Guest columnist
After three terms in office, Rep. Sue Myrick has been diagnosed with “Lou Dobb’s disease.”
The first Republican woman to represent North Carolina in the U.S. Congress, her symptoms include being one of the most intolerant women in the Congress. Sue Myrick also serves on the board of advisors for a fringe right-wing Christian group called the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. NCBCPS’s stated goal is to combat social regression by implementing state-certified Bible courses in public schools.
Unable to distinguish between mainstream Muslims and the radical fringe, Myrick’s religious and racially biased attacks have progressed to include illiberal attacks on the Hispanic population.
A progressive moral degenerative disease, Dobbs’ disorder is named for Lou Dobbs, former xenophobic CNN reporter, who attributed a startling rise in leprosy cases to illegal immigrants from Latin America.
When the moral neurons die, the ability of the brain to control bigotry is lost.
This ailment has several symptoms, including stiffness of the heart and masked hatred. Following nationwide protest for immigration reform, Myrick swore to continue her fight for 287(g), the regulation that allows for law enforcement harassment of foreign “looking” citizens and for detaining those without immigration documents. She has vowed to dedicate herself to the “stop and deport” tool, created to isolate and intimidate particular classes of people.
Myrick admits openly to her toxic-laced concerns, “The administration… is laying the ground work frankly to gut the 287(g) program … giving up on the fight on illegal immigration. Period.”
Indicators include ignoring the common good for self-righteousness and jingoistic and acutely distorted assertions.
Along with a limited capacity to tolerate and include others, for example, Muslim congressional interns, consistent with Myrick’s disease is a decreased ability to move the muscles of the face, resulting in hardheadedness and narrow constraints in political and humanitarian views. Left untreated, this can result in the acute violation of multiple constitutional rights, leading to the legally sanctioned mistreatment of others. In a moment of incoherency, Myrick wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to ensure that emergency medical care is not extended to illegal immigrants.
While there is not a sure cure that halts or reverses this type of discrimination, democracy modestly slows the progression of immigrant bashing and intolerance. Recognition of the fact that there are millions of undocumented immigrants sweating their lives away on farms and in restaurants, living with low wages and little hope may give way to a lasting cure and open the minds of our leaders.
Those are the same people spending billions on war machines while poverty and ignorance continue at home; those willing to fight a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but unwilling to fight with one-hundredth the money on immigration reform to secure economic freedom or safe labor on this nation’s farmlands.
If congresspersons like Sue Myrick can support the recruitment of undocumented persons to serve in this nation’s military, she can push for the kind of reform that gives them equal access. Such an offer made by our federal government lacks a moral choice when it says, “In war you will be an American citizen, but in the meantime you’re an illegal and we can’t help you.”
The cure lies in recognizing the full human equality of all of our people — before God, before the law and in the legislative body of government. Pray for Sue Myrick, pray for the cure!
We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because the laws of God command it, although they do. We must do it for the single and primary reason that it is the decent thing to do.
Khalilah Sabra is the director of the Muslim American Society-Freedom in North Carolina.
