Who killed Edith Rodreguez’s son?

posted at 6:20 pm on June 6, 2006 by Allahpundit
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I snarked on Ted Kennedy last month for demagoging this issue, but it’s actually hugely important. It involves the same logic used by people who blame the UN for the sanctions against Saddam that supposedly killed 500,000 Iraqi children, which of course is the same logic being used right now to oppose withholding international aid to the Palestinians over Hamas’s stance towards Israel.

The question, simply put, is to what extent bad actors should be culpable for the foreseeable adverse consequences of their actions. The rule of law would seem to dispose of it pretty easily, but not to Teddy: the Kennedy solution is that if a criminal is insistent enough on breaking it, the law should yield lest those terrible adverse consequences flow.

Which brings us to this horrible story from WaPo via MSNBC:

The body of the 3-year-old boy lay still, covered with a jacket and his arms crossed over his chest. His mother, found wandering along a desert highway hours earlier, had carried him there as she had tried to cross into the United States illegally.

The sad discovery was not unique. Since 1993, when the Clinton administration began a crackdown on border crossings in San Diego and El Paso, more than 3,500 people have died trying to cross into the United States through desert. And, as officials work to put more patrols and fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, immigrant advocates fear there will be more deaths among the tens of thousands who attempt the trip.

It was over 100 degrees in the desert when the boy and his mother, Edith Rodreguez, tried to cross. When he got tired and couldn’t continue, the rest of the illegals they were with abandoned them. She tried to carry him the rest of the way but couldn’t do it, and laid him down to go get help. When the border patrol found him he was dead.

Who killed him?

Kennedy would say we did by putting up a fence. Not because he’s reflexively anti-American (although some of our readers might argue with me on that point), but because the victims are impoverished and/or members of a racial minority and, according to Teddy’s leftist weltanschauung, that fact alone exculpates them from their bad acts. It’s age-old bullshit, but you see it from progressives high and low because it gives them a chance to play hero to people they regard as having roughly the moral autonomy of retarded monkeys. For example, Freedom Folks wrote a post today about the principal of a high school in Indiana censoring the student newspaper — to the point of having the editors change the statement about free speech on its masthead — because it published an op-ed on illegal immigration that some of the Hispanic students didn’t care for:

“Many students were upset, voiced being angry at the tone of the editorial,” [Principal Joel] McKinney said. “There were rumors going around that the school doesn’t care for [Hispanics] because they allowed” the editorial to be printed in the student paper.

McKinney said he beefed up security that day as a precaution.

“I’m in charge of making sure the environment isn’t disruptive,” he said. “There was no violence, but there was some verbal confrontations we had to deal with.”

To “help diffuse [sic] the tension,” McKinney said administrators did remove the papers.

It’s rare that this stuff happens in the context of immigration, though. To find intellectuals apologizing for anti-intellectual values, your first stop is always jihad. Here’s Gerard Baker writing today about progressivism BBC-style:

It believes Palestinians are the innocent persecuted victims of violence and imperialism (a recent Jerusalem correspondent memorably confessed to weeping openly when she caught sight of Yassir Arafat’s coffin at his funeral in Ramallah) and that the murder of innocent Israeli citizens is on a moral par as victims of war with the killing of Palestinian terrorists by Israeli forces…

It believes passionately in equal rights for homosexuals, though of course it urges cultural sensitivity when dealing with countries where such “deviancy” is rewarded by execution.

Read Caroline Glick and the Sunday Times of London’s interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, too. Things might be changing abroad, but what will they look like here two election cycles from now? Does it even matter?

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