Rabbi Daniel Brenner, a visionary and a highly effective rabbi, has rejected the idea that the immigration debate is a strictly right or left issue.

In an email exchange with Luke Ford, Rabbi Brenner noted,

My sense is this: Steinlight is deliberately trying to upset people. He gets a kick out of it. [...]

That said, immigration is an issue that is incredibly complicated and does not fall into the same political lines as others do because of — unions, the Catholic Church, Agri-business — so therefore it is a mess. I credit those who are raising the issue for discussion. [Emphasis added].

Some interesting statements by Dr. Stephen Steinlight from his interview with Luke Ford, which lasted two hours and forty minutes.

If comprehensive immigration reform were ever to pass, Heaven help us, it would have the most enduring and palpable impact on this country of any piece of legislation since the Emancipation proclamation. The heart of that legislation is not amnesty. That’s a weapon of mass distraction. The heart of that is doubling legal immigration. Given the way the system works, the engine of extended family reunification, chain immigration, it will mean 60 million to 100 million more Mexicans here in 20 years.

Steinlight’s critique of the social-Left was delicious.

Those people who fall over backwards to want to be loved by people of color, by Muslims, by anyone who’s skin tone is darker, who feel fundamentally ashamed to be Americans, who feel we need to apologize for who we are, whether it is because we’re white or because we belong to this culture, those people are all in favor of this because it is some kind of justifiable retribution.

“God spare us all from tikkun olam Jews. The rural white poor in this country, they despise. They no longer particularly like blacks because their self-loathing love was not requited. Right now they think they can patronize hispanics. I’ve got news for them — it ain’t going to be for long.

I wish they’d stop and think for a minute. Their support of this particular group, someone else is paying the price. You’re not. You’re probably college educated and have a decent job, and if not, mommy and daddy is going to take care of you. But what about folks who work for a living and have no expectations of inherited wealth? Those people are being slaughtered.

What they are always soliciting is the approval of the other, of the foreign. They see themselves as borderless humanists, the last group of people in the world I would trust to do anything. Why is it that their passion always increases in direct proportion to the distance between themselves and where the tragedy is taking place?

Luke Ford has the story.

Oh, he was also part of the smear against Rabbi Slifkin. Because as we all know, embracing an “Old Earth” and macro-evolutionary theory means you aren’t a TRUE JEW.

But stealing…well, that’s just fine, now, isn’t it?

I always thought that Luke Ford’s crush on Amy Klein was cute. Amy was in my circle of friends when she lived in NY, and I certainly could understand why a fellah would have a thing for her. But I had no idea how intense it was. Intense as in, say, a personal story about it by Amy in the f’in New York Times!

Amy Klein writes,

… Ford and I settled into an uneasy relationship: He wrote nasty and stalkerish things about me, and I ignored him.

But it wasn’t easy. His blog’s popularity ensured that when a potential suitor or editor searched for information about me online, Ford’s posts were the first to appear.
[…]
Time and again I heard friends say with alarm: “Hey, Amy! Did you know there’s this guy on the Internet who writes all these things about you?”

“Yes, I know, he’s my cyberstalker,” I would say with resignation.

Although in truth it was oddly flattering to have someone obsessed with me, even someone like Luke Ford. We humans are egotistical creatures: We look through other people’s wedding albums searching for pictures of ourselves, so of course we can’t help but feel flattered by someone who follows our every movement, and even writes poetry about us. Under the title, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Amy Klein,” Ford wrote (quoting the Four Seasons):

Oh, I used to love to make you cry.

It made me feel like a man inside.

If I had been a man in reality,

You’d be here baby, loving me,

Now my nights are long and lonely.

And I ain’t too proud, babe.

My friends, suitors and editors were worried, but at this point he had been writing about me for years and never approached my residence or called or even sent me an e-mail message. “Don’t worry,” I told them using my favorite “Hitchhiker’s Guide” reference. “He’s mostly harmless.”

Needless to say, Luke Ford himself has been pretty excited about this article, even pretending that it was more negative than it was.