liberals
support “open borders.” They want to convey a faux-image of liberals as
thoughtless do-gooders, willing to stand back and allow anyone and everyone to
come across our borders to commit crimes and acts of terror while taking your
job and living off the God-fearing, patriotic taxpayers of the USA.
In the post factual world created by the vast right-wing conspiracy,
that oftentimes works. Doug Watford’s recent letter is Exhibit A. Mr. Watford
deserves the benefit of the doubt. He’s a true believer. The problem with true
believers is that they often refuse to allow facts to get in the way of
opinion.
To support his claim, Mr. Watford cites an August 2018
column in which I discussed the theological underpinnings of the immigration
debate. My premise was that God was an open-borders sort of guy (sic). Borders
are a human creation.
I wrote, “God’s
earth became a Garden, providing everything humans needed. No borders; just the
earth…populated by the first humans for whom God had a vision of shared
reality. Borders are human constructs designed to thwart God’s will by
perpetuating economic, political, and social inequality.”
Human sin, I
wrote, created a world where borders are tools of exploitation. “Borders were created,” my column alleged, “to make sure
that the very best belonged to the powerful and the less powerful had the
leftovers. Borders became the means for dividing God’s creation between the
haves and have nots. Border were the means by which humans institutionalize
injustice and inequality.”
The
column acknowledged human sin won’t permit the kind of open borders God
intended. Liberals do not want open borders. They want what God asks in the
Bible, i.e. justice for the least of these.
Conservatives
like Mr. Watford don’t want to talk about the injustice of ripping children
from their families and housing them in prison camps. They don’t want to talk
about the race-based efforts of this president to break the law by denying
asylum to people whose lives are threatened by gangs and political violence
back home.
Their
views cannot weather a fact-based debate, which allows the battle to continue
without justice for immigrants and refugees. Conservatives are not simply
soi-disanters. They are purposely ignoring the facts to create the world they,
not God, want.
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