Help curb boating accidents in Florida, Gov. Desantis. Sign the Lucy Law bill.
After miraculously surviving this, one of the first things I said after waking up from my medically-induced coma was, "I can make a bigger difference now than I ever could before this happened."
As a marine biologist who worked at Loggerhead Marinelife Center at the time of my accident, I frequently saw the devastating effects of boat strikes on sea turtles, not knowing that I would soon endure the same fate.
I often snorkeled off the coast of Palm Beach County, enjoying the beauty of the area's diverse marine life. On that fateful day, I was snorkeling off of the coast when a 36-foot speedboat directly hit me. The driver did not see my divers-down flag, a required safety device that was floating just a few feet away from me. GPS data from the boat recorded their speed at about 45 miles per hour at the time of impact.
I firmly believe that my faith was what saved me and that God had given me an opportunity to help others through this incident. When I heard about Lucy's Law, I knew I had to support it. The bill is comprehensive boater safety legislation named in honor of Lucy Fernandez, a Miami teenager who was killed in a tragic boating accident. She was just a few years younger than me at the time of my accident; she deserved to live a long, full, and joyful life.
The legislation, which currently awaits the governor's signature, has three main components. It requires the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to establish standards for online boating safety education courses. It also aligns boating under-the-influence with driving-under-the-influence penalties and creates harsher penalties for operators who leave the scene of an accident.
Gov. DeSantis, we're counting on you to help prevent more of these life-changing accidents. I urge you to sign Lucy's Law. This legislation may not change what happened to me, but it can help protect others and potentially save lives.
Florida is the boating capital of the world. We have pristine, blue waters filled with marine life, which my career is dedicated to preserving. Every resident and visitor has the opportunity to explore all that our coastal waters have to offer. But with that opportunity comes responsibility.
According to the FWC, there were 659 boating accidents in 2023 alone and 59 of those were deadly.
Education and training saves lives. Lucy's Law will save lives.
Carter Viss founded the Carter Viss Foundation, a boating safety nonprofit based in Jupiter.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida bill could improve boat safety. Desantis must sign. | Opinion
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
National Geographic
10 hours ago
- National Geographic
There are 4,000 black bears in Florida. Is that too few, or too many?
This 195-pound male Florida black bear, named M13, was identified by biologist Joseph Guthrie on the Lake Wales Ridge in Highlands County, Florida. Photograph by Carlton Ward Jr. Once on the brink, Florida black bears have made a remarkable comeback. Now, there's a vote on hunting them. Photographs by Carlton Ward Jr. In a state with such iconic megafauna as the Florida panther and the American alligator, the shy, reclusive Florida black bear is often overlooked. Until there's trouble. In less than two weeks, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) will hold a vote to decide whether to go ahead with a black bear hunt in December. It would be the state's first black bear hunt since 2015. Proponents of the hunt say the black bear population is sturdy enough to sustain a hunt; opponents say it's not. Wildlife biologists estimate that roughly 11,000 black bears once roamed across the peninsula, traveling throughout the state's pine flatwoods, swamps and oak scrub. The bears followed the annual fruiting cycle of acorns and palmetto berries, and they travelled widely to find mates. This was pre-Columbus, pre-conquistadores, pre-missionaries and military forts. It was before the first pioneers shaped the state, before the original land barons built their winter havens along the coasts, before planned development and subdivisions and strip malls, the modern hallmarks of contemporary Florida. This was a time when Florida was still wild, its land a single vast connected parcel for animals to roam. Florida Bear Tracks Join Shelby, a black bear biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildelife Conservation Commission (FWC), and her all-female team in South Florida as they embark on a critical mission: capturing and tagging black bears. From its pre-Columbian peak, the Florida black bear population fell precipitously. Between unregulated hunting and habitat loss, bear populations dwindled. By the 1970s, the Florida black bear had bottomed out with fewer than 500 bears left in the wild. But on the heels of a worldwide focus on conservation and wildlife preservation—the first Earth Day was held in 1970; the Endangered Species Act was signed in 1973—the state of Florida turned to safeguarding its native bears. In 1974, the FWC classified the Florida black bear as a threatened species. In the decades that followed, with dedicated conservation efforts, the Florida black bear population rebounded. Today, FWC biologists estimate the black bear population in the state of Florida to be around 4,000 bears—a robust figure. By most accounts, the Florida black bear is an ecological success story. Yet the numbers are slightly misleading. Though Florida black bears have come back from the low of the 1970s, their population is spread across the state in seven geographic areas, called Bear Management Units by the FWC. While three of those units have more than one thousand bears (1,198 in the central region, 1,044 in the south and 1,060 in the east panhandle), the numbers in the other four units are significantly lower: 496 bears in the north (counted as part of a contiguous subpopulation with south Georgia, adjacent to the Okefenokee Swamp; the total subpopulation has around 1,200 bears), 120 in the west panhandle, 98 in south central and just 30 bears in the Big Bend area. Opponents to the proposed bear hunt worry that it could decimate populations in some of the units with lower numbers of bears. The FWC says it has restricted the potential hunt to the four Bear Management Units which 'could be hunted in a sustainable manner without decreasing the bear population,' according to information released by the commission. The hunt is intended to target male bears—most female bears should be in their dens by December—and the commission says the 187 permits available for the proposed 2025 hunt is equal to the number of female bears that could be removed without reducing the population of the individual Bear Management Units. During the 10 years since Florida's last bear hunt in 2015, the state's black bear population has grown modestly. Meanwhile, Florida's human population has been booming, with 3 million more people living in the state since the last hunt. The growth puts tremendous pressure on bears and increases the probability of conflict with suburbanites and drivers. The photo above shows a development east of Naples, where new construction is consuming and fragmenting bear habitats. A Florida black bear crosses safely beneath Interstate 75 from Picayune Strand State Forest to Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. There are more than 30 wildlife underpass structures crossing under the long stretch of I-75 called Alligator Alley between Naples and Fort Lauderdale. These underpasses, combined with fencing parallel to the highway that directs wildlife to the crossings, prevent animals from being stuck by cars. Part of what scientists know today about the Florida black bear's home range comes from a 2009 collaring of a young male bear, known in the literature as M34. The bear was collared by a team from the University of Kentucky, including wildlife biologist Joe Guthrie, then a graduate student. It was a particularly fortuitous collaring. Female Florida black bears have a home range of roughly 15 square miles. They stick close to their food source of fruit, nuts, berries, termites and ants (with an occasional possum or armadillo in the mix). This helps them stay healthy as they prepare to den down in the autumn and well-fed when they are nursing in the spring. Florida black bears give birth to two or three cubs (in rare cases, four) every other year. The cubs spend the first 18 months of their lives near their mother before spreading out. Female offspring tend to stay close to her as they grow, often inheriting part of her home range. A Florida black bear crosses under a barbed-wire fence from Big Cypress National Preserve onto an adjacent cattle ranch, which bears and other wildlife consider to be one connected habitat. Big Cypress National Preserve is an integral part of 4 million acres of contiguous public land in and around Everglades National Park (an area twice the size of Yellowstone National Park). Whether this large block of public land, and the bears of the Big Cypress population, stay connected to the rest of Florida and the U.S. to the north, depends on whether there is enough new land protection in the Florida Wildlife Corridor. A suburban development east of La Belle, right in the Florida Wildlife Corridor. This development was abandoned decades ago, allowing forest to return between the roadways. Male Florida black bears, on the other hand, have a much wider home range—anywhere from 25 to 100 square miles, with the average around 60 square miles, enough to breed with several female black bears. Male cubs leave their mother's home range as they enter the three- to four-year mark and approach sexual maturity. They seek new terrain far away from their home range where there's too much overlap of genetic material with the available females. These young males set off on a perilous journey over an unknown landscape, facing dangers from roadways, suburban neighborhoods and older, stronger male bears. Luckily for Guthrie and his team, they collared two-and-a-half-year-old M34 at the beginning of his journey. The collar stayed on the young male bear for nine months, from October to July, sending highly accurate GPS locations every hour as the bear journeyed more than 500 miles across the state. Over the course of those months, scientists were able to collect substantive evidence showing how large mammals move through the complicated, high-risk landscape of south-central Florida, where conservationists had spent decades fighting for a connected, protected network of land. (The quest to protect Florida's wildlife corridor) 'Along comes this bear making this outrageous, surprising dispersal and showing how connected it all was,' says Guthrie, now the predator-prey program director at the Archbold Biological Station, an independently operated field research station near Lake Okeechobee. 'Here was a black bear that answered a lot of questions and filled in a lot of our theories. The M34 data revealed the connectedness of the landscape in a way that made sense. It was a great, great discovery for our research and ultimately for conservation.' Guthrie and his team, along with other advocates for Florida's wild places, used the M34 data to join forces. Their mission: to build a living landscape corridor across Florida, uniting individual conservation lands into an uninterrupted stretch of wilderness. For the Florida black bear, it would mean connecting the pockets of bear populations across the state, ultimately preventing isolation, inbreeding and decline. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologists Mike Orlando, left, and Alyssa Simmons, right, weigh a dead Florida black bear at Rock Springs Run Wildlife Management Area in Lake County on the first day of the 2015 Florida bear hunt. Can hunting and conservation co-exist? What began as a grassroots idea to protect a pathway of undeveloped lands in a single, connected corridor across the state became a fully fledged, state-supported project in 2021 with the passing of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act. Today, the Florida Wildlife Corridor comprises nearly 18 million acres of contiguous wilderness—10 million of those areas are protected while nearly eight million are connected but not yet protected. The corridor is used by all seven subpopulations of the Florida black bear, and each of the FWC's Bear Management Units is in or touching the corridor. It's also key habitat for other imperiled Florida wildlife like panthers, gopher tortoises, burrowing owls and swallow-tail kites. 'If we want to maintain Florida's natural ecosystems, including its wildlife, we can't do that with postage-stamp-sized pieces of land. It cannot—it will not—work. We need connectivity, a wildlife corridor across the state where animals can move through the landscape. Otherwise, we're going to lose all of the things that are representative of Florida,' says Greg Knecht, executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida. The Wildlife Corridor is also a favorite place for Florida sportsmen like Travis Thompson. Thompson is a life-long hunter and executive director of the conservation-minded nonprofit All Florida, which seeks to bring hunters and conservationists into the same room when making environmental policy. Thompson, like many sportsmen in Florida, believes strongly that both groups share the same environmental goals. (Hard numbers reveal the scale of America's trophy-hunting habit) Thompson grew up in Florida, where he spent his summers snook fishing and his winters at turkey camps. 'My Saturday mornings were in a dove field or a turkey blind or at a boat ramp, catching fish,' Thompson says. His desire to hunt and his wish to protect wild places are tightly bound. 'Everything I do is through the lens of conservation,' he says. Today, Thompson is mostly a duck hunter. 'I love ducks more than anyone you'll find. I don't want to shoot all the ducks in the world. I want to make sure there are plenty of ducks so I can shoot a bunch every year.' This perspective, he says, is the same one a lot of hunters bring to the environment: they want to protect it to continue to do what they love. Though Thompson isn't a bear hunter—'I don't have any interest in hunting a bear,' he says— he believes science should guide wildlife management decisions. And the scientists at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who make the decisions about hunting Florida black bears: 'They're the best bear scientists I know,' Thompson says. A Florida black bear walking through a swamp of 500-year-old cypress tree on Bergeron's Green Glades West cattle ranch, adjacent to Big Cypress National Preserve and the Seminole Tribe of Florida's Big Cypress Reservation. The swamps fill with water during the summer and autumn rainy season. The bears in the Big Cypress subpopulation are the southernmost in the United States. Without the Florida Wildlife Corridor, bears in Big Cypress subpopulation and other wildlife like the Florida panther could be cut off from the rest of the state and country. Too few bears vs. too many The FWC is one of the largest fish and wildlife conservation agencies in the nation, with a significant portion of its $600 million budget dedicated to wildlife research, habitat assessment and data collection and analysis. 'We're here to do good science,' says George Warthen, the agency's chief conservation officer. Like Thompson, Warthen grew up in Florida and is an avid hunter. Hunting has been an important part of his conservation journey. 'What draws me to hunting is my connection to nature,' he says. 'I can't imagine leaving Florida because of my connection to the land.' The pull toward a 3 a.m. wakeup and early morning stints alone in the woods is not that different from the impulse that draws wildlife photographers, he says. (Bears at Disney World? Get used to it, experts say.) Like many, Warthen advocates for allowing the data to guide decisions around Florida black bear protection—including possibly allowing the first black bear hunt in the state in a decade. 'As wildlife managers, we want to step in before an animal overpopulates,' Warthen says. 'When any wildlife species starts to reach the upper limits of what a habitat will support, overall health of the population can begin to decline because of increased stress on individuals competing for resources. This can lead to disease outbreaks, lower reproductive rates in females and increased infanticide by male bears. The combination of these factors can lead to declines in the population which are much harder for wildlife managers to predict, and therefore manage, for long-term sustainability of the population.' Among the 40 states in the United States with resident black bear populations, Florida is one of only six that does not allow a regulated hunt. The other five cite low bear population numbers for why they prohibit bear hunts within their borders. Connecticut has roughly 1,200 bears; Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Ohio have less than 250 each. The eye of a young Florida bear cub, who was identified with its siblings by biologists from the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission during a den study. The cubs' location was known because their mother had been given a GPS collar the previous summer. Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission biologists Darcy Doran-Myers and Shelby Shiver carry Florida black bear cubs a short distance from their den in Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge to a clearing where the had space to study and record measurements for the cubs. Warthen is careful to make a distinction between previous eras in the state's history, where unregulated hunting was detrimental to wildlife populations, and this modern one. 'Not a single game species has gone extinct—or come even close—in North America in the modern era of regulated hunting,' he says. 'Instead, if we look at deer and turkey as prime examples, we see where the population exploded as money from hunters went toward restoration.' He believes the story of the Florida black bear can be a similar one: The more groups that want to protect the bear—from hunters to scientists to conservationists—the more people who will ultimately be in the bear's camp. The vote on whether to move forward with the bear hunt is scheduled to take place at the FWC's next quarterly meeting, held August 13 and 14 in Havana, Florida. The commission's seven commissioners will vote on the issue. If it goes forward, the hunt will be held for three weeks in December, between December 6 and December 28, and span four Bear Management Units: central, east panhandle, north and south (with the exception of Big Cypress National Preserve, where bear hunting will not be permitted). Hunters will be allowed to hunt within the Florida Wildlife Corridor, which is composed of a mosaic of public and private lands, including many of the state's wildlife management areas. The hunting permits would be granted by a lottery process. (Revered and feared: the history of Florida's elusive panthers) The FWC has provided opportunities for the public to voice opinions on the hunt both in-person and on-line, and groups for and against the hunt plan to pack the room the during the commissioners' meeting. The anti-hunt group Bear Defenders has called for statewide protests on Saturday, August 9, with locations in 13 cities across Florida. Many Floridians are passionately opposed to the hunt. 'It's going to be a disaster,' says Kate MacFall, Florida State Director of Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society. MacFall remembers Florida's 2015 bear hunt, when 304 bears were killed in the first two days of the hunt—some of them cubs, some of them lactating mothers. FWC officials were forced to end the hunt early. MacFall calls it a fiasco. 'People were appalled. It made Florida look bad. The commission seems to have forgotten that, and we're headed down the wrong path again.' MacFall is particularly alarmed by the potential use of dogs, archery and baiting in upcoming bear hunts. 'We are asking the FWC to remove the worst kinds of cruelty,' she says. 'While they are moving ahead with the hunt, we do have an opportunity to make it less cruel.' Florida is set to decide whether to reinstate a limited hunt for black bears, a move that has drawn both supporters and critics. Where bears belong The Florida Wildlife Federation has been involved with minimizing the potential harm and risks of a bear hunt, including baiting and artificial feed stations. The Federation's president and CEO, Sarah Gledhill, says that the group's focus is on prioritizing the coexistence between bears and humans through education and better waste management. Its biggest hope for the preservation of the Florida black bear? 'Conserving large tracts of land, building wildlife crossings and restoring habitat that has been degraded over time,' Gledhill says. Conservation biologists sometimes ask themselves why they do what they do. Why they go through all the heartache and expense and hardship of saving a species—any species. Guthrie, who collared M34 as a graduate student and has since committed his career to protecting Florida bears, puts it simply: because they belong in this world. 'We get to share this planet with these fascinating, mysterious animals,' he says. 'No matter how closely we study them, we will never know what their lives are. But I'm still compelled by the mystery of their existence, how they live right under our noses and yet remain these enigmas, able to survive a thing like hibernation and raise their young for the next generation. I think some of us should dedicate our time and energy to making sure they last.'
The Hill
a day ago
- The Hill
Authoritarian threats to campus speech come from both abroad and at home
In 2015, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School named Teng Biao scheduled a public event with another Chinese dissident that coincided with the visit by Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, to China. The law school's vice dean for international legal studies convinced Teng to cancel the panel to avoid 'embarrassing' the school and undermining its programs in China. In 2018, the debating union at Georgetown University's Qatar campus planned to discuss whether 'major religions should portray God as a woman.' Accused of 'insulting God,' the university canceled the event because it 'failed to follow the appropriate approval processes and created a risk to safety and security.' Administrators noted that the school encouraged 'civil dialogue that respects the laws of Qatar,' presumably including prohibitions of blasphemy. On March 25, masked federal agents surrounded and handcuffed Rumeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University and a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, on a street near her home outside Boston. They forced her into an unmarked car and shipped her to a detention center in Louisiana. Her apparent offense was co-authoring a pro-Palestinian opinion piece in a student newspaper. The federal judge who ordered her release declared that Öztürk's detention risked chilling 'the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.' These three incidents reflect a disturbing trend in which university administrators seek to accommodate authoritarian regimes eager to silence critics, and the Trump administration works to suppress campus protests and criticism of its policies. In her new book 'Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech,' Sara McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, paints a portrait of 'censors without borders' policing speech, while complicit universities, eager to profit from global partnerships and tuition-paying international students, turn a blind eye or, worse, self-censor to avoid alienating China and other authoritarian states. McLaughlin does a commendable job of calling attention to threats to freedom of expression across the globe, though, in our view, suppression of speech by foreign governments on U.S. campuses is not as pervasive a practice as she makes it appear. At least not yet. In 2023, students at George Washington University posted artwork mocking China's fitness to host the Olympics. When two Chinese student groups complained that the artwork 'insulted China,' the university president, Mark Wrighton, declared the postings unacceptable and agreed to investigate those responsible. After a public outcry, Wrighton apologized, terminated the investigation and declared his support for 'freedom of speech — even when it offends people.' McLaughlin finds it 'troubling that Wrighton's first instinct … was to promise censorship.' But she offers no evidence to support her assertion that the instinct to censor was 'shared by many university leaders.' Nor does she demonstrate that 'sensitivity exploitation' — using the desire to create a welcoming environment for all students to suppress criticism of a foreign government — is having a widespread impact on free speech. In a recent Gallup poll, 74 percent of college students said their institution was doing an excellent or good job of protecting unfettered expression, while only 5 percent believe it is doing a poor job. Of much greater concern is the ability of China and other authoritarian states to restrict the speech of their nationals abroad by threatening their families or, when they return home, their livelihoods or freedom. Universities 'want to reap the financial and reputational rewards' of bringing international students to their campuses, McLaughlin contends, but have failed to 'accept the [accompanying] responsibilities to free speech and academic freedom.' McLaughlin suggests as well that U.S. institutions that have relationships with authoritarian foreign partners often feel pressure to self-censor because 'that is how many university administrations operate: not as values-driven institutions, but as global corporations that must protect the bottom line.' Having 'reached the point where brand supersedes all else, and protecting image matters more than protecting values,' they continue operating campuses in countries 'conducting human rights violations their community members are not freely allowed to teach or discuss.' These broad-brush attacks are, alas, not accompanied by practical proposals for what universities can and should do. How might leaders of campuses in the U.S. 'stand by' international students when their families at home are threatened? How can they protect scholars who lose access to research materials or are denied visas for criticizing authoritarian regimes? Should they insist that the host countries of campuses they operate abroad respect American academic norms in their entirety if the cost is sharply limiting opportunities for their faculty and students, including individuals from the countries in which they operate? Or should they warn students and faculty of the likely constraints on expression and do what they can to minimize them, recognizing that their campuses will not be able to operate as freely abroad as they would at home? McLaughlin acknowledges that the extent of self-censorship by students, teachers and administrators 'is difficult to measure.' And that universities should not 'simply cut off engagement with unfree countries.' Instead, campuses established in authoritarian countries should 'carefully and thoughtfully tailor engagement to limit opportunities for rights violations and interference,' advise students and faculty of the challenges they face, make clear they oppose 'transnational repression' and educate students about how to protect themselves. Good advice, as far as it goes, though that is how most universities already operate. Sadly, the greatest threats to free speech and academic freedom on American university campuses may now be home-grown. Shortly after taking office, President Trump promised to deport 'all the resident aliens' who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted in March of revoking at least 300 visas of students and others whose activities 'are counter … to our foreign policy.' Last month, the State Department directed consular officials to screen the 'entire online presence' of foreign students seeking to study in the U.S. for 'any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.' Red states, eager to amplify Trump administration policies, have adopted a host of educational gag orders restricting discussion of race, gender, sexual orientation and other 'divisive concepts.' Ohio, for example, limits discussion of ' controversial beliefs or policies,' including 'climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.' And last month, a federal judge temporarily enjoined a Mississippi anti-DEI statute for 'possible widespread suppression of speech.' As McLaughlin recognizes, the 'fight against authoritarian influence' is 'a problem that cannot be 'solved,' only mitigated.' Given the Trump administration's approach to higher education, mitigation efforts should probably begin on American soil and with our own government.
Miami Herald
a day ago
- Miami Herald
Pastor: Homeland Security's use of Bible verse in video is blasphemy
My social media channels were flooded with the words of the prophet Isaiah last week. That's hardly unusual. I am a pastor and the algorithms feed me a steady stream of sermons, articles and even memes based on scripture. The verse I kept seeing, Isaiah 6:8, also happens to be one of my favorites. The prophet is telling the story of his commissioning or call to ministry. He has an ecstatic vision of God seated on the heavenly throne, surrounded by flying seraphim singing 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord.' Isaiah is filled with dread and confesses, 'Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.' The Lord cleanses the prophet's mouth with a live coal and then he hears God say, 'Whom shall I send, who will go for us?' and Isaiah replies, 'Here I am, Lord. Send me.' Like a lot of Christians, this passage resonates deeply with me. I've never had a vision like Isaiah's, but I have heard the Lord 'calling in the night,' as the old hymn goes. I have, with fear and trembling, prayed those words, 'Here I am, Lord. Send me.' Whenever I hear them, I remember my decision to follow Jesus, who quoted Isaiah at the beginning of his public ministry, saying, 'He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the prisoners free and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.' Usually I love to hear Isaiah 6:8. It speaks to what is most sacred in my life. But I was disgusted when I heard those words last week in the Department of Homeland Security's new recruitment video. The ad opens with marine helicopters traveling down a runway at dusk, preparing for take off on a mission. A genial male voice with a slight southern accent says, 'There's a Bible verse I think about sometimes, many times.' Now the camera cuts to the inside of a helicopter, the light grows dimmer but we can make out DHS secretary Kristy Noam surrounded by agents in body armor. The narrator intones Isaiah 6:8, 'Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Who shall I send? And who will go for us?' Ominous music swells up, but the voices aren't singing 'Holy, holy, holy,' they chant again and again, 'You can run on for a long time, sooner or later God's gonna cut you down.' Then a rapid montage of shots: agents chasing people in boats, a Customs and Border Patrol patch on a uniform, armored vehicles, rugged terrain surveilled through night vision goggles and the brightest light–the gleam of plastic zip tie handcuffs in an agent's belt. In choosing to use Isaiah 6:8, the video suggests that the Trump administration's mission to capture a daily quota of undocumented immigrants, deny them due process and imprison them in 'Gator Gulags' is God's mission. God didn't send the prophet Isaiah to hunt down the poor and vulnerable. In fact, in chapter 16, God puts these words in the mouth of the prophet; 'Hide the fugitives, do not betray the refugees, let the fugitives stay with you; be their shelter from the destroyer.' God sends the prophet Isaiah on a dangerous mission to speak judgement against the powerful, announcing 'Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field til there is no space left and you live alone in the land. Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent.' Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol agents are sent by the federal government, not the sovereign Lord. To suggest otherwise is the textbook definition of blasphemy. Kate Murphy is pastor at The Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte.
