In a December 6 memo, Scott Lloyd, Health and Human Services Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, created a government document that should be the gold standard of the role of a government employee when placed in a moral dilemma.
In his eight-page document Mr. Lloyd makes it clear that “sexual assault is the gravest offenses in the catalogue of offenses man can commit against his fellow man, or in this case, a teenaged young woman.”
The director also articulated that the only aggressor in the case before him was the attacker. It is not “possible to cure violence with further violence” by destroying the child. Yet currently Lloyd is under fire for the memo defending his position to protect all the refugees under his office’s care from violence, and for allegedly discussing a potential life-saving alternative to abortion.
What we know from news reports is that a small number of young girls being held in custody after they entered the country illegally found they were pregnant. Seeing an opportunity to promote an abortion on demand agenda, the American Civil Liberties Union sued to make the government either facilitate or even coerce the teenage girls to abort their children.
Indications are that the ACLU is not acting in any of the young girls’ true interests. In one case, the Department of Justice said lawyers for the woman tricked government attorneys by scheduling an abortion in the middle of the night, just hours before a Supreme Court review. In a more recent case, the young girl in question is complaining of unwanted coercion to have an abortion.
Contrast that with the words Scott Lloyd chooses to close his December 6th memo, “Refuge is the basis of our name and is at the core of what we provide, and we provide this to all the minors in our care, including their unborn children, every day…”
Without question one of the fundamental roles of government is to enforce law, which serves chiefly as a statement of the ethics and morals of the people it governs. And Director Lloyd’s critics seem to have forgotten the general rule of politics that elections have consequences. When President Obama was elected, he quickly surrounded himself with ardent pro-abortion advocates and activists, and put them in positions of responsibility. That Obama’s successor would appoint people with different priorities is par for the course.
Lloyd should not come under fire for protecting all the refugees under his office’s care from violence; rather he should be praised for courageously offering real relief and protection to those in his care, rather than exploiting and politicizing them as the ACLU has chosen to do. In his own words, the United States “cannot be a place of refuge while we are at the same time a place of violence. We have to choose, and we ought to choose to protect life rather than destroy it.”
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