Commentary
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, reports emerged from the Irwin County Detention Center, an immigration facility in Georgia, detailing forced hysterectomies performed on migrant women held in custody. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Ocilla, Ga., owned and managed by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company, oversaw these surgeries in what have been described as appalling conditions and an “utter lack of care of detainees’ health” during the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Tragically, as too many people fail to realize, forced sterilizations are not a recent development. Rather, as a form of state violence they date back more than 100 years, when states across the country (beginning in 1907 with Indiana and followed in 1909 by Washington, California, and Connecticut, as well as many others over time) approved “eugenic sterilization.” These early laws passed by state legislatures allowed state officials to sterilize males and females—some as young as 12 or 13 years old—believed to have inheritable and incurable diseases or afflictions, including insanity, mania, or dementia.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGISTS, fairness is one of our most innate moral intuitions. As a parent, I can vouch for this because I routinely navigate the extra-sensitive fairness meters of bickering siblings. Young or old, we protest perceived slights in the same terms: “That is so unfair!”
This snap judgment, however, is not always accurate. Consequently, when circumstances trigger a reflexive accusation of unfairness, we should pause to verify that we are not off base. As Christians, especially, we must test our gut reactions against the insights of our faith to ensure that our intuitions match our convictions.
The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine is a paradigmatic illustration of this responsibility.
With a limited supply likely deep into 2021, many who want the vaccine will be unable to get it for quite some time. Recognizing this reality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has created guidelines for who should have priority at each stage of the rollout. According to ACIP, health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities have priority, and after that essential workers and those over 75 should have access before anyone else.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
MARCH 25 marks the sixth anniversary of the start of the brutal and tragic war in Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition’s offensive operations, code-named Operation Decisive Storm, began with airstrikes and a naval blockade against Houthi rebels with the goal of restoring Yemen’s ousted government. With early and extensive U.S. military support, this war has created what many consider the most severe humanitarian crisis on the planet.
During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised a policy reset on Yemen. “I would end U.S. support for the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and order a reassessment of our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Biden said. “It is past time to restore a sense of balance, perspective, and fidelity to our values in our relationships in the Middle East. President Trump has issued Saudi Arabia a dangerous blank check. Saudi Arabia has used it to extend a war in Yemen that has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, pursue reckless foreign policy fights, and repress its own people.”
Biden’s promise offers hope to those committed to peace, but his administration must do much more than help pick up the pieces. Yemen needs humanitarian aid, an end to the blockade, and good faith diplomacy.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE PASSION CENTER is a Christian community in Pembroke Pines, Fla., about 20 miles north of Miami. The organization is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination, but it neither emphasizes its denominational ties nor resembles a traditional church. This self-described “holistic ministry training center” has no building, but it has a mission to keep Jesus and social justice intertwined.
The faith community was founded and is led by Elizabeth Rios, who earlier started the Center for Emerging Female Leadership in New York. Members of the Passion Center used to meet regularly for community service projects, local demonstrations advocating for the priorities of marginalized communities, dinners in local restaurants, and a monthly comedy night for their neighborhood. The pandemic shut down the in-person gatherings. Unlike many other Pentecostal and charismatic churches, the Passion Center leadership had no qualms about following the science. They had no building to close; they just transitioned their ministries online. The Passion Center is one example of Pentecostals who don’t mind getting politically engaged in justice work to further the reign of God here on earth.
Pentecostalism is one of the fastest growing Christian movements in the world. In 1980, about 6 percent of Christians globally were Pentecostal—now it’s 25 percent. As of 2014, there were 10 million Pentecostals in the U.S. In many places around the world, Pentecostalism is the predominant face of Christianity. These rising numbers are shifting Christianity’s demographic center from the prosperous North to the global South.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE OTHER DAY, during a Zoom call with my younger sister, I said something that sounded harsh—maybe even inappropriate. “You know, there’s a part of me that is honestly glad Mom isn’t alive during this pandemic.” She was quiet for a moment, “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
With untreated COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and her radical hospitality, my mom would not have listened to public health officials’ guidance on the coronavirus. She would have visited her friends to check on them, taken meals to elderly neighbors, and watched over her grandchildren, all while smoking half a pack a day.
Mama, strong and resilient for more than 60 years, would have thought herself impervious. So, Mama would have caught the virus. And, because she and Daddy were tied at the hip, she would have passed it on to him. Daddy, with his emphysema, high blood pressure, a heart that endured two strokes, and a penchant for salty, fatty foods, is definitely vulnerable to COVID-19.
But Mama died from a sudden heart attack in February 2019. Daddy is at home during this global pandemic. Our brother cares for him and a nurse checks in. Daddy is safer and Mama is no longer suffering. We, their children, don’t have to navigate the heartbreak of losing parents during a global pandemic, of not being able to say goodbye properly.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
WE'D ALL LIKE to think that empathy is a primary motivator in our lives. The ability to understand and share the emotions of another feels like an intrinsically human characteristic. But what happens when society erodes our collective empathy in service of a very individualistic worldview; when the world asks us time and time again to gloss over our mistakes instead of learning from them? Who are we to each other when we stop asking questions about the impacts and consequences of our actions?
Recently the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany released the first-ever 50-state survey conducted on Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z in the U.S. The data is alarming.
More than 60 percent of survey respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust; nearly 50 percent could not name a single concentration or work camp, though there were more than 40,000 in operation during World War II; and more than 10 percent believed that Jews themselves caused the Holocaust.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
AS THE BIDEN administration enters the White House, it must focus not only on repairing the damage caused by four years of the Trump administration but also push forward a bold agenda using all available channels: unilateral executive actions, the rule-making process, and collaboration with Congress. Here’s a wish list for the first 100 days.
While we await mass distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine, Americans are living through some of the highest infection and death numbers we’ve seen at any point in the pandemic. A coordinated national response to the coronavirus must be a top priority for the administration. This includes a national mask mandate, a robust and coordinated federal strategy, a national vaccine distribution strategy, and additional support and stimulus to individuals, health systems, and states to address the health and economic impacts of the disease.
While the wealthy and those with stocks and investments have only seen their wealth increase over the past year, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans has expanded dramatically. A progressive economic agenda is needed to bolster and support those with low and middle incomes (roughly 80 percent of Americans). The priorities should include rolling back tax cuts for the wealthiest; forgiving federal student debt; increasing the federal minimum wage; ensuring access to paid sick and family leave and affordable child care; modernizing unemployment insurance; and introducing a budget that supports safety net programs and invests in the people and communities struggling the most.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE TRUMP administration was an utter catastrophe for those who care about justice and peace in Israel/Palestine. U.S. policy was entrusted to right-wing settlement supporters such as Ambassador David Friedman and Jared Kushner and Christian Zionists such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The administration applauded—and legalized—settlement expansion, showing utter disdain for international law. They displayed blatant antagonism to Palestinians by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, cutting off financial aid to Palestinian hospitals and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and closing the Palestinian Liberation Organization office in Washington. They capped it all by promoting fake “peace” alternatives, such as Trump’s disastrous “Peace to Prosperity” plan and the normalization agreements with Gulf countries. These policies aimed to appease the most hard-right policies of Israel and the eschatological fantasies of evangelical Christian Zionists, rather than seeking genuine peace or justice.
The Biden administration is likely to reverse some of these extreme steps. Biden has already signaled, however, that he would not reverse the embassy move, nor support any measures for conditioning aid to Israel based on its behavior. Biden’s policy will likely be marked by a return to the traditional policies of the Obama era, which included anemic objections to renewed settlement expansion, verbal support for a two-state solution, and vague references to international law, while resisting any pressure on Israel to actually comply with international law or create a sovereign Palestinian state.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE UNITED STATES is one of only 28 countries without a provision in its Constitution that provides equality under the law regardless of sex.
The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed in this country nearly a century ago. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 with bipartisan support in both houses and then set a time limit for ratification by the states. In January 2020, when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, the amendment met the requirements to be added to the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, the deadline for ratification passed more than three decades ago.
The amendment’s language is simple: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The ERA would add what the Founding Fathers intentionally left out: constitutional rights and protections for everyone regardless of “sex.” Isn’t it time?
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE WAR BETWEEN Armenia and Azerbaijan this past autumn was an avoidable tragedy.
The disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region has been populated since at least the second century B.C.E. by Armenians, one of the world’s oldest Christian civilizations. The Muslim Azeris and others have lived there and in neighboring areas for centuries as well, and the region was ethnically mixed (albeit majority Armenian) when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Stalin’s divide-and-rule policy for drawing borders made Nagorno-Karabakh a theoretically “autonomous region” within the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic. As the Soviet Union was breaking up and Azerbaijani persecution of ethnic Armenians increased, the Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh governments, with widespread support of their respective populations, demanded the transfer of the region to Armenia.
When Azerbaijan refused, Armenia seized the territory by force in the 1990s—along with large swaths of western Azerbaijan, populated primarily by Azeris, that were never part of Nagorno-Karabakh. Hundreds of thousands of Azeris, and a smaller number of Armenians, were victims of ethnic cleansing by both sides.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE ELECTION DID NOT, as many had hoped, offer a resounding renunciation of Trumpism and its often-explicit white supremacist ideology. On the contrary, millions more people than four years ago voted for a man (and a worldview) with few illusions about his nature, showing a willingness to ignore, if not condone, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia.
Trump’s presidency made unarguably clear, for those who harbored doubts, that racism and white supremacy are not restricted to a small, inconsequential fragment of society tucked away in the shadows. Now, it’s distressingly but importantly clear that a very significant minority of voters either harbors these views explicitly or is fine with ignoring or downplaying them for their own perceived advantage. As painful as that is to acknowledge, it’s actually a step in the right direction, since a problem cannot be addressed until it is first named.
A primary task before us as we emerge from the destructive tumult of the past four years is to mitigate the damage done to so many people and to our earth itself. “Mitigation,” by definition, includes “reducing the harmful effects” of actions taken. It’s considered a stage of emergency management, which feels about right.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE CLIMATE CRISIS is a moral crisis. What else should we call the willful choice to inflict hunger, disease, and suffering on those in the poorest circumstances?
At the same time, the climate crisis is an opportunity to allow God’s healing grace to enter our lives. As with every great failure of our collective conscience, the way forward begins with each of us standing up in faith and love to right the wrongs of the past. Around the world, faith communities are doing just that. As national governments fail to show the decisive and visionary leadership we need, faith communities are taking up the mantle of justice. Under the banner of the U.N.’s “race to zero” initiative, many faith communities are committing to meaningful changes in the way they operate to build a healthy, safe world that protects everyone.
It’s hard work, but it is the way of the future. In 50 years, the Earth’s fossil fuels will be depleted, and the world will no longer run on oil and gas. The only questions are how quickly we can make this change and whether we can make it well. Many faith institutions have chosen to put their pocketbooks to greater service by divesting from fossil fuel companies and reinvesting in clean renewable energy. To date, nearly 400 faith-based institutions have divested, constituting the single largest source of commitments in the global divestment movement. Committed institutions range from huge international networks to small communities of women religious, around the globe. It’s a big movement that is successfully pressuring oil companies to think beyond the status quo.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
In 1994, Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), establishing a template for free trade deals that was neither free nor fair. While North American trade tripled and corporations profited under NAFTA, the costs were borne by manufacturing workers across the U.S. and Mexico, smallholder corn farmers, and our environmental commonwealth. These trade consequences contributed to migration to the U.S.
The dirty secret about free trade agreements is that much of the content has little to do with trade. They serve to maximize corporate profits by pressuring countries to weaken or jettison domestic laws that serve the common good—such as public health, financial, and environmental regulations—to make room for policies that serve corporate interests and economic superpowers. Corporations and other nations can sue for perceived “unfair treatment,” which often costs taxpayers millions or billions of dollars and results in a regulatory chilling effect. With hundreds of U.S. government-approved industry trade advisers at the negotiating table—and few civil society representatives—is this any surprise?
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
When I was in labor with my third child, my older sister was bewildered by my pain. As I walked the hall of our two-story row house in southwest Philadelphia, seeking moments of comfort between birth pool and bed, couch and floor, she said to me, “But, you’ve already done this before. Why is it so hard?”
“I haven’t birthed this baby!” I cried out to her. Then I settled into a deep silence, preparing myself for the next wave, the next earth-shaking moan.
Our souls are crying out this Advent of 2020. We want to call this season the coldest, these times the most hostile, this ache unbearable.
And it is true. We are saturated with the names of the dead, no longer shocked by callous leaders or the collective amnesia that refuses responsibility for ongoing systems of oppression.
Though history and our theology will remind us that empires fall, that pandemics cease, that justice will prevail, such awareness doesn’t diminish the pain of raw grief, this collective lament. We haven’t celebrated Christmas this year; how can we even begin?
I do not know how hope still shivers through my bones. I do not know how to unclench rage-tight teeth. I do not know how to look at this war-soaked, warming planet and believe that the Author of Peace is weeping and raging with us and making straight these deeply crooked and corrupt paths.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
MORE THAN A year ago, during the early days of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests, a Christian hymn echoed in the streets. “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord” had become an unofficial protest anthem. A year later, the spirit of hope that permeated the song’s adoption has evaporated.
This summer Beijing overrode the “one country, two systems” principle agreed to in 1997 by implementing a new national security law (NSL) in Hong Kong that gives China’s central government a broad set of powers to silence anything deemed subversive. The effects have been swift and chilling. In August, legislative elections for 2020 were delayed a year; pro-democracy candidates were disqualified. Controversial texts have been removed from public libraries, pro-democracy professors silenced, and newspaper offices raided.
Some of Hong Kong’s leading democracy activists, including legal scholar Benny Tai and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Joshua Wong, confess Christian faith. During the height of recent protests, many pastors invoked Christ in their participation. For example, pastor Roy Chan organized Protect the Children, a civilian peacekeeping collective, to shield young protesters from police violence. Under the new NSL, actions like Chan’s could be prosecutable, with potential life sentences.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
FOR ABOUT TWO decades I was part of a small, unaffiliated fundamentalist religious community in South Carolina. There I learned that Jesus’ condemnation of religious hypocrisy was a warning to adhere tightly to the church’s long list of superficial rules for holy conduct. It was a holiness defined more by rule compliance than goodness of heart.
Later, in college, I learned that Jesus was making an institutional critique more than an individual one in those biblical passages. He was in fact condemning a devotion to rigid rules that emphasized appearance over substance and venerating law while neglecting the soul.
Such beliefs are an apt metaphor for the fundamental defect in a near-century of U.S. police reform efforts. Most have ignored the heart and soul of our policing and carceral institutions; they have instead tinkered with these institutions’ appearances. Many of these reforms likely reduced some harms of U.S. policing. Yet, they have left largely in place the ideas and practices that taint the heart of American policing: Police techniques—even those blessed by law—maintain an anti-Black, gendered, heteronormative, and ableist status quo. As Christian faith teaches, mere adherence to rules is not holiness. As we learn by examining the limitations of police reform, reduction of harm is not justice.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
PEOPLE OFFER MANY reasons for not voting, from “one vote doesn’t matter” and “there’s no real difference between the parties” to the conviction that an election “won’t bring about real justice (or the reign of God).”
The latter, at least, is certainly true. Voting—even electing the best-available candidates for the most important positions in government—definitely won’t bring about the peaceable kingdom.
But who is ultimately elected—especially at the presidential level—can make a world of difference in the lives of those in the most vulnerable conditions. For instance, in the past three-plus years, more than 200 judges have been appointed to the bench, many of them to lifetime terms. Of that number, zero have been Black. And judicial appointment is only one of many powers in executive hands, which affect everything from education, housing, and immigration policies to whether our society makes the hard choices of confronting racialized policing and combating climate change.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THERE IS A nationwide trend of Republican state lawmakers rethinking the death penalty, and their faith is playing a central role. From Catholics to evangelicals, Christian lawmakers on the Right are abandoning capital punishment like never before.
Take Colorado as an example. For years a bill to repeal the death penalty ran into a wall in the state Senate. This year three Republican senators co-sponsored the bill and provided the crucial votes for it to pass. The Colorado House of Representatives approved it and the governor signed it into law in March—making Colorado the 22nd state to abolish the death penalty.
Why did they do it? These Republican lawmakers decided the death penalty does not align with their Christian or conservative values: the sanctity of human life, individual liberty, and limited government. They see a system that exonerates one person on death row for every nine it executes, with more than 160 people in the U.S. being freed from death row due to wrongful convictions since 1973. They see a bloated government program that does nothing to make people safer.
“We were created in the image of God and that is a very good thing. And part of what that means, in my understanding, is it is against the natural order for one created in the image of God to willfully take the life of another created in the image of God,” said state Sen. Owen Hill. “My conscience demands that I vote to abolish the death penalty in Colorado.”
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN JUNE, NEARLY 700,000 DACA recipients could breathe a sigh of relief when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The court determined that the basis for President Trump’s action was “arbitrary and capricious.” The grounds presented for termination failed to consider the impact of the program’s rescission, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.
The grounds of the ruling are important because the court did not address whether DACA was legal. For now, DACA remains fragile. People who have benefited from the program, put in place by executive action under President Barack Obama in 2012, can continue to obtain valid work permits and are protected from deportation. An estimated 130,000 people would have been eligible to submit new applications for the program, except that the Trump administration released a memo on July 28 saying it would “reject all initial requests for DACA and associated applications for Employment Authorization Documents.”
This momentary reprieve and upsurge of hope resulted from decades of fierce social, political, and legal organizing by undocumented youth and their supporters, often at great personal risk. The Trump administration may decide to attack DACA again. It would likely be a costly undertaking since a substantial bipartisan majority of Americans support DACA.
While DACA prevents the eviction from the U.S. of a sector of immigrants, it does not dismantle the massive deportation machine that operates in this country nor create a pathway to citizenship—key components of comprehensive immigration reform. Authentic immigration reform begins with the recognition that U.S. immigration laws, from their inception, have been informed by discriminatory narratives. The first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, made it possible for those born elsewhere to become citizens—but only if they were “free white persons” (“white” meaning certain Europeans, and “persons” essentially meaning men), excluding enslaved people, Native Americans, those without property, most women, and all others not defined as white. Only property-owning white male citizens could vote.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IT IS TIME for radical change. This summer Black students in Oakland, Calif., demonstrated they deserve it—schools without police. After a 10-year organizing effort, students of the Black Organizing Project were victorious. The Oakland school board voted unanimously to pass the “George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate the Oakland Schools Police Department,” which will dismantle the school police department and redirect $2.5 million to pupils’ needs. Like students across the country, Oakland scholars want to reimagine safety because too many of them have been dehumanized, disrespected, and criminalized by police in their schools.
Following the brutal murder of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May, the United States has seen a surge in progress in the movement for police-free schools. While this demand is not new, the moment made it real.
The Minneapolis school board led the way when it unanimously voted to end its contract with the police department. Then Portland. Then Denver. Then Charlottesville, Rochester, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.
Fueled by Black and brown students, the police-free schools movement asserts that removing police from schools will increase students’ chance to thrive and feel safe from state violence. The presence of police in schools increases the chances of youth interaction with the criminal legal system. Whether we call them “school resource officers” or police, they enforce the criminal code. Moreover, police too often aggressively suppress what they perceive to be disobedience or disorder. They ticket, arrest, and violently impose their will upon young people.