Over the past few weeks, Americans learned (mostly for the first time) that “2,342 children have been separated from their parents after crossing the Southern U.S. border.” Naturally, this led to a lot of outrage. Initially, President Trump blamed Democrats for the “horrible law” leading to this, but as it largely related to of his own Administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy (dating back to April of this year), he eventually backtracked and signed an executive order shifting the policy from one of family separation to one of family detention (while still leaving authorities the power to separate families for the sake of the child, when circumstances demand). Thanks be to God, that seems to be a generally-good solution to the problem, and one that makes nearly everybody happy…. except that it didn’t (at least immediately) lead to any relief for the thousands of children currently separated from their parents.
One of the most troubling things the last two weeks’ debate on immigration brought up was how quickly social conservatives simply shrugged at the problem, with excuses like: “Obama did it, too!” “abortion is a bigger issue, ” etc. Typically, these weren’t points raised to further the conversation, but to end it by deflection. Ultimately, all this served to do was to undermine the pro-life cause. When pro-lifers only seem to care about the well-being of children when it’s politically expedient for Republicans or for President Trump, the message the rest of the world hears isn’t “Wow, they’re right, abortion is a bigger issue,” but “these people don’t really care about kids as much as they care about their party.” That may not be the case, but that’s the message this kind of “but abortion!” deflection sends.
To be sure, I completely understand why social conservatives are in no mood to be preached to about taking care of children by liberals who support abortion. But now you get how the other side feels, too. Both sides are (understandably) disgusted with the other for an apparent lack of principles, even on something as important as whether we should protect children. For decades, the Soviets would deflect criticism of their (abysmal) human rights record by responding, “And you are lynching Negroes.” And they were right: America had a serious problem with lynchings during these decades. But that deflection didn’t make the Soviets’ own hands any cleaner.
I. Children Have a Right to Their Mother and Father
The solution here, it seems to me, is to simply stop the partisan bickering and score-keeping and instead talk about principles. All of us, conservative or liberal, religious or irreligious, should be able to agree to the following basic principle: “Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child’s development and emotional maturity.” That’s from Pope Francis’ opening address to the Humanum Conference in 2014. As you’ll see, figures from all over the political spectrum agree with this… as does a wealth of social science. So does the United Nations, in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which holds that “Children also have the right to know and, as far as possible, to be cared for by their parents.”
But why should we care about this at all, especially if we don’t have children ourselves? For the good of the children, obviously, but also because the well-being of the family matters to society, and the well-being of society matters to the family. Pope Francis put it this way:
The crisis in the family has produced an ecological crisis, for social environments, like natural environments, need protection. And although the human race has come to understand the need to address conditions that menace our natural environments, we have been slower to recognize that our fragile social environments are under threat as well, slower in our culture, and also in our Catholic Church. It is therefore essential that we foster a new human ecology.
So just like the influx (or death) of a particular species would totally change its natural environment, if the family is dying, the surrounding environment suffers. So if we care about the well-being of society, it’s good to focus on the family. In a recent essay, Mary Eberstadt recalled the social scientist James Q. Wilson’s warning from 1997:
Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth. These differences are not explained by income….children raised in single-parent homes [are] more likely to be suspended from school, to have emotional problems, and to behave badly.
We now stand two decades and “many more books and scholars and research studies later,” only to find that “a whole new wing has been added to that same library Wilson drew from, all demonstrating the same point he emphasized throughout his speech: The new wealth in America is familial wealth, and the new poverty, familial poverty.”
Sociologists like W. Bradford Wilcox and Mark Regnerus are famous (and infamous) for compiling this data, but I am intrigued by a much less expected source: the New York Times. The piece is entitled “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” but the data presented is actually more nuanced. Of particular note is the role of fathers (in particular) within the community:
The authors, including the Stanford economist Raj Chetty and two census researchers, Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter, tried to identify neighborhoods where poor black boys do well, and as well as whites.
“The problem,” Mr. Chetty said, “is that there are essentially no such neighborhoods in America.”
The few neighborhoods that met this standard were in areas that showed less discrimination in surveys and tests of racial bias. They mostly had low poverty rates. And, intriguingly, these pockets — including parts of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and corners of Queens and the Bronx — were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.
“That is a pathbreaking finding,” said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist whose books have chronicled the economic struggles of black men. “They’re not talking about the direct effects of a boy’s own parents’ marital status. They’re talking about the presence of fathers in a given census tract.”
Other fathers in the community can provide boys with role models and mentors, researchers say, and their presence may indicate other neighborhood factors that benefit families, like lower incarceration rates and better job opportunities.
That doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t play a role, or that fatherless families are the only problem facing African-American males. Indeed, some of those other factors – like mass incarceration – directly play into the problem of missing fathers. So the situation is more nuanced (not less) than the Times’ headline let on. But very near the heart of the question is a reminder that family matters, not just for the nuclear family, but for the whole community. The dissolution of a family isn’t just a purely private affair. And this seems to be part of why these researchers had such a hard time finding well-functioning African-American communities. As the Times’ accompanying graph shows, only about 4% of poor black kids live in “father-rich” environments, compared to 63% of poor white kids:
But nevertheless, the statistics speak for themselves, as President Obama acknowledged boldly in a 2008 Father’s Day address at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago:
Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation. They are teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models. They are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.
You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled – doubled – since we were children. We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.
The fact that figures as varied as the conservative Eberstadt and liberal Obama are sounding the same alarm about fatherless communities should give us pause. When people The Nation’s Mychal Denzel Smith responded to Obama’s speech by mocking “the dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father’“, they did so simply by turning a blind eye to a wealth of data on both the widespread problem of fatherless families and fatherless communities.
II. What This Implies
Maybe everything I’ve written so far seems uncontroversial. After all, who would want to deprive a child of their biological mother and father, absent some extraordinary reason like abuse?
And yet, we’re a nation with no-fault divorce, in which the parents’ happiness is permitted at the expense of the child’s well-being and future development. Or to take a more extreme example, we’re a nation in which IVF and gay adoption are legal and almost uncontroversial, in which, from the very beginning, we intentionally deprive a child of her biological parents for the sake of the adults who can afford the procedure. In these ways, we both subvert the rights of children and risk treating them like commodities rather than human beings.
Even attempting to speak out on this can backfire, as the fashion designer Domenico Dolce (of Dolce & Gabbana) found out in 2015. He came out against IVF on the grounds that it’s unnatural and that a child needs a mother and a father. When asked whether he wanted to be a father, Mr Dolce said: “I am gay. I cannot have a child. I don’t believe that you can have everything in life.” Elton John (who has two children through IVF) led a boycott against Dolce & Gabbana until Dolce was finally forced to apologize.
Of course, it doesn’t stop there. All sorts of practices in the modern West – from wide-spread pornography to the growing length of the workweek – work against the health and well-being of the family and of children. Taking our rhetoric about children seriously should actually cause us to reevaluate our policies and politics.
III. The Hard Cases
The idea that a child has a right to a mother and father obviously isn’t absolute in at least one sense: parents can die. But what about other causes? What about when parents give kids up for adoption, or when families are separated because of abuse or other factors? And to get squarely back to the question at the heart of this month’s immigration debate: how do we make sense of a child’s right to a father or mother if that parent breaks the law?
As a a general rule, the question ought to be: will the child (and society) be more helped or hurt by this separation? When a single teenage mom decides to give up her baby for adoption, that’s usually a selfless act of love, and the harm of the child not knowing his or her biological parent (and make no mistake, that is a pain that child will have to grapple with) is hopefully off-set by the child having a greater opportunity to grow up in a healthy familial environment. In the case of married couples’ separating, the Catholic Church’s stance is that:
If either of the spouses causes grave mental or physical danger to the other spouse or to the offspring or otherwise renders common life too diffcult, that spouse gives the other a legitimate cause for leaving, either by decree of the local ordinary or even on his or her own authority if there is danger in delay.”
So the Church recognizes that yes, there are cases in which a family being all together under one roof might be a nightmare rather than the ideal.
But maybe the hardest cases of all are when a parent is a non-violent lawbreaker. Should they go to jail, for the sake of society? Or not, for the sake of their families? We saw this tension in an obvious way this month, but I want to turn your attention to a fascinating proposal. Professor Paul Butler, a former prosecutor for the District of Columbia, now argues that “there is a tipping point at which crime increases if too many people are incarcerated. The United States has passed this point. If we lock up fewer people we will be safer.” He offers three reasons: that it disrupts families, creates too many unemployable young men (since few employers are willing to take a risk on an ex-con), and that it turns jail into a “rite of passage,” thereby decreasing respect for both the law and law enforcement. In particular, Butler takes aim at the shockingly-high number of people imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses. This epidemic of incarceration is no small part of the story of how we ended up with two-thirds of poor black kids growing up in communities with few father figures. An imperfect father is (typically) better than no father, and that’s as true for the broader communities as it is for the immediate family. So at least sometimes, the pro-family solution (and the way of best protecting the common good and public interest) might be not punishing to the fullest extent of the law.
A good Saint to turn to is St. Perpetua, who was imprisoned – and separated from her baby – on account of being a Christian. She testified: “I was frightened, because I had never experienced such darkness. Oh, what a terrible day: the strong heat because of the crowd, the extortion of the soldiers! Worst of all, in that place, I was tormented by worry for my infant” (a fuller account of her martyrdom can be found here). It’s a striking witness that what hurt her the most is to be separated from her baby. So as the family continues to suffer a thousand different attacks, St. Perpetua, pray for us!
“….how do we make sense of a child’s right to a father or mother if that parent breaks the law?”
A nation has a right to protect its borders. Some crossers are not legitimate, to including “coyotes,” gang members, and others who traffic in vulnerable children, and who have a vested interest in crossing clandestinely. Separating these children is a mercy to them.
Some of these families are legitimate, but feel they have a right to break the law crossing at other than a border station, without permission. Families seeking a better life should do what those like my father and mother’s parents did – come to a national entry point and patiently wait to plead your case for entry or asylum, and not cross illegally.
If this country is making an effort not to separate families of those who cross illegally, it is doing a lot more than other nations’ ways of dealing with lawbreakers, to meet the high principles Joe outlined above. Unfortunately, the transparently hypocritical goal of many who are making the most noise about this issue has little go do with maintaining family integrity, and more with weakening or abolishing national borders to keep a steady supply of new dedicated party voters.
When the situation is not about ethics or decency, but about maintaining power, resistance can be expected.
In regards to Professor Paul Butler’s argument:
I don’t really see how removing jail sentence from “non-violent crimes” would really help us out. Theft isn’t necessarily violent. Breaking and entering isn’t necessarily violent, public drunkeness, public obscenity, shop-lifting, etc.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0887403416684594?journalCode=cjpa
“The present study investigated the ACCA’s classification of burglary as violent through analysis of National Crime Victimization Survey data for the period of 2009 to 2014. Results showed that burglary is overwhelmingly a non-violent offense”
Additionally, Prison does not make men unemployable, typically its themselves.
Moses,
His focus is on “non-violent drug offenses,” not all non-violent crimes. He wasn’t talking about burglary or breaking and entering, etc.
As for the effect of prison on employment, it’s three-fold:
1. A gap in your employment history
2. A criminal record
3. Potential psychological damage from incarceration and/or prison culture.
Butler points out that even for an entry-level job, if you’ve got a 30 year-old felon who spent the last six years in prison, or a kid fresh out of college, most employers are going to feel more comfortable going with the second choice. That’s understandable, but the result is that going to prison does (demonstrably, and somewhat understandably) make it a great deal more difficult to find or keep a job.
I.X.,
Joe
Dear Moses. It just isn’t right to put lawbreakers in prison because it might harm their reputation.
Look, young men have the right to break and enter into your home and steal your stuff because there are no jobs to be had and also there is the universal destination of goods to keep in mind.
As for those invading America. they often arrive with youth who are not their own children and the internationalists trumpet the photos as a way to attack Trump.
Who knows why the media would intentionally mislead men….
Joe,
As a young man who has spent the majority of his work-life with ex-cons and non-violent drug-users, I say…nay.
I’m sure Mr. Butler will never have to worry about his new co-worker being a meth-abuser, or a bi-polar crack dealer, or much worse, his supervisor, but my view from the low-wage/entry-level trenches is…no. Please no.
One day, I’m sure I’ll be in a comfortable rung in society where the drug habits of a new co-worker will be a non-issue, but until then, all I can do is sneer when some rich boomer thinks it would benefit society to make my work-life more miserable.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2018/03/more-imprisonment-does-not-reduce-state-drug-problems
As far as your logic, you seem to be admitting that poverty is related to drug use? So would it not be better to attempt education and rehabilitation rather than sending them to prisons so that they can be abused and probably negatively reinforced in their behavior?
That was @ Moses’s comment: “One day, I’m sure I’ll be in a comfortable rung in society where the drug habits of a new co-worker will be a non-issue”
actually, most of these people make more money than I do 🙂
furthermore, Ryan, you should consider that those whom use drugs, can easily become involved in selling these drugs, which is a (notoriously) lucrative, non-taxable income.
for people stricken by poverty, they sure live in nice apartments and drive nice cars 🙂
If US parents commit a crime and are in the slammer, their children are separated from them.
Thanks for another great article, Joe. You offer a lot to digest and digress.
For starters, review of Church teaching on the family is wanting–the idea of interpersonal communion and how children fit into that. Under what conditions does the Church accept an intervention by the state?
Finally, some argue that nonviolent crime leading to imprisonment often reflects a plea bargain from greater offenses where costs are higher and outcomes more uncertain for the state. The perpetrator accepts the bargain rather than risk a potential longer sentence were prosecution of the greater charge to succeed. Or lesser drug possession crimes are punished with incarceration because the perpetrator is a prior offender (of more serious charges). Does anyone out there have knowledge and/or DOJ stats on this?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2013/12/08/why-97-of-federal-drug-offenders-plead-guilty/#16514a4d5db0
The way I understand the article is that drug offenders almost unanimously choose to plea because of mandatory minimum sentencing and prior convictions, which prosecutors will bring up at trial and which lead to dramatically higher sentences.
as far as intervention of the state, I’ll defer to Joe answer that, but I might speculate that it would be morally permissible under circumstances of graver criminal activities like felonies or abuse of the child by parents. There is a case of the Papal States (I think) where they took a child who had been baptized in danger of death from his Jewish parents for fear that the child would become apostate, however such a case is an aberration not the church norm. Regarding immigration constituting a grave crime, it’s hard to make that case, basically impossible; you’d have to err on the side of the immigrant first of all until you have evidence that they are not refugees or asylum seekers or escaping terrible conditions of poverty and extreme need in their home countries, in this case it’s not even a venial sin for a person to choose to immigrate, even if the country has laws against it. I say that based on St. Thomas’s teachings on ‘theft’ specifically. See article 7 of question 66 (second part of Second part) http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3066.htm#article7 That’s only St. Thomas teaching on theft, but the church more generally teaches a right to emigrate from one’s country for security and livelihood (see Pacem in Terris paragraph 25). Specifically, though the a country generally has a right to regulate immigration, they don’t have a right to abuse immigrants in order to deter immigration, even if the immigrant is doing so illegally because the immigrants in question have moral rights to basic human needs in other countries that they desperately search for in vain in their own. https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/28/world/us-migrant-countries-snapshots/index.html
St. Thomas also spoke about immigration. Check this out: http://www.tfp.org/what-does-saint-thomas-say-about-immigration
Even better, with more detail and clarity, is this: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/kschiffer/what-the-bishops-the-catechism-and-st.-thomas-aquinas-say-about-immigration
Finally, Article 25, number 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares:
Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Question: Why aren’t fathers asked to care for their children and the mothers of those children?
Also please don’t take any of my comments as contentious. I’m not trying to stir controversy 🙂 I’m just passionate about this.
In Christ,
Ryan
Where have all the commenters gone? Is this topic too controversial?
It seems as if the family which comes to our borders is already broken. The media seems to show women travelling with children and separate from large groups of men. I don’t believe I’ve ever really seen pictures of ‘mom-dad-children’ arriving at the border together. My mental picture of immigrants is not that of a traditional (mom-dad-children) family.
Most immigrants to our southern border are probably some denomination of Christian. It is my sense that more of them are Catholic. So it seems as if the Church may have a vested interest in salving wounds of its nearest relatives. But here I ask: What example does a broken, impoverished immigrant family offer us? The message of the broken impoverished immigrant family to many Americans seems to be “The streets of America are paved with gold, and we will break your laws to walk on them.”
The choir here sings to the choir of one again. Anybody care to listen to Pink Floyd’s, “Is there anybody out there?” Spooky lyrics, apropros, with an album titled, “The Wall.” http://www.metrolyrics.com/is-there-anybody-out-there-lyrics-pink-floyd.html
Joe’s point is well taken. All points of the political spectrum agree about the neutral point at which we may begin to talk. We are all pro-family. Fathers and mothers ought to be supported in bringing up their children.
Has the U.S. reached the tipping or disequlibrium point? When can the broken American family (the country) no longer care for the families of other parts of the world?
Margo – I tried to post twice before, and both disappeared when I hit “post.” Let’s try again….
When immigrants hit Ellis Island in the 19th and early 20th century, they were subjected to several tests before they were allowed to disembark in the US. One was a medical exam. If for example, a child failed this, a parent had to accompany the child back home, while the other parent went on with the remaining children – an early version of “family separation.” Pass this, and the prospective immigrants had to endure a make-or-break interview about themselves. The turn-away rate, at a time when the US population was probably half what it is now, was only about 2%. Immigration as a privilege, not an entitlement, was an accepted cultural paradigm – Emma Lazarus seemed to have no problem with it when she penned “The New Colossus” – and “open borders” wasn’t even a concept much less a “thing.” It was a system that managed to meet the spirit of both Matt 25: 31-46, as well as Matt 7:6. Of course, this was before so-called progressives, their political base waning, discovered the wealth of votes to be harvested from massively uncontrolled, encouraged illegal immigration, and cultural Marxists came out of the “no borders, no nation, no profits” closet.
Old Europeans are beginning to recognize the motives of the globalists in pushing massive uncontrolled migration, are anything but altruistic, and are looking to the policies of Hungary and Poland as examples to emulate.
AK – I’m glad I’m not talking to myself!
As a social conservative, I decry the open border-socialist position on immigration. Many new immigrants need and so receive social and welfare services. Of course there is more deficit spending which is pushed forward in time and onto our children’s backs.
This past and current year, my town tackled the issue of siting shelters for the homeless. Unbelievably, our progressive city government tried to locate a shelter in such a place that it circumvented the city’s zoning code! My neighborhood hired a (not cheap) land use attorney who argued the case very well, and we prevailed. But the idea is mind-boggling, is it not? Elected city officials operating with brazen illegal impunity in the name of social justice.
Economics 101 was reiterated: Surplus drives down prices, and demand increases. Where shelters are placed, the homelessness problem increases by about 40%! So WHAT SHOULD WE DO? I personally note the homeless, buzzed to hell and back, smoking joints without impunity, on the ‘stoops’ of their tents staked to green spaces in our downtown sidewalks. We are a state which legalized marijuana. Which came first? Drug abuse which led to homelessness? Or homelessness which led to drug abuse? Now the city is planning to build ‘safe houses’ where one may shoot oneself up with heroin under supervision. In case of an overdose, people stand by, trained to administer Naloxone to reverse impending death. The homelessness problem increases. The city builds more shelters, more safe houses, ad infinitum.
Our country is broken. Why not invite the barbarians? Oh. They are already here.
P.S.: Adding fuel to the fire, four churches joined with the City by offering services and property for the shelter. One property so offered, in the center of a single-family residential zone, was at the heart of the dispute. In essence, my neighborhood fought for the rule of law against ‘State’ and ‘Church’. (The churches were Protestant, but some Catholic pastors spoke in favor of the shelter, without perhaps knowing why or how or even that it was against city code). The churches argued it was a free exercise of religion, and the City agreed that was the case. It was not. Heart-wrenching, requiring a lot of prayer.
Margo – put it this way……I have a feeling, from the turn of some current sociopolitical phenomena, God has not given up on us yet, not to the “Babylonian Exile” level, anyway, and has some purpose for which we’re being preserved, even in our fallen and sinful state of affairs.
Doesn’t mean we might not be in for some challenges. His will be done…..
I don’t want to be rashly judgmental, or accuse you of racism. I just thought it might be helpful to point out that calling people barbarians might tend to give the wrong impression of your character. Less pejorative terms generally foster better dialogue; again not saying that you intended to express contempt with your diction, just that it could come across that way.
Ryan,
Before you do make a mistake of rash judgment, perhaps you may wish to re-read my comment. Maybe you know something I don’t. Whom did I call a barbarian? Rather, I noted that some had been called. I’m not worried about how my character impresses. I know the source from where my character derives.
P.S.: Oh, yes. Please inform where you discern any hint of racism before you accuse me of it! Let’s talk about dialogue. Yes. Let’s.
Ryan – Margo is spot-on with her pejorative. Same -exact-issue here in Colorado Springs. We’re not talking the Harvard grad who lost his position on the arbitrage team, whose last possession is his 5-man REI expedition tent. Interviewed, the people who camp year-round on the mid-town creek (fouling the watershed so badly the EPA threatened the city with lawsuits)say they **like* their off-grid lifestyle, and as long as they get food and an occasional shower, they stay. Lots of crime and abuse happen in these tent camps. Now, go look up the online definition of “barbarian” and see it if it fits.
“I don’t want to be rashly judgmental, or accuse you of racism. ”
Oh wow. Have you ever seen the ages-old Monty Python skit where the English policeman (an unarmed Bobby) yells at a fleeing felon, “Halt!” Or I’ll yell “Halt” AGAIN!” Accusations of ray-cissim might mean something to someone somewhere these days, mostly in the spare offices of the Democratic Socialists of Amerika, but for the vast majority, that “pejorative” has been cry-wolf overused into meaninglessness.
“Our country is broken. Why not invite the barbarians? Oh. They are already here.”
Not only invited, but elected. I saw this +40 years ago…when I first idly wondered about all those screaming hippies in the street burning flags, breaking windows and spitting on returning troops….where were they all going to end up? Now we know……
We have a second chance these days…let’s see what we do with it.
AK – Are you hopeful about our second chance?
My comment was rather intended to be a caution and an invitation to clarify, not an accusation, and I do apologize for the misunderstanding. Perhaps an explanation would help clear up some of the misunderstanding. This comment thread is specifically about poor people and immigrants. Therefore when you said ‘Why not invite the barbarians’ it appeared like your antecedent basis might be ‘immigrants’ since these are the people we are talking about in the comment thread, and which you first referred to in your comment. This could have all been a misunderstanding argument structure, so I was reserving judgement specifically because maybe you weren’t referring to immigrants as barbarians. Secondly there was also the chance that perhaps what you meant by using the term ‘barbarian’ was not what it is often used for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian. Therefore, to be clear in my question who are you referring to as barbarians, and what do you mean by it? In hindsight it would have been better to use this question in the first place instead of the ‘r’ word so I beg your forgiveness, it was unkind of me. And I mean that sincerely, I should have taken my own rule and paused before posting which would have prevented this from taking the turn it did. Perhaps I was just eager to do some virtue signalling and caused you unnecessary duress.
Hi Ryan,
You say: “This comment thread is specifically about poor people and immigrants.” I
The comment thread aligns with the title of Joe’s article: What it Means to be Pro-Family. Joe mentions poverty, politics, race, and immigration insofar as they relate to the health of the family.
We could count the number of times Joe uses the words ‘poor people’ and ‘immigrants,’ or the number of times Joe references these.
We could count and then compare the number of times other people are mentioned. For instance, Joe mentions ‘children’ and ‘family’ many more times than he mentions immigrants. He mentions Republicans, Democrats, Obama and Trump. He speaks of pro-lifers, liberals, social conservatives. These words: the family, father, mother, children, infant baby, girls, boys, spouses, adults, and the nuclear family are frequent. Joe quotes Pope Francis. He mentions the human race, the rest of the world, the community, society. He mentions the local authority, the crowd, the lawbreaker, soldiers, and St. Perpetua. He discusses the work and words of numerous authors, researchers together with an economist, a sociologist, a prosecutor, a musician and a designer. Oh. There are also ex-cons, employers, mentors, teachers, coaches, and role models.
You and I apparently disagree on the thesis of this comment thread.
“Why not invite the barbarians? Oh. They are already here.”
Regarding the human family that is certain, considering the 50,000,000+ abortions over the last few decades. What else would we call it if not a ‘barbaric’ practice??
But it is actually worse than barbaric, and for this reason: Crocodiles have been inhabiting the Earth relatively unchanged for 100 million years, or more. And yet they are very caring for their young, protecting them lovingly within their mouths and guarding them behind by their 2 inch teeth; and shedding crocodile tears of joy in the thought of chomping on any thing so stupid as to presume to attack them. And then again, look at the care that penguins take in guarding and protecting their precious eggs, and then raising their chicks until they are able to adapt and then thrive in the brutally cold environment of Antartica. And now look at humans, barbaric humans, who shoot up heroin, snort cocaine and get stone drunk while even in the last months of their pregnancy. Not to mention the countless abortions, even in the latest stages before birth.
If this isn’t barbaric….what is??
Hi Margo. Been a bit busy lately so I couldn’t comment as often as normal. But animals, even very primitive ones, are so careful for the care of their young, that I can’t understand how people think that the neglect of fetuses, infants and children is normal and AOK? It is just one of the many wicked and noxious fruits of ‘barbaric liberalism’.
Al,
Yes. I know busy too. I always appreciate your sharing knowledge about the animal kingdom. I’ve seen the documentary-movie “Penguins.” It was extremely touching to see those parent father penguins guarding their eggs.
I take Joe’s primary principle to heart. I agree with it: The larger society needs to support the family. How do we define family? I would argue for all those involved in propagating it: God first, man, woman, child. In this order is how I would protect it.
The details and tactics and logistics and costs are where our society disagree. I would argue we need so start with our own barbarian selves.
Hi Margo,
Your definition of family is good on a micro level, but considering we include God into the family definition, we then need to include all others in creation, such as angels, as well. I guess this is why St. Francis referred to every creature, even the Sun and fire, as his ‘brothers’.
But on an anthropological level, we need to look to both nature and history to understand this micro level definition you give, and our own history history includes animals that closely share our DNA, such as the great apes. We see a great deal of social structure in their life habits, and also the role of alpha males who are the leaders of their particular families. And, this is where I think liberal and progressive thinkers go wrong, in neglecting that alpha males still play a part in our modern society. That’s not to say they are inherently better than any other member, but that in nature, and especially with animals, they have always played a dominant role. So, if we just overlook this fact, and say that there are actually no alpha males in our human society, and that they should not exercise their natural abilities and leadership talents, we are then redefining mammalian nature itself, since it is indisputable that predominately all mammal species include such alpha males as part of their family social structure, and therefore humans who share such DNA characteristics, should also have alpha males that play an important part in their society.
This is what I think is going on in politics today. The feminists and other liberals cannot tolerate a leader that is obviously an alpha male, such as is Donald Trump, as their political leader. It ruins their vision of the world as egalitarian in social structure and talents. And yet this goes against both world history and biology itself, not to mention the Judaeo Christian religion and its ancient sacred scripture. They’re trying to create a new ‘fantasy’ history in their own image, without reference to either true history, God, or even nature itself. In doing this they can upturn everything humanity has ever learned about human society, and start from scratch….inventing whatever weird things they have in their imaginations, or drug induced reflections, along the way, and then proclaiming it to be truth and reality.
Quite an interesting world we live in, to say the least!
Best to you in the Lord.
Hi Al,
In our culture, there is certainly evidence for “the feminization of the American male.” Have you ever come across Jordan Peterson? There is lots of audio of him out there. Here is Bishop Barron on the Strange Notions blog. https://strangenotions.com/the-jordan-peterson-phenomenon/
Peterson talks about our at-risk young men; we can extrapolate the effects on the family.
Best to you, always, Al, in the Lord. (This is a beautiful phrasing of a blessing. Thank you.)
Thanks, I’ll check out those links, Margo. But since I grew up in S.F., I have quite a bit of experience watching the movement first hand. Very rare stuff to say the least.
O, of course, one must remember that when young black men commit crimes it is owing to the racism of white men.
Since the rise of Trump, that hateful demagoguery has lost its teeth which is a good thing because such a claim includes with it the idea that young black men are not moral agents.
Anything they do that is positive is exaggerated by claims the black had to overcome racism to do whatever it was he did that merits praise whereas if he choses to commit crimes and gets arrested and jailed the responsibility for what he did is sloughed-off onto Whitey because racism.
There is a reason many conservatives have tuned-out such things as the family separation at the border.
The left has exhausted the average man by its constant criticism and negativity
One of the most troubling things the last two weeks’ debate on immigration brought up was how quickly social conservatives simply shrugged at the problem, with excuses like: “Obama did it, too!” “abortion is a bigger issue, ” etc.
More blaming the victim. The natives are restless to the point of turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the latest stunts of the media.
Once, the biggest invasion in the history of the world was Barbarossa, when the Armies of Hitler invaded Russia but that has been dwarfed by the invasion of foreigners into the United States since 1965 and STILL the Americans are expected to just shut up and put up with the invasion of poor, unskilled, diseased, low intelligence, foreigners who go on welfare, have no intention of assimilating, who have no sponsors, and who have caused the coffers of the USCCB to stay full as they resettle the unassimilable aliens into local small towns.
This is the major reason Trump will be re-elcted in a LANDSLIDE.
Our elites have managed to turn America (90% white and christian in 1960) into Neo-Yugoslavia, a nightmarish conglomeration of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-religious peoples and how’d that work out for Yugoslavia?
There is a coming war amongst these groups and it will be blamed on whitey when all he wanted was his country to be preserved as the one he was born into but one never hears Pope Francis speak of that legitimate right.
In “City of God,” Saint Augustine noted that it is easier for a man to speak to his dog than it is to speak to a foreigner who doesn’t know the same language.
It is long past time for Pope Francis to retire because his politics are extreme leftist and harmful to local communities and men of Faith.
Joe and all,
Wonder if you’ve ever seen Principles from Christendom College? Two past chaplains (Frs. McGraw and Planty) from Christendom recently co-wrote on immigration, covering morality, legal positivism, justice, penalty, etc. Worth a peek.
https://www.getprinciples.com/illegal-immigration-a-legal-and-moral-analysis/