You unsuccessfully challenged Senator Graham in the Republican primary. Because of his more moderate views on immigration, some people have interpreted his win as a sign that South Carolinians do not share your views on immigration. What do you think about that?
He did not run on immigration. He ran against Obamacare. He had $10 million in special-interest money, and he was able to craft the message that he was a conservative. Not one ad mentioned immigration.
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Many evangelical pastors in South Carolina have recently started speaking out in favor of legalizing the status of undocumented immigrants, saying biblical scripture urges Christians to welcome immigrants of all backgrounds. As a Baptist yourself, what are your views on this?
Well, South Carolina lags Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and some other states when it comes to abortion regulation. I wish our pastors would be more involved with protecting the unborn, which is clearly a biblical mandate, than to be used as pawns by folks on the left who want to grow a demographic that has been voting Democrat for years.
But what about their argument that biblical scripture is more important than politics?
The Scriptures also talk about the rule of law. I believe that pastors, like any other demographic, can be used by politicians as pawns. And I believe that if that's the case, they could be well-intentioned, but the end result for this country is going to be very, very negative.
How will it be negative?
Because you're going to turn Texas blue. You're going to have folks like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, who will have the votes to continue this country on a collision course, basically losing our sovereignty and losing the power we have as a nation.
You sponsored the law that gave police the authority to detain motorists suspected of being in the country illegally. The state has since agreed to block the "show me your papers" part of the law. Does this mean South Carolina is slowly changing its views on immigration?
No, I think South Carolina is pretty solid on immigration. If South Carolina was for amnesty, then Lindsey Graham wouldn't have said in that one interview the lie that he was going to tell the bigots to shut up. That statement there was very telling. But the fact is that Washington controls more elections than the actual states themselves when it comes to the money that it takes to win the elections. You can see that with Cochran in Mississippi. Washington has gotten so powerful that it has overwhelmed the states. It's not something that happened over decades, it's something that's happened over more than a century.
But it was the state that agreed to block that provision as part of the legal settlement. Do you not see that as a state effort?
No, I think they saw what the federal government has done in other states. I'm very concerned about people's individual liberties. There was more good than bad in the deal. We want to make sure folks aren't profiled, but if you are breaking the law, then I don't think that's a problem. I think it's a fine line, but I think the state was looking at what the federal courts had done.