I recently spent a day helping a Hispanic family who are going through the asylum process. It required a trip to Indy. My rudimentary Spanish came in handy.

The father and his five-year-old son came in May 2018, at the height of the Trump Administration’s deliberate policy of separating children from their parents. ICE deported the father to his home country, and sent the boy to the Bronx, where he went through a series of detention centers before landing in a foster home. For eight months he was separated from his family. A five-year-old child. My country did that, and it was unconscionable.

When I picked them up, the boy and I walked out to my Dodge Durango. He suddenly stopped in his tracks, looked at me with bugged-out eyes and a delighted grin, and exclaimed, “Nice car!” He’s a happy, fun kid who loved getting my attention for his playful antics. But I couldn’t help wondering about those eight months.

Just before the Civil War, a United Brethren minister wrote a song which swept through the North and rallied sentiment against slavery. “Darling Nelly Grey” told the story of a runaway slave from Kentucky whose sweetheart had been sold to a Georgia plantation.

It was based on a real situation. Benjamin Hanby and his father, a UB bishop, were highly involved with the Underground Railroad. Among the fugitive slaves they sheltered was Joseph Selby, who told about his “darling” who had been sold away. Selby died in the Hanby home, and Benjamin later wrote that song. It grabbed people’s hearts, because tearing families apart has never been an American value.

Today, we need a Benjamin Hanby to write a song about that Hispanic father and child. But I sense that American sentiment is already pretty much rallied against what happened to them.

When I write against the forced separation of families, I feel I’m in the best tradition of United Brethrenism. That applies to deporting a parent from an intact family that has been here a long time. And it applies to removing children from parents who cross into the States illegally as a punitive tactic of deterrence. The family is sacred. We can make allowances. Increasing the number of single-parent homes doesn’t make America better.

Bishop William Hanby, one of my predecessors as the denominational editor and a writer of UB history, intentionally broke the law to help slaves. He wrote:

“We may be bound by a man-made law, but we are more bound by a Lord given conscience….I have made my voice known and shown my scorn for injustice, and I will continue to stand against any law that makes it a felony to give food to a hungry slave or befriend precious men, women, and children who deserve freedom….When a man-made law is in conflict with God’s law, there is no compromise. We choose one way or the other.”

Amen.

I’m a fan of reporters. Of those dogged men and women who spend hours poring through documents, making phone calls, interviewing people, filing Freedom of Information Act requests. Who chase down numerous dead-ends until they find the right trail. Who shed light on what some want to keep secret, and who risk their lives and sometimes die on battlefields to help us understand foreign conflicts. I’m a fan of those people.

Last year, I remember watching a Rachel Maddow program in which she built this devastating case against the Trump administration regarding a foreign policy situation. She pulled together pieces of reporting from various credible news sources to paint a picture of Administration deception and corruption. It was very convincing.

A couple days later, I read a Washington Post article which dismantled her argument. She had taken many pieces of real information found by real reporters, and assembled it in a dishonest way to make the Trump administration look vile. The WaPo article set the record straight. It was good reporting.

I’m not a fan of talking-head pundits on TV and radio. Maddow, Hannity, Limbaugh, Carlson, O’Donnell, and Ingraham all do much the same thing–take the hard work of reporters, cherry-pick what they want, and slant it to fit their agenda. I don’t respect such persons, and I rarely listen to them.

Their’s is a lazy job. They don’t dig for news. You can bet they subscribe to the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other major news sources to learn what reporters have uncovered. Then they talk about it, twisting it to their liking and omitting what doesn’t fit their bias. If they are conservative pundits, they convince their listeners that none of these news sources–which they personally rely on every day–can be trusted.

As much as possible, I go to the source–the reporters who dug out the information and wrote it up. I was trained in their craft, I understand it, and I respect it. It’s a craft in which you inevitably make mistakes, and in which some people get sloppy and cut corners. But I much prefer them to the cannibalistic pundits.

I just finished a deeply disturbing book: “The Slavery Question,” written in 1852 by one of my predecessors as the United Brethren editor, John Lawrence. It’s comprehensive, looking at many aspects of slavery. Lawrence describes how American laws treated slaves as livestock. He republishes ads like this: “Large sale of negroes, horses, mules, and cattle.”

Slaves had no rights whatsoever. Legally, anything they acquired or owned belonged to the master. Their marriages had no legal recognition. They had no right to even their own children. A mother could return from the field and find that a child had been sold, never to be seen again. Slaveholders had the legal right to abuse them in any way they wanted. They were, after all, just livestock. Think on that: livestock.

One story shows how deeply the Christian mind can be corrupted.

A southern church needed new silver for serving the communion elements. So they sold a slave, a man, to raise the money. A slaveholder member probably “donated” the slave for that purpose. Every Sunday, when people came forward to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, they took the juice and bread from silver purchased by selling a human being. And it didn’t bother them. They saw it as no different from auctioning off a cow.

I can’t get that story out of my head. These were American Christians.

Michael Gerson is one of the few evangelical Christian voices in the Punditsphere. He carries solid credentials as a political conservative–Heritage Foundation policy advisor, speechwriter for Bob Dole and George Bush, among other things–but places the Bible above ideology, whereas most conservative pundits cite the Bible only when it affirms their ideology. I look forward to Gerson’s weekly columns. They can be prophetic, and they remind us evangelicals that we are citizens first of the Kingdom of God, and only secondly of a man-made country.

From this past week’s columns:

“According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely group in America to affirm an American responsibility to accept refugees. Evangelicals insist on the centrality and inerrancy of scripture and condemn society for refusing to follow biblical norms — and yet, when it comes to verse after verse requiring care for the stranger, they don’t merely ignore this mandate; they oppose it….It indicates the failure of the Christian church in the moral formation of its members, who remain largely untutored in the most important teachings of their own faith.”

I’ve felt for a long time that when convicts pay their debt to society, they should regain the right to vote. That’s what happens in Indiana and 35 other states. So I was happy to see George Will’s recent column, which echoed my sentiments.

In Florida (and other states), felons lose the right to vote PERMANENTLY. Will mentions one Florida felon who went on to earn a law degree. But for the rest of his life, he can’t vote. Is that right?

Will writes of Florida, “The state has a low threshold for felonious acts: Someone who gets into a bar fight, or steals property worth $300 — approximately two pairs of Air Jordans — or even drives without a license for a third time can be disenfranchised for life.”

That now includes 1.6 million Floridians, including 20% of the state’s voting-age African-Americans. Nationwide, of the 4.7 million former prisoners who can’t vote, one-third are African-American. There is an undeniable a racial element, and class element, since such laws especially affect African-Americans and poor people. Nationwide, such laws prevent one of every 13 African Americans from voting.

Will continues, “What intelligent purpose is served by reminding felons — who really do not require reminding — of their past, and by advertising it to their community? The rule of law requires punishments, but it is not served by punishments that never end, and that perpetuate a social stigma and a sense of never fully reentering the community.”

In Florida, Republicans control both houses of the state legislature, plus the governorship. They don’t want to jeopardize that. Since Florida is the largest swing state, and blacks and poor people are generally more likely to vote Democrat, Republicans–not just in Florida, but nationally–have a strong interest in not restoring the votes of felons. Similar laws exist in Virginia and Arizona, two other significant swing states where Republicans have the upper hand.

But permanent disenfranchisement isn’t the norm. Here are the 14 states which automatically restore voting rights after a person leaves prison: Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Hawaii, and Utah. As you can see, it’s a mixture of conservative and liberal states. Another 22 states restore voting rights after a person completes parole or probation (they may also be required to pay fines, fees, or restitution before having voting rights restored). So states like Florida are in the minority.

Interestingly, in Maine and Vermont, felons have the right to vote even when incarcerated. California extends voting privileges to persons in county prisons. There’s a lot of other variety. Wyoming, in 2017, restored the voting rights of nonviolent felons. In 2013, Delaware eliminated the five-year waiting period for restoring voting rights.

Florida has a process for restoring your voting rights: you have to wait 5-7 years (depending on the crime) and then apply to the governor, who can say yes or no. Republican governor Rick Scott has received tens of thousands of such applications, but has approved only 1600 of them (compared to 150,000 by his predecessor). A cynic might wonder how many of those persons were white, middle-class people with Republican political connections. He has also pushed other measures to suppress voting among people who tend to favor the Democratic party (students, the poor, minorities). Scott is my Least Favorite Governor Ever.

Name a single instance, anywhere, in which Democrats have passed laws to hinder or prevent conservatives from voting? Take your time. I’ll wait.