Where Have All The Children Gone?

Araceli Sanchez had a harrowing week.  Last Tuesday, she left her 3-year-old’s birthday party to grab more paper plates.  She was pulled over for making an illegal turn to avoid construction.  If it was me, I’d have gotten a ticket and been on my way.

But Araceli has a Spanish accent, and no driver’s license.  And she lives in Arizona.

Araceli is married to US Citizen Guillermo Garcia, an Infantryman in the Army.  Contrary to popular belief, for most undocumented, marriage to an American Citizen does not guarantee you status in the US.  Quotas, which vary by country, keep official, legal immigration artificially low – even before the recession when businesses were crying for more workers.  Even if married to a US citizen, if you come from a country whose quota is full for the year (which usually happens within the first few days of the new quota year), you must be deported to your home country and wait ‘your turn’ (which will likely never come).  Usually the penalty is a minimum of 10 years in your home country.  The law does not bend when children are involved.

The Obama administration has been deporting record numbers of immigrants.  In 2010, the President had achieved 10% more deportations that President Bush did in 2008, and 25% more than Bush in 2007.  In the first half of 2011, 46,000 parents of children were arrested, detained and deported.  5100 of those children ended up in the foster care program.

There was no mention of who cared for Araceli’s child during her 48-hour stay in prison, since her husband was stationed, and panicked, in Germany.  But Araceli was lucky; one concession of the Obama administration is to decline to deport spouses of military personnel.  According to the provision, Araceli should never have been handed over to Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) after showing her military spouse ID. 

In 2010, I met a woman who wasn’t so lucky.  She was arrested in Harvard, Illinois for allegedly crossing the white line, midday, in her vehicle with her child.  Even though a friend arrived with bail, she was held for days for detention proceedings.  No member of police enforcement followed up on the location or care of her child while she was imprisoned.  She was turned over to ICE, booked, and given a deportation hearing date.

Starting from the 1870’s, American colonists took Native American children to re-education camps to ‘kill the Indian, save the man’.  Although some Indian boarding schools still exist, the practice is widely condemned now.  From the period of 1869-1969, Aboriginal children in Australia, known as the ‘stolen generation’, were forcibly removed from their parents in order to ‘civilise’ them, and in hopes that the tribal people would ‘die out’.  A formal apology was made in 2008. 

In my mind, American deportation policy toward undocumented immigrants is no less cruel and immoral.  The children are sometimes left here willingly, out of their parents’ desperation for a better life for their child.  But a nation that purports to value ‘families’ cannot ignore the tragic challenges these children will face in a flawed and financially-starved foster system with no local source of support.

Thankfully, the US might have a legal opportunity to change their policy.  The Latino Policy Coalition has submitted a complaint with the United Nations regarding the human rights record of the United States.  The complaint asserts that the 5100 children placed in foster care are now missing, and must be accounted for and reunified with their parents.

For the health, not only of these families, but also the fabric of our society, and our integrity as a nation, I hope this complaint forces the Obama administration to reconsider its deportation policy.    

Generational Divide on God's Love

Today, voters in North Carolina will have the opportunity to vote on a constitutional ban on gay marriage in their state.  While these laws already exist in NC, proponents of Amendment 1 say that a constitutional amendment is necessary ‘to protect marriage’ because ‘it’s what God created to give children a mother and a father’.

Nevermind the biblical record that the first marriages in the bible had several ‘mothers’ with one father, or that several passages in the bible have been taken out of context or oversimplfied to justify the condemnation of gay and lesbian people.  (For a fun overview of the quandary of biblical verses and homosexuality, try the film Fish Out of Water.)

The truth is that this is a generational issue, and will end up hurting the church. 

Young people overwhelmingly support gay marriage.  According to Gallup, between 2010 and 2011, support for gay marriage grew from 53% to 70% among those aged 18-34.  Within 20 years, this will not be a political football anymore, but for now, it brings the conservatives and the senior citizens out to vote. 

In the meantime, we damage the Christian doctrine of radical love.  Too many young twenty- and thirty-something’s already regard the church as a Ground Zero for judgmentalism, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and bigotry.

On social media and dating sights, people are overwhelmingly “spiritual but not religious”.  These are people who have not seen the church as Christ’s body, demonstrating courageous, rule-breaking, radical love for all of God’s people, but rather have been told where they have done wrong, who they must cut out of their life, what they must believe, and how they should vote.

This is not the way of Jesus, regardless of how ‘saved’ a person claims to be.  Jesus constantly put himself on the side of victims of prejudice.  That is how he demonstrated God’s radical love for all people.  And if Jesus was anywhere last week, he was with the LGBTQ supporters of the United Methodist Church, as they prayed, wept, and witnessed for the universal love promised by God – even as it’s denied by the church.

Proponents of North Carolina’s Amendment 1 claim, in their ad, that “everyone, gay or straight, is free to live as they choose”, except that passage would interfere with health care coverage and custody battles for children of gay couples, and domestic abuse protections would be weakened for all unmarried couples, gay or straight, in domestic partnership or civil unions. 

We, as flawed humans, do so much harm with these notions of knowing what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘Godly’ and ‘incompatible with Christian teachings’.  We cause permanent damage to young people as we reject their emerging self – as parents, community, and church members.  We foster environments where bullies thrive and young people take their own life.  And we condone the very same prejudices Jesus stood against by legalizing exclusion, shame and second-class citizen status.

As Tommy Tomlinson wrote in his Charlotte Observer editorial, No One Is Hurt By Gay Marriage, "when our children and grandchildren look back on it all, this whole debate will make us look silly and small. I suspect that, in God’s eyes, we already do."

I believe God is praying, weeping and waiting for the day we realize it’s not our place to judge, to condemn, or to exclude. 

  

Male Rage is In Season

There seems to be an epidemic of male rage in my neighborhood lately.  The shouting matches below my floor have spread to the apartment next door, and raised male voices can be heard on my dog-walk route, loaded with cuss words aimed at the women in these men’s lives.

And yet, Congress is divided about renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.  Due to objections over expanding protection to LGBT folk, Native American women and immigrants (in the form of more visas), “republicans complained the changes to the law were designed to set them up and distract from issues such as the economy that Democrats would rather not discuss.”

The thing is, this has everything to do with the economy.   The economic plunge of 2008 fell more on the male gender than the female gender. The very first outcome of the housing crash was that houses stopped being built: contractors, carpenters, electricians, roofers, plumbers, landscapers – all out of work indefinitely.  From there it spread to corporate America, with layoffs disproportionately putting men out of work. According to the Council on Contemporary Families, men and women feel the crisis in distinctive ways:

“Men have born the brunt of the recession so far, accounting for more than three-quarters of job losses. And men are more likely than women to experience job or income loss as a fundamental threat to their identity. But the wives of laid-off men also suffer: Unemployed men are more likely to exhibit hostility towards their partners than unemployed women. Not surprisingly, female partners of unemployed men have higher level of depressive and anxious symptoms than do male partners of unemployed women.

Imagine: formerly independent bread winners that were head of households now subject to rely on government ‘hand-outs’ and their wives for survival.  Couple that with the depression, shame, and sense of powerlessness and lack of agency that often accompany looking for jobs when jobs are scarce, and rising tempers seems a likely result.

People of faith who work for peace understand the connection between violence and poverty, agency, and justice.  First coined by Bishop Dom Helder Camara in 1971, the Spiral of Violence begins with “fundamental experiences of injustice and violation” like “lack of social opportunity, educational discrimination, policy harassment, unemployment, military occupation, and so on”[1].  In these situations, an inherent byproduct is the idea that it’s “beyond our capacity to change”.

And so, as with previous economic recessions, a new survey shows that domestic violence is up nationwide.  “Peg Coleman [Utah Domestic Violence Council] says unemployment increases the risk for violence three fold. ‘If their [the abuser’s] strategies are less than respectful to begin with, they are going to seek more control in areas where they feel that they have it, which can lead to abuse.’” 

And yet, the conservative march towards cutting benefits and government spending continues, aimed at state funded programs like home health care and nursing homes – which will have a disproportionate impact on women’s careers.  Cutting is not the answer:   we need more funding to help intervene in impoverished families and domestic abuse situations – before it’s too late. 

---

[1] Enns, Elaine & Myers, Ched.  Ambassadors of Reconciliation, Vol II: Divese Christian Practices of Restorative Justice and Peacemaking.  Maryknoll, NY, 2009.  6.

Bully Nation

Friday was the International STAND UP to Bullying Day. In the wake of dozens of youth suicides, “more than 2600 schools, workplaces and organizations representing more than a million people” took a pledge against bullying. In fact, in the saddest but very real turn of events, the latest suicide tragedy occurred while the community was viewing the anti-bullying film and hearing from the victim’s boyfriend.  

But I question how can we make a dent in the bullying epidemic in schools when we, at a national level, are bullies.

Bullying is the natural outgrowth of a climate where there is a moral ‘black and white’, a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ lifestyle, an acceptable and unacceptable way to exist. It occurs when judgment such as that is sanctioned by parents, national leaders, and those purported to speak for God.  When a child hears from elders that an individual’s way of life is wrong, and therefore unworthy of human dignity, compassion, or God’s love, that child feels free to bully.

We bullied our way into Iraq by talking about WMD – but it was only possible because we had been labeling Muslims as ‘jihadists’ and therefore a threat worthy of destruction.  We bully immigrants regularly by categorizing them as ‘illegal’, as if people, rather than actions, can be ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ and so destroying families is valid.  Police (some police) bully people of color in neighborhoods of color every day with profiling and harassing, leading others to think it’s ok to copy that behavior.  And almost every GOP candidate for President has bullied homosexuals from a national pulpit, declaring their love and families unworthy.

Unfortunately this is more and more common in religion, and bolstered by our degrading political atmosphere.  Chris Hedges, in his book American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America, makes a strong case that people find Christian fundamentalism appealing in an increasingly changing, uncertain, unstable world as a refuge for ‘inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty’.  He says, “they are utopians who have found rigid, clearly defined moral edicts, rights and wrongs, to guide them in life and in politics” through this type of religion.  This type of religion leads to bullying. Not every religion sanctions Fred Phelps and his ilk, but too many faith leaders preach from the pulpit who will ‘receive the kingdom of heaven’ and who won’t.  Even the Vatican recently chastised it’s own devout for not focusing more on bullying the sinners. 

My God loves all the little children.  The Jesus I follow did not deny his grace to anyone of any lifestyle, but stood up against the bullying of his time – the purity laws.  He ate with prostitutes, sinners, tax collectors.  He did not withhold his healing powers to people based on their country of origin. He was banned from towns because he allowed contact with the ‘unclean’.  He cast his lot with the marginalized. 

Children’s behavior manifests the basest of human society.  If we are to stem the tide of bullying in schools, it will require that parents directly intervene in every message their child receives on who is worthy or unworthy.  Parents will have to remind them that every child is loved and worthy in God’s eyes, and faith leaders need reminding that what Jesus did do was admonish people not to judge.