Yet another atrocity of the regime

They keep thinking of further ways to punish people violating, or existing, outside their picture of what America means. I had not thought of this one -- but of course...

Jill Filipovic reports: 

As part of its strategy of arresting and warehousing immigrants in abhorrent conditions which are leading to illness and even death, the Trump administration is grabbing up pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children from across the country and shipping them off to Texas so that they can’t get safe and legal abortions — and where they also don’t get adequate medical care.

This is an administration rule: If an undocumented child is pregnant, she goes to a single South Texas shelter in San Benito, where abortion is outlawed and where she will be hours away from the large hospitals that have the kind of specialized obstetric care that pregnant girls need. The girls are being sent to Texas specifically because Texas bans abortion, and moving them there means that they won’t be able to end their pregnancies. 

There are reportedly more than a dozen pregnant girls currently being held at this center. Before this policy was put into place, pregnant children who were in the US illegally and without a guardian would be sent to trained foster families or specialized facilities; not anymore. The directive came from Angie Salazar, the director of refugee resettlement, but was pulled directly from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan. ...

Filipovic -- rightly I think -- characterizes what is happening here as rape, the state repeating what has already been done to these children.

... after having control over every aspect of their lives stripped away, from where they live to what has happened to them sexually, the Trump administration is committing what I would qualify as tantamount to a second rape: Saying, just like a rapist does, your body is not yours, and I will do with it what I want.  

The girls' story escaped into the mainstream because even employees of the Office of Refuge Resettlement under the Trump administration understood they were being part of something very wrong. The plan to ship pregnant migrants of any age to Texas where abortion is outlawed was part of Project 2025. 

Any atrocity to ensure women have no control over our bodies ...

Recurrent panics fuel mobs. Everything old is new again...

Watching MAGA panic about the existence of trans and gender variant youth and by extension their elders, I realized I'd seen something very like this before. This is a country all too easily led into periodic hysteria about sex and gender, especially when it comes to actual children. Trump and the Republican Party are fanning the flames of fear for political gain.

Does this seem familiar? It certainly could. I remember when our culture in the 1980s was obsessed with the McMartin Preschool abuse trial. Something terrible must have happened ... or not. From a New York Times retrospective [gift] by Clyde Haberman: 

... Starting in 1983, with accusations from a mother whose mental instability later became an issue in the case, the operators of a day care center near Los Angeles were charged with raping and sodomizing dozens of small children. The trial dragged on for years, one of the longest and costliest in American history. In the end ... lives were undone. But no one was ever convicted of a single act of wrongdoing. 

Indeed, some of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

Still, McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details. ...

... Inevitably, perhaps, the mass frenzy over supposed Satanism and sexual predation invited comparisons to the Salem witch trials and to McCarthy-era excesses. Americans do seem prone episodically to this kind of fever. ...

Witness the widespread panic a few decades ago when people around the country convinced themselves that evil neighbors were handing children poisoned Halloween candy and apples embedded with razor blades. Arthur Miller highlighted this phenomenon in his 1953 play, “The Crucible,” which invoked the Salem trials to comment on a contemporary abuse, the scattershot McCarthy hunt for Communists ...

It seems to me obvious that Trump and MAGA are playing a very tired, very American, tune ...

So what's the other political party doing in response to MAGA's fantasies and bigotry? Far too often, cowering in closets. Most Democratic politicians are too timid to take on the assault on emerging medical science and anthropological understanding that the experience of many contemporary Americans is forcing into the light.

Parker Molloy, a Chicago media journalist, has some advice for timid Democrats:

There's a glaring omission in all the Democratic hand-wringing about trans issues: actual trans people. ... 

The disability rights movement has a motto: "Nothing about us without us." It's a simple principle that Democrats have completely abandoned when it comes to trans issues. Instead of talking to us about our lives and needs, Democratic strategists talk about us as an abstract political problem to be solved. ...

If Democrats actually bothered to have these conversations, they'd discover something ... we're not asking for much. We're not demanding special privileges or radical restructuring of society. We mostly just want to exist in public without harassment and access the same healthcare everyone else takes for granted. 

By and large, trans people are not demanding (who even asked for this?) that people announce their own pronouns or whatever corporate/HR nonsense Democratic politicians think trans people want...

Talk to trans kids and their parents, and you'll hear the same themes repeatedly: They want to use the bathroom in peace. They want to play sports with their friends. They want their teachers to use their names. They want to go to school without being bullied. They want to see a doctor when they need to. 

These aren't radical demands. They're the baseline expectations of any child in America.

Talk to trans adults like me, and the asks are similarly modest: Keep our jobs without discrimination. Update our driver's licenses to match our appearance. Access medical care our doctors recommend. Walk down the street without fear. Again, these aren't special rights. They're basic dignity.

But Democrats can't make these arguments because they don't know our stories. They've treated us as a constituency to be managed rather than human beings to be heard. They've let Republicans define who we are and what we want because they've never bothered to ask us ourselves.

This is more than just morally wrong; it's politically stupid. When you don't know the people you're supposedly defending, you can't defend them effectively. When you treat someone's existence as a political liability rather than a human reality, you've already lost the argument.

... they need to reframe the debate. Republicans aren't protecting children; they're weaponizing government to bully kids. They're the ones obsessed with bathrooms, genitals, and controlling people's bodies. Democrats should make them own that weirdness. ...

Democrats need to connect trans rights to broader freedoms. This isn't about special privileges or ideology. It's about the government staying out of personal medical decisions. It's about families, not politicians, making choices about their children's health. It's about the freedom to live your life without constant government surveillance of your gender.

These are winning arguments if Democrats would bother to make them.

... they need to tell human stories. Trans people aren't abstractions or political footballs. They're people's children, siblings, friends, and neighbors. When Republicans attack trans people, they're attacking real families in every community. Democrats need to make that real for voters.

.. Democrats need to show some backbone. Voters respect politicians who stand for something, even if they disagree. What they don't respect is cowardice. Running away from every fight Republicans pick doesn't make Democrats look reasonable. It makes them look weak.

Democrats have been down this road before. It leads nowhere good. You can't build a political coalition by constantly throwing people out of it. You can't inspire voters by standing for nothing. You can't protect some children by agreeing that others are disposable. ...

Get over yourselves, Dem politicians. If you can learn just enough to be real, people will respect you. Most of us aren't on the side of witch burners, soiling our pants and fleeing phantom dangers. You won't win the QAnons, but there are plenty of other people who might be willing to stop panicking, if you modeled some guts. 

Another generation will learn what desperate women will do

This may have been the most prescient sign at Tuesday's demonstration. No bunch of Christian nationalists are going to stop a lot of women from aborting. Women have always done what women had to do -- whether that be raise children in poverty or violent circumstances or avoid having children when they couldn't or shouldn't raise them. Women get abortions.

Some will be in sanctuary states, so long as the majority can hold off the authoritarians. But some will be by whatever means women can imagine that might end an unwanted pregnancy. Yes, the famous coat hanger -- or throwing themselves down a flight of stairs -- or douching with heaven knows what.

I'm old enough to remember what being a young woman was like when abortion was illegal. We took up collections for pregnant classmates to send them off on buses to Tijuana, to risk their lives under the instruments of unknown practitioners. Some of our attitudes toward the Tijuana option were racist; but the dangers were real. You could be permanently injured by some greedy quack. Women will do what they think they have to do.

Modern abortion drugs will reduce some of the dangers, so long as the restrictionists fail to proscribe them. But women will abort, somehow.

Parents need help

Feminist writer Jessica Valenti highlights the state of anxious confusion that the welcomed start of the school year has brought to people with children too young to be vaccinated.

Parents I know are scrambling to find pediatricians who might give their not-yet-12 year-old the Covid vaccine off-label, now that it’s FDA approved. Others are simply lying to their local CVS about their kid’s age, desperate to see them protected before they walk into a building with hundreds of other students. I don’t blame them, not even a little. 

I’m doing my own ethical dance, trying to sort out what I can do to shield my once severely ill daughter from a virus that we still know so little about—one that is killing children and leaving others with baffling long-term neurological symptoms.

And this is not just about physical health. Parents have seen the mental and emotional toll the pandemic has already taken on our children—quarantine, of course, but also the learning behind plexiglass desk dividers, and the lack of everyday things like sleepovers or stress-free playdates.

The way kids interact with the world around them has completely changed. It’s a loss that’s impossible to measure.

Her sense of being out on her own coping with an affliction which is invisible to people without kids reminds me of the searing insight the filmmaker Vito Russo gave us about living with HIV in the days when that meant only stigma and approaching death.

Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches.

It's awful to realize that's where many parents find themselves this autumn.

The general obliviousness of childless adults to the struggles of many parents has distressing policy implications. One of the great successes of the early Biden administration has been the monthly $300 federal child tax credit which is drastically reducing poverty for millions. Yes, having children equates with poverty for too many households. We say we value kids -- finally we're helping as a society to pay for them.

But the legislative sausage making which helped enact the $300 payments made the payments a short term effort, extending only to the end of the year. Democrats hope to extend the program in their big budget bill. But this turns out to be a hard sell.

... the public is not yet in sync with Democratic leaders. In a mid-July Morning Consult poll, only 35 percent of voters said the expansion should “definitely” or “probably” be made permanent, with 52 percent saying the opposite. A YouGov poll from around the same time found only 30 percent of voters favored permanent expansion; 46 percent opposed it.

... The perplexing question is: why aren’t the checks themselves breaking through the partisan divide? Why isn’t the credit selling itself?

1. Not everyone gets the checks. About 39 million households are receiving the checks. But America has about 121 million households. ...

2. Even people who get checks believe that other people shouldn’t. ... [Reagan and the GOPers taught us well to sniff around for welfare bums, you know.]

3. The expanded child tax credit was slipped quietly into a crisis package—perhaps too quietly ...

4. Voters support crisis help more than permanent help. 

... Many Democrats saw opportunity in crisis: Seize the pandemic moment, send out near-universal and unconditional checks, and demonstrate that’s the most direct way to eradicate poverty.

But unpleasant though it is to consider, most voters may not aspire to slashing poverty as much as progressive Democrats do, and therefore may not want to spend huge amounts of money to that end.

I'm prepared to believe that a universal child tax credit is probably the simplest means to reduce poverty in our country. We're rich enough to make that choice. Let's hope Dems can push this through  during the legislative battles that will dominate the fall in Congress.

Brains and drive -- what else?

I read a book about Joe Biden. The least I could do was read the available book about Kamala Harris. So I did.

Author Dan Morain strikes me as bringing a conventional state capitol journalist's perspective to California's current favorite daughter: congratulatory, careful, and slightly cynical. After four decades of urban and state political reporting, his viewpoint is no surprise. Up close, Sacramento and its denizens most likely always looks powerful, compromised, and slightly sleazy.

Simon & Schuster bills Kamala's Way: An American Life as "a revelatory biography." It is not.

The later part of the publisher's blurb does seem more accurate; this is a detailed accounting of Vice President Harris' life, upbringing, some influences, career, some accomplishments:

"... the kind of people she brings into her orbit, the sorts of problems she’s good at solving, and the missteps, risks, and bold moves she’s made on her way to the top."

If the story of Harris's career is unfamiliar, this is a good introduction. As a dabbler in San Francisco and California politics for decades, I appreciate that Morain understands and explains why Northern California contributes so much beyond its population size to the state's politics. It's not just the available political cash; Los Angeles and Hollywood provide plenty of that too. It's also the intimacy of a setting in which committed activists clamor to be heard and give all politicians a rough ride. Those who prevail get tough. Harris learned survivor's moves -- navigating a still white-dominated political environment.

And for all her lofty perch, we still don't know quite what beyond brains and ambition drive Harris. Morain tries -- in his telling her most authentic policy passion, the aspect of her career that stands out, has been defense of children from racist limitations, neglect, and predators. That's not a full agenda, but it's certainly a good base from which to start.

Beyond Morain's scope is the marvelous symbolism which Harris' new position embodies. I'll leave it to Nsé Ufot of the New Georgia Project to explain:

Harris’ election proves what many of us have always known: We do not need to moderate or shrink from who we are as a party in order to win elections — a winning platform can be rooted in equity and justice. ... With Harris, America will have a vice president who knows what it means to be a Black woman in a country that too often takes our experiences and needs for granted (until it desperately needs us to save itself).

After reading Dan Morain, I looked back at two of my own takes on Harris: when she ended her presidential campaign and when Joe Biden chose her to be Veep. I think they hold up pretty well. 

This incredibly accomplished woman is still unfinished, still becoming. I look forward to seeing what she makes of the next four years and beyond.

Two views on policy for children

Paul Krugman asks: Why Does America Hate Its Children? In typical Krugman fashion, he documents what other countries do for kids and digs into causes of the U.S.-diference. He is not just throwing about invective.

The answer, I’d suggest, goes beyond the fact that children can’t vote, while seniors can and do. There has also been a poisonous interaction between racial antagonism and bad social analysis.

These days, political support for programs that aid children is surely hurt by the fact that less than half the population under 15 is non-Hispanic white. But even before immigration transformed America’s ethnic landscape, there was a widespread perception that programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children basically helped Those People — you know, the bums on welfare, the welfare queens driving Cadillacs. ...

... What this means is that we’ve established a basically vicious system under which children can’t get the help they need unless their parents find jobs that don’t exist. And a growing body of evidence says that this system is destructive as well as cruel.

The complete column is worth pondering.

Krugman's method is to think down through the data. Some people think up -- through their lives. I was reminded of this video. Here's the story of two dads whose family experiences point where we are going and something we need for a more child-affirming society.

That man with 45 embroidered on his cuff

For months we asked ourselves: what will he do in an emergency?

Now we know. Fortunately, so far, fumbling and bumbling have overwhelmed the instinctive bellicosity. The only disturbances that really get his attention are those that he takes as attacks on himself. Everything else seems inconsequential is his limited consciousness.

I was reminded that, in one of the 2016 debates, Hillary Clinton was asked to say something positive about him. All she could come up with was "his children."

Now his fragility is being showed up by what the media insist on calling children, but I'd call young leaders. Good for them; sad for him.

LGBT realities

It would be tempting to think that legalization of marriage equality and general easing of mainstream recoil from gay people and our lives would mean that our life chances have become more similar to those of everyone else. (We're about 4% of the U.S. population, by the way.)

Not so, according to this data from the Williams Institute at the UCLA Law School:

That last figure doesn't take into account that only between a quarter and a third of us are raising kids, a major impediment to economic success for many people.

What kind of society is this which makes raising the next generation a harm to the parents?