I’m a conservative because, at heart, I think you should conserve what is best and fix if its broke–you shouldn’t go on some ideological dream campaign in which you think you’re going to make the world a better place. The world is already a pretty good place, but it still needs some work if my view, and the liberals often have a good vision of what’s wrong with the world.

I don’t mind listening to them to see afresh some things that needs fixing. Liberals usually ask the right questions and almost always get the wrong answers.

This is why I get frustrated when my fellow conservatives get their backs up and make an instinctive reaction against the liberal complaint and sometimes end up holding and defending an untenable position out of political brinksmanship.

So immigration. There is a big problem with immigrants. In fact, when you read history there has always been a big problem with immigration. Put simply, poor people want to move somewhere else for a better life.

America was built on immigrants. If you’re an American your people somewhere back the line were immigrants. Even the native Americans came here from somewhere else as I understand it.

So what’s the big deal about being anti-immigrants? I know, I know. We’re against illegal immigrants. OK, so let’s help them become legal. This is a big country there’s still lots of room for everyone. The majority of immigrants come to the USA to have a better life.

Let’s build a wall if we have to, but let’s also have a really generous way of opening the doors, welcoming immigrants, helping them find homes, learn English, get jobs, be integrated, pay taxes and enjoy the very best of our rich and generous country.

Furthermore, we need immigrants. They have always been a vital part of our workforce and our country. We should work to see them as the solution, not the problem.

We need to be concerned for the immigrants and the poor, but to equate the crime of abortion with the proper concern for the poor is a big mistake. It is a mistake on several fronts.

First of all it is a slip into sentimentalism. OK. I get it. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the poor and that’s ok, but any argument based on sentimentalism is an irrational argument and ultimately there is no mercy or justice or peace that is irrational.

Second, being irrational, it is a logical problem. Look, abortion and being mean to immigrants is not equal. Not at all. Consider this: if the two were equal we would be talking about the legal imprisonment, torture and murder of millions and millions of immigrants. Auschwitz is equal to abortion. Deporting illegal immigrants is not.

Third, this is a propaganda trick. Rather than our church leaders standing up and fighting abortion with real backbone and vigor they shift attention to the immigrants non stop. What is happening here is a kind of reverse scapegoating. Scapegoating creates an artificial guilty party. Reverse scapegoating creates an artificial victim, or takes a real victim and pumps them up to be the super victim who bears all the crimes of humanity and therefore elicits all our sympathy. This is trickery and fakery–even if it is unconscious.

What we need is common sense and compassion and some logic on all sides. Of course as Christians and Catholics we should identify with the oppressed, the poor, the homeless and the needy. We should reach out to them and see Christ in them and we will be judged if we do not.

But we should not remove the crime of abortion from the top of this list as a result.

I’ll finish. Look at it this way: Let us say that our government made it legal to incarcerate millions of old people in assisted living centers and euthanize them. Their families, their friends of the doctors were permitted to give the old folks an injection and put them to sleep–forever, and let’s say this was happening all across the country. Old people were being killed off.

Would you say working to abolish such an evil was on the same moral footing as helping immigrants?