While the federal government is cramming foreign children like sardines into cages, waiting for the Obama Administration to decide how best to use the crisis for its own political advantage, the feds are making it clear that there is no place in the camps for pastors who would like to encourage and pray with the children.
While the feds say they're "meeting the spiritual needs" of the children through their own chaplain program, they are absolutely shutting out any pastor who is not part of the official program.
Todd Starnes of Fox News reports:
Coffin said he was having lunch with four other ministers when they started tossing out ideas – ways their churches might be able to be an encouragement to the children being held.
One of the other ministers placed a telephone call to Border Patrol and was turned away. So Coffin decided to make a telephone call, too – and what he was told was startling.
“They flat-out said no,” he said.
What about just a pastoral visit to encourage the children?
“They said no,” he said.
What about allowing pastors to pray with the children?
“There was an immediate no,” he replied.
The message was clear – men and women of the cloth were not welcome at the border.
“That frustrates me to no end, to be honest with you,” Coffin told me. “It drives me absolutely nuts that our government would turn us away.”
He said churches are not even allowed bring soccer balls or play ping pong with the illegal immigrant children.
Pastor Coffin even asked if they could provide the children with toys, blankets and food. But the federal government’s response was the same – no donations allowed.
What could be driving such a policy?
Spiritual needs? We have our own official government program for that! You would just be in the way!
I guess the most obvious answer would be that the feds want to limit the public's access to the facility because the last thing they need is more cell phone pictures going up on Facebook and Twitter that reveals the horror of life in the camps. That is not a consideration pertaining to the well-being of the children, of course. It's to protect their own asses. Just as you would expect they would think.
Not far behind is their basic hostility toward people of faith and the notion that there would be any benefit whatsoever to pastors visiting the children. Spiritual needs? We have our own official government program for that! You would just be in the way!
The ban on donations is harder to explain, but it smacks of circling the wagons. What's happening in these camps is simply an atrocity and the less contact there is between the camp operations and members of the general public, the better. They won't even let members of Congress see what's happening, so they're certainly not going to grant access to some meddlesome pastors who might not be Obama supporters.
Now lest you think I'm overlooking it, obviously the right thing to do is to send the children back home as soon as possible. But you don't have to ignore that fact to believe it's also the right thing to do to meet their needs while they're here, and those who want to help should not be turned away just because the government is worried about political embarrassment, nor because bureaucrats and their political masters in Washington don't like having their secular sensibilities offended.
Someone needs to help these kids. God knows the feds aren't doing it.
