Why are we taking children from their parents on the border?

Over recent weeks, the Trump Administration’s zero tolerance policy towards people crossing the border illegally has been making the news, especially in regard to the separation of parents from their children when they are caught crossing the border. Parents are being arrested and their children are being placed into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which then tries to place them in homes, either the homes of relatives legally living in the US, or in foster care.

The parents are then held in detention centers until their plea hearings. They then face a choice: they can plead guilty to the misdemeanor charge of illegal entry, which often results in being sentenced to “time served,” allowing them to be reunited with their children, or they can plead not guilty, which will result in them being kept in custody, away from their children, until their trial. Most of these parents are choosing to plead guilty, so that they can get back to their children sooner.

It is an open question as to whether this guilty plea will hinder the parents’ ability to obtain asylum, though the Justice Department claims it will not. A single misdemeanor isn’t normally considered a particularly serious crime, and thus grounds for refusing asylum, but that is at the judge’s discretion. And a criminal record of any kind can impede the immigration process, even apart from the asylum hearing.

So, here is the question: What is the purpose of charging these parents with illegal entry and separating them from their children? This might affect their ability to apply for asylum and be granted legal residence here in the US, but as stated before, the Justice Department is claiming that it will not. So why are we putting them through this at taxpayer expense?

First, let’s take the Justice Department at their word. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has claimed that the intense crackdown on people crossing the border without proper documentation is intended to act as a deterrent to people crossing the border. And, while he claims that the separation of families was not the goal of the policy, he clearly considers it to simply act as a further deterrent to families crossing the border.

Here is the question, though: what kind of deterrent is the possibility of prosecution in the US to people fleeing extreme poverty and gang violence?

Mexico, which is the country of birth for nearly half of all current undocumented residents of the US, had over 20,000 people displaced from their homes due to violence last year alone.

And Central American immigrants, who account for the majority of new undocumented people crossing the southern US border, are also fleeing horrific conditions.

Guatemala, which is the country of birth for more undocumented immigrants in the US than any other country except Mexico, has been hard-hit by poverty, especially in rural communities inhabited by indigenous Guatemalans. For many of these desperate poor people, the only choices are join one of the gangs extorting money from others, try to scrape together payments to the extortion gangs, driving them further into poverty, face the possibility of kidnapping if they don’t pay the extortion gangs, or flee.

After Guatemala, El Salvador is the country of birth for the next largest group of undocumented in the US. El Salvador has a homicide rate 15 times that of the US. And when the gangs there extort money, it is under threat of death for the person being extorted and their family, not kidnapping. Nearly 1 in 4 Salvadorans were the victim of a crime in 2016, According to a study by Central American University. And about 40% of Salvadorans are actively trying to leave the country.

The country of birth for the next largest group of undocumented is Honduras. Over 60% of Hondurans live in poverty, and about 20% of Hondurans live in extreme poverty, at less than $1.90 a day. And, while Honduras is not as violent as El Salvador, it still has a homicide rate of nearly 9 times that of the US.

This is where the people crossing the border are coming from. Will facing the possibility of being arrested if they are caught crossing deter them? I think not. Will the prospect of facing separation from their children stop them from trying to get their children away from the poverty and violence in their home countries? No.

Now, Sessions has said that people who think that they have a legitimate asylum claim should present themselves at ports of entry. So it could be simply that he is trying to deter people from not following proper procedure for seeking asylum. Except Customs and Border Patrol has actively been preventing prospective asylum seekers from applying for asylum at ports of entry, either by turning them away and telling them to come back later, or sometimes by even actively preventing asylum seekers from crossing into the US.

So, again we ask, why are we separating hundreds of parents from their children, prosecuting them for misdemeanor illegal entry, then sentencing to time served?

If it is to deter people from coming to this country at all, it is not going to be very effective, thus serving to be cruelty without purpose.

I think it is more likely that it is an attempt to reduce the number of asylum seekers the US takes in. If the US can get more of the people seeking asylum to do so at ports of entry, then either force them to wait a long time to be processed, or bar them entry into the US altogether, than they can better control the number of asylum seekers granted asylum. And if this process does not result in more people going to ports of entry to seek asylum, then the Justice Department could call for the misdemeanor charges to count against asylum seekers, even if they don’t result in an immediate denial of asylum.

So, the Justice Department and the current administration are cruelly tearing apart families in order to exert control over how many asylum seekers we have to take. This is unconscionable. Our country is not being overrun with asylum seekers. We are not facing a pressing need to reduce how many we take in. Yet our country is doing all of this in its attempt to work around international law pertaining to accepting asylum seekers.

It is clear that the parents are distraught about being separated from their children. But what about the children? They start by being held at border stations. The Department of Health and Human Services has such a backlog in processing their cases that over half of the 550 children currently held at border stations have been there longer than the 72 hour maximum allowed by law. After their stay at these places, they are transferred to holding facilities run by HHS. It is taking an average of 45 days to place the children with sponsors.

We don’t know the conditions in these holding facilities. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Or) was denied entry into one of these places when he attempted to visit one. Jeff Sessions admitted that he had not visited any of these facilities. So the whole process is happening with little to no transparency.

This cruel process needs to end. Now. These people, fleeing violence and extreme poverty, are coming to the Land of the Free, only to have their families ripped apart. We are trying to bar entry to everyone we can, even those who need it most.

I am ashamed of my country.

Supreme court decides in favor of Colorado baker in wedding cake case

In a 7-2 decision, The Supreme Court of the United States found in favor of Jack Phillips, the Christian baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

This is fascinating on many levels. First of all, every decision leading up to the Supreme Court case found against Jack Phillips. Second, it is unusual for a SCOTUS case dealing with gay rights to have such a strong concurring majority, as cases dealing with these issues are regularly split 5-4, often with Justice Kennedy being the deciding vote.

In this case, however, Justices Kennedy, Kagan, and Breyer all sided with the more conservative justices of the Court in favor of Jack Phillips, despite every level of the Colorado court system finding against him. Only Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented.

Because of this strong majority in this case, I think that it is important not to write off SCOTUS as being political on a contentious issue. That is why, rather than reading news and opinions on the decision, I decided to read the official opinions published by the Supreme Court justices themselves.

Ho. Ly. Shit.

A Supreme Court opinion is often a very dense thing to read, though most justices do try to write in a way that can be understood by more than just constitutional lawyers. And in this case, there are five of them. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, Justices Kagan, Gorsuch, and Thomas all wrote concurring opinions, and Justice Ginsburg wrote the dissenting opinion.

And I think it is pretty clear from reading them that this decision does not set precedent allowing businesses to refuse to sell goods and services to be used at same-sex weddings.

First of all, a very important piece of the majority decision is that at the time of the incident (the summer of 2012), the state of Colorado did not recognize same-sex marriage. Therefore, arguments predicated on the fact that same-sex marriage and opposite-sex marriage are the same, and that a willingness to provide goods and services for one and not the other is discrimination based on sexual orientation, are not supported by the state laws of the time.

This is important, because if this exact thing had happened in a state where same-sex marriage was legal (as it is in all 50 states now), that may have been enough to cause a justice or two to join the dissent (probably both Justices Kagan and Breyer, based on my understanding of the concurring opinion which Kagan wrote, and with which Breyer concurred). So, like I said, this does not provide clear precedent for future cases.

Next, there is the single most contentious part of this case: The Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s handling of Jack Phillips’ freedom of speech and free exercise of religion when hearing this case.

One point on which it seemed that all of the concurring justices agreed is that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed a clear negative bias towards Jack Phillips’ religious beliefs. This was supported by the fact that several of the members of the commission seemed to endorse the view that religious beliefs cannot be legitimately carried into the public sphere or the commercial domain. One commissioner came out fairly strongly against freedom of religion, and seemed to equate Jack Phillips’ religious freedom claim with people who use religion to justify slavery or the Holocaust. None of the other commissioners objected to these statements.

The other point is where it gets contentious: the Commission provided an environment that came across as hostile towards religious freedom in the public sphere, but to what extent did that effect its decision?

In order to determine what effect this apparent hostility towards religion had on the decision, SCOTUS explores the differences and similarities with a set of three similar cases brought before the Commission. In those three other cases, a man went to three different bakeries and asked them to bake a cake with an anti-gay message, then brought suits against each one when they refused him. The Commission found in favor of each of those three bakeries.

The majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy focused on the inconsistencies in how the Commission decided those three cases as opposed to how it decided the one against Jack Phillips. Kennedy noted that in the other three cases, the bakers’ willingness to make other products for the customer that didn’t have the objectionable message as proof that they were not discriminating against the person, but that in Jack Phillips’ case, his willingness to sell the customers other products was disregarded as irrelevant. Additionally, in the other three cases, part of the Commission’s finding in favor of the bakers had to do with their conscientious objection to making the statement that the customer wanted, while in Jack Phillips’ case, they did not recognize his conscientious objection as valid, because any statement made by the commissioned product would be that of the customer, not the baker. Finally, Kennedy’s opinion took issue with the fact that the disparate approaches of the Commission between Jack Phillips’ case and the other three cases indicated that the Commission was making a values judgment as to the offensiveness or lack thereof of the products each baker was being asked to make, despite significant legal precedent proscribing the courts from making such values judgments.

This comparison to the other three cases is the focus of both Justice Kagan’s and Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinions. They each concur with the majority opinion, but then go on to strongly disagree with each other.

Justice Kagan, after supporting the majority opinion’s position, goes on to point out that a major difference between Jack Phillips’ case and the other three cases is that those other three bakers were refusing to write/draw/design a message that they would refuse to anyone else, while Jack Phillips was refusing to make and sell a wedding cake that he would have made and sold for an opposite-sex wedding. She also emphasizes the fact that Jack Phillips refused to make the wedding cake for the same-sex wedding before any discussion of design is had. He objects not to making them a cake with a specific design, but a wedding cake of any design for that purpose.

Justice Gorsuch, on the other hand, argues that it is not a wedding cake that the Jack Phillips will sell to one person but not another, but rather a cake for a same-sex wedding, which Jack Phillips wasn’t going to make for anyone. Therefore, the Jack Phillips case should have been treated in exactly the same way as the other three baker cases, according to Gorsuch’s opinion.

Justice Thomas provides an interesting perspective in his concurring opinion, taking something that is briefly touched on in the majority opinion, then elaborating on it and fleshing it out. While the majority opinion and the other two concurring opinions focus primarily on the clash between freedom of religion and freedom from unjust discrimination, Thomas focuses on the free speech element. He points out that, throughout this whole case, we are talking about a baker actively making a cake commissioned for a same-sex wedding, as opposed to selling a cake that is already made that is then used for a same-sex wedding. Thomas argues that forcing the baker to utilize his artistic expression in support of something he disagrees with is a violation of his First Amendment rights. This argument, that art and expression through art, holds a much higher place as speech than business transactions, is interesting to me. I would be interested to see that explored further by constitutional scholars.

Finally, Justice Ginsburg wrote the dissent. Basically, she comes to the conclusion that, since the baker makes commissioned wedding cakes, and since he refused to do so for a same-sex couple, and since there are (and were at the time of the incident) anti-discrimination laws prohibiting businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation, the baker was in the wrong, simple as that.

So, there you have it. It is a complex situation with lots of nuance, and it provides little to no opportunity for this case to be used as precedent for new cases that are similar. So let’s not turn this into some big culture war rally point. No, this is not some landmark case that indicates we are shifting as a country on issues of same-sex marriage. No, this is not an attack on the LGBTQ+ community.

So pause. Take a deep breath. Read the opinions of the justices. And move on.

Men’s Rights Activists: Misogynists or Misunderstood?

I just watched an interesting TED talk. It was given by the woman who made The Red Pill documentary. She talks about how she went into the process expecting to expose Men’s Rights Activists for the misogynistic assholes they are. Instead, she found men who made valid points about injustices that exclusively or disproportionately affect men. She then found that she was vilified and slandered by other feminists for making a documentary about MRAs that didn’t portray them as monsters.

Now, I don’t think this is fair to her at all. She legitimately seems to be a thoughtful person who is trying to contribute something positive to the conversation so that we are better able to improve the world around us. Rather than attacking her, we should challenge the ideas she brings to the table.

So that is what I will do.

The view she presents, the understanding she develops is inherently limited. It relies solely on the interviews she conducted. Those men she interviewed were speaking with an outsider: her. Now, if the only two sources of information that were available to you about a group of people were the second-hand portrayals of that group in the media and by those who view that group as the “enemy” and the interviews that you yourself conducted with members of that group, I can understand giving quite a bit of weight to your personal experience. But we have another source of information about who these MRAs are: the internet. You see, MRA groups are primarily based online, so if you know where to look, you can see how they talk to each other, which is going to give you a raw view into what and how they think without filtering it through a second-hand source or dressing it up for an outsider. And even a short excursion into MRA subreddits, 4chan, and 8chan will show you that the MRA movement is heavily populated with misogynists and those who tolerate or even defend those misogynists, even if it isn’t every single person who claims the title of MRA. (The excursion will also leave you needing to take a shower.)

See, while some of the issues that MRAs raise are very real (such as the lack of resources to help male domestic abuse victims, or the fact that men are disproportionately more likely to commit suicide than women), they rarely, if ever, directly engage in an effort to tackle those problems. Instead, they seem to take the attitude of, “Why do we need to change anything? There are ways in which men have it better and ways in which women have it better. So it all comes out in the wash.” Or, they sit around and bitch about how bad they have it, and how no one is trying to solve their problems.

And those are just the ones who are anti-feminism, as opposed to those who are more full-blown misogynists.

There are also MRAs who are inherently distrustful of women, seeing the relationship between the genders to be adversarial and zero-sum. They want sex with women, but always suspect that a woman will use that sex to manipulate them in some way. They see attachment to a woman (through marriage, having a child, or even being in a committed relationship) as a means for her to gain an upper hand on him. So, some of them just want a string of one-night stands of protected sex, so that they can never be tied down, and many of them will lie or manipulate to achieve this. Others want a relationship, but want one in which they fully dominate the relationship, giving the woman no opportunity to control or manipulate him.

And those are the ones who can get a woman to have sex with them. You then have a seedy sub-group of MRAs called incels. They believe that men have a right to sex, and, more specifically, sex with a woman who they find attractive. They are focused on this “right” in particular, because they can’t get sex. So they call themselves “incels” or “involuntary celibates”. This group often fantasizes about manipulating, raping, and even killing women who won’t have sex with them. And, every once in a while, an incel will work to make that fantasy a reality.

For the sake of fairness, I would like to say that there are MRAs who reject the more misogynistic elements of their community. They try to draw a line between MRAs and groups like Red Pill, Men Going Their Own Way, Pick-Up Artists, and Incels. Still, these guys spend their time bitching about feminists and how bad men have it rather than really doing something about these issues. And those are the good apples.

So, I think we can say that MRAs are not a group of misunderstood activists trying to fight injustice. They are, at best, a bunch of guys complaining that society is more focused on other people’s problems rather than theirs. And, at worst, they are a bunch of misogynistic assholes.

Nonetheless, where the problems they present are real, I do think that we as a society should work to do something to fix things.

Interestingly, the handful of times that I have heard of people actually working to remedy these ignored problems that disproportionately affect men, they have been… feminists.

Now, feminism is a big tent, and there are lots of different versions of feminism, but the one I subscribe to says that many of the traditional cultural and social norms and mores that surround gender in our society (sometimes referred to by feminists as “The Patriarchy”) are harmful to both women and men, and that together, we can break down those harmful elements of our culture and society and work to make it better for all of us.

I am a feminist. I am a feminist for my wife and my daughter. But I am also a feminist for my son and myself. I believe that we need to build a future where we celebrate difference without discriminating based on labels. That means men and women working side by side for a better future as co-creators of a new tomorrow, not as adversaries.

Holy Week Reflection #3: Requiem for Judas

“…but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.” –Mark 14:21

This is a tricky passage from last Sunday’s passion narrative. Based on Catholic belief in the sanctity of life, the only way we can conceive of it being better for a person to have never existed is if they end up in the eternal torment of Hell for all eternity.

But we also believe that God, in his infinite love and mercy, can forgive all sin, that no sin is too great. So we believe that the actual betrayal itself can be forgiven if Judas repents. So there must be another cause for Judas’ eternal damnation to be a certain thing.

The explanation that I have most often heard is that Judas doesn’t trust the mercy of God. He is remorseful for his betrayal, but despairs of ever being forgiven, so he goes and commits suicide. This is contrasted with Peter, who is remorseful for denying Christ three times, but does not lose hope.

This has led the Catholic Church to often come to the facile conclusion that suicide, while not objectively the worst sin a person could commit, resulted in a high likelihood that the person was in Hell, since they didn’t have time to repent of the sin. I mean, people still prayed for mercy on the deceased’s soul, but the official stance was to deny them Catholic funeral rites or burial in a Catholic cemetery (though, often, priests and bishops making the call in specific cases would take the pastoral approach of allowing for the possibility of temporary insanity, thus leading to the allowance of Catholic funeral and burial). This was the official position of the Curch until 1983.

And, at least the way I was taught about suicide growing up, this harsh view of suicide is largely tied to Judas’ suicide, and this particular passage.

But how can this be? How can Judas be culpable for his despair? Jesus flat-out told his Apostles, including Judas, that it would be better for his betrayer to never have been born.

Now, it is true that Judas still decided to go betray Jesus even after Jesus said this. But we have to remember that people are rarely cartoon villains. They don’t just hatch evil plots just to be evil; they almost always have a motivation. The two most likely motivations for Judas were:

1. He no longer believed that Jesus was the Messiah, so came to a conclusion similar to that of Caiaphas, that it is better for one man to die that that the whole of Judea should suffer. If this was the case, watching the actual process of Jesus’ condemnation changed his mind, bringing on his remorse. But if he did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah when he betrayed him, than why would he put any stock in the statement about it being better for him to have never been born? And if he did believe that Jesus was the Messiah afterwards when he felt remorse, why would he have any hope of redemption?
2. He believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but still believed that the Messiah would be a warrior-king. If this was the case, then he could have convinced himself that he wasn’t betraying Jesus, so much as getting Jesus’ military campaign underway. Judas has seen Jesus perform great miracles over the previous few years. If Jesus was supposed to rise up and claim the throne of David, then wouldn’t it make sense that he would bring that power to bear against his enemies if they backed him into a corner? If this is the case, then Judas’ remorse comes from realizing that Jesus was not going to be a warrior-king, that he would not be using his power to overthrow corrupt rulers, and that Judas had, in fact, betrayed him. If this is the case, then he only came to the full realization that he was, in fact, betraying Jesus when Jesus didn’t free himself during his farce of a trial. At that point, upon coming to the full realization that he was the betrayer, since he did believe that Jesus was the Messiah, why would he have any reason to doubt that it would have been better for him to have never been born? And so, why wouldn’t he despair in that moment?

If Jesus’ statement in the above passage is saying that Judas is going to Hell, and the reason is that he despairs of redemption after he betrays Jesus, than it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jesus himself has a hand in giving Judas that despair. And that is…problematic, to say the least.

Look, I don’t know the correct interpretation of this verse. I only know that the traditional reading of this verse is based on interpretations that to me seem to have the disturbing result of implying that Jesus had a direct hand in setting Judas down a path that led him into Hell. And I can’t believe that that is true. I can’t believe that God wants anyone, even Judas, to go to Hell.

So maybe we are reading the whole thing wrong. Maybe we are completely misinterpreting what “better…if he had never been born” means. Maybe there is a chance that even Judas, the Apostle who betrayed Jesus, is in Heaven.

Holy Week Reflection #2: The Poor

“”For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you wish you can do good to them; but you do not always have Me.” Mark 14:7

This verse, from Sunday’s Gospel reading, is Jesus’ response to those who rebuked the woman who anointed him with the expensive perfume. Those who rebuked her claimed that the perfume could have been sold, and the proceeds given to the poor. Jesus chastises them for rebuking her, saying that what she did was a good thing.

Traditionally, I have seen this passage used to rebut those who try to shame the Church for using jewels, precious metals, and other expensive adornments for churches, altars, and liturgical vessels. They say that this passage shows that it it appropriate to use our precious goods for worship.

I have no problem with this argument. But there is another use of this passage that I have seen that disturbs me to my core.

I have seen this verse used to claim that any attempt to eradicate poverty is not only futile, but is against the teachings of Christ. Instead, giving to the poor is a spiritual exercise for the benefit of the givers, even though it won’t really have much impact. In fact, the poor are in a better spiritual position than the rich anyway.

This argument was used to oppose wealth redistribution by the government, in the forms of a social safety net. The person who made this argument said that mandatory taxes to create a social safety net robs people of the ability to choose to give charitably and to gain the spiritual benefit of that charitable giving.

They said that, while the desire to eliminate poverty is an understandable one, the idea that it can be done before the Second Coming is a humanist lie. Plus, we should be focused on people’s spiritual well-being over their physical one.

I call bullshit.

First of all, most people striving to “eliminate” poverty are not under the delusion that complete elimination of poverty is something that can actually be achieved. That being said, we can do our best to reduce poverty.

And we should.

And that is because, in the Catholic tradition, we are not souls with bodies. We are body and soul together in a single being. Therefore, loving our neighbor requires us to desire the good for them in their entirety. This includes their physical good. So striving to reduce poverty is very clearly a way of following the second tenet of the Great Commandment.

Additionally, how is embracing the State’s use of my tax dollars to create and strengthen a social safety net not to my spiritual benefit? Why is the only beneficial path me directly voluntarily offering some of my own wealth either to the poor or to a charity that helps the poor? That view, that focuses on the specific action as what has benefit rather than the desired outcome, is an unnecessarily narrow one.

This interpretation seems to me to simply be an attempt at a biblical justification for a Libertarian view of the role of government, and the view of taxes as theft. It is a view that puts self-determination and private property rights before all else.

But let us not forget that Jesus told us to pay our taxes. And he said that it is most difficult for a wealthy man to enter the Kingdom. And Saint Basil the Great called the hoarding of excess wealth theft from the poor.

We are our brothers’ keepers. We are called to work for their good, body and soul.

Holy Week Reflection #1: Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday is weird.

On Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, we read how Jesus rode into Jerusalem. People lined the streets with cloaks and palm branches, blessing him as he rode. We have a procession to celebrate this triumphal entrance into the city, repeating the people’s cry of “Hosanna!”

Wait, hosanna?

“Hosanna”, according to Merriam-Webster is an interjection used as a cry of acclamation and adoration.

And that is what we think as we parade around our churches, waving palm leaves.

But that isn’t what those people meant.

“Hosanna” comes from the Hebrew contraction “hosha’na”, thought to be a shortening of “hoshi’ah-nna” which means “Save, we pray”.

They were beseeching Jesus to save them. They were saying “Son of David, take your throne and restore us to our former prosperity! Please!”

A very common view of the Messiah in first century Judea was that he would be a warrior-king. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, evoking the messianic imagery of Zechariah 9:9. The people thought they were seeing David, the Warrior-King, come again. They wanted him to protect them from the Romans, just as David had protected their ancestors from the Philistines.

This is the first time in the Gospels that Jesus seems to publicly take on the role of Messiah. Other times that he does or says things that indicate his messianic role, he exhorts those who witness it not to tell anyone. But here, he embraces the role wholeheartedly.

This is a turning point for Jesus. By claiming the role of Messiah, one of two things can happen.

He can emerge as the military commander that the people expect the Messiah to be, claiming his place as the King of the Jews. If he chooses this path, he will have the backing of the people. This route leads to glory.

Or, he can choose to eschew the popular view of the Messiah. He will amass no army, yet will claim a title that seems to make him a threat to Herod, the Sanhedrin, and even the Roman occupiers. This route leads to death.

I can’t help but wonder if this was another temptation of Jesus. He could save the people the way they wanted to be saved, earning their adoration, or he could save them in a way beyond their understanding, earning their scorn.

Of course, a look at the history of Judea at the time makes clear that on the warrior path, after glory would come death. Every would-be warrior-king Messiah died in his rebellion. And even if Jesus was able to inspire a larger rebellion than any other revolutionary, the chances of him being able to drive out the Romans were slim, which means he still would have likely ended up on a cross.

And the Christian faith holds that after the death of the second option comes glory. Death itself is conquered. And Jesus provides the salvation that is most needed.

Still, he was faced with a choice that day, riding into Jerusalem: how to respond to the cry of “Save, we pray.”

The March for Our Lives

Today was the March for Our Lives. Over 800,000 people marched in Washington, DC, and there were sister marches in 842 other cities. I attended the sister march in Toledo, OH.

When marches for various political issues happen, politicians who support the issue will usually come out and address the crowd.

But not this time.

Today, the speakers were students. At the march I attended, they thanked the various politicians who offered to speak, but their offer was declined. Today was a march, a movement led by students. And it was students who addressed the crowd in Washington, DC, Toledo, and in many other marches around the world today.

One of the students who addressed the march in Toledo today spoke about how she has been threatened for her public stance on common sense gun reform. Yet there she was, leading the charge.

Another student spoke out against the idea of arming teachers, and the many ways that could go wrong.

Yet another pointed out that school shootings of this magnitude are disruptive well beyond the school where they happen, since they inspire copycat threats. There have been hundreds of copycat threats around the country since Parkland, FL.

They all called on politicians to put the safety of students before gun rights, and called on the voting public to hold the politicians accountable if they don’t.

And this was just our small rally of several hundred people, instead of several hundred thousand. But the voices of these kids joined with those of the students who addressed other rallies around the country.

Emma Gonzalez, who shows us the power of silence.

David Hogg, who calls out those politicians who are in the NRA’s pocket, telling them to update their resumes.

Delaney Tarr, who calls on all of us to not let this march be an end, but rather a beginning.

Ryan Deitch, who calls for arming teachers with the supplies they need to teach their students, and arming students with information and knowledge, not guns.

Sarah Chadwick, who says that a single life is worth more thank all the guns in America.

Edna Chavez from South Los Angeles, who lost her brother to gun violence.

11-year-old Naomi Wadler, who speaks for all of the girls of color who have been victims of gun violence, but who don’t make headlines.

Alex King and D’Angelo McDade from Chicago, who speak of the need for communities to come together and do what is necessary to insure this never happens again.

I have observed protests before.

There was the Occupy movement, that didn’t end up accomplishing much.

There is the annual March for Life, which has had no real impact on abortion at the federal level.

There is the Black Lives Matter movement, which has seen some success in changes to policing policies, most notably the number of police departments which utilize dash and body cameras as standard procedure.

But this feels different from all of them. This is bigger. These students are driven. They are not going away. Many of them will be voting in November. Even more will be voting in 2020. And soon, within the next few election cycles, some of them will be running for office. And gun reform will be the pillar of their platforms.

Change is coming. And, frankly, if gun rights advocates want a voice at the table to help decide what that change looks like, they better find a compromise that they can live with now, before these kids push them out and make all the decisions without them.

The clock is ticking.

The topic of gay priests got me thinking…

“For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.” Hebrews 4:15

Tempted in all things.

Let’s do a thought experiment.

Jesus never married, and was without sin, so we can conclude that He was celibate, as all unmarried people are called to be.

Jesus was tempted in all things.

Even if this isn’t meant to mean that he was tempted in every way that any human ever hand been tempted, it is a reasonable conclusion that Jesus quite possibly faced sexual temptation. He never succumbed to temptation, but he faced it.

Given all of that, we come to the “what if” question.

What if Jesus were gay?

Now, I am not claiming he was, nor do I have any evidence to support such a claim.

But if he was, would it matter?

He lived a celibate life.

He never sinned.

So does it matter if Mary Magdalene was the temptation, or John the Beloved was?

I cannot think of a reason why it would.

If you can think of a reason why it would matter, I would be interested in hearing what it is, but I cannot think of one.

And if it, in fact, does not matter for Jesus, why should it matter for his celibate representatives here on Earth?

I really want to hear your thoughts on this.

Scapegoating gay priests is not treating them with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity”.

During my lifetime, the single thing that has driven more people from the Catholic Church here in the United States is the scandal about priests molesting children and bishops covering for them. It is that second part, I think, that really did it for a lot of people. It is one thing to find out that there are priests who prey on children. That kind of discovery can shake you to your core. But to find out that bishops and other people in positions of authority knew about this and hushed it up, moving the priest to a new place really is enough to make a person lose faith, especially when that in not a one-time horrible mistake, but rather a systematic set of actions designed to put the reputation of the Church above the lives of those children who were hurt, and those who could be hurt in the future.

Since the scandal broke in 2002 the Church in the United States has made some major changes, requiring all of its clergy, employees, and volunteers who have contact with children to undergo safe environment training, and they have regularly assessed this training and implemented improvements as they have discovered them. Additionally, some Catholic dioceses (though unfortunately, not all) have done a good job of reporting child abuse allegations to the civil authorities and have cooperated with them.

One action from the Vatican, seemingly in response to the scandal, was not positive, however. In 2005, they put out a document laying out that men who “practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture'” cannot be admitted to the seminary or to Holy Orders. It goes on to make fairly clear that “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” are referring to someone who is gay, and not just going through some adolescent phase.

While this document does not address the child abuse scandal directly, it does indicate that it is addressing the question of whether gay men should be admitted to the priesthood because that question is “made more urgent by the current situation”. In 2005, many people were still coming forward in the courts and the media to expose decades of child abuse by priests, not only in the United States, but around the world. If this was not the “current situation” that the document was referring to, the Vatican never made any clarifications when that is what people took it to mean. And some bishops have even made claims that homosexuality and pedophilia are linked, only further supporting this view.

As a result, there have been those who have framed the child molestation scandal as being about gay priests, and still do. Just last week, I was in a conversation online about millennials and the Church, and someone brought up the scandal as one of the reasons that so few young adults are going to church, calling it the “pedophile priest sexual abuse scandal”. Another person responded, “You mean the homosexual priest scandal.”

Despite this horrible misconception, the Vatican has repeatedly reaffirmed its ban on gay priests since 2005, and the most recent time was just last year.

Whatever the reason that the ban on gay priests might have been put in place, I think it is harmful, and should be overturned.

First, the association with the child abuse scandals only feeds into homophobia, which is contrary to Church teaching, since the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that gay people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” and that “[e]very sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

Second, when a man has taken a vow of celibacy and is faithful to that vow, why should it matter who he finds sexually attractive? And why is there an assumption that living that vow would be harder for a gay man than a straight one? This whole thing seems to be rooted in homophobic stereotypes that are often wildly inaccurate.

Let gay men who genuinely want to live the faith as a priest into the priesthood. To continue to not do so would be to perpetuate that unjust discrimination that the CCC tells us to avoid. And it needlessly reduces the potential pool for priests when we already don’t have enough.

When Society Turns Us into Monsters

Hopefully, most of you know the story of Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old girl who was one of the first African-Americans to go to a formerly all-white school in the south after Brown v. Board of Education.

This is her here, being escorted to and from school by US Marshals:

That little girl was amazing. She stood up to adversity and persisted where many adults (including myself) would have likely given up. At age six.

But as amazing as she is, she is not my focus today. Instead, I want to talk about the nature of the adversity she faced.

When Ruby Bridges first went to William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans, she was the only student in the entire school. Because every other student was pulled out of school because she was there.

Every. Single. One.

There was only one teacher, Barbara Henry, who was willing to teach Ruby in the entire school. And Mrs. Henry wasn’t even from New Orleans. She was from Boston, and so not really a part of the community.

All of the local police refused to act as a protective escort for Ruby, and so US Marshals had to come in and escort her to and from school every day, as well as to and from the restroom during school.

And the reason Ruby needed a protective escort is because parents of the other students at William Frantz Elementary stood outside the school picketing every day, shouting racial slurs and death threats at Ruby, a six-year-old girl.

Starting on Ruby’s second day, other kids slowly started to come back to school, but their parents still wanted Ruby nowhere around their kids, so Ruby remained the only student in Mrs. Henry’s class, and she had to eat in the classroom.

This little girl was given a worse time than anyone, let alone a six-year-old, should have to endure. And it was the entire community that did it. No one but some US Marshals under orders and a Yankee outsider schoolteacher stood up for her.

Now, was every single individual white person in that community evil? I don’t think so. That is just a terrifying thought. Nonetheless, there was evil there, and it was strong, affecting everyone.

If this evil didn’t originate in each individual person, then where? In the community itself, the society, the culture. There was such a deep-rooted racial hatred there that it swallowed them all. As much as I would like to say with complete confidence that I would refused to pull my kids out of school, the rest of the community be damned, I can’t. I would like to think I would, but I don’t know that for sure. It still took until the second day for the bravest white man in the community to send his daughter back, and she still was not in the same classroom as Ruby. If I had been raised in that culture, had been a part of that community, what would I have done? I don’t know, and that disturbs me.

The crazy thing is, this wasn’t all that long ago. That school year where Ruby sat in Mrs. Henry’s class as the only student was 57 years ago. Ruby Bridges herself is still alive at the age of 63. Some of the parents, and many of the other students from William Franz Elementary that year are still alive. That culture is not gone.

I know with certainty that it is not gone, even if it is not as strong as it once was.

There is a young African-American boy who my family knows. He went to a Catholic elementary school, and was one of the few non-white students in the whole school. He was ostracized by several of his classmates, who used racial slurs to refer to him. He and these boys were in second or third grade at the time.

And lest you think this is a Southern problem only, this did not happen in the South.

We may love our culture and heritage here in America, but we must not idolize it. We need to take a good, hard, critical look at it. If and when we find evil in it, we must not ignore it. Evil doesn’t go away just because we pretend it’s not there. We must acknowledge it, then ruthlessly cut it out like the cancer it is. And then we must repair the damage that that cancer has caused.

That is how we can Make America Great Again, if it ever truly was to begin with.