Of interest —

• Bishop John C. Wester of Salt Lake City argues that making illegal immigrants pay a fine, catch up on back taxes and learn English in order to become lawful residents is not “amnesty” because the illegals aren’t getting something for nothing.  Ummm, OK.  He also says that the Catholic Church supports a country’s right to enforce its borders, although the U.S. bishops believe (apparently, anyway; straight answers are hard to come by) that current U.S. policy is unjust because … well, just because.  Inasmuch as there are signs of hope within the U.S. episcopacy regarding its recovery from its jackbooted leftism following Vatican II (remember how the bishops got involved with nuclear disarmament?), on some issues the Men in Purple haven’t quite figured out how to reconcile state sovereignty against the nostrums of left-wing human-rights activists.  Although I am sympathetic to the plight of many poor Mexicans who seek employment in the United States — I dealt with some of them, working for a Meijer store near a farming community, and came away from that experience with a positive impression of itinerant laborers — one would think the bishops would seek first to influence the socioeconomic situation in Mexico before reflexively criticizing the push by some conservatives to enforce existing border-security laws.  This is a supply-and-demand problem, but wouldn’t it be more consistent with authentic Gospel teachings to agitate for reform in Mexico’s redistributionist, crime-ridden culture than to berate Americans who oppose an open border and all the social and economic externalities it entails?
• I am giving serious consideration to dumping my Facebook profile. The growing privacy/security instability of that platform is really starting to worry me; I am not a fan of having my personally identifiable information made available to the masses, shared without my consent and sold like a commodity with no compensation pushed in my direction.  There is a call for an open-source set of APIs to replicate Facebook functions without needing to use Facebook.  I’m considering doing something similar with this blog — deleting the Facebook and using gillikin.org as my central social-networking repository, with Twitter as the outbound push and all of my data focused inward, under my complete control.

Happy Mother’s Day.