Safe Haven

Again, to the extent that family separation is happening at all, it should not be happening. If a progressive says this, they're right. Let me repeat: if a progressive says this, they're right. What you, O "Conservative," must decide is whether you want to feel superior, or whether you want to build a society worth living in. I'm 38 now. My rage against the Democrats and their galling hypocrisies is far spent. I had my twenties and half my thirties to be angry to little effect. What "whataboutism" does is blind us to the holes in our anthropology. We can't learn whilst scoring points. If I turn to "liberal" issues, it's because they're in front of me. I don't need to repeat things I've already said. No effort to stop prison rape, or to save spotted owls, or curb carbon emissions, either explicitly or implicitly, signifies that I have changed my position on anything else. Take a moment to actually digest that. I supported...

I don't know why this is hard. Apparently, we have to say this. It's also ridiculous and indefensible to treat asylum-seekers as criminals. That position doesn't even make sense. If someone falsely claims asylum, that could be a crime. It is not required that the United States accept every claim, but a claim as such is not a criminal act. We could grant that inhumane conditions and treatment of immigrants predates this administration. Indeed, advocates for immigrants had been suing the Obama administration throughout, and in many cases, rightly so. This policy of actively separating asylum-seekers from their children is weeks old. Some advocates for the present administration blame a Flores directive from 1997, but the only relevant fact there is a limit to the detention of a child. Are you really suggesting that holding a child even longer would be acceptable? Child psychology experts are telling us that the separation inflicts a trauma that may not be able to be und...

You know, back when I was a contrarian, and that seemed like conservatism, I would often get annoyed when "liberals" found some "Be kind to the foreigner" verse, and tried to shame us with it. It's quite true that nothing is ever as easy as it seems, especially in politics. I still absolutely agree that most things are complex, more complex than we realize. A certain "anti-politics" driven by emotivism loses patience with the compromise of negotiation, lawmaking, even the very idea of statecraft. On the other hand, have you noticed the sheer number of references to aliens and sojourners in the Scriptures? And we're just speaking of the Old Testament, the place where people who haven't actually read the Bible go when imagining God as mean and scary. If we throw in the covenant of Our Lord Jesus Christ as well? Forget it; if we built luxury hotels on the border for every sojourner, we might get close to fulfilling that command. So while it...