After making a strong push last week to promote the views of religious liberals to advocate against the Trump administration strictly enforcing immigration laws, Monday saw the liberal Bible-thumping go into overdrive as MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell brought aboard Father James Martin, and cued him up to complain that Trump's immigration policies are "sinful" and to repeatedly attach the word "evil" to the government keeping children in a separate facility while their parents are prosecuted for illegally crossing the border.
At 12:26 p.m. Eastern, on her Andrea Mitchell Reports show, the MSNBC host introduced the segment by recalling that "a growing number of religious leaders, including the American Council of Catholic Bishops, rabbinical groups, even evangelicals who have in the past supported President Trump, are imploring the White House to change this policy."
Without informing viewers that it was religious liberals who started arguing that the Trump administration is violating the Christian Bible, leading Attorney General Jeff Sessions to quote Scripture last week in response, Mitchell began by turning to Father Martin and posing: "I've been following you on Twitter. You have tried to set the record straight in terms of the biblical verses that are being used by Jeff Sessions, Sarah Sanders, and others, to justify this policy. Help explain it for our viewers."
Father Martin recalled that the biblical portion read by Sessions "has been used to justify slavery at different points and even Nazi-era laws."
He soon complained that "I think those uses of Scripture to justify what is sinful, I think, is obscene," and then added that "it's really insane to use the Bible to justify sin."
Mitchell soon brought up the Statue of Liberty, noting that it is "just about the anniversary of the Statue of Liberty being delivered from France to us in the 19th century."
Father Martin soon continued to rail against the separation of illegal immigrant families during processing as he complained that "it's un-Christian, and it's sinful," and declared that people "need to call it what it is, which is 'sin.'"
The MSNBC host further cued up her guest for more bashing of the Trump administration as she recounted, "And you said last night on Twitter that it was 'evil,'" leading him to respond: "It is evil. I mean, we need to call it 'evil.' It clearly does not proceed from God."
Father Martin had used the word "evil" a total of five times by the time he reached the end of his rant:
It's also something that -- as we see, sadly -- is cloaked in lies, which is another way of recognizing something that is evil, so it has all the hallmarks of evil. I don't know what more we can say. We're choosing to do evil actions, and the only thing that we can say is that, you know, people who participate in these things are also going to be judged pretty harshly, I would think.
As if she were previously a model of journalistic neutrality, Mitchell then suggested that journalists are justified in taking a political position against such determined enforcement of immigration laws by the Trump administration:
This has precipitated a real soul-searching among journalists because those of us raised in the traditional frame of "On the one hand and on the other hand," are finding that we can no longer stand quietly and just describe this policy without pointing out that this is being misrepresented, and it's very uncomfortable for a lot of people of my generation of journalists to constantly be saying the President "Misrepresented, he misspoke, this is a lie, this is not true," but people have to speak out.
