'This Cannot Be Justified': Fox News Priest Rails Against Jeff Sessions for Citing God to Separate Families
17 June 2018
Fox News religious panel clashed on Sunday over a Trump administration policy that separates immigrant children from their parents.
During a panel discussion with four religious leaders, Fox News host Pete Hegseth noted that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had used the Bible to defend Trump’s immigration policy.
Bishop Leon Benjamin of New Life Harvest Church defended Sessions by arguing that laws ultimately came from God.
“I’m totally in agreement with Attorney General Jeff Sessions,” Benjamin said. “This is totally what we should be doing. The Bible clearly says that the higher power, we have to be subject unto, which is government, but ultimately God.”
“We are not in anyway being dishumane [SIC] to these children by separating their parents,” he insisted. “Health and Human Services is taking good care of these children while their parents are going through this process because they did break the law.”
Fox News contributor Jonathan Morris vehemently disagreed.
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Morris replied. “There’s nothing wrong with a politician quoting scripture, but it’s not going to go well for you when you take one scripture to justify your policy. That same scripture… has been used in the past to support slavery. When you say, ‘No, this is the law of the land, support it.’ We could say today, the law of the land is abortion. Oh, we need to support that.”
“No,” the priest continued. “We have a responsibility as a government, as a nation to make just laws… Let’s not take on scripture and say it’s okay, therefore, to take a baby out of a mother’s hands or a father’s hands. That cannot be justified.”
Morris noted that “President Trump can also have an executive order [to change the policy] like he’s done so many times in the past.”
“Let’s not use scripture to suggest that it’s okay to take babies out of their parents hands,” Morris said.
Watch the video below from Fox News.