Light and Momentary

I don't know how we move forward

Like a lot of purple counties, mine tilted right in the last election. On my block and among my colleagues I am in a mostly blue bubble, but in Gladlyville as a whole I am in the minority. At the gym, at the grocery store, on the trail, roughly every other person I encounter voted for Trump. It's almost certainly a more pronounced majority at my church. 

I expended many hours and many pixels blogging about Trump between 2016 and 2021, culminating in a post about January 6 that caused at least one long-time reader to decide she was never coming back here again. I found it unimaginable that he could be elected in 2016, unimaginable that 2020 could be anything other than a Biden landslide, unimaginable that he could think of running again, unimaginable that the 2024 race would be close. The Gen Z kids were going to turn out in droves, I asserted in the fall. The polling only looks close because they never answer their phones.

This is where Inigo Montoya turns to me and says:  

Princess Bride You Keep Using That Word GIFfrom Princess Bride GIFs

Sad to say, my imagination is not keeping pace with the preferences of my neighbors.

So what happens in a world where the unimaginable has in fact become the everyday? I do not really know the answer to that question.

I have put myself on a pretty strict news diet. I'm not even reading Heather Cox Richardson. I have called my reps once, but a once-a-month schedule feels more doable to me than the once-a-week schedule I maintained during the first Trump administration. In 2017 it felt urgent to me to follow the news closely. Did it do any good? Did it do enough good to offset the peace of mind it cost me? I'm managing my inputs much more aggressively this time around. I can't predict what Trump will do or say because he doesn't think or act like a normal human being. I can't focus on the hypotheticals while also preserving my sanity. So I won't.

But one thing hasn't changed for me: in those stunned sad posts from November 2016 I put a lot of emphasis on kindness. That's still where I find myself, trying to be intentional about kindness while not shying away from honesty. You know that old saw about people not caring how much you know unless they know how much you care? It has been my experience that kindness and curiosity are more likely to advance a conversation than the zingiest arguments. Here in my red-shifted town I am trying to take the long view, one conversation at a time -- keep the door open, share new information, invite a different perspective.

During the pandemic the polarization was visible in my church in a way that still plagues me. Our pastor handled it well, I thought, by designating two weekend Masses as masks-required and two as masks-optional. "I implore you," said the pastor, "in your charity for the vulnerable -- for the elderly and those going through cancer treatment and others who must avoid this virus -- wear a mask at these two Masses so they can be safer." A small subset of parishioners refused; they were going to Mass when they wanted to go to Mass and they weren't going to mask. One of them in particular afforded me a lot of opportunities to practice custody of the eyes; I still see him and think "WELL, IF IT ISN'T MR. CAN'T-BE-BOTHERED!" This is a failure in charity on my part, I know; he is more than his bad decisions.

In the intervening years the masks have mostly vanished but the polarization has only grown. I know many people who were tenuously Catholic then and emphatically not Catholic now; I know many people who have slid toward rad-traddery without seeming to see the absurdity of telling the Vicar of Christ that he is insufficiently Catholic. I categorically refuse to relegate my church to the crazies. I belong there, in my parish; I belong here, in Gladlyville. 

I think, maybe, because I don't know what else I can possibly think without succumbing to despair, that the best way forward is just to keep showing up. I'm going to keep talking about my trans kid in church circles, where a lot of people don't know that families they care about include trans members. I'm going to keep sending Christmas cards to that one big family we used to be close to. I hate it that the daughters in that family have less access to higher education than the sons, but I'm willing to be Christmas-card-level friends anyway. Over the years I have occasionally established connections with our friends' kids via Christmas letters (e.g., they think my letter is funny and find me on social media), and so I'm going to carry on, as one of the few women in higher education in their orbit, saying that I am happy to hear from them.

And so I am going to choose to believe that other people are out there doing the same uncertain and occasionally heartbreaking thing: showing up in their purple counties, purple churches, purple marriages, and saying, "Hey, I care about you, and have you considered that...?"

It would be the height of irony for me to write a thousand-word post about the importance of being persuadable and then follow it up with a 1400-word post in which I appear to disregard the comments disagreeing with me, so let me be clear: I've been thinking about the things you said. I hear you: that husband sounds pretty far out there. It's a tough situation, no question about it. They may wind up divorced; that might be best for everyone involved. It may be the case that she asked the question in that particular group because she knew how they would respond.

But who is better positioned than that guy's wife to say, "I love you; that's bonkers; you know better than that"? I can imagine a marriage in which she is genuinely seeking better ways to say those things, which is why I answered the question she asked. I did suggest some other resources; I did invite her to DM me if she'd like. But I started by answering the question she asked, because once we start assuming that disconnection is the best option, the world gets bleaker.

Would you cut off a parent who voted for Trump?

Would you cut off a son who announced that household voting seemed best to him? 

Would you cut off a brother who showed up to Thanksgiving dinner in a shirt with a Punisher logo? 

In every case, it seems to me, the devil is in the details, and a Facebook post is unlikely to supply those details.

I see a lot of Facebook posts from West Virginia friends steeped in the Fox News worldview, and I teach a lot of young adults from farm country whose parents' worst nightmare is that they will be brainwashed by the libs in the pursuit of higher education. Last year I got a couple of thank-you cards from students that meant a lot to me. One said, "You have made me rethink so many things, in the best way." The other said, "In your classes there is an atmosphere of joy that I treasure." I am so lucky to have the job I do, where I can waltz in as my curious goofball self and teach about why we should fund scientific research, and how access to healthcare saves lives, and why disability advocacy matters. I'm going to keep requiring my students to participate in the political process as advocates for people with disabilities, and reflecting on what they learned. I'm going to keep telling them about the costs of inequalities in access to healthcare, and our collective responsibility to enforce environmental laws that protect gestating babies and their families from avoidable harms.

I'm not going to change a lot of minds on Facebook, but I'm willing to answer questions, to offer compassion and connection. The outcomes of my work in the classroom are variable and uncertain, but I'm going to keep showing up and doing my best. And I cannot know what the future holds for the US Catholic Church, but I'm confident that if the gates of hell will not prevail against it, neither will Donald Trump.

I don't have an ending for this too-long post, except to say it again: Kindness. Honesty. Patience. Persistence. That's where I am right now. You?

It was a JOKE

Last night after Elwood and I saw our movie, we went to our neighborhood's Irish-ish place. We each ordered a beer and chatted for a while. In the middle of our conversation I was frowning at the sound system. "What's the name of this song?" I asked Elwood. I started reciting the lyrics, because I've heard it a zillion times. (I think this joint has a playlist of approximately 50 songs that they've been looping through on repeat for the whole time the business has been open. We probably heard this same song during our first visit there in 2005.)

"What is it?" I asked him again. "I took out my dog / and him I did shoot. What is it?"

"What?!?!" replied Elwood. "What did you just say?"

"I took out my dog / and him I did shoot," I said again. "It's the song they'll play at Kristi Noem's installation into whatever position she's going to hold in the Trump administration."

It was a joke, a wee bitter joke about a person who had disappeared from my radar entirely after doubling down on her choice to shoot her dog. There was speculation that she had been a contender for the VP slot on the Trump ticket, and there was further speculation that she had disqualified herself with the dog-shooting hullabaloo.

But tonight I looked at the NYT homepage and discovered that she's going to head up the Department of Homeland Security.

Maybe it's true that in Trumpworld the only disqualifying offense is disloyalty.

Not the post I wanted to be writing tonight

Well, I guess it was inadvertently appropriate that yesterday's post featured a guy staring over the edge of a precipice.

On the day after the 2016 election I wrote this earnest post about being an unwilling ticket holder at the first Trump rodeo. It seems so naive in hindsight; he was so much worse than I could have possibly imagined on that day. Four years later I said, "Whatever that future looks like, it will not be governed by the least competent, most dangerous president we have ever seen." Which, okay, I guess foretelling the future is not my talent, because here we are again, about to be governed by the least competent, most dangerous president we have ever seen.

I am mostly in the Numb Denial zone today, which was useful for showing up at work and getting my job done. But oh my friends [she howled with a small and woeful howl of disbelief], this is not the way I thought the election was going to unfold.

Well-known liberal bias

I am taking another Facebook break, so I do not know how my politically conservative friends responded to the news that Judge Terry Doughty ruled in favor of right-wing plaintiffs chagrined by their treatment on social media. But I can tell you that they've been mad for a long time about the treatment they perceive as unjust if not outright tyrannical.

When I first learned about the option to report problematic posts, I thought, "Oh, good, this will help people to know when they've been taken in by false information! Hurray for helping people!" I did not foresee the actual outcome-- the bitter complaints and the doubling down, the growing certainty that conservatives were being silenced unfairly. 

Back in 2020 I posted about our epistemological crisis and its impact on the Church. I guess even then I thought cooler heads would prevail. Obviously, I thought, no one could argue in favor of a purported right to propagate false information. Little did I know! In a National Review article quoting from his ruling, Judge Doughty appears to say that he is concerned about social media crackdowns on demonstrably false conservative claims about the 2020 election.

I should be clear that I have only read articles about the ruling, rather than the ruling itself, and I can certainly imagine problematic forms of government interference in social media channels. Still, I have to think that when Stephen Colbert joked in 2006 about reality's well-known liberal bias, he did not foresee this particular future.

We own a piece of this

I am thinking about 25 years' worth of messaging to "good Catholics." We were supposed to vote for the Republicans in 1994, because abortion, and never mind about Newt Gingrich's then-shocking decision that it was better to shut down the government than to negotiate with the liberals.

We were supposed to vote for GWB in 2000, because abortion, and never mind that he broke his campaign promise to hold the line on embryonic stem cell research less than seven months into his first term. Never mind the war, because abortion.

We were supposed to vote for Republicans in 2008 and 2012, because abortion, and never you mind about candidates who refused to take a principled stand against torture. The liberals were supporting a worse mortal sin, the logic ran (if torture was even a mortal sin -- they weren't convinced about that), and at least torture didn't kill anybody. Remember when they told us Obama was going to shut down all the Catholic hospitals because he was so committed to advancing the abortion activists' agenda? 

I found myself more and more puzzled and unhappy across these years, as the rhetoric became more and more divisive. These are the Five Non-Negotiables, screamed the pamphlets, with lots of bold-face type and little sourcing.

There are a couple of men I know who would describe themselves as pillars of their churches, but I have had to mute them on Facebook because of the ugliness in their political posts. If Nancy Pelosi is a beloved child of God, redeemed by the death of the Lord, then there are limits on what we as Christians should say about her. But it turns out that if you spend decades telling people that WE are right and THEY are dedicated to promoting evil, it gets a lot harder to see Nancy Pelosi as a beloved child of God, redeemed by the death of the Lord. If you tell people that all good Catholics vote Republican, it pushes people to overlook Republican policies that are problematic for Catholics. 

I thought surely Donald Trump was a bridge too far in 2016, but I was wrong. I thought surely SURELY his 2020 campaign would flounder and fail, but I think he would have won if not for COVID, and the Catholics saying "most pro-life president ever!!!!" would have propelled him toward that victory. 

I am permanently done with any flavor of pro-life activism that looks favorably on the Trump administration. Catholic Vote mailers? Straight into the recycling bin, unopened, forevermore. I called and harangued the Priests for Life office again and again, until they finally took me off their mailing list. I can't even deal with the sight of their envelopes. Because when you tell people to overlook evil in the name of stopping evil, you blunt their moral sense. And when you steer people toward media sources that play fast and loose with the truth (because those sources tend to condemn the evil you oppose most emphatically) you wind up with a nation in which astonishing numbers of people believe that the Most Pro-life President Ever (no) won the election (no) but was thwarted by widespread voter fraud (no) and that there is somehow justice (no) in their refusal to accept the outcome of a free and fair election and in obstructing the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy (so much no ALL THE NO). You wind up with armed insurrectionists smashing windows in the US Capitol, shouting that it's time to hang the vice-president who has been attempting to do his constitutional duty even as the mob erected a gallows on the lawn. 

The church is full of people saying "you can't be a Catholic and a Democrat!" as if it were a self-evident truth. This position has led an appalling number of Catholics to reject biblical truth (family separation at the southern border, anyone?), the Catechism (capital punishment is morally inadmissible, Roma locuta est), and science (climate change deniers, repent and submit to the Pope). If a person rejects the Bible, the Catechism, and science, what's left? 

We have profoundly damaged our Christian witness in the name of rewriting abortion law. And as the nation picks up the pieces (and, please God, removes from office the man who fomented the Wednesday insurrection), we in the church need to have some hard conversations about where we've found ourselves, and where we go from here.

BRISK CLAP

OK, US Catholics, we have our work cut out for us. We have spent decades walking down an increasingly untenable political path, driven by strident voices calling abortion the Most Evil of All Evils and saying Effective Pro-Life Political Action Equals Laws Against Abortion. But--

It is my highest priority to live a life of joyful obedience to Jesus Christ in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. I believe every word of the Catechism. And I do not believe those strident voices within the Church are right. In fact, I believe them to be responsible for deepening divisions and driving people away from the faith. Let’s do better.

An increasingly polarized political landscape has left too many Catholics thinking that it is A-OK to sneer at the libs, or to wear a PELOSI SUCKS T-shirt, or to call anything left of center “socialism.” Can we just stop with that? It's unlikely that on Judgment Day Jesus is going to be like, "wrong, socialism is when the workers control the means of production," but I tell you what: he is the guy who said it was the same as murder to call one's brother a fool. I don’t think he will look kindly on use of the word “libtard.” (Obviously, I likewise condemn schoolyard insults aimed at Trump and his fellows.)

This political landscape has also left too many Catholics thinking that all left-leaning political positions are self-evidently wrong. Medicare for all? Laughable. Ending fracking? Wishful thinking from ignorant dreamers who fail to see it’s not economically feasible. Subsidized high-quality childcare? OhohoHOOOO, it is a PLOY to allow the government to indoctrinate your children!

What if we didn’t do that?

My opinions are unchanged since I posted about abortion four years ago: just as in parenting, if you want people to make different choices, you smooth the path toward those choices. If your two-year-old is lying in the floor screaming for Halloween candy, then one option is to repeat “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” But probably the better choice is to say, “Huh, it’s 10:00 and he didn’t eat breakfast. Scrambled eggs and toast, coming right up.” If your teens are fighting all the time, then sure, you can ground them and yell “NO RUDENESS AND DISRESPECT” at them (using your most polite and respectful bellow). Or you can figure out what the obstacles are between the situation you’ve got and the situation you want, and tackle the obstacles.

Let’s talk about obstacles. Women are not having abortions for funsies. Women are having abortions because they can’t afford a(nother) baby, and because they are in unstable relationships, and because their life circumstances do not seem to be compatible with motherhood. They are having late-term abortions in part because their unborn babies have disabilities or life-limiting conditions. In that incomplete list of reasons for abortion there is so much scope for bipartisan political action. So let’s commit to some bipartisan political action already.

In the UK, which is hardly a hotbed of pro-life activism, every pregnant resident of the country has access to skilled prenatal care, to her choice of birth setting, and to in-home follow-up care for herself and her baby in the weeks after delivery. Her out-of-pocket cost? Zero. If we in this country were genuinely committed to protecting the lives and well-being of unborn babies and their mothers, we could do something similar. With a coalition of Democrats and Catholic Republicans, we could make it political suicide for a legislator to oppose Medicaid expansion for pregnant/postpartum women and children under age 5. If ostensibly pro-life legislators vote repeatedly to repeal the piece of legislation that requires insurers to cover prenatal care, then we should hold them responsible for dereliction of their pro-life duty. Healthcare is a huge messy expensive issue, but the eye-wateringly expensive part is end-of-life care. In the richest country of the world, the cost of routine perinatal/well-child care is 100% a solvable problem. We just need the political will to solve it.

Similarly, the rest of the developed world has figured out better solutions to maternity leave and childcare. In fact, the entire developing world* has also figured out better solutions to maternity leave. If the pro-life community in the US acknowledges these barriers to motherhood and commits to working together on solutions, we can make a difference for the terrified newly pregnant women out there thinking, “I never thought I’d have an abortion, but I just cannot see how to make this work financially.” But we need systemic change, which will require sustained political action. And yes, it will be expensive. Remind me, though -- how many KAZILLION dollars have we sunk into deeply divisive and ultimately unsuccessful personhood ballot initiatives? All those strings of appeals in court cases that have only re-entrenched Roe v. Wade as settled law – how much did they cost, and how much good did they do?

*(excluding Suriname, New Guinea, and a few tiny countries in the South Pacific) 

As a nation we can afford maternity leave that allows women to stay home and recover after they have babies. We can afford childcare that allows them to go back to work when they need to, and know that their babies are safe and well cared for. If we want to, that is. If you are reading this and thinking grumbly thoughts like “Not business-friendly! Not fiscally responsible!” then I invite you -– gently, respectfully -– to consider how much of a priority it should be for the pro-life movement to be business-friendly rather than mother/baby-friendly. I ask you how much of the gospel is about protecting business interests at the expense of the vulnerable, and how well those priorities square with the idea of a preferential option for the poor. I note too that the Canadian economy, despite having a GDP only 8% of ours, has not collapsed under the weight of one-year paid maternity leaves.

Whoops, I just passed a thousand words. But you guys, we also need to talk about the pro-life impact of two other causes usually linked to the left. First off: we can reduce the number of babies with severe congenital anomalies, and thus the number of women seeking second-trimester abortions, if we reduce women's exposure to environmental toxins. Fracking kills unborn babies; ergo, in my view, pro-lifers should oppose fracking. Don't tell me we can't get by without an activity that nobody had even heard of 10 years ago. Don't tell the mothers with empty arms that cheap energy matters more than their babies' lives.

Second: we can use political means to make it easier to parent children with disabilities. We can insist on adequate funding for early intervention, for early childhood special education, for school systems that can then focus on access to services rather than gatekeeping to balance a too-skimpy special-ed budget. And let's not forget respite care. It's great to smile at the person at church who's caring for a child with an apparent disability. But the kinds of ongoing support that make a difference in caregiver well-being and eventual outcomes for people with disabilities -- those require political will, and public funding.

I guess if the one true pro-life political strategy were passing more restrictive laws against abortion, then seating judges sympathetic to those laws might be the one true indicator of a pro-life president [she says skeptically]. But I believe there are many, many ways to work politically toward the pro-life goals of protecting gestating babies and equipping their families and communities to welcome them. So let's get it together, and stop turning up our noses at our natural allies. Nobody in heaven is going to be awarding any brownie points for the zingiest social media post about whether Joe Biden should receive communion. But I do believe they will ask us what we did for the least of these.

The Left

I clicked on a Crisis link today, when I saw Mark Shea describe it as an "epic piece of false prophecy from the worst and dumbest journal of false prophecy in the Catholicosphere." I mean, how could you resist a description like that? I suppose I should not be surprised that the folks who were arguing against women's suffrage in August (for real, I am not making it up; you know you want to be Catholic so you too can go to church with folks like this) have lost the plot and jumped the shark.

One thing that jumped out at me today was the article's vilification of The Left, as if The Left were a homogenous entity in uniform opposition to Catholics. As if faithful Catholic leftists could not exist. (Dorothy Day, Secret Enemy of the Faithful.) As if nobody ever leaned left on economic issues while also embracing Church teaching on sexual morality. (My dudes, Acts 3-6 is not what you'd call a compelling argument for capitalism.)

I have a blog post in my drafts folder about moving forward after this interminable election day/week/fever dream, and at the heart of it is the idea that GOP economic policies have been accepted by many faithful Catholics as The One Right Way To Do Economic Policy. This is bunk, not to put too fine a point on it, and unusually corrosive bunk at that. I'm curious about the timeline here. I know that in the early 90s it was taken for granted in evangelical circles that Left-Leaning = Anti-Christian. For those of you who've been around for a while, was that true in the Catholic milieu as well?

All In

I know a woman -- let's call her Anne-Marie -- who homeschools her large family. She was raised in an unusually Catholic family in an unusually Catholic city, and she grew up steeped in a culture that said "ending abortion must be the highest priority for committed Catholics, and the most reliable way to end abortion is to pass laws against it."

When I met her mom in 2014 I was shocked almost into rudeness by her willingness to broadcast conspiracy theories as fact. I wondered if perhaps the mom was having some premature cognitive decline, because surely, surely, no one with intact faculties could believe that nonsense. In hindsight I suspect that too much talk radio was a more likely culprit than cognitive decline.

Anne-Marie and I crossed paths most often on Facebook, where I wound up hiding her posts for a while. On the day of the Newtown shooting she posted about it: she thought it was so sad that those kids had died, and she hoped the liberals wouldn't use their deaths as an excuse to take away people's rights.

In 2016 Trump was a bridge too far for her. She had voted Republican for as long as she had been able to vote, but she thought it might be better to vote third-party over Trump. 

Now, though? Over the past four years she morphed into a rock-solid Trump voter. She thinks you should have voted for him too, because he is the most pro-life president in history, and her #1 priority is to ban abortion.

A few weeks ago I thought to myself, "What we have in this country is an EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS!" And then I thought, "Probably saying the phrase 'epistemological crisis' out loud disqualifies you as a source of information in the minds of the people whose epistemology concerns you." I have so many church friends who see it as a badge of honor to eschew mainstream media in favor of Fox News and its ilk. Don't get me wrong -- I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and when Trump does something that makes me angry I make a point of reading what the National Review says about it. It's not Fox's conservative slant I'm complaining about; it's the truth dearth.

Within the US Catholic Church our Trump problem has been massively compounded by priests and bishops who are also watching Fox News. I was gobsmacked to find that Catholics were still -- still -- being cautioned that it was a mortal sin to vote for the Democrat. Did you see Mark Shea's series on this earlier this fall? It was excellent, and I think it went largely unheeded by the folks who have been hearing since the 80s that good Catholics vote Republican.

I voted for Biden with a clear conscience, because Trump is the very embodiment of a proportionate reason. If Biden wins I will weep with relief -- not because I have any disagreements with the teachings of the Church, but because Trump is a menace and we are lucky that he has only presided over the deaths of a quarter-million Americans and ravaged the norms of democracy. But if Trump pulls out a victory, Anne-Marie will celebrate, and she will be certain that the angels in heaven are rejoicing with her.

This bespeaks a problem larger than the results of the 2020 election.

43%

I am thinking a lot lately about living in a country where 43% of the population approves of the president. My own capacity to extend him the benefit of the doubt was depleted in-- oh, maybe February of 2017. I have surrounded myself with people who share my concerns about the calamitous costs of his corruption and incompetence. We are in the majority. But not by much.

I go to church with people who think of Trump as the most pro-life president ever. They were uncertain about him in 2016 but now they are all in.

No matter who wins the election, I don't know how we bridge that divide.

Maximum Division

Change my mind: I think Trump's choice of Amy Coney Barrett was deliberately engineered to intensify our polarization. 

I think the nones look at someone in a charismatic Catholic community, where members promise to yield to other people's authority, and declare to themselves that every single part of that is freaky-deaky. (Plenty of Catholics find it freaky-deaky, for that matter.)

I think a big slice of America looks at someone with seven -- count 'em, seven -- children and thinks to itself, "Freakiest-deakiest." A small but vocal segment of that big slice is looking at the combination of seven children and People of Praise membership and shrieking, "Aunt Lydia is about to rule over you, America!!!!!!" 

Still another slice of America is thinking that deep commitment to the faith is admirable, and that anyone who can combine mothering seven children with Coney Barrett's legal career must seriously have her act together.

I am just waiting for the conservative quote-tweets of the Aunt Lydia comparisons, saying, "Look how they hate your faith and your families. We can't let that hatred win!" I think those voices will be targeting Catholics who don't want to vote for either Trump (because he's unequivocally the worst president in history) or Biden (because abortion), trying to persuade them to see Trump as the more authentically Catholic option.

These quote-tweets, of course, will be criss-crossing the tweets from left-Twitter, in which LGBTQ voices are saying, "Look how they hate your rights and your families. We can't let that hatred win!"

And I know that my perspective on this is a little quirky, since I'm a Catholic with charismatic sympathies and an eyebrow-raising number of children who leans left politically and also believes firmly in the unique and unrepeatable nature of each human life. But there are so many worthwhile conversations we could be having here, and instead we will only get sound bites on both sides: they hate you. You must vote against them.

The president visits the JP2 shrine

I was very glad that Archbishop Wilton Gregory spoke out against the president's visit to the DC shrine of St. John Paul II, because I have a lot of concerns about that particular photo op. Trump stands in opposition to pretty much everything St. JP2 represents. Here's why:

• Because St. JP2 spent way too much time visiting "shithole countries," bringing them the good news. He preached the truths that we are one human family and racism is a sin. He would not be on board with the idea of bias as a brand.
• Because St. JP2 was very clear about the hazards of aligning with the folks in Moscow, whereas Trump has been far too cozy with them for far too long.
• Because throughout his pontificate he spoke courageously against authoritarian governments that would deny the intrinsic worth of the individual. A quote from a story worth reading: "During his visit at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the symbol of the evil of totalitarianism, he told the thousands of people gathered from the Eastern European countries to resist the falsehoods they had been told: 'You are not who they say you are, so let me remind you who you are.'"
• Because he was always courageous. If you had to distill his whole papacy into three words, they would be (of course!) BE NOT AFRAID. It might be nice if the president, who emerged from his bunker to preside over the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters so he could pose for a photo with a borrowed Bible, could learn from that example.
• Because when the goons in Moscow sent tanks to threaten the members of Solidarity in Poland, St. JP2 did not say "Oh, yes, what an excellent idea, deploying military force against civilians whose ideas you find dangerous." In the past four years we have seen an unrelenting succession of nadirs. There seems to be no bottom. This was the lowest point for me of the entire Trump presidency (so far!): the president of the United States of America just threatened to sic the US military -- the people sworn to serve and protect this nation -- on American civilians. I am very sure St. JP2 would have some Thoughts about that plan.
• Because St. JP2 believed so firmly in the sacredness of the body and of human sexuality that he was willing to be unpopular for the sake of truth. The contrast with the president is too depressing for me even to type it out.
• Because, as he showed in his writings and addresses, St. JP2 believed wholeheartedly in our obligation to steward our intellectual gifts wisely -- to think hard about hard things, to accept difficult truths as binding even if we might prefer to disregard them. The president's scorn for science, his unwillingness to make the difficult choices that could have limited the scope of the COVID-19 outbreak -- his anti-intellectualism has caused a staggering number of avoidable deaths.
• Because St. JP2's whole life was characterized by humility, while Trump, the least humble person in living memory or maybe even in human history, thinks humility is for losers.
• Because St. JP2 wanted us to remember that "materialistic concerns and one-sided values are never sufficient to fill the heart," which is not a view that a person with gold-plated bathroom fixtures seems to have taken to heart. (Do we need to pause a minute to watch that video? I might need to pause for a minute and watch that video, even though I'm not quite done here.)

• And last: because he is attempting to play us. He is saying to himself, "Hey, 60% of white Catholics voted for me in 2016." He wants us to say, "Oh, what a swell guy; in a time of crisis he thinks about St. JP2. I love St. JP2! Therefore I should vote Republican."

Oh, my friends, let's not get played.

No. Absolutely Not.

Maybe ten days ago, or a million years -- who can tell at this point? -- I saw a quote attributed to one of Boris Johnson's lackeys. We should just let the virus run its course, he said, and deal with the fallout later. Prevention would be too hard on the economy.

"Thank God," I said to myself, "that this nonsense is on the other side of the ocean from me. That right there is why the Bible says love of money is the root of all evil."

Like the coronavirus itself, this unspeakably execrable flavor of cupidity has wormed its way inside our borders and is infecting disturbing numbers of people. A man from my church posted approvingly about the president's presser today, in which Trump asserted that we're just going to have to get back to work after a couple of weeks of this.

So let's be absolutely clear about what he is saying: we should allow more than 2 million people to die, many of them in heartbreaking respiratory distress, because the economy is the most important thing here. We should allow this virus to run roughshod over the most vulnerable members of our society. We should just...stand aside while it ravages our country -- primarily our elderly, but uncountable others as well.

I have been frustrated for a long time now with the voices on the right calling Trump The Most Pro-Life President In History. Now some of those same folks are expressing support for him in this, perhaps the least pro-life idea ever to issue forth from a human mouth.

Let's have a brief review of How To Catholic: 

• Do we protect the vulnerable and marginalized, even when it is personally costly, whether or not they have already been born? (Answer: yes)
• Do we believe in a preferential option for the poor, who are already disproportionately affected by this virus and who urgently need our assistance? (Answer: also yes)
• Do we seriously suggest that allowing more than 2 million agonizing and largely avoidable deaths to happen, primarily so rich people can get back to being rich, is a pro-life perspective? (Answer: HELL NO, we do not.)

Recently, just before the wheels fell off the world, I wrote a post for the parish blog challenging the idea that good Catholics^TM are required to let abortion drive our voting decisions simply because there are more lives affected by abortion than by any of the other issues related to human life and dignity (i.e., it doesn't really matter if a Republican candidate supports the death penalty, because so few people are executed compared to the numbers of abortions in this country). Because I just wrote that post, I can tell you the Guttmacher Institute's most recent estimate for the number of abortions per year in the US: 862,000. And yet some of the people who claim that protecting the maximum number of lives is a moral obligation have now added an astonishing asterisk: *but it's okay to consign more than twice that many people to painful deaths this year if the price is right. One wonders what they might have to say about abortion if it were more profitable.

I do not pretend that there is a clear path forward, though this article from the Atlantic makes a whole lot of sense to me. But we must categorically reject the president's idea of allowing the virus to do its thing so the stock market can return to doing its thing. The only moral code in which this proposal makes sense is the one where Mammon is Lord. No man can serve two masters, some rabble-rouser once said. Donald Trump is showing us yet again where his true allegiance lies.

Please, my friends, let's make it clear where our true allegiance lies.

We'll have no bananas today

When the news broke on Tuesday that the White House was declining to participate in impeachment proceedings -- call it the Bartleby approach to a constitutional crisis -- I assumed that the letter saying "we would prefer not to" had been written by some sleazy lawyer. He was ridiculed on Twitter by conservative attorneys, including Gregg Nunziata. 

Wow. This letter is bananas. A barely-lawyered temper tantrum. A middle finger to Congress and its oversight responsibilities.

No Member of Congress should accept it, no matter his or her view on the behavior of Pelosi, Schiff, or Trump.

Things are bad. Things will get worse. https://t.co/AesJ6cGHrl

— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) October 8, 2019

George Conway also came down hard on the writer:

I cannot fathom how any self-respecting member of the bar could affix his name to this letter. It’s pure hackery, and it disgraces the profession. https://t.co/igPGL45oRS

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 8, 2019

So I was surprised to see the New York Times coverage of the author in Wednesday's paper. White House counsel Pat Cipollone, author of the bananapants letter asserting that the rule of law is not a thing, has 10 children. He's been an active supporter of Catholic charities, especially of pro-life efforts. He co-founded the National Prayer Breakfast. He introduced Laura Ingraham to the faith.

This is like the Mike Pence maneuver all over again. Remember how that played out in your Facebook feed in 2016? Trump is terrible, said one of my friends at the time, but Mike Pence is trustworthy. Vote GOP, because Mike Pence!

Ah, yes, Mike Pence, lodestar of integrity.

Pence is trying as hard as he can not to go down with the ship. pic.twitter.com/jrA8aoQSfb

— Matt Rogers 🎙🎃 (@Politidope) October 10, 2019

I suspect that the choice of Pat Cipollone as White House counsel was a deeply cynical move designed to shore up Catholic support for Trump. If the National Prayer Breakfast/March for Life guy says it, then it can't be an egregious violation of democratic norms or an attempt to subvert the authority of a coequal branch of government. 

Or maybe, actually, it can.

This morning I said to Elwood, "The longer we spend saying to each other, 'This is not normal,' the less true it is." We used to agree that someone who talked unironically about his great and unmatched wisdom would probably need psychiatric intervention. When the person saying it holds the nuclear football, the question of an appropriate response is more urgent. And yet somehow some Catholics are still saying that the current state of the White House is an acceptable flavor of bananas.

Kurdish children are dying because of Trump's determination to carry out Putin's agenda.

I have no words to write to this tweet as I speechless after receiving this video from Syria 😔 pic.twitter.com/JKUrbNW6fh

— Mutlu Civiroglu (@mutludc) October 12, 2019

Our failure to reckon with climate change is threatening lives around the globe. (My own Alex is in Tokyo right now, weathering the record-breaking typhoon that just pummeled Japan. The tweet below shows footage from an earlier, weaker typhoon. Horrifying, no?)

This Typhoon in Japan last year was 400km wide.#Hagibis is 1400km wide.

Stay inside.#RWC2019 pic.twitter.com/RtGX2VWrzu

— Martin Cross (@MartinXRugby) October 11, 2019

And yet for a vocal subset of US Catholics, the only legitimate way to be pro-life is to focus narrowly on changing US abortion laws and building a judiciary that will uphold additional restrictions. As of this week, when every news source is exploding with stories about Trump's failure to comply with US election law or with House impeachment proceedings, Abby Johnson is still exhorting folks to vote for him in 2020.

To be a universal Church is to see the big picture, the forest and the trees. Truth matters; the law matters. Say no to the bananas. Say it loud.

All stressed up and no way to know

I'm not sure that post title makes any sense. But I am ALL hopped up. SO SO SO hopped up. I thought I knew how things would go down tonight in one of the races I'm following, but it's so close. 

"Jamie," says Elwood, "we're not going to know until 3am." I have an 8am meeting and I teach twice tomorrow morning. BUT HEY-- 3 am is not totally unreasonable, is it?

Okay, it is actually totally unreasonable.

Here I am, being a responsible grownup and heading off to bed. I will sleep a little more peacefully tonight, feeling relieved that I will not have to move to Belgium after all.

A boy named Chip

I went to high school with a boy named Chip. In my memories he wears his wavy hair in a mullet; he has a wispy mustache. In the right hip pocket of every pair of jeans he owns there is a faded ring, left there by his ever-present can of snuff. We were never friends but we were friendly acquaintances; we have many mutual Facebook friends.

Chip left our small West Virginia town for the Carolinas, where he still spends time with his crew of WV expats. He shows up all the time in comments on friends' posts. I knew he was a Trump supporter. I knew he eschewed what he labeled "political correctness."

I didn't know he'd gone off the deep end.

One of my Facebook pals posted about a Trump rally in Tennessee. Her college-age kids had attended the protest outside the rally, and she was posting in support of the protest with a side of worry about the potential for violence.

Chip showed up spewing nonsense about triggered libs, the snowflake left, and the failure of my friends' children to recognize the Greatest President in History. I rolled my eyes and kept scrolling. But it got worse: when another commenter pushed back, he erupted. "I hope some migrants come my way," he said, "so I can use them for target practice."

Target practice.

I reported him to Facebook for hate speech, a first for me. Today the post is gone. I'm curious about what happened-- would Facebook take the whole post down and not just the offending comment? Is there a way for me to tell how they called it?

Generally I don't get in arguments on Facebook and I certainly don't go around reporting people there. Live and let live and go complain on Twitter, that's my motto. But I'm still thinking about the boy I knew. Chip remains friends with one of the few out gay men from our high school class, who treats him with surprising patience. He is still close to the son of an immigrant from the Philippines, who seems not to have been marked out for target practice quite yet.

I feel confident that Chip's grandpa took him hunting when he was a little kid. I bet he got a rifle of his own sometime in his teens; gun culture is huge there. I also feel confident that the people who taught him to shoot were very clear about suitable targets.  

In the wake of the attempted pipe bombings and the Pittsburgh shooting, there's been some debate about the actual impact of Trump's rhetoric. He's just shooting off his mouth, you snowflake-y liberals! He's not actually radicalizing people!

Something surely is.

"This provision is unambiguously ableist"

I have been trying to write a post about the proposed changes to the public charge policy for the parish blog and HOOO BOY I need a break from being calm and measured and not swearing. 

via GIPHY

There, that's better.

Is this issue on your radar? If not, allow me to put it there.

The discussion about how self-sufficient an immigrant needs to be is an old discussion. The phrase "public charge" dates from the late 19th century, when it became part of immigration law. An individual deemed likely to become a "public charge" -- someone in need of extensive government support -- could be denied entry to the country. 

The public charge guidance that's been in place since 1999 focuses on cash support from the government-- things like TANF and SSI. If those payments make up more than half of an individual's financial support, or if an individual seems likely to require long-term care in a publicly funded institution, s/he can be labeled a public charge. A would-be immigrant can be denied entry to the country or a legal immigrant can be denied permanent resident status, based on the public charge policy.

In September, though, the wretched Scooby-Doo villains masquerading as leaders of the free world proposed a significant revision of the public charge policy. If their proposed rule takes effect, use of non-cash government benefits -- Medicaid, SNAP, subsidized housing -- could disqualify a person from obtaining permanent resident status. We're talking about legal immigrants, whose sponsors have submitted affidavits of support, being denied permanent residency. We're talking about people whose children are US citizens -- did I mention the part about legal immigrants? -- worrying that they might not be able to keep their families together.

This rule change will disproportionately affect people who are poor, disabled, pregnant, unborn, or very young. This is not a pro-life action. This is the very opposite of a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable. 

I found multiple sources citing the DHS itself, assessing the likely impact of this rule change. Here's an example from the American Immigration Council:

DHS admits that many U.S. citizens will be affected by the rule because immigrant families will no longer take advantage of benefits. The agency’s list of negative effects includes “worse health outcomes … especially for pregnant or breastfeeding women, infants, or children,” as well as “increased use of emergency rooms,” “increased prevalence of communicable diseases,” “increased rates of poverty and housing instability; and reduced productivity and educational attainment.” In fact, even before the regulations have gone into effect, health providers report that fear among immigrant parents has already caused many to forego nutritional benefits for their U.S.-born children.

I went looking for that text on the DHS website and, strangely enough, it seems to have been scrubbed. I wonder if there is an online repository for all the things that have disappeared from .gov websites under the current troglodytocracy, all the pages that used to say climate change is real and mercury is bad for gestating babies and PREGNANT WOMEN NEED PRENATAL CARE.

In my world, it is better for pregnant legal immigrants to have access to prenatal care via Medicaid than for them to forgo prenatal care and place their babies at higher risk. In my world, it is better for legal immigrants with disabilities to receive services than to avoid them for fear of being denied a green card down the line. I could keep ranting for a while here, but maybe I will share some links instead:

• Thousand Days summarizes the impact for pregnant women, gestating babies, and young children
• AAP points out that 1 in 4 US children has at least one immigrant parent
• Kaiser Family Foundation contrasts the old guidance with the new version of the rule
• Center for American Progress describes the policy change as a form of targeted discrimination
• ASAN provides historical context (and the title of this post)

The public can comment on the proposed rule change until December 10.

Not normal

Hi, this is a reminder (in case you needed one) that things are really weird right now. Although I was just writing yesterday about embracing weird things, I didn't mean these weird things.

The President of the United States is not supposed to treat the UK or Canada like hostile foreign powers.
The President of the United States is not supposed to treat hostile foreign powers like pals.
The existence of NATO has not traditionally been controversial among US political figures.
The existence of facts, ditto.

Where do we go from here?

Yes, you can!

I used to think of calling my reps as a Big Deal, an intimidating prospect. I am here to tell you that it is not actually a big deal. This is the script I always use:

Hi, thank you for taking my call today. My name is Jamie Gladly, and I am one of Congressman/Senator Lastname's constituents in Gladlyville. My zip code is 12345. I am calling about [issue], because [reasons, sometimes tailored to his/her political leanings]. I would like to ask the representative/senator to [co-sponsor legislation / introduce legislation / vote yea or nay on a bill / issue a statement]. I [would appreciate / do not need] a response from the representative/senator. [pause for aide to say something pleasant and non-committal and to confirm my address] Thank you again for talking with me today. 

Boom, you're done. I can usually make all 3 calls in less than 5 minutes. No one has ever been anything but impeccably courteous to me, even when I am feeling a little rant-y. The last time I called about family separation at the border, I joked with my kids that if they had been listening with a "Mom calls her legislators" bingo card in hand, they would have had an easy blackout.

Today I was feeling more than a little rant-y, and I expanded the [issue] and [reasons] sections of my script accordingly. I am going to post a version of them here, in case anybody who reads here might be feeling cautious about making calls.

I am calling about the front-page story in today's New York Times, reporting a sudden and unexplained shift in a position that has received longstanding bipartisan support. US officials inexplicably opposed a World Health Assembly resolution in support of breastfeeding, and did so by bullying and threatening smaller countries until the Russians intervened to stop them. This behavior is nothing short of bizarre: it flies in the face of decades of research on the importance of human milk as a low-cost means of protecting mothers and babies worldwide. Protecting and promoting breastfeeding is pro-life and pro-economic responsibility [I emphasized this first for the R side of the aisle] as well as pro-science and pro-women's health [I led with this for the other side]. I am especially concerned about the HHS response to the NYT reporter, which clearly reflects the influence of infant formula industry marketing strategies. The only possible explanation I can think of for these events is lobbying by the infant formula industry, which will have serious adverse effects on the well-being of babies and mothers if it continues unchecked. In the wake of the recent scandals at the EPA, I am concerned that HHS has also been the target of hidden industry lobbying efforts.

I would like to ask the senator/congressman to consider doing two things: first, to issue a statement in support of our policy of protecting and promoting breastfeeding in time for World Breastfeeding Week, which is August 1-7. Second, I'd like to ask the senator/congressman to consider calling for an investigation into donations by the infant formula industry that may have influenced delegates to the World Health Assembly meeting and representatives of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Let me know how it goes!

Optimism Level: Sub-Basement

i am so bummed about Justice Kennedy’s retirement. I disagreed with him in all the places you might expect me to, but I appreciated his centrist-ish POV. 

Moderate is a valuable quality in a Supreme Court justice. I am trying not to go all Chicken Little on you here, but I doubt his successor will be any flavor of moderate.

I still can’t believe McConnell pulled off that Merrick Garland business.

World Gone Mad

Don Blankenship appears to have the lead heading into tomorrow's Senate primary in West Virginia. 

This article details some of the lies he is telling.

This article tells the story of a man who lost his brother, his nephew, and his son in the Upper Big Branch disaster.

In the last paragraph of this New Yorker article Blankenship talks about ambitions beyond the Senate. 

It seems like he must be joking, but I thought his Senate campaign was a joke too.