Only Donald Trump Could Piss Off Episcopalians Like This

The man is a genius.

It’s not every day that the Episcopal Church tells you to go fuck yourself. Donald Trump and his army of racist lickspittles truly have a gift.

The Episcopalians didn’t actually use the words “go fuck yourself.” (Out loud.) Sean Rowe, the Presiding Bishop of the church, was much more polite about it when he let his flock know that their refugee resettlement ministry is ending its four-decade-long association with the US Refugee Admissions Program run by the United States government. We’re just paraphrasing.

The split is not because the Trump administration has ushered in a golden age of freedom and abundance that has brought prosperity to every corner of the globe, thereby cutting way, way down on refugee flows from developing countries to the West, oh no. When has Donald Trump ushered in a golden age of anything besides grift?

Rather, the Episcopal Church is walking away from the partnership because Trump and his people are unreconstructed bigots explicitly focusing on the nonexistent oppression of one tiny subset of the planet’s white people while condemning much of the nonwhite refugee population that the Church has sought to help to a weird limbo in which many have been approved for resettlement in America, but aren’t allowed to actually come here because the very sight of them causes the blood vessels in Stephen Miller’s brain to pop like bubble wrap being danced on by an entire touring company of Stomp!

Rowe sent a letter out to his flock on Monday laying out the situation. After talking about the near-complete stoppage of refugee arrivals since the admissions program was shut down in the days immediately after Trump’s inauguration, he wrote:

Then, just over two weeks ago, the federal government informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees.

In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step.

Incredible. Not only has the administration really ramped up its Make America White Again campaign, but it is demanding that religious charities participate if they still want to be a part of the federal government’s refugee work at all. And this from people who have made “religious freedom” for Christians an overriding goal of the entire conservative movement.

Luckily for the Episcopalians and common decency, religious freedom works both ways.

We wrote about those Afrikaners a few days ago. That’s the group of alleged farmers fleeing from the nonexistent “genocide” being perpetrated against them by the majority-Black South African government as revenge for decades of Apartheid. Or at least that’s the white supremacist allegation. Trump even repeated it to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday morning:

Again, NOT ACTUALLY HAPPENING. If Trump wants to rescue people from a genocide, there’s a real one that is ongoing and has been in the news a lot the last couple of years that he could work on. We’re pretty sure he’s heard about it.

Rowe went on to state how “painful” it has been to watch a tiny group of people “selected in a highly unusual manner” while other groups have been patiently waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years. He was also outraged that “victims of religious persecution, including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months.” Which is hugely ironic, because one of the rallying cries we’ve seen on the Right for many years is about all the Christians supposedly being persecuted all over the world. Tucker Carlson used to whine about it constantly on his nightly White Power Glower Hour on Fox.

America About To Get .00000000000001% Whiter As Trump Imports Future GOP Voters From South Africa

Unfortunately for the refugees Rowe is thinking of, their skin color is not a Trump-approved hue, we guess.

Speaking of the Afrikaners, a local TV station has footage of them arriving at Dulles Airport and being greeted by Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau on Monday. Don’t skip the Q&A with reporters towards the end, when Landau flat-out says that the main criteria for who gets refugee status in the US is how quickly they can be “assimilated” into America. Since the government has fast-tracked the Afrikaners while canceling the emigration of people from places like Afghanistan where there is genuine repression going on, we’re going to categorize this as “letting the cat out of the bag.”

In fact, in what is either a cruel irony or a deliberately dickish move, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem chose Monday to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of Afghan refugees in America. This could lead to thousands being deported back to Afghanistan, which is still under the Taliban’s repressive rule. Some of these Afghanis may have helped the US during the 20 years our military was blowing up their nation, so sending them back to the Taliban might be a death sentence.

Noem is nicer to her pets than she is to human refugees. At least she just shoots the pets without sending them somewhere to be tortured first.

Bishop Rowe also wrote in his letter that the Episcopal Church will now lose any federal grant money that it had received in partnership with the government to help fund its operations. It has long been a right-wing talking point that the government should stop helping the poor and downtrodden and turn that job over to private charities and churches. What they never mention is how much of their funding ministries like the Episcopalians’ refugee program actually get from the federal government.

Finally, Rowe wrote:

I have said before that no change in political fortunes alters our commitment to stand with the world’s most vulnerable people, and I want to reaffirm that promise.

We’re old enough to remember when helping the world’s most vulnerable people was something the US aspired to, if not always successfully. We’re old enough to remember this because it was all of four months ago and we are not toddlers.

Good on the Episcopalians, and welcome to America to the Afrikaners. We hope you enjoy your status as a political football.

[Episcopal Church]

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