When we face a need that asks a lot of us, it’s tempting to try to make the needy person invisible. At Deseret, I’m talking about how both parties try to avoid acknowledging the humanity and reality of the one in need—Democrats averting their eyes from the child in the womb, Republicans from the refugee at the border.
The man walking through the water and the baby he holds are more alike than different. Whether a refugee is walking through Mexico or a baby is cradled in a suitcase — or, before then, in her mother’s womb — someone is on the way. Someone whose name we may not yet know, someone whose particular personality is yet to be revealed to us. Someone we know primarily through their need — they cannot survive unless we open the door to them and make them welcome.
Within our own borders, politicians hide from another kind of abject need — not the baby in the suitcase, but the baby in the womb. On abortion, the parties’ rhetoric reverses. It’s the abortion-rights activists within the Democratic Party who describe a baby in the womb as a kind of parasite, a foreign invader with no just claim to shelter. It’s abortion opponents within the GOP who speak movingly about the dignity of the weak, but whose party fails to deliver substantial material support for refugees.