Follow Your Tax Dollars: The Woman Bishop, the Refugee Grift and President Trump
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Follow your tax dollars. That’s always good advice whenever one of these controversies about funding comes up. Such as the attack on President Trump, mainly over his policy to deport illegal immigrants, by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, its official name, as he sat in the National Cathedral.
That’s especially true when the controversy occurs in Washington, D.C., which this year will waste $6.8 trillion in the federal budget. To pay for that, $4.9 trillion will be stolen from you in taxes and $1.8 trillion billion put on the national credit card to be paid back, with interest, by your children and your children’s children.
A study a year ago by the Center for Immigration Studies found:
of the more than 30 faith-based nonprofits among those UN NGO partners — representing Jewish, Lutheran, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, and nondenominational evangelical organizations — shows that the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been mainlining taxpayer funds to these groups, which then distribute them to keep hundreds of thousands of migrants comfortably moving toward illegal U.S. southern border crossings.
Notice included are Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups. Even Evangelical Protestants, who politically are the most conservative, get their cut.
And get this, these so-called charities even make money on the suffering of the illegal immigrants. The Washington Post reported in 2015 during the Syrian refugee crisis, caused by President Obama’s murderous attacks on the country’s government:
More refugees also means more revenue for the agencies’ little-known debt collection operations, which bring in upwards of $5 million a year in commissions as resettled refugees repay loans for their travel costs….
“It’s money-producing, and I do find that troubling,” said Ronald Simkins, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Creighton University. “It adds a perception of conflict of interest. Certainly for their advocacy it can become that. ... It becomes in some sense self-serving in the end.”…
In some cases, collections subsidize a church’s various departments and programs. In the Episcopal Church, collections from refugees account for 1.7 percent of budgeted nongovernmental revenues, or $721,000 a year on average. From 2013 through 2015, the haul from refugees was $400,000 higher than expected and helped create a projected $3 million surplus for the church, according to Episcopal Church Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer Kurt Barnes.
Trump is going to be cutting out all this grift, including to Ms. Budde’s Episcopal Church. The impression we’re supposed to have is of selfless charity workers helping refugees. Certainly, some people do that and should be commended for feeding and patching up the illegals before they’re sent home. But I don’t see many of the workers in these church groups taking vows of “poverty, chastity and obedience” and living themselves only off charity. Instead, Big Charity is just as big a grift as Big Pharma, Big Agra and Big Tech.
Then there’s what happens to the illegal immigrants once they get here. As Trump has pointed out, many are raped and the children are sold into slavery. And once they get here, many children even are aborted. He pledged in his Second Inaugural “to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities.” Ms. Budde doesn’t care about any of that.
By the way, what is the position of Ms. Budde’s church on abortion? A Feb. 23, 2024 statement by the Episcopal Church’s Office of Government relations reads, with brackets in original:
In a series of statements over the past decades, the Church has declared that “we emphatically oppose abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience.” At the same time, since 1967, The Episcopal Church has maintained its “unequivocal opposition to any legislation on the part of the national or state governments which would abridge or deny the right of individuals to reach informed decisions [about the termination of pregnancy] and to act upon them.”
How’s that for clarity? What happened to: “But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37)?
The general policy seems to be taking our tax money bringing in illegal immigrants, then hand them over to Planned Parenthood, which takes our tax money to give them abortions. Grift upon grift upon grift.
We need strong religious leaders who aren’t giving us lectures while grabbing our tax money. The decline in church attendance shows people don’t want politics, but God.
Trump has described himself as a lax Presbyterian. But God bless him as he ends both the illegal immigrant grift and the abortion grift. He’s the one doing God’s work.
And King David didn’t always follow the Ten Commandments, either. Such as in that business with Bathsheba.
I hope Trump every day recites Psalm 63:
O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;
To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.
Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.
Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name.
My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips:
When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches.
Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.
My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.
But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth.
They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.
But the king shall rejoice in God; every one that sweareth by him shall glory: but the mouth of them that speak lies shall be stopped.