Let's imagine for a moment that the media is just making all this shit up. There are no kids in cages. There aren't actually 2300+ children who have been separated from their parents since May. No US law enforcement personnel has ever told a parent, "Your child needs to come with me for a bath," only for the parent to find out, twenty or thirty minutes later, that the child will not be returned. Let's say that all the reports are exaggerated, overblown, or just made up bullshit, and you should reflexively believe the opposite. None of it is real, none of it is actually happening. Let's say it's all a bunch of hysterical wringing of hands and performative moral virtue signaling and just the evil media profiteering on the (made-up) suffering of others.
To imagine that all of what we're seeing is bullshit will be easier for some people than for others, probably. How else to explain that, according to a recent poll, 55 percent of Republicans support the asylum-seeking family/child separation policy? Lest you think the question was worded a certain way, to get a certain pre-determined result, here's what was asked:
As you may know, some families seeking asylum from their home country cross the U.S. border illegally and then request asylum. In an attempt to discourage this, the Trump administration has been prosecuting the parents immediately, which means separating parents from their children. Do you support or oppose this policy?
Total Rep Dem Ind
Support 27% 55% 7% 24%
Oppose 66 35 91 68
Don't Know 8 11 2 8
For our purposes, though, none of that is actually happening. It doesn't make the administration's callous and cynical policy any better.
Even if you disregard the entire media-driven narrative and social media-amplified hysteria as exploitative lying about things that aren't actually happening, the politics of deploying and defending the policy by the Trump administration and its surrogates are an unforgivable abomination. Even if not a single child has been separated from their parents, the policy and its ongoing defense is morally reprehensible--whether implemented by Trump or the Democrats or Obama or Clinton or Congress or Satan himself. Even in a theoretical, consequence-free thought experiment vacuum of political war-gaming, it is indefensible to use the threat of (further) irreparable harm to innocent children as a means of achieving a desired policy outcome. I almost cannot believe that I feel the need to have to say that. But, then, fully a quarter of Americans apparently don't have a problem, here.
So it doesn't matter how they defend it--whether they cite the bible or claim that it's not actually a policy but merely the unfortunate result of (themselves) enforcing someone else's laws or just straight-up admit that they're separating children as a deterrent to future migrants or to score political points with the base. No matter what rationalizations or obfuscations or blame-shifting they do, it's important to remember how simple this is.
It is so easy. It requires no moral heroism, just a simple acknowledgement of the instinct you feel when you consider the question. Would a moral human being use even the empty, theoretical threat of separating children from their parents to achieve political ends? Should any person, never mind the "most powerful man on Earth," raise even the specter of harming innocent children to gain something, even for the greater common good, if such a thing were conceivable? No. Of course not.
Does it matter? Not enough.
