Twenty-One Things that Caught My Eye Today: China, Syria & More (November 24, 2020)

Upcoming Virtual Event: Adoption and Foster Care in America: No Time to Waste

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3. Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Mor Maurice Amsih denounces looting of Mor Touma Church in Turkish-occupied Rish Ayno

4. Cameroon cardinal says he ‘refused to be tortured psychologically’ during kidnapping

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7. Sinister manipulation, stolen childhood: Inside a Tallahassee child sex trafficking network

On Tuesday, months after the arrests began, police unveiled results of Operation Stolen Innocence, a two-year investigation into the network that trafficked the girl. In all, 178 people — men and women of all ages, races and backgrounds — were arrested on charges including human trafficking, lewd and lascivious battery on a child, possession of child pornography and solicitation of prostitution.

TPD began the operation after spotting the girl in an online listing, Chief Lawrence Revell said during a news conference. After rescuing her, they unearthed a mountain of electronic evidence, including sexually charged messages between the girl and her customers and graphic images documenting her own abuse.

8. Charles Camosy: During the Pandemic, the Elderly are Dying — Slowly and Needlessly and in Pain

9.  Margot Cleveland: Forcing The Sick And Elderly To Die Alone Is Crueler Than COVID-19

Imagine the agony of a father or mother seeking healing and forgiveness from an estranged child before death. Think of the sick or elderly racked with guilt and unable to secure a final penance. Such emotional agony might well pale the physical suffering the dying endure without a constant bedside caregiver who can hear the moan, see the grimace, and witness the struggled gasps for air. Even the kindest and most skilled medical professionals cannot provide the comfort a loved one can.

Those imposing heavy-handed coronavirus rules must realize the truth: Restricting access to the dying is cruel. Keeping people from their suffering loved ones does not safeguard them. It merely subjects them to a different kind of suffering — one for which there might be no recovery.

10. Bitter Taste of Hypocrisy Lingers After Newsom’s Meal

11. Kenneth Craycraft: What Christians Can Expect From Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

To his credit, Biden does not take the intellectually disingenuous “personally opposed but” position of some of his pro-abortion Catholic predecessors and colleagues. His Catholic faith notwithstanding, Biden has repeatedly personally affirmed the morality of abortion without meaningful restrictions. And he has promised to facilitate access and procurement of abortion on demand, financed with tax dollars. 

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In addition to these policies that violate the religious moral sensibilities of most Christians, a Biden-Harris administration will also directly assault religious liberty. Harris has been a strong supporter of the Do No Harm Act in the Senate, and she will almost certainly make it a priority in the new administration. The purpose of the Act is to subvert, if not practically eliminate, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and similar legislation in many states. Implemented after the 1990 Supreme Court case Employment Division v. Smith, RFRA laws are designed to protect sincerely held religious practices from otherwise generally applicable laws that prohibit them. 

12. Institute for Family Studies: An Update on the Changing Face of Adoption

The new data confirm a trend noted earlier, namely that the proportion of adopted children who are being raised by parents of a different race from themselves has increased. That proportion increased from 21% to 29% between 1996 and 2016, as shown in Figure 2. The proportion adopted by mixed-race couples also increased, going from 4% to 10%. Conversely, the proportion adopted by parents who were of the same race as the child declined from 76% to 61 percent.

It is primarily white parents who adopt children of a different race or ethnicity than themselves. Whereas 96% of the students adopted by Black parents were Black and 88% of those adopted by Hispanic parents were Hispanic, 68% of the students adopted by white parents were white. The proportion of different race students who had been adopted by white parents increased from 24% in 1996 to 37% in 2016. Three-quarters of all adopted students in 2016 were living with adoptive mothers who were white, whereas 17% lived with Black mothers and 5% with Hispanic mothers.

 

13. Mere Orthodoxy: Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family

Why is this? How is it that, in an incredibly wealthy country—one in which most Americans believe strongly that families matter, and ought to be protected and preserved—we seem to be selling families so short?

Quart and Eichner tackle this question in different yet complementary ways. For Quart, to understand the plight of the parental worker, one must take into account the brutal autonomy and ruthless logic of our economic system. We have centered the norms of the workforce around the assumption that most workers are untethered and autonomous—and employers and politicians often get irked and annoyed when they realize that most workers, in fact, are neither of these things. Dealing with parents-as-workers requires us to deal with embodied humans: humans who age, who have babies, who need a place to breast pump, or who require more than a week of unpaid maternity leave in order to heal from the strain of childbirth.

“As President Donald Trump once commented, pregnancy is ‘certainly an inconvenience for business,’” Quart writes. “However loathsome, he was articulating the cruel common sense of capitalism: why should employees take any kind of leave for any reason at all, least of all for reproduction? But by this logic, what about those of us who do reproduce?”

14. Tanveer Ahmed: The case against the medicalisation of mental health

15. Robert Nicholson: Joe Biden, Peacemaker?

As I wrote a few months ago, “To reject peace with flawed regimes is to forget that their recognition and respect of neighbors is a necessary step on their path to better behavior.”

That Biden should welcome additional Arab states to the peace table is a no brainer. His more novel contribution could be in coaxing Palestinians to the peace table, too. It is true that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas vehemently boycotted peace initiatives under Trump and condemned normalization with Israel in the strongest of terms. I’m not sure any administration should feel pressured to placate him. But a new US president creates new opportunities, and, given the right approach, a post-normalization Palestine may be closer than we think.

16. The Daily Signal: Churches May Be Closed, but This Pastor Says We Have Reason to Hope

17. Institute for Family Studies: No, the UK Lockdown Has Not Led to a Divorce Boom

We also found that the proportion of couples actively considering divorce had dropped by two-thirds. That’s 70% fewer married fathers and 61% fewer married mothers actively considering divorce. This should really debunk the notion that a divorce boom is on it’s way. It’s not.

By coincidence, a recent IFS report found that four of five U.S. states that report divorce in real time showed a fall in the number of actual divorces. Their further analysis found that half of married couples’ said their appreciation of one another had risen during lockdown, and their commitment had deepened.

18. What Biden foreign policy picks mean for religious freedom

19. Deseret News: Religion Is Not a Hobby, Government Should Treat It Accordingly

20. Rod Dreher: Hard Work & The Chieftain

21. Nation That Revolted Over Three-Pence Tax On Tea Now ‘Pretty Cool’ With Government Locking Everyone In Their Homes

When asked what it would take to get them to revolt, most people agreed that if something really important were threatened like easy access to their favorite Starbucks beverages, they would be the first to start the revolution.