Is Donald Trump Going to Deport Christian Homeschoolers?

Last updated on: November 22, 2016 at 11:38 am by Libby Anne

Is Donald Trump Going to Deport Christian Homeschoolers? 2016-11-22T11:38:11-04:00 Libby Anne

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Kris Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state, is widely known to be working with Trump to develop a plan for registering Muslims from “high-risk areas” of the globe.

An Associated Press photographer captured a high-resolution photo of Trump and Kobach, who was holding a binder and a stack of papers in his left hand that appears to be his “strategic plan for [the] first 365 days” of his run atop DHS, should Trump tap him to lead the agency.

The first section of the partially obscured document highlights his plan to deny potential terrorists entry into the U.S. According to the document, Kobach wants to “[u]pdate and reintroduce” the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which was in effect from 2002 to 2011 . “All aliens from high-risk areas are tracked,” his plan says.

Additional bullet points reveal how closely Kobach’s strategic plan aligns with the president-elect’s campaign rhetoric. The document suggests adding “extreme vetting questions for high-risk aliens.” Questions would include “support for Sharia law, jihad, equality of men and women [and] the United States Constitution,” the plan reads.

That last line took me up short.

I grew up in a community that held that women’s place was in the home, tending children, and men’s place was in the workforce, the public face of the family. I knew women who had to ask their husband’s permission to leave the house. My mother read and promoted literature by religious leaders who taught that wives should submit to their husbands in all things. I know what it is like to be taught that as a girl, it is not my place in life to have a career or strive for the things of men.

I did not grow up in a Muslim community. I grew up in an evangelical homeschool community. The United States is full of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (among others) who do not believe in the equality of men and women.

What about Sharia law? As it so happens, there are already many many many groups living in the U.S. that believe that domestic crimes (child abuse; domestic violence; sexual abuse) should be dealt with within their religious communities rather than being reported to secular authorities—and they practice what they preach. Once again, I’m not talking about Muslims. I’m talking about evangelicals, fundamentalist Christians, and Catholics, among many, many others.

As for jihad, I grew up in a community that kept guns so that we could “defend ourselves” should the government overreach and begin to oppress us. I was never in a militia group, but those existed too. And then there was anti-abortion violence—I never participated in it, but I didn’t feel I could condemn it in a straightforward manner, either. Arsons and those who made threats or murdered abortion doctors were saving babies from being slaughtered, after all.

Today, leading figures in the Christian homeschool world in which I grew up are calling for a new constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution after their own desires—would this count as “support for . . . the United States Constitution” as outlined in Kobach’s proposals? We’re talking about people want to rewrite the Constitution to make it in line with their values and beliefs. I’m thinking that falls afoul of the intent of that question.

Before we move on, let’s go back to gender equality for a second. Trump has tapped Steve Bannon, who runs Brietbart, as his chief advisor. I recently came upon an article on Brietbart from this past April in which the infamous troll Milo argues that the best way to make women happy would be to undo the invention of the washing machine and birth control, because those two inventions took women out of the home and out of the family and made them the miserable desperate lardasses they are today. This is not an exaggeration. Trump thinks a man who runs a website that posts articles ordering women back to the kitchen is worth being his chief advisor.

Even beyond all of this horrible hypocrisy and all of these double standards, I am extremely leery of ideological tests for immigrants. That is the start of a horrible slippery slope. Who determines the ideological tests? Who decides what they cover? We have religious freedom in this country, and the freedom of speech. We have never, to my knowledge, kept people out of this country based on ideological tests.

A test like this might seem simple, but it’s not. Do the people conducting these tests have a full understanding of what terms like “sharia law” and “jihad” mean? These aren’t terms that necessarily translate well, and not everyone who uses them means the same thing. Besides, people can lie. This should be obvious. If Al Qaeda or ISIS sent someone into the U.S. to commit a terrorist attack, they would surely coach them on what to say to pass an ideological test.

Enough of these hypocritical self-serving bullshit ideological tests for immigrants.

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