Before I get to anything serious, let me just tell you briefly about my love of the Great Lakes.

A little more than a decade ago we took our family on vacation to Lake Michigan for the first time. It was BEAUTIFUL. The water was freezing even in August, but to an Ohio girl born and bred who’d really only ever seen Lake Erie (which is also pretty, I guess? but the least impressive of the Great Lakes, in my humble opinion), Lake Michigan was magic ✨

That was before I even saw Lake Superior.

Sometime in my travels, I became low-key obsessed with shipwrecks. I actually have a poster showing all the shipwrecks in Lake Superior that still hangs in our house now- there are less than 400 documented/discovered, but closer to 600 ships are suspected to have wrecked in that one Great Lake alone. I made my family listen to a podcast about it. I also dragged my family to the Great Lakes Museum in Toledo, Ohio about five years ago, and I loved every minute of that museum. Did you know there are some 100 fighter planes from WWII sunk in the depths of Lake Michigan?! The U.S. Navy kept two aircraft carriers on the lake and used it as a training grounds for pilots. The first President Bush trained there in his days in the Navy.

I won’t bore you with other random facts, but suffice it to say I am in AWE of these lakes. I have this meme saved in my phone from the first time I saw it, because it’s hilarious but also sobering:

Lake Ontario (America 🙄) is fine. I wasn’t nearly as impressed as I was with the lakes in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan when we visited it, but all the same, all of the Great Lakes are pretty amazing, and I find myself telling people here in the West that the ability to so easily visit them is one of the things I miss most about living in the Midwest.

Anyway, onto one of the things, in a long list, that Lake America is a distraction from…

Elections

Elections law is complex, and I won’t pretend to be an expert here. But the competing headlines about this week’s Supreme Court ruling and lower court rulings on challenges to President Trump’s March 31st Executive Order had me curious, and I dug in so you don’t have to.

When the order was issued, I remember thinking it was interesting. Executive orders do not have the same force of law as laws passed by Congress, although they are certainly enforceable. Unlike laws passed by the legislative branch, executive orders can be overturned by a sitting president - so if President Trump issues one today, it can be essentially repealed by the next president. That happens regularly when a new president takes office. Congress can also take action to mitigate executive orders, like voting to revoke funding for a certain program, or creating laws around the executive order that make it more clear or more difficult to enforce.

The U.S. Constitution itself provides that states are delegated the authority to carry out elections, but Congress is able to dictate regulations to the states, which they have done with passage of the National Voter Registration Act in 1993 or the Help America Vote Act that was passed after the 2000 presidential election.

Whether a president, the Executive, can regulate elections is kind of a different question, and that’s the one that the courts are now trying to answer.

The League of Women Voters was first to challenge the executive order in April, and in August, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction for the entire executive order that is still in effect - meaning, while there are still arguments to be made and things could change, the entire executive order is on hold and cannot be enforced.

Meanwhile, a separate lawsuit brought by twenty-three states and the District of Columbia claimed injury from the rules implemented in particular by the U.S. Postal Service regarding regulation of mailed ballots. That lawsuit is the one that reached the Supreme Court earlier this week. The Supreme Court ruled not on the merits of the case but on procedure that the plaintiffs brought their case too soon, because the Postal Service rules they claimed to be injured by had not yet been published. (SCOTUSblog has a great explainer here - thank you, SCOTUSblog).

Affirming this was the lower court judge’s subsequent lifting of the injunction in agreement with the Supreme Court, agreeing that the timing didn’t line up, which still allows the plaintiffs to re-file their challenge after the Postal Service issues their rules.

The headlines made it all sound panicky, but in reality the Supreme Court just said that the procedural timing didn’t add up. Now, here’s everything that happened next:

While that was happening, the Postal Service issued their rules 🙄

The plaintiffs filed their challenge again, and the rules have been blocked by the same judge, again.

Remember that the other injunction though, issued in the case brought by the League of Women Voters, still stands.

On top of that, the rules issued by the Postal Service this week acknowledged that none of its rules could go into effect until that injunction was lifted.

(still following? I’m suddenly remembering how much I hate trying to follow election law)

If the Administration claimed any of this as a victory at any point in this week, it is of the most hollow kind.

If you’re still reading, here’s what I think you need to know:

While President Trump is out there getting headlines for the chaos he seems to be trying to sow for November’s midterm elections, I genuinely believe that’s all his executive orders on elections will come to this calendar year - headlines.

The rules from his own Postal Service more or less acknowledge it.

For as much as the president seems to like to act like he is above the law, sometimes the inertia of government works in everyone’s favor (though that cuts both ways, that inertia can stand in the way of positive change, too).

Elections administration is incredibly important, and I don’t know of any state official charged with that duty that does not take it seriously. They have been preparing for months already, and the idea that even the most innocuous pieces of this USPS rule issued this week - for example, the uniform appearance of ballot envelopes for federal elections that is proposed - could be implemented in such a short time is untenable.

And all of that is the way it should be, frankly. Despite our continued focus on national politics, national political figures, and federal elections, local elections matter so much more, and it matters that elections are locally administered. While the president is in D.C. watching his IndyCar race from his front porch and flinging executive orders out like spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, states and counties have been preparing for November’s elections by training poll workers, certifying primary results for the general election, proofreading ballots and preparing them to be printed and/or mailed. Making major changes to elections across fifty different state systems is not something that can be done weeks beforehand, and it probably shouldn’t be.

No matter how this all plays out in court this Fall, it’s simply too late for any of this to apply to elections taking place on November 3rd, 2026. And if you are worried about it, find a way to drop off your ballot in-person or vote in-person, if that is an option in your state.

All of that said, if the Supreme Court takes action that contradicts my prediction before November 3rd, I will be deeply alarmed. I guess there’s no way to fully rule that out, and I’ll just have to look like a fool if they do. Also worth saying is this: as much it sounds like I’m mocking the administration, I’ve said it before - they are not fools. President Trump has very intelligent people working for him. Even if this isn’t successful for this midterm election, it will have implications for 2028.

In the meantime, go enjoy those Great Lakes (even Lake America, I guess) if you’re close enough to visit and rest assured that you will be able to vote and your vote will be counted this November.

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I’m tempted to close out that paragraph with the closing line from Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day. Remember that book? I read it to my kids probably hundreds of times and have parts of it memorized even now. Poor Alex has a terrible day and even when he threatens to move to Australia, his family doesn’t acknowledge his threat or even seem to hear him. The last lines are something about his toothpaste getting on his pajamas, his nightlight not working, and the cat choosing to sleep in his brother’s bed instead of his, which is when he says: “it has been a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day.”

To which his mom replies, “some days are like that. Even in Australia.”

I’m not trying to bail on my family and move to Australia, but I’ll take the wisdom of that mom: sometimes life is just like that.

There’s an urban legend that author Ernest Hemingway was once challenged in a $10 bet among friends to write the shortest story. What he came up with was this:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Oof.

The words themselves don’t capture the story; it’s what’s unsaid that makes it a story.

As I’ve wrestled with hard things, I keep thinking of that story.

Wildfires and floods have caused destruction across the country this summer. We’re at war even though I think we are supposedly not at war (I genuinely don’t know). The headlines are short, and I keep remembering, they don’t capture the full story. Behind every story of destructive natural disasters are real people who have lost every earthly possession; behind every story of a bombing are real people lost to their loved ones. Our ability to comprehend it is limited, and I allow myself to read the headlines and move on, because I can’t hold all of that grief.

But that works in reverse, too.

I took a retreat this summer with a friend to a beautiful resort in Colorado. Two days in a row, it stormed in the evening, leaving stunningly beautiful rainbows behind for us to look at in awe.

I went to the Grand Canyon with my family and stared out a cliff walls that reflected the brilliant sun, the red earth below, and the blue sky above all at the same time. It was incredible.

I took photos of all of those things, but they pale in comparison to what I saw with my own eyes, standing amid those sights. The photos are pretty, sure, but they’re flat. They’re missing some essential quality that would allow me to experience that same awe that I did standing in front of it.

As this summer comes to a close, it feels important to me to acknowledge that holding the tension of what’s hard and heartbreaking with the beauty and small joys that are right in front of me is just a very human experience.

All of it is real, but I can’t quite hold onto it. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, it’s hevel - a vapor.

There is both joy and heartbreak now, but neither is forever.

This is what it is to be human, and to long for the kingdom we were made for - one that is real and everlasting and in which there will be no tears and no more pain, where everything will be made new.

I’ll end this with Frederick Buechner quote that I’ve shared before, which he described as his own summing up of God’s grace:

“Here is the world! Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid. I am with you.”

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It isn’t an isolated viewpoint. I didn’t link to the post because I’m not trying to play the rage game and have no interest in adding clicks to it, but sadly, there are 100 more posts just like it if you go to Google and search. There is certainly validity in criticism of our country, but to make the case that democracy isn’t worth saving is short-sighted and frankly ignorant of all of world history. Comparing our country to a utopia that doesn’t exist and failing to call us to anything better, I’ve found most think-pieces and arguments in that vain to be BURN IT ALL DOWN arguments conveniently written to the length of a social media post and of course very easily shareable.

I’m not saying there aren’t real issues facing our country today. You can scroll back through two years’ worth of Substack posts that I’ve written to know I’m willing to acknowledge that we do. But my mood going into our 250th on July 4th is way different than that internet rage post.

I bought this hat back in 2017. I thought it was cute. I got it at Old Navy. When I started getting compliments on it from strangers at the grocery store and at the pool, I felt great about it- they love America, too! I thought (seriously).

After months of wearing it, my husband was with me when someone complimented me on it and he said, “You know it’s because they think it’s a MAGA hat, right?”

I did not.

It genuinely did not occur to me even then, in 2017, that it looked like a MAGA hat.

I said, “Well now I know.”

And despite having not ever once voted for President Trump, I have continued to wear it. Why?! My friends and family will ask me, sometimes exasperated and worse, I suspect, embarrassed. And my answer is really simple:

Because I love America.

No campaign, party, ideology or politician owns the American flag nor a “true” love of country. I can love America and disagree deeply with things our government is doing or has done, and I will not give anyone the satisfaction of believing they can own the flag and my conscience.

When I give that as an answer for why I couldn’t just wear something else, it doesn’t go over well. Principles are fine and all, but I understand that people don’t really love walking around with me while it feels like I’m making an entirely different political statement. Maybe I need to pair it with a shirt with this Alexis de Tocqueville quote: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

I’m not quite that nerdy, but I fully believe that sentiment. It takes humility and grace and the willingness to listen to others to repair faults, and even if we seem in short supply of those things, I believe we have that in us even if our leaders don’t.

Listen: Wearing my hat feels like it’s own small form of resistance, albeit one that isn’t entirely obvious to others. I love America, and I don’t care who knows it.

(And, I look good in red.)

It feels like it’s unfashionable to love America right now as an American, or to show any form of patriotism at all. It’s become associated with a particular political side to say that you do, and I hate the totally false illusion of division it creates. It implies that to say we love our country means that we love an aggressive, flags-attached-to-our-truck-beds, never-apologizing or acknowledging wrongdoing, throwing-our-power-around-with-pride kind of patriotism, and anything less isn’t patriotism at all.

We know that isn’t true though. And we don’t have to accept it as truth.

That post I referenced at the beginning taps into a deep, underlying cynicism about our future as a country. Again, it’s not like criticism is unfounded. We have problems - but then, we always have. It’s not as if we have ever lived in some sort of American utopia, and anyone who tells you otherwise is making a lazy pitch to get your vote.

The opposite extreme though is that toxic mix of cynicism, skepticism and innate disbelief of any possible good intentions of others that shows up in our conversations - and in the conversations we may avoid (don’t talk to the woman in the American flag hat, for example). It shows up in the complaints we make to our pastors (we should be talking more about this issue, I might tell them, because I believe of course that other people need to hear it).

We can choose if or how we want to allow all of those negative beliefs about others to form us, though. Make no mistake, if we are not fighting that very human tendency to “other” everyone not like ourselves - that is to assign them to a different, and probably somehow lesser category than ourselves - then that lack of discipline to recognize the humanity of others will be formed in us. When we listen to that vocal minority that is constantly feeding us cynical and dehumanizing views and allow it to form us, allow their language and their perspective and their rage to influence us, then we allow it to form not only ourselves but our culture in to an unforgiving one. When I see the injustices committed by our current government, my response cannot be one of exacting revenge, or I will have allowed it to form me into something just like it. We have to train ourselves to respond with grace.

Former President Obama1 spoke in 2024 at his foundation’s “Democracy Forum.” The topic of his speech was a defense of pluralism, and it is inspiring despite a maybe dry subject. Like his 2008 campaign message, “Hope and Change,” his worldview is aspirational and inspiring, and it was nice to hear that he hasn’t lost that message or viewpoint in the years since. He isn’t naive, he just deeply understands the damage that cynicism and the despair it leads to can do to a human. I love that he is still out there combatting it even now, when he could be doing any number of other things with his time.

His speech was specifically about the importance of pluralism to save our democracy, which he defines as “find[ing] a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different from us.” Here’s a small excerpt:

It is not about abandoning your convictions and folding when things get tough. It is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances, and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking. Now, there are risks involved in engaging with groups you disagree with, particularly if there’s a power imbalance involved. There is a risk when you begin to negotiate compromise that you’ll give away too much, that you’ll whittle away your issues to the point where it’s hard to claim that you’re making progress. And building bridges may require you to deal with people who not only disagree with you, but do not respect you.

When I was president, there were times, many times, where I was negotiating with people who made it pretty clear they didn’t think I should be president, legally, morally. But as long as we’re clear about our core principles, as long as we know what our North Star is, we have to be open to other people’s experiences and believe that, by listening to these people and building relationships and understanding what their fears are, we might actually bring some of them, not all of them, but some of them along with us. And this isn’t just the job of leaders, this is an important point. Advocates and rank and file, in any group, have to be down for compromise as well.

Let me highlight a few things for you: first, he says he negotiated with people who didn’t think he should “legally or morally” even be the president. Does that hurt something in your gut the way it does mine? How painful that must have been for him to know people thought so poorly of him as to believe that, and yet he not only gave them the time of day but negotiated with them. He kind of sails right past that part in his speech, but I think it’s worth pausing to acknowledge how difficult that must have been for him.

He goes on to stress the importance of being “open to the experiences” of those same people. What a powerful testament to the power of assuming the best intent of others. If President Obama can do that for people who were so willing to believe the very worst of him, surely we can make better assumptions of others, too.

Secondly, his closing point is that this is not just the work of leaders or elected officials - it is the work of every American.

Someone who doesn’t believe in the promise of America wouldn’t give a speech like that. Especially when it’s so much easier to sell cynicism.

So listen. You may see me out and about this week celebrating America’s 250th birthday, and I may be unapologetically wearing my America hat. Frankly, people can assume anything they want about me or read way further into my fashion choice than I think is necessary, but I want to encourage you to remember that instead of making our own story or assumptions about others, we have the power to choose not to do that and to assume the best. Don’t overthink it. Share a bomb pop or a beer with a stranger at the fireworks and just enjoy the moment. We can choose to assume that others we encounter at the parade and at gatherings wearing their red, white and blue, regardless of their politics, are out there with us because they love America, too.

And that’s all worth celebrating together.

Happy Independence Day, and happy 250th! I hope you do something to celebrate whatever it is you love about America.

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As I worried they might, the Court ruled in favor of the Trump Administration. However, as I’ve taken time to understand it a little more, I think it’s worth clarifying what they did - despite the obvious cruelty of the implications of their decision, it isn’t like the Court decided to send millions of immigrants residing safely in the U.S. back to war-torn and non-functioning countries - former DHS Director Kristi Noem did. The question posed to the Court was whether the judiciary had the authority to review the Department of Homeland Security’s determination in reviewing the TPS status of immigrants from certain countries.

And sadly, their determination is that the law was written in such a way that they do not have that authority. The Court is not there to make laws; they exist to interpret them, and when Congress initially passed legislation creating the TPS program, they did not include language allowing courts to review what the Executive Branch decided about TPS.

Before we’re too hard on Congress, even, I think we should consider that in 1990 (when TPS was passed), maybe Congress should have considered that a president may hold such prejudice and indifference toward the suffering of immigrants/fellow human beings that he/she might choose to end the program even while beneficiaries’ countries were in chaos, but they didn’t. And who would’ve?? (I can imagine James Madison doing exactly that in his time, but this was two centuries later and we had an awful lot of distance from despotic monarchies). George H.W. Bush was president at the time, the Soviet Union had just fallen, and we were still making movies featuring bad guys from West Germany. I just don’t think it was even on anyone’s radar that the United States itself would have an executive who rule/enforce policy with cruelty.

Yet, here we are. My heart hurts deeply for those who will be impacted, and I personally fully expect that the president will stick to his plan to end legal status for these people who are simply living and trying to find a better life amongst us. I mourn all of that, and yet some of the nasty things being said about the justices - Amy Coney Barrett, adoptive mom of two children from Haiti in particular - is so disgusting that it’s almost equally discouraging to me. I deeply desire to see my government treat people with dignity, but to have integrity in that belief, it also deeply matters how I treat people and talk about people. And only one of those is in my control.

Here’s the question I keep coming back to: Can the court find that although a law does not violate anyone’s Constitutional Rights, it is still be unjust?

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American Magazine thinks so. In an editorial they published, they say, “the results of these decisions, whether or not they are legal and constitutional, are profoundly immoral and unjust.” I am inclined to agree.

If you want to feel some hope about authorities not all be awful and xenophobic, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has been speaking out on behalf of the large Haitian population in Ohio - his comments are worth listening to.

SCOTUSblog podcast Advisory Opinions also breaks down the decision in more detail and gives kudos to Justice Kagan for writing verbatim in her dissent all of the racist comments that President Trump has made about the plaintiffs in this case (namely Haitians living in the U.S.) that Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, dismissed as irrelevant. I thought their commentary was worth listening to as well.

There’s no good news to share about any of this, but I think it is worth being thoughtful in how we talk about it, rather than just throwing more fuel on the fire or saying mean-spirited things about Supreme Court justices - which ultimately makes us as bad as those we criticize.

If I may, some better news that I thought was worth sharing:

• The Economist podcast (which normally lives behind a paywall, but I feel hopeful that this link is free - let me know if it works!)’s U.S. Correspondent John Prideaux undertook a roadtrip tracing the steps of Alexis deTocqueville, author of Democracy in America. I mentioned the book last week, comparing some of the World Cup European tourists to Tocqueville (which I stand by), so I was delighted to discover this podcast series a few days later. Prideaux sets out to see how Tocqueville’s observations of American exceptionalism hold up after two centuries, and while it isn’t all a glowing review of the United States, it still is really delightful to listen to. A great series going into the weekend of America’s 250th! You can listen here.

• As churches contemplate how to mark America’s 250th this Sunday, if at all, I thought Christianity Today Editor-at-Large Russell Moore’s column was encouraging. No, we shouldn’t be singing patriotic songs - but it doesn’t mean we can’t reflect with gratitude on our circumstances being citizens of the United States. Here’s a little excerpt:

  “Recognize the 250th anniversary. Thank God for every blessing and gift that has come with America, without pretending our country is faultless. We seek to be “a more perfect union,” our founders wrote, not a perfect one. When a loved one has a birthday, what do we do? Recite Uncle Ronnie’s past addiction to horse tranquilizers or the time his car was repossessed for nonpayment? No. We thank God for another year of Uncle Ronnie’s life and think about all the ways, through him, God has blessed and shaped us. That’s not idolatry; it’s just gratitude.”

  And here’s the link.

• Speaking of embarrassing relatives, this made me laugh, despite my indifference about the Reflecting Pool debacle:

  

  Lastly, I genuinely can’t get enough of the World Cup coverage, and I can’t help but root for all of these amazing teams playing across the country! I’ve already shared some of that content here, but this piece on everyone’s newfound love for Ranch dressing made me actually laugh out loud - especially the guy who has lived here long enough to be ashamed that he chugged an entire bottle with his friends before sending them back to South America 🤣

  ---

  I know these are hard and weird times, and here we are coming up on this big holiday. I think it’s okay to hold joy and sorrow together, and even to enjoy yourself despite the things that feel heavy. So I know this was a weird mix, but really, I’m just trying to hold all of this at the same time, too.

Anecdotally, I’m aware that a lot of my left-leaning friends fully believe that the Supreme Court as it currently stands is just a rubber stamp for everything President Trump does. I’m equally aware of the rebellion on the right that has been antagonizing justices for being “disloyal” to the president for (much less frequently) ruling against his policies. The president himself has had all manner of unkind things to say about all of the justices, but especially about his appointees who have failed to please him with their every move (thank God for Amy Coney Barrett - there, I said it).

In truth, a lot of what the Supreme Court is deciding is the normal, boring stuff of government - which is great. Boring doesn’t equal unimportant, it actually signals government doing the work it’s supposed to do. Regardless, in the weeks when decisions are announced, the outrage machine goes into overdrive over some cases that just really don’t justify the level of anger or panic they aim to create. Kind of in the same way that I don’t think the coverage of the Reflecting Pool is quite as important as having fought a war for possibly no gain, I think it’s worth reserving our investment of worry into certain causes over others (don’t worry, I have faith the Reflecting Pool will be fixed, even if it just has to wait for the next POTUS).

Here’s one potential example: in March the court heard arguments in the case Watson vs. the Republican National Committee, in which the RNC is challenging Mississippi election law that allows ballots to be counted when they have been received up to five days after Election Day. The case got little press coverage during oral arguments, and frankly I agree with Dispatch Advisory Opinion podcasters and attorneys Sarah Isgur and David French that it really doesn’t matter - states administer this differently already, and if the deadlines need changed, everyone will adjust without a whole lot of trouble.

I want to predict anyway just for the fun of it that if the case is decided in favor of the RNC there will undoubtedly be liberal voting rights groups decrying the decision. But I also think it’s worth noting that even as I type this from my very liberal state of residence, Colorado, we are in the midst of a primary election for which my ballot has to be returned by 7 p.m. on Election Day (June 30th) in order to be counted - and there’s no grace for when it’s postmarked. No one is being disenfranchised in the state of Colorado because of this, and no one will be in other states if they have to change their deadlines, either. People are actually very able to adapt and meet deadlines when they the rules.

What opinions to pay attention to

There probably won’t be a lot of need to create extra drama in this next two weeks over Supreme Court decisions though, because there are big cases for which rulings will be issued that might be really controversial, have the potential to impact thousands of immigrants, and are really important to President Trump as some of his priority initiatives. The birthright citizenship case and temporary protected status for certain immigrants are the ones I am personally most concerned about. Others, including ruling on the president’s authority to remove a governor of the Federal Reserve and heads of independent agencies, are really important, but are related to limiting the president’s power more than our country’s capacity for what feels like cruelty. All of these cases matter significantly, but feeling complicit in the cruelty of allowing our government to send back refugees brought here to protect them from war and violence weighs far more heavily on my conscience.

Unlike deciding whether or not my mailed-in ballot needs to be stamped by a certain date, the impact of a decision allowing our government to end Temporary Protected Status could allow for the deportation of nearly one million people back to countries like Afghanistan, Haiti, and South Sudan. Two of the three don’t even have functioning governments, and the third has a government that has so oppressed women that they have essentially been “erased from public life.”

Once a nation has made the list of countries from which immigrants have temporary protected status, the Department of Homeland Security has the right to reevaluate that status once every nine months, annually, or every 18 months. There is no legitimate case to be made for DHS to look at the governments of those three countries and determine it was “safe” for anyone to return in 2026. Whatever the stated reasoning, it is nothing short of cruelty.

Back in February of this year, many Ohioans were preparing to defend the large population of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, much as protestors in Minnesota spent the winter doing when ICE had concentrated immigration enforcement efforts there. It never quite came to a head, because the day before the Trump Administration’s order to rescind the Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, federal courts intervened.

When the Supreme Court issues its ruling on TPS (which is expected in the coming days), it’s hard to know what will happen, but I cannot imagine it ending well if the court rules in favor of the Administration.

You can learn more about the case before the court here and here. You can read why the president’s open criticism of the court is troubling (and most troublingly how the court is being attacked by both liberals and conservatives) here.

I don’t know if people are offended by my calling some of the Supreme Court’s work “boring,” but what I really am trying to highlight in writing any of this is that many rulings are going to be issued over the coming two weeks. Again, I fully expect the outrage machine to be hard at work, but not all of it is deserving of your attention or emotional investment. Some of it is, and I really am bracing myself to feel deeply disappointed. Even if the Supreme Court finds in favor of the Trump Administration, I don’t necessarily believe that they are endorsing the cruelty of it - their task is interpreting the law, and the court has done so without regard to obvious discrimination and prejudice before. Plessy vs. Ferguson allowing legal racial segregation and Korematsu vs. United States providing the legal basis for internment of Japanese Americans in WWII are two good examples. I’m not arguing that the merits are the same, only the fact that the court sided with what amounted to cruelty and dehumanizing policy - and they could do so again, as much as I’d like to hope they don’t. I also hope that like in those two circumstances, when we know better, we’ll do better, and policy will be fixed through Congress or constitutional amendments.

All of that was what motivated to re-send an old post earlier about praying for our leaders. I don’t believe it’s an easy job for any of them, but the costs of their actions are real. Let’s pray for them all 🙏🏽

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The murders of a Minnesota state legislator and her spouse this past weekend were shocking and sobering and awful. I lack the words to fully express my horror, but no elected official deserves to die, no matter how much one may disagree with them. I’m sure more will come out about the shooter showing he has mental illness or became radicalized, but this kind of violence, while shocking, is increasingly common.

Members of Congress have resigned because of harassment like SWATTING. Nancy Pelosi’s husband had his skull fractured by an attacker looking for the former speaker. Representative Steve Skalise was shot playing softball with other House members, and January 6th is never far from my mind when considering present-day political violence.

Several social media connections of mine shared heartfelt posts about their time serving in the state legislature either as staff or elected officials that reflected my own feelings. There are a million things to be said about these murders, including the importance of defending our elected officials.

Yesterday, I saw something that reminded me of the ways in which God has humbled me in how I think about those with whom I disagree that I thought was worth sharing.

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Politicians are humans, too

Over the weekend, there was a middle-of-the-night mass shooting in downtown Columbus, Ohio. In a story detailing the incident, the mayor was quoted: “Violence in our city – particularly involving and impacting young people — must stop. Columbus Police are doing their part by actively patrolling our neighborhoods and downtown… I need parents to do their part – know who your kids are hanging out with, set a curfew in your home, check your kids’ rooms for weapons and check their social media for unsafe activities.”

I lived in Columbus for most of my life. Raised in the suburbs, after I married and had a family, we chose to stay in the city because we loved it. We loved our proximity to downtown, the fact that we could walk or bike to restaurants and stores, and that our kids could walk to school.

Living in the city still had its drawbacks though. Think what you will of Columbus (I realize people from other states still think Ohio is only cornfields), but it’s a large and growing city. There’s more traffic than you’d ever expect, there are real problems like unaffordable housing, the schools, transportation, etc. - common problems in growing American cities. I found myself criticizing and/or complaining about the mayor and the city council often on social media and to my friends. I just felt so annoyed that they couldn’t figure out how to take care of things like clearing snow from the streets in winter.

I don’t remember when exactly this happened, but I remember texting a friend of mine and saying, “I’m always so annoyed with the mayor, but I was praying the other day and I felt like God told me to look for something he was doing that I could support.” Being a pastor, she responded, “that sounds like something God might do.”

So I paid attention, and when I felt frustrated, I prayed for the leaders of my city. I tried to refrain from posting criticism online and from venting my anger and frustration to friends. I managed to break my habits and instead consider that I didn’t know how I would do it differently if I were in their position, nor should I assume that I could do better - why would I assume that I could? Arrogance? I chose instead to assume they were doing their best.

I also lost interest in the pursuit of finding a thing to support and kind of forgot about it, to be honest.

Fast forward a year. Like most major cities immediately post-Covid, Columbus experienced a serious uptick in crime. The homicide rate in 2021 was a record high (which thankfully has since dropped) and the rate of cars stolen and then wrecked by unlicensed, underage kids rose as well, with increasingly fatal consequences.

The mayor gave a press conference one day in 2022 following such an incident in which someone had died as a result. I couldn’t quote what he said, but it was something to the effect of feeling like a grieved parent over what these kids were doing. “Parents need to know where their kids are and ask questions about what they are doing,” I remember he admonished the public. It didn’t feel to me like a lecture - for the first time I considered that as a person, he cared that young people were making such huge mistakes with permanent, fatal consequences, and he knew that it didn’t have to be that way.

And that was the moment I realized God had done something in me.

I didn’t feel anger. I felt compassion. For a politician I didn’t like.

I only wanted to assume he was doing his best - not out of ignorance, not out of idealism - because I knew he was human, just like me. But with a lot more pressure and responsibility on his shoulders.

Here’s my point: we can wring our hands all day about what a mess our country is in. We can blame the president, we can blame Congress, we can choose to blame “the other party.” We may even be right in some of those cases.

But every one of those positions are held by people. Humans, just like you and me, doing their best - but with a lot more responsibility on their shoulders.

Who am I to think I know better, or that I know I would do better?

I don’t know, and I can’t know that. Because I am not them.

If I am going to make assumptions then, I’m going to assume they are doing their best - that they are men and women who have done the work to get elected and serve their country, making the best decisions they can.

Could I name some lawmakers who feel like notable exceptions to that right now? Sure.

But I’m not gonna.

Because what I have learned is that God cares as much about my humility and how I live my life surrendered to God as he does about theirs.

Pray for our leaders

I Timothy 2:1-3 (the Message translation) says this:

The first thing I want you to do is pray. Pray every way you know how, for everyone you know. Pray especially for rulers and their governments to rule well so we can be quietly about our business of living simply, in humble contemplation. This is the way our Savior God wants us to live.

It’s so hard. It is so hard. It is SO hard - but what I am telling you that I have learned is that we have to choose, as believers, to trust that God is taking care of things that we cannot see and may never know anything about. It feels good to protest; it feels good to march and to voice dissent and to make our opinions known. It feels better, at least to me, to know that I’m doing all I can to change things I don’t like.

But God is not limited by our action or inaction. God works in all things - and that includes in us.

Sometimes we have to focus on allowing Him to work in us and trust that He is working in others, too. Even when they are in a position of authority, and even when we disagree with them.

Sometimes we need to ask God to change us when we don’t understand what is happening in the world.

Will it fix the world? Almost definitely not the way we expect it to.

I was shocked to learn that God really had changed my heart toward someone I believed I deeply disliked, especially because I did so little to get to that place.

In a moment where it feels like what we desperately need is more control, I encourage you to consider that in fact we need to surrender control to God. In changing us, we have no idea what He could do and what it could mean for those around us and our country.

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I am thankful that the schemes of this most recent shooter were stopped when they were and more blood was not shed. And I pray for the family of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and their extended family. May God have mercy.

“On the fifth day of a journey across the Atlantic Ocean, we saw the gigantic buildings of New York. Before us was America. But when we had been in New York for a week and, as it seemed to us, we began to understand America, we were quite unexpectedly told that New York is not at all America. They told us that New York is a bridge between Europe and America, and that we were still situated on the bridge. Then we went to Washington, being steadfastly convinced that the capital of the United States is indisputably America. We spent a day there, and by evening we managed to fall in love with this purely American city. However, on that very same evening we were told that Washington was under no circumstances America. They told us that this was a town of governmental bureaucrats and that America was something quite different. Perplexed, we traveled to Hartford, a city in the state of Connecticut, where the great American writer Mark Twain spent his mature years. Much to our horror, the local residents told us in unison that Hartford was also not genuine America. They said that the genuine America was the southern states, while others affirmed that it was the western ones. Several didn’t say anything but vaguely pointed a finger into space.”

You can read a little more about their trip and see photos here.

From Alexis DeTocqueville in the 1830s to these Russian satirists in the 1930s to today, there’s delight to be found in the challenge in finding “the real America.” And that’s why I think the impressions of World Cup spectators has been so delightful to see and hear this past week.

I don’t know anything about soccer. I loved going to Columbus Crew games when I lived in Ohio, and I love Ted Lasso even more, but I know basically nothing when it comes to the World Cup.

Much like the Olympics though, coverage of people from all across the world experiencing this once-every-four-years event as tourists in our country is absolutely delightful and 100% worth following. So while there are a million “more important” things happening in the world, I want to bring a little bit of that coverage to you in case it isn’t coming across your social media feeds this week:

• A Kansas town has gone all out to welcome the team from Algeria:

Adam Kinzinger

“We Don't Know Too Much About You, But We Want to Welcome You Here”

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news…

Read more

3 months ago · 2814 likes · 236 comments · Adam Kinzinger

• There’s been a Scottish takeover of Boston and Rhode Island, which this BBC article says has pumped some $35 million into the local economy (largely in sales at local bars).

• Norwegians rowing all over the place is a thing, I guess, which is somehow just really endearing.

• And if you’ve not heard of Freddy from Germany yet, his observations on American culture as he travels the South have cemented his internet fame:

@gmaSocial media has fallen for Freddy, the German influencer account road-tripping across the U.S. to cheer on Germany at the World Cup. #worldcup #usmnt

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(My favorite might be the more academic commentary on Freddy, comparing him to a modern-day Alexis DeTocqueville.)

Anyway, that’s it - that’s the whole post. There’s plenty more content on social media if you have it, but I’m just here to say it’s worth following in this particular instance. In a sea of news coverage about wars and pessimistic economic predictions, it’s worth taking some time to follow something so joyful. And since I’ve already mentioned Ted Lasso, I’ll leave you with this -

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The whole heartbreaking thing made me ponder a lot of things about our culture. The vulnerability with which influencers live their lives on the internet, on purpose, for on thing. How it is that we exist in a culture in which this was something anyone felt comfortable announcing, for another. And the ways in which our privileged culture has malformed our thinking about human dignity and the value of human life, which is what I’m really here to parse through.

Influencer Culture

I have to be super honest here and say that I am the least qualified person to level any judgment about influencer culture. I couldn’t name one B-list influencer if I had to (ask my kids). I’m at best vaguely aware that this is a thing that exists. The Kardashians come to mind as kind of the OGs of influence fame, but I couldn’t even name all of them, and they’ve been on TV for almost 20 years.

Influencer culture isn’t my lane.

I want to acknowledge that I can’t fully put myself in their shoes because my life is nothing like theirs. I take breaks from social media sometimes. Sometimes, I walk away from all of those accounts for weeks or months at a time when I feel particularly tired or overwhelmed by it. I have the freedom to do so because it literally doesn’t matter: I’m not making money from it, no one has any expectations of me and I have no obligations to fulfill.

Someone who has built their career on Tik Tok or YouTube doesn’t have that same freedom, though. And if they have announced a pregnancy to that audience only to receive news of a difficult prenatal diagnosis, well, that puts them in a particularly vulnerable situation that I, as a non-influencer person with a pretty disposable social media presence, will not ever face.

I can choose to assume that they were doing their best and extend grace to them even while disagreeing with their choice.

When our best falls far short

We live with a level of ease that our ancestors just a handful of generations ago could never even have imagined. In Project Hail Mary, a novel (and now a movie) about saving earth from the existential threat of the cooling of the sun, there is this little speech by the lead of the project trying to save the earth, putting into context the appreciation we should have for the age in which we currently live:

“For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it… it was all about food. Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.” She walked to the other side of the room. “The industrial revolution mechanized agriculture. Since then, we’ve been able to focus our energies on other things. But that’s only been the last two hundred years. Before that, most people spent most of their lives directly dealing with food production.”

Maybe that’s a silly quote to pull from a novel, but it stuck with me when I read it. What a great reminder of the luxury with which we live. What a time to be alive!

For the last few hundred years, we have lived with increasing comfort. Without the daily threat of starvation or malnutrition here in the West, we have been able to focus on so many other things that have vastly improved the quality of life for not only ourselves but people across the world: vaccines for serious illnesses, improved agricultural processes to protect from drought and starvation, sanitation practices, clean water, etc.

The goal of those things has been to improve the human condition, which they have, and not simply to alleviate inconvenience and stress or to eliminate human hardship. Nobel prizes are awarded to those who have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” We have certainly benefitted, and we are aware enough to call inconveniences like downed WiFi “first world problems.”

Try as we might though, our scientific advances haven’t solved for everything that is broken in this world.

It feels like humankind has done everything possible to protect ourselves from uncertainty, illness, and disaster, but somehow it still manages to break through: cancer that couldn’t be cured takes the life of a loved one, an accident that couldn’t be prevented causes lasting damage, a natural disaster can still destroy our homes. We might really, really want a baby that never comes, or lose a baby that we never even got to meet. We might find out that our baby has an extra chromosome.

It’s hard.

I know. I am human, too.

There is a holy longing in every one of us for heaven. It’s built-in. We know when things do not work as we believe they should. Whether we believe in God or not, or believe in Jesus and his promise of redemption for this world or not, we all know that illness and starvation and death are not what we were designed for. We long for the world described in Revelation 21: “the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain…”. That’s what Jesus promised us is coming - the kingdom of God.

I want that. I really believe all humans long for that. And so our very imperfect attempts to bring that reality to earth, absent the ability to usher God’s kingdom here ourselves by our own power, is to take things into our own hands. Medically-assisted suicide is a good example: what we really want is a cure for suffering, but absent the ability to cure all disease, some have decided that death is the better answer. We entertain arguments in favor of abortion that say that a baby born into poverty would be better off never being born at all, even though we can’t know, with our human lack of omniscience, what that person’s life could turn out to be.

Twice in Proverbs, a collection of the best of human wisdom, we find this saying:

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”1

It has echoes, doesn’t it, of Satan in the Garden of Eden: “Did God really say…” that he was going to deprive you of something? That you couldn’t have everything, and that you couldn’t be like him? If you take your own action to make it right, the way you think it should be, “surely you will not die.”

Adam and Eve were meant to live in wholeness, forever, with God in the Garden of Eden. But Satan created enough doubt that they believed him, and now here we are, living in bodies that are subject to illness, death and decay, in a world where we are told we will strive for our food to survive, where suffering will come and we have to decide what to do with it.

Those we choose to live without

The truth is that the Ridgways aren’t alone in their decision. The CDC estimates that between 60-90% of babies prenatally diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted in the United States. This happens quietly across the country all year long. They just so happened to announce their choice with the megaphone they hold, the equivalent of saying the quiet part out loud: that they don’t believe that a life with Down syndrome is a life worth living.

And really, that’s the message. It can be couched in fear or statistics, but the core of the influencer’s comments was this statement: “Down syndrome isn't a 'blessing,' it is objectively s---ty from a health perspective.”

Sixty to ninety percent of parents who receive the same diagnosis came to the same conclusion, even if they don’t announce it on YouTube.

I’m pretty certain not one of those parents is thinking that they want to rid the world of people with an extra chromosome, but taken as a whole, there is not another way to describe what we are witnessing as the practice of eugenics.

The very worst reality of all this to me is that people with Down syndrome can hear the message, too. There are estimated to be somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 people living with Down syndrome in the United States right now - whole human beings, presumably with families and jobs, or attending school with our children - who are able to understand, and they hear the message, too. Even couched in the most positive language Ridgway used, it doesn’t sound like kindness: “You matter a lot and we’re glad you’re here,” he said, addressing his fans with autism and Down syndrome. But he continues: “As for us, we made a difficult decision that we believe in the long-run will be beneficial for our family. Thankfully, we had a choice.” [emphasis mine]

Imagine hearing that and knowing that is how people think about your life.

Imagine hearing that an entire country has announced that they’ve eradicated Down syndrome, only to understand that what they’ve actually done is systematically standardize a healthcare system to eradicate certain people.

We can’t control the decisions other people make, but to read about the Ridgeways or any other family that’s made the same decision and fail to stand up for the dignity of those with Down syndrome is to give tacit approval. It treats human life as expendable and inconvenient. It flies in the face of the Bible and the Christian ethic of human dignity that says every human is created in the image of God. To fail to speak up against the rejection humans that he has created is to distort our own souls - to agree that we might know better than God, to believe that we can “fix” it.

And in the end, it leads to death and heartbreak.

The National Down Syndrome Society has put out some really great educational content in light of this story that is worth checking out. Their mission as an organization is “to create a world where individuals with Down syndrome thrive.” There isn’t a hidden agenda, it’s just advocacy for people. I encourage you to check them out here, and watch this video.

I know not everyone shares my love of celebrating Independence Day, but it remains one of my favorite holidays. I’ll find reason to celebrate this year, and I hope you do, too.

Lucky for us, the government has found a way to make our celebration accessible no matter how we might prefer to party: i.e, by taking a “great American roadtrip” with your family to notable landmarks and national parks all across the country, or by watching an IndyCar Freedom 250 race on the streets of Washington, D.C.

In a time when all we seem to talk about is the intractable division in the U.S., there are in fact two government-sanctioned, competing organizations planning celebrations for America’s 250th, a fact I didn’t even realize until headlines started popping up about music artists cancelling their performances at something called “The Great American State Fair.”

At first, I thought the cancellations were happening because artists had suddenly decided they didn’t want to be associated with an event that in some way affiliated them with the federal government, because they didn’t like Trump. Which, okay, I guess, but it seemed strange that performers would suddenly bail when they had to have understood that a celebration of America’s birthday would have something to do with the sitting president. So I dug a little deeper into the issue, which is how I only just recently came to understand that “America 250” and “Freedom 250” are not the same.

All of these weird headlines about UFC Fights on the White House lawn and Indycar races on the streets of D.C. are starting to make more sense! So now I’m here to share my newfound knowledge.

America 250

America 250 is the very normal kind of government commission created by Congress to plan and execute events celebrating the country’s Semiquincentennial. According to the official government website:

“The U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission was established by Congress in 2016 to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Appointed by the House and Senate leadership of both parties, the nonpartisan Commission is composed of 16 private citizens, 4 U.S. Representatives and 4 Senators, as well as 12 Ex Officio members from all three branches of the federal government and its independent agencies.”

Super normal. Just another government commission with a set purpose and set time frame, doing official government work, set to be forgotten until the next significant birthday of our country (presumably the “tricentennial?” I think).

That bipartisan commission has pulled together all kinds of events honoring American history, including an essay contest for kids to win a “field trip” some of the United States’ most important historical sites and experiences (they have a performance of Hamilton listed as part of the NYC trip to see the 9/11 Memorial and other things), a time capsule (which makes me think of this episode of Parks and Rec), and a guide to the crazy number of events planned across the country on July 4th. They coordinated special USA 250 patches that NFL players wore in the Super Bowl this past year and coordinated with NASA to incorporate the America 250 logo into the Artemis mission.

There’s nothing to dislike about America 250, is what I’m saying. It’s pretty standard stuff.

Freedom 250, on the other hand…

Freedom 250 has a significantly better website. (It’s just true, look at it. ) But that makes sense, because Freedom 250 was formed as a private-public partnership with significantly greater access to private capital to fund things like awesome websites and without any sort of committee or congressional oversight. Freedom 250 was created via Executive Order by the president, who designated himself Chair of the organization and Vice President Vance as Vice Chair, for the purpose of celebrating America’s 250th.

There isn’t all that much harm in the president creating his own commission. Presidents tend to like to have their names on things, and I can honestly see any other president having done something similar to “own” some of the celebration and the planning rather than letting a congressional commission get all the credit. Feels a little like when Pam and Karen made their own Party Planning Committee on The Office to rival stuck-up Angela’s, but… honestly, that’s a really good analogy. I’m going to let that sit.

Where it departs from normal practice is where it blurs ethical lines - neither America 250 nor Freedom 250 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit needs to disclose their donors, but a group actually chaired by the president probably ought to have more accountability, considering that any organization that contributes then ostensibly has a seat at the table with the president himself. Maybe once they’ve given their hundreds of millions they don’t expect to have input on anything other than the events they’re funding, but also, there’s nothing that precludes them from lobbying the president on other things while they’re, you know, already there. Also, given that the president has access to the list of donors, it’s not crazy to think he might check that once in a while as various asks are made of him by certain industry leaders.

One of the most egregiously ironic twists is Freedom 250 advertising the dedication of Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidential Library in South Dakota this summer. The man who dedicated so much of his political career to fighting corruption in government would probably hate everything about the financial structure of Freedom 250.

So I can see why musical artists who had agreed to perform at the Great American State Fair suddenly got cold feet. Do I think they would terrible Americans if they went ahead and performed there? Not personally, no - I think it can still be a celebration of America, and by performing I don’t believe they would be generating revenue for anyone that would make it unethical (I’m willing to be corrected on that point, but I don’t see anywhere that the event costs money for attendees or generates a profit). But I can also see why it puts them in an uncomfortable position, signing their name to an even with an organization that may not be operating entirely above-board.

Here’s my favorite part though

Back to the division we are all so tired of - these two organizations seem to encapsulate something about our current division perfectly. Kevin D. Williamson writes for The Dispatch about it so well, if a little derisively for my taste, in this piece about growing up in a family that fought on the front lawn. The insinuation, of course, being that we are a country that gets drunk and fights on front lawns - the piece isn’t super flattering to him or our country, but it isn’t meant to be. “There was alcohol involved,” it begins, and you can probably guess the rest.

There isn’t anything all that elite in my opinion about an essay contest for kids, or special patches for football players, or having astronauts pose with a flag. But if there’s anything President Trump is known for fighting against, it’s the elite. And so there is this underlying tone of Freedom 250 - a sense that somehow, it’s all giving the middle finger to America 250 and its “elite” celebration by counteracting it with events for, I assume, “real Americans” in the form of an IndyCar race, a UFC fight, the Patriot Games (which seriously, no one thought, “but the Hunger Games, so maybe we shouldn’t”??) and somehow it feels like maybe even through a recent politically-sanctioned prayer rally (though as you may know, I have complex feelings about that).

We’ve all got another month until July 4th, so with all of this information, I hope you feel like you can plan accordingly.

Palate Cleanser

For something celebratory about America, my family and I have loved watching the latest series by YouTuber Ryan Trahan and his wife, Haley. They are on a mission to rank the Top Ten Tourist Attractions in America, and it’s just easy, delightful watching. We were already big fans, but this series feels like a great palate cleanser that I can recommend after everything else above. Start with the first episode and make your way through!

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The Virginia redistricting ballot initiative debacle is high up on my list of stupid partisan things from the past few weeks. I’m not exempting every other state’s transparently partisan and stupid mid-term redistricting from criticism, but Virginia’s is particularly ridiculous: When the Republican-majority state Supreme Court struck down their redistricting efforts, Democrats appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for intervention - using the same legal argument that they called “catastrophic” when Republicans used it just three years ago. From the New York Times:

“Virginia Democrats suffered a stinging loss in their state Supreme Court this month. Its justices, by a 4 to 3 vote, rejected a voting map that would probably have flipped four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives from red to blue.

What state officials did next baffled election law specialists.

Jay Jones, Virginia’s attorney general, a Democrat, raced to the U.S. Supreme Court, filing an emergency application that relied on a theory that many Democrats had previously argued is extreme and dangerous.”

The theory is called the “independent state legislature theory,” and here’s what that same article goes on to say about it:

“The theory was a key element of President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His supporters argued, for instance, that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had been powerless to extend voting deadlines during the pandemic because it overrode the will of the State Legislature. Democrats were appalled.”

My point is not that one party is more ridiculous than the other. My point is that our political parties’ only apparent solution to partisan political maneuvering is to be more partisan - they’re probably not actually blind to the hypocrisy, but power-hungry enough to choose not to care.

Gross.

But there is another recent EVERYTHING IS STUPID story that tops the rest. Without further ado, here is my disappointed-mom take on one story this week:

The Colorado Democratic Party

In 2024, a Mesa County Clerk by the name of Tina Peters was found guilty by the state of seven charges of tampering with county elections equipment in 2020 (to prove there was fraud or that the election was somehow “stolen”) and subsequently sentenced to nine years in state prison. Shortly after taking office last year, President Trump began a social media campaign on his Truth Social to “FREE TINA PETERS”, calling her “an innocent political prisoner” being subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment.” While it was clearly in keeping with his other efforts to exonerate (and now compensate?! I don’t have time to dive into that here) other January 6th offenders and 2020 election tamperers, it was curiously specific of him to focus on one woman from a small county in Colorado - except of course, this is a blue state, and in the president’s second-term revenge tour, nothing seems to be more important than making his opponents pay. (Examples: childcare subsidies, immigration enforcement, and disaster relief funding).

The president went so far as to announce that he was pardoning Tina Peters - except that the federal government can’t pardon criminals convicted under state laws.

Consequently, he undertook a campaign to punish the state through whatever means he could, with seemingly no care for the very real consequences of his pettiness. First, he vetoed a bipartisan water bill sponsored by Rep. Lauren Boebert, his supporter-turned-mortal enemy, apparently. Then in December of last year, the president denied the state disaster relief funds it sought for wildfires and floods that had impacted the western portion of the state in 2025.

In the same week, the Trump Administration cancelled over $100 million in previously-approved grant funding for environmental and transportation projects in the state and announced the closure of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. In September of last year, the Trump Administration also announced that U.S. Space Command headquarters would be moved from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama - a state he won by 47 points, which he casually happened to he casually happened to mention in his press conference making the announcement.

Okay, so this is vengeful, but maybe not stupid - so far

Despite the fact that this insanity is all the president’s doing, here is why this all has made me feel pessimistic about the Democrats just as much as I am about Republicans and President Trump:

On May 14th, Colorado’s Democrat Governor Jared Polis announced that along with a slew of other pardons and commutations he was reducing Tina Peters’ prison sentence. In fact, she will be released having served less than two years of the nine-year sentence she was given. He gave what I think is a good explanation in a post on social media, which you can read here in its entirety. I’ll quote what I think is the best part of it:

“Tina Peters will remain a convicted felon for her crimes. I am simply correcting what I see as the error the trial court made by sentencing her to nearly nine years in prison.

Tina Peters finally accepts responsibility for her crimes and pledges to follow the law going forward.

Tina Peters said: “For years I’ve dedicated myself. But I made mistakes. Four years ago, I misled the Secretary of State when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong.”.

I am glad that she is finally taking accountability for her actions.

In examining this case, I gained a deeper understanding of the passion that many Coloradans feel about how justice was served in this case. It hits a nerve for people on both sides of the aisle. Some incorrectly feel that she did not commit a crime and should not have been convicted at all. Others see her as a symbol and want her to be in prison for as long as possible. Our legal system should not be based on symbols, politics and passions – it should be based on the law being applied fairly in every instance.” (emphasis mine)

Now, here are some quick disclaimers I need to give before I say more: I disagree with Governor Polis on a lot of things. I agree with the court, the jury, Governor Polis and a whole lot of others that Tina Peters is guilty. And aside from what he shared publicly on social media, I know nothing more about the governor’s reasoning for reducing her sentence.

But my own interpretation is that an awful lot of people should be thanking the governor.

Because just a week after Polis’s actions, the federal government magically released $50 million in funding it had been withholding (yes, that is also stupid- the president wasn’t especially trying to hide that it was related to Peters, but it’s almost scandalous to make such pettiness SO plain).

His actions appeased the president enough to release all of the funding that is being held up on account of the president’s fragile ego and strangely fierce defense of Tina Peters, and there’s no way to deny that other Democratic officeholders owe Polis a lot of gratitude.

Is it right that the president put the governor in such a position, essentially holding the residents of Colorado hostage via federal aid for disaster relief on the condition of releasing a prisoner “loyal to” the president?

Unequivocally, NO. What an absolute disappointing, corrupt reality that is. Stupid, even.

But it seems to me like the governor made all the right calculations - he’s term-limited and on his way out at the start of 2027, while every other statewide elected official (all Democrats) and federal representative of Colorado has an election to win in November. Outside of a long appeals process, no one else can re-sentence Peters and end this stalemate in the timeframe that might still allow the state access to needed federal funds while Trump is still president in the next two and a half years. He did what needed to be done.

So I would have expected Democrats in the state to quietly thank Polis, while issuing carefully-crafted statements condemning the reality of the situation and the reduction in Peters’ sentence.

Instead, they’re burning it alllll down

Instead, statements condemning the governor’s action poured out from elected officials all across the state almost immediately. Attorney General Phil Weiser and current U.S. Senator Michael Bennet are competing in the June primary to replace Polis as governor in November, and so maybe it’s no surprise that once Weiser denounced Polis’ decision, Bennet took his statement even farther. He called Gov. Polis’s actions “disqualifying” if he wanted to be appointed to the U.S. Senate and stated flatly that if he were elected governor, he would not consider appointing Polis to the U.S. Senate (if Bennet wins the governor’s race, he will appoint someone to serve the remainder of his senate term).

Then, Colorado’s Democratic Party Central Committee voted to formally censure Polis and have barred him from speaking at party events.

Seriously?

Worse, Tina Peters - who could graciously accept that she no longer has to spend the next seven years in prison - put out a statement capitalizing on their actions and sticking to her guns apparently as an election denier, saying, “it should be obvious to Democrats and Republicans alike that they have something to hide,” since “they are willing to continue to destroy people’s lives to cover it up,” and that the vote to censure Polis “shows just how radical Democrats have become.”

I don’t really like to write posts that are so pessimistic, because I’m aware there is enough of that out there. But that our politics has become so transparently stupid has me pretty exasperated over here <cue disappointed mom face>.

My takeaway is this - we know that the political parties will always be fighting, maybe in increasingly petty ways. The ways in which they respond to each other’s partisan actions with their own partisan actions is disappointing.

Maybe what I want to take away from it though is the fact that we average Americans don’t have to buy what they’re selling, though. Just because the people in power respond to partisanship with more partisanship, claiming always that their respective party has the moral high ground even though it’s pretty clear no one does, does not mean that we have to choose one of them to side with.

We’re allowed to call stupidity what it is.

So when you, like me, find yourself tempted to respond to someone who is telling you what the “right” answer is in response to whatever politically stupid thing is happening on a given day,

consider responding with the grace that our politics has forgotten. Acknowledge what is dumb, and acknowledge that humans are just being human. We can choose to have grace for their humanity, maybe challenge them to do better, and go about doing our best at whatever we are doing. Like I would tell my own kids when I’m disappointed with them, I’m just asking that we do our best here.

Because whichever political leaning you have will have its turn to be stupid, too. And rather than allowing ourselves to get wrapped up in any of it, rather than putting ourselves in the position to defend all the stupid things because we’ve placed a part of our identity in our party politics, we can just let the politicians do all that, while we live our very normal lives with grace for each other.

And without all the stupidity.

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All of those incidents have been shocking to me, even if they maybe shouldn’t have been surprising. From his first campaign, President Trump has sought to earn support from evangelical Christians largely through promises of power. In some respects, his efforts actually aren’t much different from any other Republican politician’s over the last forty years or so. Reagan was the first to capitalize on the power of the pro-life vote, and George W. Bush perfected that outreach in his presidential campaigns.

Party affiliation aside, the majority of American politicians, particularly in presidential elections, have worked to gain favor with Evangelical Christians as a voting block - every president since Eisenhower has attended the National Prayer Breakfast, which started in 1953.

The announcement that the White House is hosting a day-long prayer “festival” then is honestly not all that shocking.

When I read the announcement, I immediately remembered an experience I had back in 2016.

I was working in state government at the time, and Franklin Graham had a prayer rally called the Decision America Tour that was touring the country ahead of the 2016 president election. In early October that year his tour made its stop at the Ohio Statehouse. Here is his Facebook post describing the day.

I talked a few friends into going with me over our lunch. To be clear, I was not going as a supporter or participant. I was going partly out of curiosity, and more so, out of something close to gleeful mockery.

Hear me out: I had recently stepped away from working in the pro-life movement (for the first time). It was a difficult season, not least because the pro-life movement was rallying around then-candidate Donald Trump as the the pro-life candidate, which felt wildly incongruous with everything I thought the movement stood for, but also because we had come out of an incredibly difficult season in the previous five years of fending off passage of Ohio’s “Heartbeat bill.”

The bill (since passed, and now rendered moot by a state constitutional ballot initiative) was a ban on abortion as soon as a baby’s heartbeat can be detected. At the time, Ohio Right to Life was not in favor of the bill and actually thought its passage would put other pro-life protections in law at risk. It’s all too much to explain in detail here, but what is important to know is that many a “prayer rally” had been held on that same statehouse lawn denouncing the organization I worked for, and by extension me, as standing in the way of God’s will for our state. I had left meeting rooms only to find groups of people praying outside the room for me to turn from my wicked ways of advocating against the bill. I had received phone calls and emails for literally years from people saying they were praying that we (Ohio Right to Life) would come to see the truth and God’s plans to end abortion in Ohio.

So I was maybe feeling a bit cynical about people claiming to speak for Jesus about political issues to large crowds on the steps of the statehouse.

Anyway, I went to this rally and stood kind of off to the side. I was taking a video (which I believe was during Franklin Graham’s speech) and literally laughing at the people there, when Graham said it was time to pray. It was all the same Christian nationalist nonsense that I had been hearing for years, both as part of the Christian Right and as an object of the scorn of the Christian Right: praying for God to prevail in the very specific ways Christian political leaders determined he needed to, which to this crowd meant Donald Trump’s election.

And as I stood there filming and laughing, this woman came over and said, with such sincerity, “don’t you all believe in prayer? Aren’t you gonna pray? Let’s pray together!” and she grabbed my hand and bowed her head.

Let the reader understand the wave of humility that came over me in that moment.

I have the moment on video (but I’m not sharing it, to protect the privacy of others). One moment, I am laughing, and the next this woman is asking me to pray and the video abruptly stops.

I’m tearing up just remembering it now.

This woman was not shaming me. I didn’t get any sense that she was angry with me, even though I’m certain she saw me laughing, and she would have been justified if she were. And even if she was angry, her impulse was to ask me to join her in prayer.

What I felt in that moment was shame for judging all of these people. Friend, I didn’t know them. They had come from all over the state for this event, to pray for our government and for our leaders. They very likely all voted for Donald Trump later, but what they were gathered to do was pray, and that’s what they were gonna do. And I didn’t need to vote like them to pray with them.

I was humbled to my core by this brief interaction. What I remember thinking in that moment was this: who am I to presume to know how God works, or through what type of person he might work? Who am I to assume I’m smarter because I vote differently, or that I’m a better Christian than anyone here because I don’t attend events like this (at least not sincerely)? Who am I to attribute all the worst qualities of a candidate or a political figure to every one of his followers without knowing anything else about them? Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

They were just people who came to pray.

I have no idea what Franklin Graham prayed that day (probably for President Trump’s victory), but I know that I stood there and asked God to forgive me.

I do not love that the lines between worshipping God and worshipping our government are blurred. (The golden statue thing is weird, but this is actually probably more representative of the idol worship that ails us, in my opinion). I can predict with confidence that a prayer rally hosted by the White House is going to, in many ways, glorify the White House and its chief occupant, and that is most definitely not in service to God.

Speaking from experience, I know how this goes and can predict what social media will have to say about this event: if others are like me, they will feel this impulse to criticize the entire event and make very clear via social media or otherwise that they are not “that kind of Christian.” They, like me, may feel a need to condemn the entire event. Like me, other Christians might find themselves laughing at the people who take part in it. But that is exactly where I would urge caution.

The first commandment is to “have no other gods before me,” which is how we know that events that put politicians more or less on equal footing with God is not orthodox theology. When asked which are the greatest commandments, though, Jesus says, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your mind, and the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.”

I can’t say it enough; I am not better than any other Christian. That’s just not how it works. I’m not better than someone else who is attending a political prayer rally, even if I know I can see the ways that it is misleading others and misdirecting worship that belongs to God toward humans, making it essentially idolatry. That sin - leading others into idolatry - is on the hands and consciences of leaders who perpetrate it, and I am not making light of any of that. They’ll answer to God for whatever they need to answer for (see: James 3:1, Matthew 23: 1-4, Hebrews 13: 17), and if someone asked my opinion, I would advise them not to attend a church with leaders who taught worship of anyone other than God.

But the people attending? Even if I am right in my assessment and my assumptions about all of this, my chief aim ought not be critique of those attending but the impulse to recognize them as fellow humans seeking after God, brothers or sisters in Christ - my neighbors.

We are told by the apostle Paul in 2 Timothy to pray for those in authority: “I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people - for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

If I’m being really generous, maybe the purpose of this event is to celebrate that we have the freedom to do just that corporately and in public spaces. Regardless, there are many, many ways I personally pray that those in power would seek to live and rule in a way that follows the character of Jesus. That’s worth praying. It’s the prayers for or insinuation of political power, either for an individual or somehow on God’s behalf, that becomes deeply problematic.

I’m reminded of Matthew chapter nine - I don’t really know that the stories in this chapter happened in sequence or if the events were in close proximity in time, but toward the end of the chapter, the Pharisees are criticizing Jesus for healing a man possessed by demons, saying the only explanation for demons obeying him was that he was the prince of demons. Right after, it cuts to a scene of Jesus traveling and “proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.” And then it says this, beginning in verse 36:

“When he [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

That’s how this feels, to me. People gathering, maybe to seek God or maybe just to be a part of something bigger than themselves, surrounded by a confused culture, and grasping for meaning wherever we can, whether at a prayer festival or on social media.

Before we spend our time wringing our hands over this event and what it means for American Christianity, I think our call is first and foremost to know that as believers, what we are about is loving God and loving our neighbors. Even when they vote differently. Even when they attend Christian Nationalist rallies. We don’t have to participate, but whatever we say about those who do, I hope it’s because we are also moved by compassion.

I still hear the earnestness of that woman’s voice as she asked me, “Don’t you all believe in prayer?”

Let’s pray - for our leaders, for our neighbors, for our own humility, discernment, and wisdom.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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My sister and I still laugh at the family photos from those vacations: my dad standing shirtless with his very brown (Indian) skin, my mom covered head-to-toe in a beach cover-up and said sun hat, my sister smiling with her bowl cut, and what looks like a small, gap-toothed Indian boy in a girl’s bathing suit - that being me. My parents didn’t know what to do with my curly hair, so it was always cut super short. I was constantly mistaken for a boy. Either because I spent more time outside or because I just had the stronger melanin, I would get so tan at the beach that I pretty closely matched my dad’s skin tone.

Once, during our weekly Friday night pizza outing at Pizza Hut (I’m telling you, the 90s!), I remember our waitress commenting on whether my sister and I looked like our parents or not. “You look more like your dad,” she said to me, and then she turned to my sister and said, “but you look more like your mom.” Being maybe eight years old at the time, I remember saying, “Because I have short hair!” which made everyone laugh. My parents must have somehow gently explained after she’d walked away that she had meant because my skin was darker, and I remember feeling vaguely embarrassed by the whole thing. Maybe other strangers had just had the good grace not to comment on it, or I had just never paid attention, the way kids do, but that is the first time I remember being aware that I didn’t look like my mom.

It feels like a little gift to me each time I’m out somewhere with my girls and someone makes a comment about how they look just like me. My husband jokes that our youngest daughter and I need t-shirts that say “copy” and “paste” because she is just me in miniature. Once I took one of them to a doctors appointment and the nurse said, “Well you are obviously Mom, you look just alike!” with a smile. Another time we were at a waterpark and I asked to wait at the top because my daughter was coincidentally a few places behind me in line and I wanted to go after her, and the employee laughed and said, “You didn’t even have to point her out;” he knew exactly which kid I was talking about.

I only thought about this recently because a high school friend of mine posted a sweet photo of her with her son at a school event, and when I saw it I immediately thought she looked so much like HER mom in the photo. It took me aback because I had never thought much about my peers looking more like their parents as we age, and a little part of me felt disappointed that I probably won’t experience that. My mom and I share some facial features if you look closely (something about our smiles and maybe the way my eyes crinkle in the corners), but it isn’t especially obvious.

It isn’t as though there aren’t other moments that I know I’m exactly like her, though -

Like when I’m busy re-folding all of my towels into thirds after my kids or husband folded the laundry (though I’ve noticed my mom has given up on this one particular habit!).

Or like when I stay up way too late reading just about every night.

Or, this hilariously weird moment that, after the fact, I realized is 100% something my mom would do:

And always, the laugh.

I definitely inherited my mom’s laugh. The one that made me cringe as a kid and claim such embarrassment. “Why do you have to laugh so loud?!” I’d wail when I was young, and then when I got older I’d just try to hide somewhere as if I could distance myself from her. I will never forget when one of my youth group friends looked at me at such a moment on a Sunday at church and said, “you know you laugh just like her, right?”

My kids will never let me forget it, either. “You laugh just like Grammy!” they say, whether rolling their eyes or laughing with me.

There is no escaping it - I’m an awful lot like her.

On a recent visit to see my mom, we went shopping with a longtime family friend of ours, Ondina. Mom had to make a stop in Macy’s to get something from one of the cosmetics counters, and Ondina and I were preoccupied looking at something else in the clothing section. When we were done, we were scanning the store to see where my mom had gone off to when we heard her laugh ring out loud and clear from somewhere near the cosmetics area. “Found her,” Ondina said. We smiled and headed toward the sound.

Happy Mother’s Day to you all - may you feel celebrated and loved, exactly as you are.

(Love you, Mom! ❤️)

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There are layers upon layers to these laws and how we’ve ended up here. So first I’m going to stack the layers up, and then I’ll explain once we have the full picture. This summary is only of what happened in federal law and with the state of Louisiana, because other states have pursued various regulations of the drug within the confines of federal law separately, but that is just too much detail to include here.

At the bottom of the pyramid is the initial approval of Mifeprex (the brand-name drug) for abortion by the FDA back in 2001. When it was first approved, it was approved as part of a two-drug regimen (misoprostol being the second), and was only indicated for use up to seven weeks into pregnancy. Per FDA rules, the drugs had to be prescribed and dispensed by a prescribing physician at an in-person appointment, meaning that no one could go to a pharmacy to have that prescription filled - it was only available directly from a physician’s office. Also per FDA rules, Mifeprex required three in-person appointments for any patient taking it: the first including informed consent, a physical exam, and receiving the medication; the second visit within 48 hours to receive and take misoprostol if the woman was still pregnant, and the third a 14-day follow up appointment to confirm the abortion had occurred and the woman was not still pregnant. In the first fifteen years following its approval, 2.75 million abortions were performed using this drug under this regimen.

The second layer came with the changes in labeling the FDA made in 2016. These changes expanded the timeframe within which Mifeprex could be used up to ten weeks gestation, lowered the required dosage to reduce side effects, eliminated the requirement that a physician be the prescriber, opening it up to other medical professionals with prescribing rights, and eliminated all but that first in-person visit to obtain the drug. Misoprostol could now be taken at home if needed, and the follow up appointment was not required to happen in-person.

In 2019, a generic version of Mifeprex was approved. From here out, I’ll just refer to the drug as mifepristone to include both versions.

Fourth layer: with the pandemic as the ostensible backdrop necessitating the change, interest groups lobbied the federal government to loosen restrictions on mifepristone to eliminate the in-person requirement both for the initial examination and to receive the first dose of the drug. The FDA approved that change in 2021, but it took another two years for it to fully take effect (which kind of renders that pandemic-reasoning moot, in my opinion), and that more or less leads us to where we are today. Patients no longer needed an in-person appointment at all to receive the prescription, which could be obtained at a pharmacy or by mail. By the time the restrictions were lifted in 2023, 63%, or 642,700, of all reported abortions in that year were performed using this drug, and the Dobbs decision had also been handed down by the Supreme Court, overturning Roe vs. Wade.

And that brings us to the current chaos.

Louisiana

Back in 2006, the Louisiana’s legislature passed, and their governor signed, what is called a “trigger law.” Trigger laws were used by states to put in state statute a prohibition on all abortions (with an exception for those necessary to save the life of the mother or to prevent substantial impairment of major bodily functions, in Louisiana’s case) that would only ever take effect if Roe vs. Wade were overturned. Without that provision, such a ban on abortion would have been found unconstitutional with little challenge under Roe vs. Wade and would never have been enforceable. Because they included that provision, however, as soon as the Dobbs ruling was issued, Louisiana had a total prohibition on abortion immediately.

The argument for overturning Roe was always that states would then have the right to determine their own laws with regard to abortions, and we have seen state after state making their choices. Thirteen states had trigger laws before Dobbs was decided, although some have been challenged and remain in legal limbo now.

What happens when federal law and state law conflict?

In the absence of Congress taking action to resolve the conflict in federal statute (yes, let’s all pause and have a good laugh), what the Supreme Court says is what stands. They have the duty to interpret the law, and if we all change our minds (Dred Scot, Brown vs. Board of Education, etc), there are means to resolve that through our constitutional amendment process and through Congress. Absent action like that, what the Court says goes.

Which is why this case is so complicated.

Louisiana has banned all abortions (with the exceptions mentioned above) regardless of the procedure or medication used to perform them.

The federal government allows abortion drugs (mifepristone) to be mailed to patients without even an initial in-person consultation with a doctor.

So what’s to stop someone in Louisiana from having an abortion via pills they’ve received in the mail?

There’s no way to deny that it is breaking Louisiana’s state law.

Theoretically, Louisiana’s Attorney General could charge the out-of-state prescriber with breaking their state law,

except that many states that allow abortion, particularly the most liberal, preemptively also passed “shield laws” protecting prescribers in their states from lawsuits in states where abortion is not legal.

And so, Louisiana sued the FDA, saying that the 2023 changes to their rules eliminating the in-person visit and allowing the drug to be furnished by mail violates their state’s ability to enforce their own law.

Now that we have this summary, and I hope we’re on the same page, I want to say what I really came here to say:

Politics and policy are not the same thing.

Public policy is what is put in place by the government to govern our country - whether through something like agency rules (like the FDA’s) or in statute through the work of Congress, or even an amendment to the United States Constitution through a complicated process. It’s what the law is.

Policy is not really the purview of the Supreme Court; the Supreme Court’s work is interpreting policy where something comes into conflict or is unclear.

We’ve seen a lot of the Supreme Court trying to fix policy in the last ten years.

It’s not their fault; it is because Congress isn’t doing its job and enacting policy the way it is meant to.

This all became especially clear in the undoing of Roe with the Dobbs decision in 2022.

It is not the job of the Court to make laws. They found fault with Roe, and so overturned precedent. They did not replace it with particularly clear policy, because that is where law-making bodies (legislatures, not courts) are meant to step in and resolve the issues.

What is happening with Louisiana and the Supreme Court right now is a result of exactly that. Louisiana’s State Legislature did enact policy, even if that was back in 2006, and this conflict between the state and the federal government has come about because federal law is now largely silent on this issue. States have taken control, as they should, and have come up with conflicting solutions - some states allowing abortion for any reason any time, and states like Louisiana that do not. But because we are a nation of states, it is kind of inevitable that we’ll end up in conflict like this, and that’s why the federal court system, of which the Supreme Court is the ruling body, exists.

Herein lies my greatest frustration about the issue of abortion in particular: it is far easier to politick on the issue than it is to actually come to policy solutions, but that doesn’t mean policy solutions don’t exist.

Polling shows that literally no American is satisfied with our current abortion policies:

The problem is that our lawmakers are not incentivized to find those solutions- and we voters are the disincentive! When interest groups can make all the talking points and take control of the public narrative for them, lawmakers lose incentive to solve the problem. Yes, primaries are part of the problem, too. But it’s easier for a congressman or senator to rail at the Supreme Court, knowing their constituency is probably equally unhappy (whether for the same reasons or not), than it is to try to work through the issues at hand, just as it’s far easier for us to rail against whoever it is we’re unhappy with on social media than it is to get involved in fixing anything.

Let me just give just a couple of examples related to the abortion debate:

There is no reason women need to die due to miscarriage because doctors weren’t sure what was legally allowed. No one wants that, but we see it happening across the country in states where abortions ban exist and there is a perceived ambiguity for doctors about what care they can or can’t provide. A rational leader (a governor, perhaps, or a state health director, even) would call together a committee to create protocols for handling those cases with a priority on saving the lives of the mothers, much like many states did in the wake of the opioid epidemic. No, those two scenarios are not exactly comparable, but the point is that governments were able to do that work because someone prioritized it - why is no one prioritizing care for pregnant women? (and please, snarky answers aren’t sufficient, because pro-choice female legislators and other elected officials also exist in those states and they are equally not proposing this work, as far as I have seen). Hospital boards could do this. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists could do this, even alongside their abortion advocacy (which bums me out).

Similarly, parental consent laws have maintained consistent popularity despite the significant changes in abortion policy in the last five years. Americans don’t want young girls making life-changing decisions without support from their parents, and it’s not a huge logical leap to assume that opinion equally applies to drug-induced abortions - yet, federal law (what I outlined so carefully at the beginning) has never included age restrictions on those drugs. Which means that even now, in states where abortion is broadly legal but parental consent laws exist, girls under eighteen can easily, legally obtain these drugs from any prescriber without ever having to go to an in-person appointment or tell their parents.

Isn’t that a loophole we might be willing to agree to fix?

Ultimately, I hope that the Supreme Court does take up the full case that Louisiana is trying to initiate. Not because we need more laws made by court-order, but because it might cast a bright light on the negligence that has come about by our own obsessive politicking. The pro-choice side seems to me to be solely focused on winning the shame game in the social media/public arena without doing much of substance. The pro-life side seems to be avoiding reconciling with the bed they’ve made with an administration who “doesn’t think about” mifepristone regulation or safety.

I’m not holding my breath waiting for Congress to do honestly anything, but in the meantime, governors, health and human service agency directors, hospital administrators or anyone in a policy-making position, really, with the will to fix glaring policy gaps of our own creation, could be working quietly on policies that make sense.

The semantics and rhetoric around abortion will only continue to get worse in this mid-term election year, but as this case progresses, I submit all of this as one human-focused angle to consider. Yes, it’s a Supreme Court controversy, but these are real women and babies being impacted - and I think that’s more important to remember than which “side” is winning, when all the headlines come at us.

IF you find that you want to understand this particular case better, Tangle had a great rundown on all of it today that I would encourage you to check out! I was genuinely thrilled to see that they gave the “my take” section to their pro-life editor, too, so yes, that definitely informs my recommendation. Regardless, I think it is a great explainer worth your time if you want to know more.

Back in 2020, columnist and author David Brooks described this time in history, that we are still experiencing, as a “convulsion,” a particular kind of moment in modern history.

Of these modern-day convulsions, Brooks writes:

“These moments share certain features. People feel disgusted by the state of society. Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread. Contempt for established power is intense.”

It’s very worth reading that article in full.

That was published only six years ago, on the eve of the 2020 election, a moment which Brooks considered the climax of the current convulsion through which we are living.

Gosh, I wish that had been true.

We have since lived through the rest of the pandemic, which somehow got worse and not better after the 2020 election. We saw the January 6th insurrection. We found out, horrifically, together, on live TV, that President Biden was suffering from serious mental decline and we had been deceived about his health for almost half his term. We have watched helplessly as our own government under President Trump has undertaken a cruel and sometimes violent inquest of foreign-born people living among us and skirted legal processes and protections to unjustly deport them.

We recently saw the third attempted assassination of President Trump. We are at war with Iran. Three members of Congress have recently resigned in scandal. Threats against public officials have increased significantly over the past few years, and we’ve seen the assassinations of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk and Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman, Speaker of the House, and her husband.

I’m certain I am forgetting other major events, but these are the ones my brain has been able to hold onto in this era of constant upheaval.

Call it a “convulsion” or something else, but it does not appear to be ebbing just yet.

During Lent, I completed a devotional series by Lectio 365 series on the desert mothers and fathers. I shared about it multiple times even from this substack because it felt so powerful to me.

While each of the men and women considered “Desert Mothers and Fathers” have their own stories, they have quite a bit in common. Their stories all go something like this: in the midst of the cultural degradation, immoralism and collapse happening around them immediately preceding and after the fall of the Roman Empire, the men and women highlighted and quoted in those devotionals simply left the rest of the world behind in a whole-hearted pursuit of Jesus.

It turned out that what the desert mothers and fathers (who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries in the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine) lived and ultimately carried the Church through was a time we know as the Dark Ages. The structure that held their world together was the Roman Empire, which fully collapsed by the fifth century. People had come to rely on certain technology and trade and struggled to get by as those systems collapsed, emptying cities and plunging many people into poverty.

These desert mothers and fathers left in search of solitude, but it isn’t as though they turned to some utopian life of ease. There was no place left that held that for anyone in the West. Certainly their paths and their journeys couldn’t have been carefree - their desire to set themselves physically apart from the world as it existed in order to seek God came at a cost. They had to rely on others for their meals or else subsist on whatever was available to them. They lived in caves (Saint Benedict) or as hermits (Saint Anthony). Their lives were far from glamorous, but they accepted those conditions to afford the silence and solitude they sought.

They were pursuing God at whatever cost it came.

What is possibly the most shocking part of it all is that people followed them. Despite the isolation and the hardship involved, the act of living simply, set apart from others, in pursuit of God was attractive to other believers.

Some people surely followed out of necessity - in a world ruled by barbarism, they desired safe, contained communities in which to live. Even with other options available to them, though, people chose to follow these men and women, and it is because of this that the Church was able to survive.

What we are living through in the present does not fully compare to what these men and women lived through. None of this is a perfect analogy. But living in a moment where peace feels fragile, and in a persistent sense of uncertainty, it feels clear to me that these people were onto something good by seeking refuge in solitude.

Living in the wilderness

I write often about how politics-obsessed our culture is, and there are many good reasons that we find ourselves in this position. Great scholars and authors like Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone), Charles Murray (Coming Apart), or Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) have been tracing the origins of this fracturing for more than two decades, and a lot of it is neatly outlined in that David Brooks article linked at the beginning.

A commentator on a podcast I recently listened to explained this well on a micro-level by saying that the more dysfunctional Congress is, and the less they do their job, the more we end up talking, fretting, and fighting over issues, because nothing is being settled at the level it is supposed to be. When our lawmakers won’t make decisions (meaning: when leaders don’t lead), it throws our entire system into anxiety, with each of us trying to work out what we believe is the right or wrong solution. It follows that we associate ourselves with tribes to have both a sense of belonging and a sense that surely someone knows the right answers.

All of this keeps us in a constant state of anxiety over things we ultimately do not control and cannot solve. We carry that anxiety with us into church on Sunday mornings, and who can blame us if we hope to get answers to some of those specific anxieties there? It follows that church leaders and pastors want to speak into those anxieties, too.

I personally do not feel anything like the call that I imagine Anthony, Macarius of Egypt, Syncletica, or Benedict did, to pursue God at the cost of everything else, including physical comfort. Here’s the thing: I’ve read The Great Alone; I’ve watched the reality series Alive, and I can confidently say that I don’t have what it takes to bail on life as I know it, wander into the wilderness and live off the grid, pursuing God or not.

But I do have the faith to pursue Jesus in a moment that feels like the wilderness, and all the more if it can be done in community with other believers.

I’m under no illusion that if I attempted to create a monastic community today that stressed a rule of life and order to the community that anyone would join me. [Cue a Jim Gaffigan voice, “how do we live like this exactly? Does this mean I don’t have to work? Are you going to feed and house me? Also can I still have my phone?”]

Nor do I think that’s what I want for my own life. But if others share this desire I have for a community desperate for God above all else, I do think it will take effort from us all. A church is guided by its leaders, but Christian community is formed by the whole group of people agreeing to submit to Jesus and to one another in humility.

What would make a church feel like a refuge?

Pope Leo is doing something worth watching.

The pope has forcefully rebuked the American government using the gospel to justify war in Iran, and President Trump has not been slow to criticize him for it. The pope is not criticizing leaders by name, but I don’t believe that is cowardice. As he said,

“I will not enter into debate. The things that I say are certainly not meant as attacks on anyone. The message of the Gospel is very clear: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ I will not shy away from announcing the message of the Gospel and inviting all people to look for ways of building bridges of peace and reconciliation, and looking for ways to avoid war any time that’s possible.”

I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the Church works for.”

It seems to me the pope knows what he is about: Jesus, and his own commitment to the gospel.

I think the American Church would be wise to follow his lead.

What I believe this looks like is each of us deciding what we are about. If we have decided for ourselves that Jesus is Lord, do we believe the message of the gospel is what we and the Church work for?

Writing this led to so many more questions than answers for me, and while I’d love to wrap this piece up neatly and tell you what I think the answers are (much like I find myself wanting my pastors and leaders to do for me, most of the time), I don’t think this is that kind of piece. I think these are just questions to sit with for today.

I do, however, want to leave you with this quote from C.S. Lewis. It’s important to know that this comes from a sermon he delivered to students at Oxford in 1939, called “Learning in War Time.” The entire sermon is worth reading, but the crucial context is this: he is answering the question of whether pursuing a degree is a worthwhile cause while the listeners’ country is at war in World War II. “Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?” he asks at the beginning of this sermon.

We are not at war in the same way as his original audience. All the same, I love these words:

While we ride out this convulsion or whatever it turns out to be, I invite you to join me in trying to keep our eyes on Jesus. Our identity belongs in him, and together in the church, not in our patriotism or our political affiliation - and that’s how I believe we get through this.

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