Cynicism and Hope

“When you come after one part of the body, you come after all of us.”

It sounds like a threat, doesn’t it?

It’s the concluding sentence to Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics blog post on Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which may be signed into law over the weekend.

Reading it, I imagine many thousands of documented people committing the newly created crime of transporting their undocumented brothers and sisters, prompting arrests of documented and undocumented people together. They will fill the jails, singing canciones de libertad. The law will become unenforceable and other states will cancel their plans to enact similar legislation.

What the world needs now is threats like this.

From Harold A. Penner, in The Mennonite:

If Obama is right, then Mahatma Gandhi and King were wrong. If Obama is right, then the nonviolent Jesus is wrong. But no, Obama’s stated support of war is wrong. Jesus’ followers must insist on the Way of nonviolence.We need to teach and practice love for enemies. We need to renounce the just war theory. Morally flimsy from the start, it is now absolutely inapplicable because its conditions cannot be met. The fire power of modern warfare has made the theory completely obsolete. More so, it is inadmissible because Jesus commanded otherwise.