Twenty Things That Caught My Eye Today: Passover, Child Welfare in NYC, Surrogacy & More

1. Bill McGurn: An ‘Iron Dome’ Against U.S. Antisemitism

Passover marks the deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery. On Monday American Jews began holiday celebrations in arguably the freest and most welcoming society for Jews ever. Yet few Americans have any idea of the effort it takes to ensure Jews can practice their faith even in a place where it is their constitutional right.

That’s where Michael Masters comes in. A Harvard Law School graduate who has served in the U.S. Marines and as a Chicago police official, Mr. Masters is national director and chief executive of the nonprofit Secure Community Network. SCN is the official homeland security and safety initiative of the organized Jewish community in North America. Its mandate is simple: keep Jews safe whether at a synagogue, a Jewish community center or any other Jewish institution.

“Just as Israel has the Iron Dome,” Mr. Masters says, “we want to build a proactive protective security shield over the entirety of the Jewish community in North America.”

The SCN website sums up the challenge this way: “Just 2% of the U.S. population, Jews are the targets of more than 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes according to FBI data. That’s why we are here.”

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3. Naomi Schaefer Riley: How New York’s Child Services system is failing city kids

During a recent discussion in John’s office [an employee at New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services], a supervisor mentioned a mother with an “active crack addiction.”

When John suggested it would be safer to remove the child until the mother could get clean, the supervisor asked, “But what is the actual impact on the child?”

Perhaps the mom might  “burn the baby with her crack pipe before we act,” John suggested.

“Even then, I’m not so sure the child would be remanded. Our standards are changing,” he warns, “they’re changing for the worse.” He has said as much to colleagues and supervisors, but to no avail.

John is not alone in such fears.

Sarah Font, an associate professor of sociology at Penn State whose research focuses on child maltreatment.

“It is alarming that they have removed caregiver substance abuse and drug-related activity from the list of factors that would initiate an investigation,” Font says.

This is a “time when we know that child poisonings, fatalities and other injuries related to parental addiction are on the rise.”

But it is not just substance abuse that has been eliminated from the list.

So has criminal activity in the home.

That, too, apparently doesn’t affect someone’s ability to safely parent a child.

4. Peter Pomerantsev: Russia’s War Against Evangelicals

5. Washington Post editors: Religious worship is a human right, even in China. Bring David Lin home.

David Lin wanted to create a space in China for people to worship as they choose. A pastor from an evangelical Protestant church in California, Mr. Lin told his family that, on many visits, he found a yearning for faith in China. He became active in the “house church” movement of believers who seek to pray independent of the party-state. For this, Mr. Lin has been wrongfully imprisoned in Beijing for nearly two decades. Secretary of State Antony Blinken should use his visit to China, starting Tuesday, to demand Mr. Lin’s freedom.

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Mr. Lin, now 68 years old, should not spend another day locked up. From prison, he can call his family only twice a month for five minutes each time. He has been deemed a religious prisoner of conscience by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and has been designated as wrongfully detained by the U.S. State Department under the Levinson Act.
 
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Mr. Lin is hardly alone — China holds thousands of political and religious prisoners. It denies basic freedoms of speech, belief and assembly to its people. Mr. Blinken will undoubtedly have a busy agenda when he visits Beijing, but should pause and make time to appeal to China’s leaders to free Mr. Lin. The secretary should have no hesitation telling China’s leaders that Mr. Lin was not engaging in fraud in his effort to worship God outside close state control. 

6. ABC: Parishioner stabbed outside St. Peter and Paul Church in San Francisco

7. Reihan Salam: Embrace Pluralism over Racialism

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11. Rebecca Onion in Slate: The Women Who Had Five or More Kids on Purpose Think They Know Something You Don’t

An interesting twist lies in the emerging idea of the mothers, and [Catherine] Pakaluk, that the youth mental health crisis—the—is due not to phones, or COVID, or the popularity of curricula. The kids are sad and anxious, they theorize, because kids are growing up in small families and so never learn a sense of duty, responsibility, and belonging. Mothers whose older kids have to take care of babies argue that the tweens and teens have a sense of place, feel “useful.” When they share space, they learn to cooperate. It’s hinted that kids are depressed because they’re in day care and school, where they learn the wrong kind of belonging: attachment to peers and teachers, rather than siblings and parents.

12.  Chris Bullivant, Brad Wilcox: Back from the brink: The intellectual tide is turning on marriage and civil society

13. Surrogacy Makes More Babies. Pro-Lifers Should Still Oppose It. – an Evangelical case in Christianity Today by Katy Faust

Whenever you read of God’s admonishment to protect the fatherless, it’s safe to assume the mandate applies to the motherless as well. Far from protecting the motherless, surrogacy manufactures the motherless.

14. Emily Zanotti: The Hormonal Hatchet Job

The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” publication fretted publicly, last month, that women were falling prey to “misinformation” propagated, they suggested, by a vast right-wing anti-birth-control conspiracy, using social-media platforms, to wean poor, unsuspecting women off the monthly pill.

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These women aren’t committing the crime of “spreading misinformation” — they’re committing the crime of deferring from, and even questioning, the status quo. The pill may have allowed women to put off childbirth for an extended period of time, but institutional leftism, mainstream media, and perhaps even the mainstream medical industry, want to now prevent those same women from understanding the ultimate cost, not just to their families, but to their bodies.

15. The Pillar: ‘Remember’: New ministry serves Catholics grieving a suicide loss

16. A prayer for when you’re suffering in your own Gethsemane

17. Keith Rothfus: On Abortion, We Could Use Another Lincoln

18. Heather King: ‘In Praise of Failure’: Where failing can bring more fulfillment

19.  Lou Weiss: This Year in Jerusalem

For the past 40 years, my wife has prepared delicious seders, but this year we thought it best to be guests rather than hosts. And where better to invite yourself than the place where the Passover story ends? Rather than saying “Next year in Jerusalem,” we thought we’d give “This year in Jerusalem” a shot.

But this trip to Israel is unlike any other we’ve made in the past 50 years. Why is this journey different from all other journeys? When I did a pre-departure Google Maps search, instead of showing subway stops, the map presented me with bomb-shelter locations. This is also the first time we’ve had to acquaint ourselves with the shelter in our hotel.

 

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