If believing in American values vs Saudi values is 'cultural favoritism' then I hope all my grandchildren are extreme cultural favoritists.
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Of course Christian values are to help the weak, which makes us thankful that America is clearly the most generous nation in the world. Not in terms of institutionalized socialism, but in terms of personal generosity and in terms of using our power benignly. The differences in benevolence between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. or P.R.C. are obvious to a schoolchild. We didn't chase the Dalai Lama out of his homeland.
Helping the weak around the world doesn't necessarily mean importing 400 million refugees. I would dearly love to, as I would love to adopt 25 poor children, but I can't. So as a Christian I set a budget for feeding poor children overseas, lead projects towards that, etc.
Do you?
Respectfully, cynicism can be fun, but it leads nowhere. As James says, attributing the worst motives as a default assumption is almost always a guarantee that we'll misunderstand things.
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Washington left office by warning the country to remember not to get too close to Europe - to retain our essential American nature. The Founding Fathers endowed the President with vast powers against immigration, precisely because they wanted to avoid having *American values* watered down.
I believe it is good and right to guard against the 'watering down' of Christian-based values if we incorporated genital mutilation into our culture, fascism, censorship, murder of gays, taking power tools to children, and so forth. I am 100% in favor of the American culture over the Saudi and Somali cultures.
I also believe, from an atheistic point of view, that the New Testament is very obviously more benign than the Koran -- as I believe that the Buddha's teachings are more benign than an Iraqi handbook of torture. Have you ever read the Koran?
It sounds very open-minded to say 'no one culture is better than another' but look down the road and see where that leads. Honestly, you would not be happy with Sharia law imposed in America.
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Also unclear where we got the idea that the U.S. is guarding against one threat. ISIS ... Mexican drug cartels ... Euro techno-terrorists ... nuclear proliferation ... etc etc. In my view ISIS deserves special attention, and immigration security is a pretty mainstream idea.
- Jeff