The Associated Press photo of a group of frightened Baptist church women being held in a Haitian jail cell is very moving.
The women, part of a group of men and women from Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho, were only trying to do the right thing: Rescue some orphans from the devastation of Haiti following last month's horrible earthquake.
People from around the world, like these women, have been moved by pictures and video of crying and injured children in Haiti and reports that many of them have lost their parents. These women, moved by their Christian faith --- and maybe just a little bit of Christian arrogance --- went to Haiti to "help the children". They ended up getting arrested for trying to smuggle the kids across the border into the Dominican Republic without a permit.
Today, according to Frank Bajak of the Associated Press, this group of missionaries faced more questioning by a local judge, while an orphanage director said many of the children had parents.
Bajak reported Haitian Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue as saying the evidence from the judge will be presented to a Haitian district attorney who will decide whether to file criminal charges against the 10 Americans.
The Baptists reportedly claim they were only trying to help orphans survive the earthquake. But legal experts say taking children across a border without documents or government permission can be considered child trafficking.
And at the SOS Children's Village orphanage where authorities are protecting the 33 children, regional director Patricia Vargas said none who are old enough and willing to talk said they are parentless: "Up until now we have not encountered any who say they are an orphan." Vargas said most of the children are between 3 and 6 years old, and unable to provide phone numbers or any other details about their origins.
The Americans apparently enlisted a clergyman who went knocking on doors asking people if they wanted to give away their children, the director of Haiti's social welfare agency, Jeanne Bernard Pierre, told The Associated Press.
"One child said to me, 'When they came knocking on our door asking for children, my mom decided to give me away because we are six children and by giving me away she would have only five kids to care for,'" Bernard Pierre said, according to Bajak's report.
So here's the deal: A bunch of good-hearted Baptists, apparently sincere in their desire to "help" the Haitian orphans, decided they were above the law and just loaded a bunch of kids in a bus and drove off with them, presumably to place them in some nice Baptist homes in America or somewhere else.
And because it was easier to do it that way than deal with the bureaucratic paperwork that is made more difficult by the loss of records during the earthquake, the Baptists just decided to skip all that.
In the process, they've created an international incident, embarrassed themselves and their religion, and caused more stress for the kids they were trying to help.
This incident is very typical of the simplistic thinking of many fundamentalist religious types. They view the world in black and white --- "straights" are good, gays are bad; "Christians" have good intentions, "non-Christians" don't.
I had a friend a few years back who was a Presbyterian minister with a degrees in religion, theology and divinity from Princeton University. Obviously, a high-brow type, although he had a sense of humor. He told of having to deal with a small town ministerial association with an ecumenical mix of members. Some, like himself, had spent years getting their religious credentials from Methodist, Catholic, Episcopalian and other institutions of higher learning. Other participants were pastors of small fundamentalist or evangelical churches whose paths to the pulpit started with tent revivals and snake handling.
"We have a deal with them," he said. "We'll call them ministers if they promise to call us theologians. Of course, we have to teach some of them how to pronounce 'theologian'."
The Idaho Baptists, like so many on society's religious right wing, refused to acknowledge life's complexities and got themselves into trouble. They were impatient to "save" children and assumed, because they believe they have God on their side, that God would make it easy for them to just snatch up Haitian orphans like the prizes at an Easter Egg hunt and cart them off to a better life and salvation.
They were naive, to put it politely. Less charitable observers would call them dumbasses.
Did they really think that it would be easy for a group of amateurs to come in and fix one of Haiti's biggest problems in one swoop? Their ignorance of the island nation's troubled history is obvious --- it wasn't the earthquake that created all these orphans. Haiti is a ecobiological mess --- poverty, bad weather, few natural resources have plagued the country for centuries. There is very little birth control. People have their babies and when there are too many at home, many of the oldest ones are turned out on the streets, no matter how young they are.
Haiti's government --- embedded with corruption for decades --- has made some efforts to provide for orphans. There are government-run and private orphanages in the country. But, as one child welfare official put it in another news report after the earthquake --- "We only have room for a few hundred orphans. Before the earthquake, we were turning away 80 a day."
And that person was a director of an orphanage that had been destroyed by the earthquake. The children who survived were being sheltered --- and guarded from predators --- by a few employees of the destroyed building as the kids slept on the streets.
The misguided Idaho Baptists deserve kudos for the what appears to be a sincere desire to help. But they have just created more problems by their presumptions that they could be saviors.
According to the AP report, Prime Minister Max Bellerive has suggested the Americans could be prosecuted in the United States because Haiti's shattered court system may not be able to cope with a trial.
"It is clear now that they were trying to cross the border without papers. It is clear now that some of the children have live parents. And it is clear now that they knew what they were doing was wrong," Bellerive told the AP.
The White House has said the case remains in Haitian hands for now, according to the AP report. Apparently, the U.S., with its high unemployment, health care crisis, wars in the Middle East and prosecutions of assorted terrorists, has other legal priorities than having to deal with the headache of a bunch of religious loons who inadvertently committed an act that some might describe as kidnapping.
