An Open Letter to Scott Morrison: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Dear Mr. Morrison,

I refer to the article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 22/11/13.

A good, Christian, family man. And a monster.

Why does it take a court order to get you to behave like the Christian you claim to be? Do you need a judge to tell you your plan to send a two-week old baby to detention is monstrous and an affront to God and man? You are a Minister of this country. How obtuse can you be?

Or perhaps I've got it all wrong...

Perhaps you might re-read the Gospels, and indicate to me, my congregation, and my international readership where exactly we are enjoined by Jesus to behave toward others as you are behaving toward these wretched people, and their utterly helpless baby, legally seeking asylum in our country?

But happily, refusing asylum IS illegal.

Every Sunday school kid knows that Jesus had a special place in his heart for children, "suffer them to come unto me, for such is the kingdom of heaven". What poor excuse for Christian education did you have that failed to include that titbit? Let alone the utter failure of that education to have conveyed the essence of Christ's teachings--that we are to help those in need.

"Get away from me kid, ya bother me."

Short of the Third Reich, it is hard to imagine a politics more morally repellent, xenophobic, and cruel than those this government is employing with regard to the world's most desperate. Whilst I have breath in my lungs, and can vent clamour from my throat, I will tell everyone within the scope of my ministry, that you and the current government do nothing less than evil in pursuing your asylum seeker policies.

I am forced to conclude that you can be no Christian, sir. If you had the least Christian sensibility, you would quail for shame that you would visit such suffering upon those already suffering. And that when you go to face your maker--a day your 'Christian' values claim will surely come--you will have to account for this with your very soul. It will be a heavy reckoning, sir, and something in you (however deep) must know it.

How can you sleep at night under the watchful eye of the God you uphold? Temazepam? What quantities of drink does it take to quell the pain and live with yourself from day to day? Or do you simply pray the heartache away?

Is it all worth it? Is the power and money, and the assurance of a secure government pension for life, and future consulting and directorship gigs on the public purse, and all that--worth what you are doing? And the acid contempt all genuine Christians, your brothers and sisters, must feel toward you?

It doesn't take a Christian to know right from wrong. A Sikh Temple, a Zoroastrian Atash, a Wiccan circle, even the new Sunday Assembly atheist-and-comedy church would show you the door for being so beastly to a baby its sick mother.

As it's the season in which Christians commemorate the birth of Christ, you might recall the pity evoked by the story that Joseph and Mary, a poor couple far from home, gave birth to a vulnerable baby in squalor and desperation. Jesus himself was one such as the baby you've tried to exile. Do you not see?

This is actually cleaner than the squalid manger would have been, as it lacks the requisite donkey sh*t.

But even if you had made no claim to Christian values, and thereby willingly taken on the mantle of 'glaring hypocrite' (the only group, btw, Jesus condemned), you would still be open to a question which rings down the ages, from a not dissimilar context, 50 years ago:

"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

No, he didn't.

With pity and prayers for your dark heart,

Rev. Rob MacPherson