COMMENTARY Robin Meyers

The Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers. | Photo provided.

should be reminded that welcoming the stranger and providing for the needs of the foreigner is not some fringe idea in scripture. It runs through the middle of the Bible like a six-lane expressway. Nothing matters more than how we treat the other, which is inseparable from how we treat God. Philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a ground-breaking moral principle in the 18th century. He said that persons should never be used as tools, never as merely a means to an end. Rather, the moral imperative is that humans are always to be treated as an end unto themselves. They have intrinsic, not merely instrumental, value. Enlisting asylum seekers as unwitting propaganda dupes is exactly what moral philosophers, including Jesus, would call the objectification of the neighbor. The stunt was funded by Florida taxpayers, but many of them rejoiced. Cruelty is addictive, and dehumanization is a downward spiral. If you doubt this, watch all three episodes of Ken Burns new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, on PBS. But don’t watch it too late, because you may have trouble sleeping. The signs are all there, and history can repeat itself. A struggling economy in Germany, the need for a strongman to find scapegoats and the systematic dehumanization of European Jews. “Germany first!” was the rally cry, and the equivalent of “Make Germany Great Again!” People were swept up into this fascist cruelty until the Holocaust became inevitable. Once you have turned your own citizens into refugees who are welcome nowhere else in the world (including America), you must either put them all on the island of Madagascar to starve, which was Adolf Eichmann’s original Final Solution, or you must kill them— all of them.

DeSantis, be not proud. Systematic cruelty is a slippery slope, and nations die by increments, unable to see what they are becoming, and made monstrous by the banality of evil.

The Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is pastor of First Congregational Church UCC in Norman and retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC in Oklahoma City. He is currently Professor of Public Speaking, and Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University, and the author of eight books on religion and American culture, the most recent of which is, Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age.

Visit robinmeyers.com