Editor's note: This is an updated, revised and expanded version of a column first published online-only Wednesday.
A culture war rages anew in the United States between the liberal and the scared.
The latest dramatic battleground pits:
• The liberal view that America must be generously accepting of Syrian refugees because opening our arms to the huddled masses is one of our most treasured national ideals.
• The scared view that some of those Syrian refugees might be ISIS plants and that protecting ourselves from harm is the first and singularly most treasured of American objectives.
Most prominent among liberal combatants is President Barack Obama. He says it would violate everything America stands for if we closed the door on needy people fleeing our mortal and evil enemy, ISIS.
Obama apparently has had it up to here with the scared. He mocked them last week for talking tough from a distance about Iran and Vladimir Putin and then recoiling in fright when confronted up close by a 3-year-old child displaced from a war-ravaged country.
The liberal side includes religious groups--Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists and even some normally more conservative charitable organizations affiliated with evangelical churches.
They believe Jesus taught compassion instead of paralysis. They believe a war on terror wins if otherwise good people cower.
For an example of the scared contingent, pick pretty much any Republican. There are participating Democrats as well, though their specific fear appears to be more for their most treasured personal asset, electability, than public safety.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Monday that he'd resist locating any Syrian refugees in Arkansas because those refugees are the rightful problem of Europe, Asia and Africa.
House Speaker Paul Ryan pushed a bill to make the FBI, Homeland Security and the national intelligence chief officially vouch that a Syrian refugee admitted to the country wouldn't hurt anybody. And there was speculation that Republicans in the House might seek to defund refugee aid in a forthcoming appropriation bill and thus risk--again--shutting down the government.
Rand Paul put on Twitter that he had introduced an amendment to deny funds for housing assistance for refugees. He said that like it was a good thing.
Jeb Bush declared that any screening for acceptance of Syrian refugees should first emphasize Christians, which led to the obvious question of whether it's American or Christian to help only people professing favored religious views.
Included among Republicans of the scared variety is the U.S. Senate candidate in Arkansas named Conner Eldridge. He says we should suspend acceptance of refugees and declare war, and that Obama's foreign policy has failed.
(The preceding item should contain an asterisk. Eldridge actually runs nominally as a Democratic candidate for the Senate. To be fair, there are scores of other fearful Democrats around the country aligning with the scared contingent. But the refugee position is merely the latest example of Eldridge's insistence on impersonating instead of challenging the Republican incumbent he superfluously challenges, John Boozman.)
It is true that United States officials get very little reliable information when they first encounter a Syrian refugee.
So when Obama started talking about the United States doing its small part and accepting 10,000, the scared concluded that we were letting 10,000 terrorists into our neighborhoods forthwith.
But that's not the case, of course.
Because of that initial uncertainty, the United States has set up a special several-step vetting process for Syrian refugees that will take 18 months to two years and keep actual acceptance at a snail's pace.
The United States government requires of the Syrian refugee:
• Multiple high-level security checks.
• Biometric screening.
• A mandatory interview with the Homeland Security Department.
• A medical screening.
• A cultural orientation program that includes the watching of videos on housing, employment, education and hygiene.
So what we actually have in place already is a wise compromise that embraces the liberal principle of compassion but regulates it with the scared principle of protecting yourself.
There's nothing wrong with fear so long as it is not controlling, but applied strategically as an element of a problem's best solution.
The Republican House bill would add little more than one additional layer of interviews and the specific certification of a refugee's non-militancy by the FBI, Homeland Security and national intelligence.
But there's one fact to keep ever in mind: We can screen 10,000 people tightly over two years. We can allow into the country only small subsets at a time. We can apply ponderous caution and painstaking deliberation. Yet being wrong only once in 10,000 can cause a lot of harm and heartache.
That wouldn't mean we were wrong to help the 9,999.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/22/2015