OK, Back off, Lou Dobbs.

First, I have to say, I love Lou Dobbs. He rocks my world every evening at 5pm CST. But when Congress attempted to address a big, red, hotbutton issue for Lou, he was so happy he didn't seem to understand why people took to the streets. It's really about the Sensenbrenner bill.

I think the real underlying hotbutton in the Sensenbrenner bill is that it criminalized aiding one's fellow man. Whatever you do to an illegal (make him a felon, etc.), it outraged me that I, an American citizen, could get in trouble for giving a starving man a sandwich. What's next, soup kitchen workers are held responsible for checking IDs like a bartender? It may be necessary to enforce labor laws and punish those who hire illegals (if the lure of the job isn't there, that would go a long way to solving this problem) and perhaps that might need to extend to those who provide long-term housing (primarily in a business context, as, a landlord renting to illegals). But faced with the choice in the moment, I WILL give a sandwich to a starving man, I WILL give water to a thirsty man, and I WILL invite inside my warm home a man standing out in the snow. (These are meant to be proverbial statements, I would give more than a sandwich and water, and it rarely snows in Texas, and not enough to threaten someone's life.) And I'm just a regular ol' citizen. If I were part of the church, a pastor or a priest or a nun, I wouldn't just be doing that to be kind, but because kindness is the essential part of my job. The real reason that the Church got involved is not because they want to meddle in politics, but because the politics threatened to meddle in their most basic, fundemental mission-- to help the helpless, right there, in the moment, without asking for papers or really caring what Man's law has to say about it. What's next? They can't help drug addicts or prostitutes on the street because drugs and prostitution are illegal and therefore those people are criminals? This is ridiculous. But this really outrageous point of legislature is really just in the Sensenbrenner bill and I don’t think that any other part of the debate, short of the silly idea that we would round up 11 (or 12, or 20) million hiding illegals at gunpoint and ship them back where they came from–as if we could pull that off, we couldn’t even get a few thousand people out of New Orleans who were holding up signs saying here we are, please come get us– would have driven anyone to the streets or gotten the Church involved.

I have a little story. When I was in high school, I turned into my neighborhood's entrance to find a man whose car had run out of gas and he had managed to coast off the road and into our entrance, where he got stuck. I was young and naive and had never heard of Ted Bundy (who used to pretend to have car trouble or other issues) and so I immediately jumped out of the car to help. I ended up using my car to push his safely out of the way, then we went and got my mom who got us a gas can and helped us get some gas for his car. Now this might have been foolish (Ted Bundy) and we did drive with a container of gas in the front seat (boom), but I will never regret helping this man. Never mind that his English was quite broken, never mind that he might have been legal or illegal, never mind that he smelled like hard labor and his car should have been in the junkyard, he needed help and I helped him. And I defy anyone to put me in jail for that. I would go with a bigger smile than Tom Delay at his booking.