06/07/2004: "God turns up in the oddest places"

Last week, a bill was introduced in Congress aimed at forcing the International Monetary Fund to follow the lead of many Western nations, including the U.S., and cancel the debt owed to it by poor nations. According to Jubilee USA Network:

Representatives Waters (D-CA), Leach (R-IA), Frank (D-MA), Bachus (R-AL) and Lee (D-CA) introduced the JUBILEE Act today into the House of Representatives. The JUBILEE Act is groundbreaking legislation that would require the U.S. Treasury to work in appropriate multilateral settings to achieve 100 percent cancellation of the debts of 50 nations by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF would be required to finance the cancellation from their own resources without harmful conditionality.

Now, this may be a perfectly wonderful thing to do. I know the effort to get debt relief from the United States was supported by many Christians, not just mainliners but Catholics and evangelicals as well. Terrific. But when Rep. Maxine Waters made a public statement in April announcing that she was going to introduce this bill, her language was the kind that normally makes Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reach for his defibrillator:

"In the year 1999, the worldwide Jubilee movement reminded us that the Lord instructed the people of Ancient Israel to celebrate a Jubilee�or a Year of the Lord�every 50 years. During a Jubilee Year, debts were forgiven. The Jubilee movement brought this simple Biblical concept of debt forgiveness into the complicated worlds of politics and finance.

"Countless clergy, members of religious orders, dedicated church members and other activists explained to Members of Congress how debt payments took food from the mouths of the poor and caused 19,000 children to die every day in the world's poorest countries. The Jubilee movement opened our eyes to the fact that countries such as Zambia, Tanzania and Nicaragua spent more on debt service payments than they spent on health and education combined. Groups such as Catholic Relief Services, the Episcopal Church, the Africa Faith and Justice Network and the American Friends Service Committee brought a moral authority to political debates and helped us to understand that canceling the debts of the world's poorest countries was the right thing to do."

Just imagine if someone were to talk this way when introducing a measure to restrict abortion or prevent gay marriage or ban doctor-assisted suicide. The bill in question would be automatically assumed, without any necessity to read it, to be unconstitutional, simply because of the motives of the sponsor. I don't have any problems with what Rep. Waters' says. I just wish that people like Lynn and the ACLU and the People for the American Way would put a cork in their church-state hysteria when someone other than liberals talks this way.