I opened this story at the Huffington Post about Obama speaking up on Trump’s grab the children policy, and saw the subhead –

The former president calls out “the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms.”

I thought for a second about the phrase, which is a frequent trope in this story but also a literal statement – the children are much of the time literally ripped from their parents’ arms, and if they’re not it’s only because the parents are trying to minimize the trauma for the children so decide not to make it a physical struggle that they know they can’t win. The children are forcibly removed, and the parents would clutch them and resist if they had any hope it would work. I thought about that and then about the fact that of course Obama is a loving father so the expression is not a mere metaphor or emphatic rebuke to him. He can empathize with the parents very directly. Then I thought about Trump and before I could form the thought “why doesn’t it affect him the same way?” I remembered that it wouldn’t, because he was never involved with them when they were little. He has bragged about that – which is one of the reddest of red flags about his nature, that the idea of helping to raise his children is funny and disgusting to him. He was completely and determinedly hands-off, so that built-in knowledge is missing in him.

Maybe ultimately it doesn’t make any difference, because Republicans who did help raise their children still backed the hateful policy, and people who have no children are viscerally horrified by it, but…it’s one more thing. One more huge gaping hole in him where there should be something.

What Obama said was in a Facebook post today:

Today is World Refugee Day.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to have been born in America, imagine for a moment if circumstance had placed you somewhere else. Imagine if you’d been born in a country where you grew up fearing for your life, and eventually the lives of your children. A place where you finally found yourself so desperate to flee persecution, violence, and suffering that you’d be willing to travel thousands of miles under cover of darkness, enduring dangerous conditions, propelled forward by that very human impulse to create for our kids a better life.

That’s the reality for so many of the families whose plights we see and heart-rending cries we hear. And to watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very simple question: are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together? Do we look away, or do we choose to see something of ourselves and our children?

Our ability to imagine ourselves in the shoes of others, to say “there but for the grace of God go I,” is part of what makes us human. And to find a way to welcome the refugee and the immigrant – to be big enough and wise enough to uphold our laws and honor our values at the same time – is part of what makes us American. After all, almost all of us were strangers once, too. Whether our families crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we’re only here because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, how our last names sound, or the way we worship. To be an American is to have a shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us deserve the chance to become something better.

That’s the legacy our parents and grandparents and generations before created for us, and it’s something we have to protect for the generations to come. But we have to do more than say “this isn’t who we are.” We have to prove it – through our policies, our laws, our actions, and our votes.

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Also Trump wants to wreck the oceans. It’s not as if we need them for anything.

President Trump on Wednesday ended an eight-year-old policy to protect oceans, which was created as hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from a broken well, covering more than 65,000 square miles, killing untold numbers of wildlife and devastating fisheries in several Gulf Coast states.

President Barack Obama mentioned the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest and costliest oil spill in the nation’s history, in the second sentence of an executive order that detailed the first national ocean policy and called on federal agencies to work closely with states and local governments to manage the waters off their coasts.

“The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and resulting environmental crisis is a stark reminder of how vulnerable our marine environments are, and how much communities and the nation rely on healthy and resilient ocean and coastal ecosystems,” Obama’s July 2010 order said.

In contrast, Trump’s order does not mention the explosion that killed nearly a dozen workers and the spill of 210 million gallons of oil. The second sentence gives a nod to domestic energy production, the jobs it could provide and the financial rewards that can be reaped.

Beautiful clean coal.

In a statement, National Ocean Industries Association President Randall Luthi praised the new executive order as a “renewed broad vision” to foster energy security and create jobs. Luthi called the Obama policy “an uber-bureaucratic solution to a government self-imposed problem.”

“The offshore energy industry has successfully operated side by side with other ocean users, without major conflict, guided by the planning inherent in the five-year offshore national program and the leasing process mandated by the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act,” Luthi said.

Except for the Deepwater Horizon thing that is, and Exxon Valdez before that, and all the other oil spills.

Stephen Miller is literally trolling us.

A seasoned conservative troll, Miller told me during our interview that he has often found value in generating what he calls “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” This belief traces back to the snowflake-melting and lib-triggering of his youth. As a conservative teen growing up in Santa Monica, he wrote op-eds comparing his liberal classmates to terrorists and musing that Osama bin Laden would fit in at his high school. In college, he coordinated an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” These efforts were not calibrated for persuasion; they were designed to agitate. And now that he’s in the White House, he is deploying similar tactics.

Take the travel ban, for example. During Trump’s first week in office, Miller worked with Steve Bannon to craft an executive order banning travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. Trump signed the order on a Friday afternoon, unleashing chaos at airports across the country, complete with mass protests, wall-to-wall media coverage, and a slew of legal challenges. Afterward, Bannon reportedly boasted that they had enacted the measure on a weekend “so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.”

It seems implausible, that administration policy and PR are being shaped by the kind of people who spend their lives on Twitter harassing “snowflakes,” but there it is.

The AP reports:

The call came at mealtime — an anonymous threat demanding $5,000 or her son’s life.

So Blanca Orantes-Lopez, her 8-year-old boy and his father packed up and left the Pacific surfing town of Puerto La Libertad in El Salvador and headed for the United States.

Two months later, she sits in a federal prison south of Seattle. The boy, Abel Alexander, is in custody at a children’s home across the country in upstate New York. She has no idea when she might see him again.

“I still haven’t been able to talk to him,” Orantes told The Associated Press in Spanish as she wept through a telephone interview Monday from the prison. “The most difficult is not seeing him.”

She fled a threat of kidnapping her child, so now she’s in prison and the US government has kidnapped her child.

The phone call that prompted Orantes’ monthlong journey to the U.S. border was no idle threat, she said. About three years ago, Abel’s uncle was kidnapped by extortionists and freed only after the family paid up, according to her attorney, Matt Adams, legal director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

“When they don’t get their money, they kill people,” said Orantes, 26.

This time, the demand was more than they could muster. And they had only a week to pay, she said.

She and her son split from the boy’s father in Guatemala. He remains in hiding, and Orantes said she does not know where he is. Upon reaching the border, she and Abel found it impossible to apply for asylum at a port of entry, Adams said.

“A lot of people are showing up at the border to apply for asylum and are being told, ’We don’t have capacity for them,’” Adams said. “It’s not like they can just stand in a line for several days, because then the Mexican officials will grab them and deport them. So they’re then forced to go through the ravine or the river.”

That’s what they did. The pair crossed illegally into Texas and immediately reported themselves to immigration authorities and requested asylum, Adams said.

They were separated so Orantes could be prosecuted.

The woman said she was moved to different detention facilities, including in Laredo, Texas, and placed among other desperate, crying mothers. At one point, officials brought Abel to her, she said.

“They told me, ‘Say bye to him because he’s being transferred.’ I asked where,” she recounted. “They just told me to say bye to him. … He just started crying, saying, ‘Don’t leave me, Mom.’

“I just said, ‘It’ll be OK.’ That’s all I said.”

She was convicted of the misdemeanor of entering the US illegally, and sent to the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac to wait to learn if her asylum request will go anywhere.

Before Trump’s policy changes, she likely would not have been prosecuted, but instead allowed to remain with her son and granted an interview to determine whether she had a credible fear of persecution or torture in her home country. If officials found that she did, she and Abel would probably have been released while their immigration case continued.

It was weeks before she learned her son’s whereabouts, she said. She has not spoken with him. Her attorney said she has no money and is not allowed to make collect calls to the facility in Kingston, New York, where he is held. The boy has been able to call her sister, Maria Orantes, who lives in Maryland and has petitioned for custody, without success.

“He doesn’t feel well there,” Maria Orantes said in a phone interview. “When he calls, he’s crying. He doesn’t want to be there.”

In other words they’re both being tortured.

Masha Gessen published this at the New Yorker way back on May 9th, and damn did she see what was coming.

Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror. Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror. Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything. The single most searing literary document of Stalinist terror is “Requiem,” a cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova while her son, Lev Gumilev, was in prison. But, in the official Soviet imagination, it was the Nazis who tortured adults by torturing children. In “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” a fantastically popular miniseries about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, a German officer carries a newborn out into the cold of winter in an effort to compel a confession out of his mother, who is forced to listen to her baby cry.

Last weekend, independent Russian-language media published hundreds of photographs from protests that preceded Monday’s inauguration of Vladimir Putin, who has claimed the office of President for the fourth time. In many of the pictures, Russian police were detaining children: primarily, preteen boys were having their arms twisted behind their backs by police, being dragged and shoved into paddy wagons.

An unsubtle warning to their parents.

A few hours after Putin took his fourth oath of office, in Moscow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a law-enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. He pledged to separate families that are detained crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you,” Sessions said. The Attorney General did not appear to be unveiling a new policy so much as amplifying a practice that has been adopted by the Trump Administration, which has been separating parents who are in immigration detention from their children. The Times reported in December that the federal government was considering a policy of separating families in order to discourage asylum seekers from entering. By that time, nonprofit groups were already raising the alarm about the practice, which they said had affected a number of families. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the hundreds of families that had been separated when they entered the country with the intention of seeking asylum.

The practice, and Sessions’s speech, are explicitly intended as messages to parents who may consider seeking asylum in the United States. The American government has unleashed terror on immigrants, and in doing so has naturally reached for the most effective tools.

And here we are. We’re on a level with Putin’s Russia.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Adolescence is fraught with uncertainty and identity searching.

Claire believes that her feeling that she was a boy stemmed from rigid views of gender roles that she had internalized

I had a lot of gender problems myself as a teen. My parents had rigid ideas of what a person should be based on their external genitalia. So I endured endless years of Home Ec when I would rather have been in Chemistry and Physics. I wore pink as a little girl when I preferred green. I washed dishes after dinner while my brothers watched Star Trek or played cribbage with Dad…or got to do fun things like going out and helping with the tractor. My mother was very firm in her conviction that there was something seriously wrong with me. I was too “mannish”. Not in my mannerisms, mind you, because I was never what she termed a “tom boy”. In my interests. I didn’t want a hope chest. I didn’t want a bridal registry. I didn’t want a boyfriend. I wanted books and magazines and science and politics and philosophy. She made it very plain, very clear, that I was wrong, I was messed up, I was seriously broken. I wasn’t fully a girl, oh no, not possibly. But she never suspected I might be a boy, because in her worldview boys were boys and girls were girls, and had nothing in common. For that, I am eternally grateful.

She also hated the idea of psychotherapy. To have one of her children in therapy would be more horror, more disgrace than she could handle. So I never had therapy for my depression until I was 25, married, and rapidly dropping weight from the most recent manifestation of a lifelong battle with anorexia, to that time untreated. So there were no therapists to ask “are you sure you aren’t really a boy?”

The day came when I finally realized what I was…I think I was about 14…and the truth hit me like a flash of light. It had nothing to do with whether I was a girl or a boy. It turns out, I was a feminist. A female who had her own interests and talents in spite of what society and my parents said. A female who was female and didn’t want to be male for some reason, but just wanted to be allowed to be female in my own way. The battle for ERA was raging, and I had many battles with my parents over the desirability of this particular constitutional amendment. They won on the national level; I won on the personal level by identifying for myself why I was not happy in the roles established for me, and why I didn’t want to wear pink (because I liked green better!) or take Home Ec (because Chemistry, Biology, and Physics are more interesting to me) or marry the first boy who asked me (actually, I did do that, but it was many years later, and a mistake).

That recognition did not solve my depression. It did not make my eating disorder go away. It did not give me control over my own life (frankly, I’m not in favor of 14 year olds having full control over their own life, but that view is not what I thought at 14). I was still an abused, unhappy, scared child who needed some serious help, but when I finally did get help 11 years later, it was the kind of help I needed, not the kind that would assume that my desire to do “boy” activities meant I was a boy inside.

What if the internet had been available when I was going through all this? What if I had been given YouTube videos to teach me the way to live, rather than sorting it out by working through the worst aspects of puberty and eventually discovering through a long, extensive, and still evolving process who I was, separate from my “gender identity” and separate from my “assigned at birth” and separate from my “parents think I am this”? What if I had been a member of the generation who thinks that vloggers hold more answers than experts, or that experts should tell me what I want to hear? Or, worse, that experts should get their information from vloggers and 4 year olds who happen not to like pink and people with baseball bats wrapped with barb wire?

I finally achieved a solution to my depression, my anorexia, and my other worries at the age of 35, and learned how to smile. I went back to school for the Biology degree I’d never dared dream of. I explored my own sexuality without fear or shame. And today, I am more content than most of my peers, and I appreciate that. I still suffer frequent flare ups of depression, but I no longer jump to easy, obvious answers and instead look at my world and myself and see if I can sort it out…if not, I ride it out. It Gets Better. And when my therapist one day asked me, when I explained I felt like some grotesque female-male mutant, “do you want to become a man?”, I had the courage, the knowledge, the insight, and the support behind me to say “no, I just want to be the woman I want to be”. And he had the good sense, the training, and the insight to support and respect that, and understand that I knew what the hell I was talking about. He never urged me to transition, to change my name or my “gender identity”, or to be anything other than the woman I wanted to be.

Thanks to all these things, I am today the woman I want to be, rather than a depressed, unhappy woman who can’t see her way to get out of bed in the morning, or a depressed, unhappy man who found out that my problem wasn’t solved by transitioning into a different body.

If my experience could be of some help to youth and teens who are suffering similar problems, I would gladly offer my assistance. But it seems that people don’t want to hear my story now, because it does not fit with the story they have incorporated into their worldview, and insist (loudly and violently) that everyone else should incorporate into not only their own worldviews, but into public policy and health care.

Oh no, says Amrou Al-Kadhi at the Guardian, London Pride is not just corporate but also Militantly Secular.

Pride’s corporative makeover contributes to an image that I find politically troubling – that neoliberal ideology is the generator of LGBT rights. As a gay person of Muslim heritage, the inescapable secularism of Pride makes me anxious. When western capitalism is painted as a haven for gay rights, I experience a friction between the Muslim and queer parts of my identity. This is particularly sensitive in a context where, for instance, a large number of gay men in Paris voted for Marine Le Pen in 2017, persuaded by her rhetoric that Islam was a threat to civic liberties.

And last year’s Pride saw its fair share of Islamophobia, with groups holding placards reading “Fuck Islam”, with some specifically damning the East London local mosque.

Well, let’s be real: religion has not always been a fan or ally of LGB rights, and conservative religions still are not. In places where Islam is the government being gay can be fatal.

And while the treatment of LGBT people remains dire in many Muslim countries, this militant secularism mutes the fact that many queer Muslims also hope to march at Pride, and that a majority of Muslims condemn homophobia…

That’s not what the surveys say:

Of those questioned, 88% said Britain was a good place for Muslims to live in, and 78% said they would like to integrate into British life on most things apart from Islamic schooling and some laws.

However, when asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed that homosexuality should be legal in Britain, 18% said they agreed and 52% said they disagreed, compared with 5% among the public at large who disagreed. Almost half (47%) said they did not agree that it was acceptable for a gay person to become a teacher, compared with 14% of the general population.

Al-Kadhi continues:

With Pride’s corporate redesign comes some exclusionary pragmatics. Despite organisers stipulating that marchers can’t be drunk, there is a lot of alcohol at the parade, and this can be difficult for many Muslims who don’t drink, or for those who are fasting during the month.

Oh come on. It’s a huge public event, where people are going to do what they feel like doing. It’s a celebratory event, and for a lot of people that involves alcohol. Deal with it.

The enormous media presence also makes it more difficult for queer minorities who don’t have the privilege of being safely out to their families.

But the majority opposes homophobia, so what’s the problem? He hasn’t really ironed out the wrinkles, has he.

As a reaction against Pride’s increasing inaccessibility, queer people of colour and faith are creating alternative events. Make-up artist Umber Ghauri, who identifies as Muslim and queer, helped set up Queer Picnic, which offers an alternative space to Pride that is safer for people of colour and faith. Umber tells me how the secular nature of “mainstream Pride” fragments their sense of self, “forcing you to chop off your Muslim identity in order to celebrate your LGBT identity”. Queer Picnic, however, is an inclusive gathering without any media intrusion, offering predominantly sober spaces, giving intersectional queer identities the chance “to celebrate all of who we are”.

Inclusive? Is it? Is it inclusive of people who dislike religion? Of atheists? Of secular human rights activists?

You can’t always have everything. You can be devout or Out and Proud but not necessarily both. Liberal religions are fine with being out but – newsflash – not all religions are liberal.

Terry Sanderson commented on Facebook:

Here we go again, with religious people (or person in this case) whinging that they aren’t being given special privileges. This time its gay Muslims and Pride. This writer complains about Pride’s apparent “militant secularism” which he says excludes “people of faith”.

But surely secularism is there to ensure that everyone – people of all faiths and none – can take part on an inclusive basis. It tries to avoid the “I refuse to take part if they take part” mentality – and as we know, religions are very good at objecting to one another.

So now, apparently, we have a separate Pride event just for “people of faith”. This is so sad. I haven’t seen restrictions in the main parade on anyone with religious leanings. I have seen people marching under religious banners.

What this man seems to want is some kind of special privilege for religious marchers.

A new level of ugly:

In the flourishing world of baseless conspiracy theories, this one, part hoax, part smear, has been having its moment.

The idea that people whose experiences speak to some of the consequences of government policies are not to be taken at face value, and are actually “crisis actors” working for a nefarious purpose, has taken on particular prominence in the wake of mass shootings, such as those in Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter on Sunday became the latest figure to spread a similar claim, as a guest on a Fox News show, when she charged that some of the migrant children who have been photographed in varying stages of distress were “child actors,” in a bit of messaging she directed at President Trump.

Yes, certainly, that’s highly plausible, because of course it would be terribly difficult to find real children who were distressed by being yanked away from their parents by strangers. Real children in that situation are all smiling happily as they settle down on the floor of the small room walled with chain link and filled with other children, foil “blankets,” and water bottles. What child wouldn’t be delighted to have a journey interrupted in that way?

“These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now; do not fall for it, Mr. President,” she said, staring directly into the camera. “I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV.”

She says, on TV, staring into the president’s eyes via the camera.

Coulter’s remarks went unquestioned by Fox News host Steve Hilton, on whose show she appeared. He did try to move the conversation forward as a break in the show approached.

“I don’t know if that’s …” he said, trailing off as Coulter continued. “I told you we wouldn’t get a word in,” he said to the two other guests, Republican former congressman Jason E. Chaffetz and Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle.

But Coulter continued.

“These kids are being coached,” she said. “They’re given scripts to read by liberals. . . . Don’t fall for the actor children.”

She said her information came from New Yorker magazine, though it was not immediately clear which report she was referring to.

Over a series of emails with The Post, Coulter did not provide evidence for her claim.

Well she couldn’t, could she.