Not Even Christians Can Ignore The Law

Sometimes christians get a little carried away with their religion and they idea that what they are doing is good and is approved of by god -- and that idea allows them to think it's OK for them to ignore some laws that everyone else are expected to obey. After all they think, shouldn't god trump human laws?

Take for example, the ten missionaries arrested in Haiti. The odds are better than average that they went to Haiti to try and help out in the tragedy, but somewhere along the line their religious zeal overcame their common sense and they broke the law. They gathered up 33 Haitian children they believed to be orphans (although not all of them were) and tried to smuggle them out of that country.

They claim they were just taking them to a new orphanage being set up in the Dominican Republic, but who knows what would have happened to the children once they got there. Would the children have been "trafficked" out from there as the Haitian government thinks was possible? We don't know, because I doubt these American christians would have hung around to see what happened to them.

The Haitian prime minister says they "kidnapped" the children. He went on to say, "It is clear now that they were trying to cross the border without papers. It is clear now that some of the children have live parents. And it is clear now that they knew what they were doing was wrong." The christians arrested denied that, saying they did not know they were doing anything wrong. The PM's statement has more of a ring of truth to me.

How could these people not know they were breaking the law? They gathered up the children and then tried to take them out of the country without any kind of permission from the Haitian government. It's not that they were denied permission -- they never even asked for it. They'd have to be incredibly stupid to not know they were breaking the law.

There is no country in the world that allows people to smuggle their children out of the country without first asking for and receiving government permission. They would never have tried to do this with American children, so what made them think it would be OK to do it in Haiti. Were they trying to take advantage of Haiti's tragedy to put some children in the christian adoption pipeline?

Those arrested are now afraid that the Haitian (and maybe American) government is going to try and make an example out of them. That's exactly what should happen. Taking children illegally and without permission is indeed "kidnapping" -- and that's what they did.

NOTE -- The picture is of Jim Allen from Amarillo, one of the 10 arrested.