Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Good Samaritan? You have the right to remain silent...


From Alabama-

Ever give someone a ride home from church after Mass? If you didn't stop to check their paperwork first, you might have been committing a crime.

At least, that's the argument over Alabama's controversial new immigration law. The law prohibits transportation or harboring of undocumented persons, and its definition of those terms is sufficiently vague enough that there is concern it could make simple acts of Christian charity result in a one-way trip to the slammer.

According to three bishops who filed a lawsuit (representing the local Catholic, Methodist and Episcopal churches) over the law, it criminalizes "God’s command to be Good Samaritans.”

Of course, the law's backers say that it has nothing to do with punishing Good Samaritans, just your routine "bad guys" like traffickers or employers who try to hire undocumented workers as a way to get around labor laws. But who the law was written for, and who is actually going to be prosecuted under it, is not really the point here.

More here-

http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/2011/08/good-samaritan-you-have-right-remain-silent

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