John G. Roberts Jr., chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Photograph by Steve Petteway.
I think it’s fair to say that no holiday is safe from President Donald J. Trump’s displeasure with whomever he’s displeased with at the moment.
Read MoreConrad Richter’s 1953 novel “The Light in the Forest” tells the story of John Butler, who is kidnapped by the Lenni Lenape Indians in 18th-century Ohio when he is 4. His Lenape father, Cuyloga, loves him, raises him and renames him True Son – a name that resonates with irony and poignance as the story progresses and True Son confronts nature and nurture amid the realization that when you come from two worlds, you often wind up belonging to neither. Thus marooned, True Son asks, “Who is my father?”
It’s a question that some 2,000 undocumented children may be asking in the future. The Trump Administration has said it will need more time to reunite them with their parents. But already parents of 19 of the 101 detained children who are under the age of 5 have been deported. The parents of 19 others have been released and seemingly vanished – all of this according to The New York Times. …
Read MoreOn Saturday, people took to the streets in more than 700 cities in every state to voice their opposition to separating children of undocumented immigrants indefinitely and perhaps forever from their parents. They carried signs and, in Atlanta, dog crates containing baby dolls to signify the cages in which the children have been held.
Saturday’s protest was the culmination of a week of civil disobedience that has drawn the usual backlash: Oh, these are just abortion-loving feminists protesting in support of illegal children they would never carry to term. Honestly…
Read MoreIn Luke 7: 36-50, the writer paints a portrait of limitless love and the limits of the unloving. Jesus dines at the house of Simon the Pharisee, where a woman known to have led a sinful life washed his feet with her tears, dried them with her hair and anointed them with perfume, an expensive commodity. It was a profound display of contrition, humility and love, though the Pharisees saw it as an extravagant outrage, given her reputation.
After offering a parable, Jesus “turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? …
Read MoreIn his superb column titled “White Extinction Anxiety,” The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow quotes archconservative Pat Buchanan as saying that the great issue of the day “is whether Europe has the will and the capacity, and America has the capacity to halt the invasion of the countries until they change the character – political, social, racial, ethnic – character of the country entirely.”
Let me fix it for you, Pat: Do Europe and America have the will and capacity to turn back the hordes of people of color beating on their doors? That’s really what he’s asking, though I would turn it around: Do we have the intelligence, talent, industry and character to be greater than ourselves and truly become a global society? …
Read MorePresident Donald J. Trumpet has rescinded the order separating children from their parents when they arrive at the southern border but, get this, some 2,300 kids who have already been separated from their parents have not been grandfathered in. Not only have they not been grandfathered in, but they have already been scattered to the four winds – to cities in Michigan, New York and Rhode Island – which came as a distressing surprise to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Members of the conference hastily gathered in El Paso at the behest of that city’s mayor, Dee Margo, a Republican no less, who painted a very different picture of life at the border than President Donald J. Trump has – one of low crime and entwined Hispanic-American cultures.
So, what the hell is going on? You’ve got mayors – for the most part, men – who are so distressed about children who have just disappeared into their cities that the distress is palpable. You’ve got parents who are so distraught that one even killed himself. Most of all, you’ve got kids who are being traumatized …
Read MoreSo, what are we now – Myanmar?
One of my sisters lives there, working for the U.S. State Department and spending all day every day on the Rohingya refugee crisis. These minority Muslims have been ethnically cleansed from the Buddhist country. More than 600,000 live in camps in neighboring Bangladesh.
I’m glad that America abroad is still standing up to human rights abuses, because America at home is busy creating them – setting up detention camps for the children of those trying to cross the southern border illegally for the sole purpose of deterring future crossings. …
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