AGNT Letter to POTUS

Dear Mr. President:

We write to add our voices to those crying out for the end to the immoral practice of separating children from their families at the U.S. border. On behalf of the more than three million of our religious supporters in the United States and worldwide, we ask, as do our brothers in sisters in all faith traditions, that you use the power of your office to reverse the “zero tolerance” policy instituted by your Attorney General and that you take into account the discretion you and your administration have in protecting the well-being of children. We ask that you end this practice immediately, exercising your legal authority to end the traumatic separation that can have no end other than the destruction of families and of these children’s lives.

We understand that illegal entry into the United States can be a misdemeanor criminal violation, one in which you can exercise discretion to determine who should be rightly charged and who, alternately, are those seeking as asylum from horrific conditions that we cannot begin to imagine. We understand the U.S. law allows people with a credible fear of persecution — whether as an individual or as a member of a group — to arrive at the border in search of asylum.

More than that, we understand that the family is the foundation of our society, indeed our world. Without the bedrock of the family, children flounder and, ultimately, they fail. A policy that separates children from their families serves, without exception, to destabilize our country, harm our neighbors and set the stage for generations of marginalized children who grow up disenfranchised, impoverished, and unnecessarily forced into the criminal justice system.

To separate these children from their families is at a minimum short-sighted. More to the point, it is cruel, it is disgraceful and it is un-American. To use these children as pawns in a political fight is reprehensible. We implore you to end this practice immediately.

In closing, we offer these thoughts from reknowned spiritual philosopher, Dr. Ernest Holmes, spoken in 1937:

"As we enter into the spirit of the meaning of U.S. Independence Day, the day when liberty, symbolically, was conceived, the day when freedom, objectively, in our country was announced, we should think of it not merely as a political system or form of government, but we should think of it as a spiritual conception, an idea in the Divine Mind Itself, taking form in human experience; we should learn to love that liberty, and in loving the idea we should learn to tenderly and prayerfully handle the embodiment of that idea and nourish it always to greater strength; we should really conceive again the great spiritual conception of that rugged man of God who said, “…that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”

Sincerely,

Dr. David Goldberg

Publisher, Science of Mind Magazine

Rev. Donna Johnson

President, Unity Worldwide MInsitries

Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith

Agape International Spiritual Center, Los Angeles

Jim Blake

President, Unity World Headquarters

Rev. Kevin Ross

Unity of Sacramento

Dr. Roger Teel