Arizona State Senator Fires Back At Cali’s Cardinal Mahony Over Immigration Bill
Apr 22, 2010 2 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Russell Pearce, who wrote the controversial immigrant crackdown bill, lashes out at the L.A. cardinal, calling him a protector of child molesters. Mahony condemned the bill on his blog this week.
Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, who crafted a bill that would require immigrants to carry proof of legal status, lashed out at Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony on Wednesday for his criticism of the proposed legislation, calling the Roman Catholic leader a “guy who’s been protecting child molesters and predators all of his life.”
“He’s the last guy that ought to be speaking out,” Pearce said on the Michael Smerconish Program, a nationally syndicated radio talk show that airs locally on KFWB-AM 980. “This guy has a history of protecting and moving predators around in order to avoid detection by the law. He has no room to talk.”
Pearce’s bill, which has yet to be signed by Gov. Jan Brewer, has created a national firestorm as both opponents and supporters bill it as the nation’s toughest law against illegal immigrants. The bill would make it a crime to be in the state illegally and would require law enforcement officers to check the legal status of those they suspect are undocumented. The legislation would also bar people from soliciting work or hiring workers under certain circumstances, a provision aimed at the day-labor trade.
Pearce’s remarks about Mahony drew an equally feisty retort from the cardinal’s spokesman, Tod M. Tamberg.
“Mudslinging and fearmongering are the essence of Senator Pearce’s remarks,” Tamberg wrote in an e-mail. “He desperately wants to change the subject, throwing up a wall of inaccurate statements about Cardinal Mahony because he has no good answer to the cardinal’s challenge that this is a draconian and unjust law.”
Mahony, who heads the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese with 4.3 million members, lambasted Pearce’s bill on his blog this week, likening it to “German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques” that compelled people to turn each other in.
“The Arizona legislature just passed the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law,” the cardinal wrote on his blog. “The tragedy of the law is its totally false reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources. That is not only false, the premise is nonsense.”
Pearce said his legislation is not aimed at immigrants who enter the country legally and comply with its laws.
“We love and admire immigrants who come here to assimilate to be Americans,” Pearce said. “This has nothing to do with immigration. It has to do with those who enter our country illegally.”
