Children of detained migrants play soccer at a tent encampment near Tornillo, Texas, June 18. Image taken from Guadelupe, Mexico. (CNS/Jose Luis Gonzalez, Reuters)
At Millennial, Meghan Clark of St. John's University cuts straight to the point about the separations of immigrant children from their parents being conducted by the Trump administration. "In reality, this is political violence in the service of a white nationalist agenda and one more example of the extreme xenophobia of this administration," Clark writes. This is one of those moments that define who we are as a people and I hope a majority of our fellow citizens will agree with Clark and see this for what it is.
At WherePeterIs.com, Mike Lewis seconds my objections to the continued presence of Raymond Arroyo on a network that pledges itself to presenting news from a Catholic perspective. Lewis is better at searching the net than I am and he even uncovered a statement from Cardinal Raymond Burke opposing the Trump administration’s immigration policy. And, when you are to the right of Cardinal Burke. … I also want to thank Lewis for pointing out a mistake I made: Arroyo has hosted guests from the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies. I mistakenly referred to the guest as coming from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. I regret the error.
FOX News is complaining about analogies between what is going on at the border and the behavior of Nazis, but Business Insider points out that it was Attorney General Jeff Sessions who got the Nazi analogy going.
No particular link here, but hasn’t it been delicious watching Trump surrogates, who were repeating his talking points earlier in the week, have to disavow what they said less than 24 hours earlier after Trump stop the separation policy?
At Commonweal, Cathleen Kaveny examines the Irish vote to remove a constitutional prohibition on abortion and asks if it time for the pro-life movement to set aside campaigns to change the law and, instead, focus on converting the culture but acknowledging the complexity of the issues at stake. The money quote: "A fundamental tragedy of this broken and sinful world is that the most vulnerable persons — the unborn, the disabled, the needy — are often completely dependent upon persons almost as vulnerable as themselves." This is a reality with which both sides must wrestle.
In public diplomacy, it is almost always better to try and stay and persuade than to walk out. But, I can sympathize with the decision by the Trump administration to give up on the United Nations Human Rights Council, which has long been led by some of the worst abusers of human rights on the planet. The Council’s hostility to Israel would be laughable if anti-Semitism were a thing of the past, but as it is, it is morally criminal. Ironically, Americans face the same situation when considering how to treat Trump: At what point does respecting an office that is not being respected by its occupant become normalization and therefore complicity?
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In The Boston Globe, Matt Viser asks when will the Republicans stand up to Trump? He answers: Never. Because while so much of the media focuses on his outrageous tweets, it is the decisions of his policy team that keep the Republican base happy.
[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]
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