The Corner
Fifteen Things That Caught My Eye Today: Religious Freedom in Ukraine, Chief Justice Roberts & Roe & More
1. Archbishop Borys Gudziak: “Pray for peace and justice in Ukraine”
Really, there is unity in Ukraine. There’s toleration. Ukraine today has a Jewish president, and in the summer and fall of 2019, both the president and the prime minister were Jewish — the only country besides Israel where the head of state and head of government were Jewish was Ukraine. Ukraine has Russian schools, the Russian Orthodox Church has thousands of parishes there. By comparison, there are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Russia, and they do not have a single legally registered parish. Ukrainians in Russia, who number between four and six million, do not have a single Ukrainian language school.
At a time in human history where responsible world powers are revisiting their policies of colonialism and repenting for the sins committed by empires — when they’re trying to heal the wounds caused by enslavement — that the Russian Orthodox Church walks arm in arm with an aggressive military assault on a democratic country and society is really astounding.
2. Ruth Wisse: Why Does Ukraine Have a Jewish President? Ask Isaac Babel
Our guide to an answer is a native of Odessa, Isaac Babel, one of the boldest writers who ever lived. In 1920, during the first war waged by the newly formed Soviet Union, against Poland over territory that is now Ukraine, Babel served as the embedded correspondent in the First Cavalry army, made up of Zaporizhian Cossacks. His account of that war in the stories of “Red Cavalry” shows why Jews and Ukrainians may be the two peoples readiest to live and die for their freedom —and how their fused spirit lives in Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
4. Nathanial Hurd: Count Religious Freedom Among the Policy Responses to Putin’s eInvasion of Ukraine
5. Moldovan Catholic Church supporting Ukrainian refugees
6. Katie Yoder: The Story Behind the Viral Photo of a Ukrainian Man Hugging a Crucifix
7. Helen Alvaré: Roberts’s roadmap to reversing Roe v. Wade
Same-sex marriage is not an issue in Dobbs, but Roberts’s roadmap from Obergefell is a sure guide for a majority of the Court to reverse Roe on the foundations of respect for its own precedent and separation of powers. Since the foundation of our country, up to the moment the case was handed down, states protected unborn life from abortion in the vast majority of cases, and continued to try even when the Court had almost completely tied their hands. Roberts’s Obergefell dissent is right: If history is ignored, “No matter the Court’s profession of its own discipline in identifying fundamental rights, what a judge is too often ‘discovering,’ whether or not he is fully aware of it, are his own values.”
8. Experts respond to Biden: Biology and theology agree, human life begins at conception
9. Darcy Olsen: Foster care children are easy prey for predators: They disappear without a real search
Having been a foster mom to 10 children in Arizona, I know from personal experience how vulnerable these kids are. One infant I fostered was born to an 11-year-old. Naively, I asked the social worker if the grandmother would help the new mother raise the baby. She didn’t think so, the social worker told me: Grandma is the reason the child got pregnant. Grandma was pimping her out.
The social worker was nonplussed. This wasn’t her first rodeo.
10. Naomi Schaefer Riley: Drug policies should reflect addiction’s harm to children
11. Emma Camp: I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead.
12. Jay Richards & Jared Eckert: Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill Hits Target: Gender Ideology Harms Kids
13. John Stonestreet & Kasey Leander: The Nigerian Schoolgirls 8 Years Later
“At the risk of beatings and torture, they whispered prayers together at night, or into cups of water, and memorized the Book of Job from a smuggled Bible. Into secret diaries, they copied Luke 2, because they saw themselves in Mary’s ordeal of giving birth to Jesus. They transcribed paraphrases of psalms in loopy, teenage handwriting: ‘Oh my God I keep calling by day and You do not answer. And by night, and there is no silence on my part’ (22:2).”
“As we interviewed some 20 of the young women,” Parkinson and Hinshaw continue, “We discovered [something] that much of the foreign coverage had missed. We saw clearly how the teenagers’ will to survive was inseparable from their religious convictions.”
Similar convictions are being tested in other parts of Nigeria, as well. To this day, the regular murder, abduction, and violence meted out towards Christians by Boko Haram and militant Fulani herdsmen is made worse by the complicity of the government and silence of much of the world. The result is what some have called “Nigeria’s silent slaughter.” To date, the Red Cross estimates that more than 24,000 Nigerians are registered as missing, the most of any country.
In the case of the Chibok girls, 163 either escaped or were eventually released. At least 13 died in captivity. Nearly 100 girls remain unaccounted for.
14. Francis X. Maier: Selling Murder
Over the past 70 years, dozens of films have dealt with the tragedy of the Holocaust. And rightly so. But few have examined the program that set the precedent for the Final Solution and perfected its techniques. Between 1939 and 1945, the Third Reich’s Aktion T4 campaign murdered 300,000 mentally and physically disabled persons through involuntary euthanasia. The killings were expertly portrayed in state propaganda as “merciful” for the victims, economically necessary for the nation, and genetically beneficial for the German people.
Forgive Us Our Trespasses tells a very different story: the story of a mother who sacrifices her own life to help her disabled son escape a campaign of clinically organized inhumanity. . . .
So . . . what’s the point of all this remembering? Just this: Here in America, such things could never occur. Physician-assisted suicide? Sixty million abortions? Selling unborn baby parts? Fetal tissue experiments? Catholic public officials who ignore or allow such things? It can’t happen here.
Or maybe we have our own trespasses that need to be forgiven.
15. Babylon Bee: Uyghurs In Chinese Concentration Camps Fly Ukrainian Flag So People Will Start Caring About Them