Anglican revs Andrea Budgey and Maggie Helwig are protesting Canada’s detention of “hundreds of migrants” on Rexdale Blvd. Neither Budge nor Helwig were arrested.
Meanwhile, in Sweden, a wheelchair-bound woman was gang raped by six asylum seekers, none of whom were being detained at the time.
And in California, an ACNA priest spent time praying outside an abortion mill hoping to save the lives of some of the babies entering the snuff clinic. He was arrested.
Does anyone else see anything lopsided in all this?
From here:
The Reverends Andrea Budgey and Maggie Helwig, surrounding the immigration detention centre on Rexdale Blvd with No One Is Illegal, on International Human Rights Day. Hundreds of migrants, mostly refugee claimants, are held in indefinite detention in Canada. Three people have died this year while detained by Canadian Border Services.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of Revs Budgey and Helwig doing what they are doing, I wish people in leadership positions that require special care in use of language for persuasive purposes, be they police, politicians, professors, or priests, be especially careful how they associate themselves with rhetorical terms such as “No One is Illegal”.
That is a slogan that is an abuse of language. Someone who sells something is a vendor. Someone who does that in an illegal manner, may be called an “illegal vendor”. Such is merely, what I was taught to call in classes dealing with Shakespeare, a “transferred epithet” – the illegality of the action being transferred, _grammatically_, to the person. No one, other than perhaps a politically-motivated priest, would protest, using the slogan “No One Is Illegal”, the charging of someone with being an illegal vendor. But change the action from selling in an illegal manner to migration in an illegal manner and the game changes. If the point is that legal rules about immigration are morally wrong, then address that directly and specifically; avoid misleading sloganeering.
Generally, I expect priests to have a higher standard re semantic clarity than what average politicians evidence; too often they descend to that lower level. Ditto, I might add these days, re professors in certain academic domains. When the rot hits the police we are doomed.
( One can see similar slogan-thinking in bite-sized discoursing on topics that link marriage, reproduction, child-rearing, homosexuality, and “love” – the latter meaning almost anything other than agape. )