Briefly on Birthright Citizenship

 I understand that there is a case pending before SCOTUS on Trump's attempt to end what is called "birthright citizenship." I'm sure I've said this here before, but I don't understand how there can even be a legal question about such citizenship. The US Constitution is often vague or ambiguous. It isn't always entirely clear what it means when applied to any specific case. That is one of the legal realities that keeps the courts busy. But there is no vagueness or ambiguity about birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution begins: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" excludes the very few people born in the US but not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. The classic examples are children of foreign diplomats and children of enemy soldiers. The phrase "All persons" is itself perfectly plain and clear. With the very rare exception of people born here but not subject to the laws of the United States, if you're born here, you are a citizen. Period. I can't even dream up an argument that says the phrase means anything else. Donald Trump and his fascist allies may want to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants, but the Constitution just won't let them do it. They can make every policy argument they want to support their unconstitutional position, but policy preferences have nothing to do with it. When interpreting any law, including the Constitution, a court must first ask: What does the law say? Then it must ask: Is there anything vague or ambiguous about what the law's language means. If there is, the court can consider the arguments of the parties to the case about what it should mean in the case before the court. But if there isn't, the court can do only one of two things. It can declare the law unconstitutional, or it can apply the plain language of the law to the case it is considering. You can't, of course, declare a constitutional provision unconstitutional. It is constitutional by definition. The language of the 14th Amendment is clear and unambiguous. I don't see how SCOTUS has any choice but to throw Trump's case out of court promptly and perhaps even with sanctions against the Trump administration for having brought the case in the first place.

More on Donald Trump

 

More on Donald Trump

February 24, 2026

Tonight President Donald J. Trump will give his annual State of the Union speech to Congress. Essentially everything he will say will be a lie. But then, essentially everything he ever says is a lie. Most members of Congress will be there, though some Democrats apparently have the nerve and the good sense not to be. Here are some thoughts, written here a short time before Trump's set of lies is set to begin.

Nearly all of Trump's supporters are white Christian nationalists, and the more I read about white Christian nationalism the more convinced I become that this country is not just rotten to its core with racism. I’ve known that for a long time. It is also rotten to its core with stupidity. White Christian nationalists are just flat stupid about reality. About what the facts of the country have been in the past and what they are today. They insist that the US was founded as a Christian nation. It wasn’t. They insist that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are based on Christian principles and express Christian values. They aren’t, and they don't. They insist Christians are under attack in this country today. They aren’t. They say liberals are trying to stop them from practicing their faith. They aren’t. They think God sent us Donald Trump to save the nation. God so obviously did not do that that this one is even harder to get your head around than are the others.

Here’s the truth. This nation was founded on rationalistic principles derived from the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries CE. The Declaration of Independence clearly shows this truth. It says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It doesn’t say, “We hold these truths to be divine revelation.” The US Constitution almost ever mentions religion, but when it does, it does so to keep religion out of the government not in it. Not all, but many of the so-called Founding Fathers were Deists not Christians. No one is trying to stop white Christian nationalists from practicing their faith. We’re just trying to stop them from imposing it on everyone else and to stop them from inflicting the harm of others that they seem to think their ideology requires them to inflict.

Donald Trump is everything any Christian must vigorously though nonviolently oppose: He is stupid. Nearly everything he says is a lie. He is grossly immoral. He is narcissistic. He cares about no one but himself and maybe his immediate family. He violates his oath of office at every turn. Although this hasn’t quite been proven yet (largely, perhaps, because Trump's Department of Justice won't obey the law requiring them to release the Epstein files), he may be a pedophile. He is a racist. He is misogynistic. He abuses immigrants the way the Nazis abused Jews at the begging of the Nazi’s control of Germany. He uses them as an innocent target demographic on whom he can blame things that are in no way their fault and who he can use to whip up his rabid supporters against them to distract those supporters from what the causes of the country's problems really are. He is a convicted felon. He is, in fact, trying to turn our federal government into an authoritarian, indeed fascist, regime with him as its dear leader. He has no belief or faith in democracy whatsoever. To him, if he or his people lose an election, it can only be because of election fraud (of which there is virtually none in this country) and rigging of the election by his opponents (which just doesn’t happen). He has committed more impeachable offenses than anyone can keep track of. I know of not one good thing about the man.

Donald Trump is a lethal threat to American democracy and the rule of law. No person of good will could possibly support him whatever the person’s faith or political beliefs may be. Yet millions of Americans who self-identify as Christian nationalists, nearly all of them white of course, have voted for him for president three times and elected him twice. They see him as some kind of savior. I can only believe that they support him because he gives them permission from the highest office in the land to be their worst selves. Because he makes their stupidity and their bigotry somehow socially acceptable and, indeed, even virtuous. American democracy will survive only if we can overcome the immense damage to our country that he has done, is doing, and will do in the future.

On My Personal Racism

 

On My Personal Racism

February 20, 2026

This is an entry I just put on my personal diary edited just slightly for posting:

I just saw an ad in which two children, one Black and one white, are playing patty cake. It made me think. I have said that I am trying to see the person first and race second. But I have been so conditioned by American racism that I can hardly do it. How do I get over race being so unconsciously significant? It’s not consciously significant. I get how immoral and stupid racism is. But cultural conditioning is a powerful thing, and the American culture in which I grew up is profoundly racist. No one ever told me Black people were inferior. But when I was a child we chanted “Ee Meenee  Miney, Mo, catch a nigger by the toe.” And I thought nothing of it. My Mom said she didn’t like watching the NBA on TV because the players were all Black and they all looked alike. I though she was being silly, but I never really thought of her a racist; but clearly she was. The few Black students at South Eugene High School when I was there in the early 1960s were always outsiders. I never knew any of them, nor did I particularly want to. I remember the Black couple I once spent some time with In Germany. The husband was a professor at Wayne State University, no small accomplishment of course. His wife was a beautiful young Black woman. Mom, my brother Pete, and I wandered around Frankfurt am Main with her while Dad and her husband were off doing something or other, and I though nothing of it except I found it odd how the Germans stared at us like they’d never seen a Black person before. Or perhaps they’d never seen a Black person and white people being friendly with each other before.  

When I was a parish pastor, I had a few Black parishioners. They were both problematic in their own ways, one worse than the other. The Black parishioner I had for the longest time, and I, I like to think, got along fine. Late in his life he told me I was a good man, that despite the fact that we disagreed about many things about the Christian faith. I took him to mean he didn’t see me as racist, and I flatter myself that in my relationship with him I never was.

Yet when I see a person I don’t know, the first thing I see is race. I like to think that I don’t react negatively to anyone’s race, but I can’t help but wonder why it is the first thing I see. Maybe it’s because I’ve never lived anywhere where there were all that many people of color. I did have many Black clients at the Legal Action Center, where I worked for five and half years as a legal services lawyer representing low income tenants in eviction cases; and I flatter myself that I treated all of them with appropriate respect and saw them not just as Black but as Black people. I learned a bit about Black American culture from them, something I very much appreciate.

Well, whatever. I was brought up in a racist culture, and I can’t undo that fact. So I just try to be aware of it. To counteract it and to reject racism whenever I’m with a person of color. Still, my limited personal experience of it tells me how deeply, radically racist white American culture is. Even those of us who try so hard not to be racist are, deep within, racist. I can’t deny it. All I can do is hope and pray that I am able sufficiently to reject it.

Is It Grief?

 

Is It Grief?

February 3, 2026

I’ve spent a lot of time lately feeling like crap. I have described what I’m feeling as despair over Trump’s fascism and all the harm it is inflicting on the world, on my country, and on individual people and families. There is no doubt that that harm is immense. I needn’t go into all of it here. All of us who have been paying any attention at all to the news this past year know what it is. I’ll just mention two aspects of it. The first is ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Donald Trump is using ICE to create terror in American streets and American homes. He is using it against immigrants, or at least against dark-skinned immigrants, the way Hitler used his armed groups against Jews early in his deadly campaign against them. He has made millions of people afraid to leave their houses for any purpose—to go to school, or work, or a medical appointment, or the grocery store. This aspect of Trump’s fascism has provoked a massive public response against it, and Trump has backed down a little bit, in words if less so in actions. Still, Trump’s fascism and the har it is doing continue apace.

Second, Trump’s all out assault on the rule of law. Maybe this one hits me especially hard because I used to be a lawyer and still have my legal education and years of experience practicing law. I have heard all my long life that we are a country ruled by laws not by people (except in my youth it was always by “men”). That has never been as true as most Americans have liked believe, but there is still truth in it. A written constitution establishes our national government. It is the foundational law of the land. Federal office holders take an oath to protect and defend it. Until Donald Trump, even the worst of our presidents (and there have been some really bad ones) have known themselves to be bound by it. Our lives are governed by laws at multiple levels, from the federal to the local. We have institutions that exist to enforce our laws and to punish those who violate them. Law functions, or at least is supposed to function, independently of whoever the people are who are acting under it or enforcing it. The federal Department of Justice is supposed to be the top law enforcement agency in the country.

Donald Trump feels himself to be bound neither by the constitution nor by any other law. He and others highly placed in his administration violate court orders all the time. Trump uses the DOJ as his personal lawyers, and he orders them to undertake utterly unjustified investigations into imaginary crimes by his political opponents. He thinks judges who rule against him, which they, thank God, do all the time, are corrupt and should be removed from the bench. He has said his political opponents should be executed just because they are his political opponents. All of these things and a great many more that the Trump administration commits at will are all gross violations of law and constitute an assault on our traditional rule of law. And they all add up to just one thing—fascism.

I have been reacting to all of this Trumpist fascism with what I usually call despair. I also call it hopelessness. I am continually tempted to deal with how I’m feeling by withdrawing from the world as much as I can. I read far less news, and I watch news on TV far less than I used to, because most of the time I just can’t stand what I learn when I do read or watch it. Yet I know both that total withdrawal is neither possible nor ultimately desirable. I am a citizen of the United States, and that means I must be concerned with what’s going in that country if for no other reason than that it can affect me personally in quite negative ways. So I stay at least marginally involved even though I often wish I didn’t have to.

As I have thought about what I’m feeling these days, it occurred to me that I am also feeling a great deal of anger. I’m mad as hell at Donald Trump and at his many fascist minions over the severe harm they are doing to my country and to God’s world. I never have been, am not, and never will be a person who advocates or resorts to violence as a way to address problems, but I certainly understand the way it tempts people these days. Extreme problems often seem to call for extreme solutions, not that violence is ever really a solution to any problem. Donald Trump calls for extreme solutions, and we must find nonviolent extreme solutions for dealing with him. Perhaps the anger I and millions upon millions of other Americans are feeling will prompt us to find those solutions.

Then this morning I read a meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble. Trimble, an ordained Christian minister, calls herself “a strategist, spiritual leader, and serial entrepreneur,” not that that really tells me much about her.[1] She puts out daily meditations, some of which at least are well worth reading. Her meditation this morning is on grief. She suggests that we consider our reaction to the horror(my word not hers) in our country to be grief rather than despair, anger, or anything else.

I know what grief is. I have experienced a good deal of it in my life. I have grieved most deeply the death of my first wife, which occurred over twenty years ago when she was only 55 years old. Though I have remarried and my life is good, I still break into tears over that loss from time to time. Of course, our two adult children still grieve the loss of their mother when they were in their 20s. I have said to them many times that grief is the form love takes when we lose a loved one. I tell them we grieve so much because we loved so much. (I’m starting to tear up as I write these words.)

I found Trimble’s suggestion that we think about what we’re feeling as grief intriguing. I considered whether what I am feeling these days really is grief rather than despair. I want to think of it as something other than despair, and I tried to do that. But that anger that I feel just wouldn’t go away, when it occurred to me to look at Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ famous stages of grief.[2] When I looked at them online I was a bit surprised to find that “anger” is the second of those stages. It comes right after “denial.” Kübler-Ross says that anger may stem from feelings of helplessness and frustration over the situation one is grieving. So I thought: Well, I certainly am feeling one of the stages of grief these days! But does feeling one of the stages of grief mean you’re in grief? I thought no, it can’t mean that. So I decided to look at Kübler-Ross’ other stages of grief to see if I have felt or am feeling any of them.

The first stage of grief is denial. It is refusal to accept the reality of a loss. I’m quite sure I have never denied either the reality that Trump is a fascist or the immense harm he is doing as president. I guess some people thought that maybe he wouldn’t be as bad as they feared. That seems to me to be a kind of denial. But I’ve never thought that. I have never expected anything but disaster from a Trump presidency. The man is inherently incapable of creating anything else.

The third stage of grief, according to Kübler-Ross, is “bargaining.” This is an attempt to negotiate a way to lessen the loss one is feeling. My first thought was that I have never done that with regard to Trump’s fascism, but then something else occurred to me: Is my looking forward to the 2026 and 2028 elections as coming to save us from Trump that kind of bargaining? It may very well be. Bargaining can include seeking ways to lessen the loss one is grieving. I certainly hope and to a certain extent expect that those elections will at least lessen if not completely reverse the harm Trump has done, is doing, and will do for as long as he is in office. So maybe I’m experiencing some of Kübler-Ross’ third stage of grief as well as the second one.

Kübler-Ross’ fourth stage of grief is “depression.” This is a feeling of deep sadness and despair as one accepts the reality of the loss. I have no doubt that I am feeling this kind of depression. (Maybe clinical depression too, but that’s an issue for another day.) I always call it despair. I’ll say that I fear falling into despair over Donald Trump, but, if I’m honest, I think I have to admit that I’m already there. People of faith aren’t supposed to feel despair. More about that below. I feel despair because I see no short term way of ending and repairing Trump’s destruction of my country and of God’s world. So it seems I am experiencing Kübler-Ross’ fourth stage of grief too.

Kübler-Ross’ fifth stage of grief is “acceptance.” Acceptance doesn’t mean one is okay with the situation they are grieving.[3] It means, rather, that one has found a way to move forward and to integrate the loss into their life. I am taking “move forward and integrate the loss into my life” to mean that I have put the loss sufficiently deep into my subconscious that, most of the time at least, it doesn’t interfere with me living my life. I certainly have reached that last stage of grief with regard to my grief over my first wife’s death. It took me a full year after her death to get to acceptance in this sense, but I got there.[4]

It’s different with Trump’s fascism. Perhaps it’s different because that loss is still taking place. A death happens once for each person. It happens at a specific time and place, and then it is in the past. The losses Trump is inflicting on us are taking place over an extended period of time, and they most definitely are not in the past.

So I have to wonder: What does acceptance as finding a way to move forward and integrate a loss into your life mean in our current fascist, Trumpian context? Does “move forward” just mean you haven’t killed yourself in your grief and you’re still living? It seems more likely that it means that somehow you do keep living your life despite your grief. Grief certainly can derail a life. My grief over my first wife’s death nearly derailed mine.[5] I can’t say that my grief over Donald Trump has done that, not yet at least. I mean, I’m living my life, for the most part, just as I did before Donald Trump. It’s just that I live it with an anger and a sadness I didn’t have before Donald Trump. So I guess you could call that “moving forward.”

What about “integrate the loss into your life?” I guess I’ve done that with regard to the death of my first wife. I mean, her death is part of my life. It has been since it happened, and it will be until I join her in death. I’ve integrated it to the extent that while it’s always there, I don’t think about it most of the time. I thought about it a good deal a few days ago, because one of those days was her birthday. But most of the time I go through life well aware of her and her death but, for the most part, aware only at a subconscious level. Most of the time I’m not actively thinking of her death or of our time together, precious as that time was. Most of the time when I think of her and her death, I don’t break into sobs, though sometimes I still do. So I suppose I have integrated the loss of her into my life.

Have I integrated Donald Trump and his destructive policies and acts into my life? I sure hope not, for doing that seems to involve resigning oneself to the loss and the permanent nature of it. My wife’s death isn’t going to go away; but I know that one day Donald Trump will no longer be here, and I sure as hell hope that his destruction of our country’s institutions will no longer be here either.

I don’t think I’ve moved on from Trump. I’m living my life, but that life includes incessant news about some new horror he has inflicted on us or wants to inflict on us. I can go for rather long periods of time without thinking of my late wife. I can’t go more than a few hours without hearing about Trump, thinking about Trump, and being appalled by Trump. I don’t think it will be possible for me to move beyond Trump as long as Trump is part of the American political landscape and I’m still alive.[6]

So am I in grief over Donald Trump and his fascist nihilism? Perhaps. But I still struggle with thinking of my reaction to him as grief. Except, anger is the second stage of grief, and I sure feel a lot of that. Depression is the fourth stage of grief, and I feel a lot of that too. I guess I’ve done some bargaining, the third stage of grief, if counting on upcoming elections to save us from Trump constitutes bargaining.

So maybe I am in grief, or at least partially in grief. I suspect that Trimble meant just mourning over what Trump is doing, feeling really bad about it, by her term grief. If that’s what grief is then yes, I’m in grief. I mourn what my country is losing, and I’m mad as hell at the people who are making her lose it. So is it grief? I guess in a way it is.

Does thinking about my way of reacting to Trump as grief make any difference to me? Perhaps. I find myself being more accepting of how I feel since I’ve begun thinking of it as at least a kind of grief. How I think of Trump hasn’t changed, but perhaps how I think of myself has at least a little bit. It doesn’t bother me that I’m angry and depressed. It doesn’t even bother me that I feel despair as I think it used to at least subconsciously. Remembering that grief is a fully natural, human set of emotions helps. So perhaps all of this thinking about grief has helped some.

I cannot close this piece without saying something about the role of faith in all this, something neither Kübler-Ross nor Trimble does in their consideration of grief. I have had Christian clergy friends and colleagues tell me not to feel despair because: God. That God is real and really present both helps and doesn’t help. I agree that the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice. Yet that bend is hardly smooth. Injustice and other forms of evil keep coming up in human life. God doesn’t prevent them. If God didn’t prevent the Holocaust, and God of course didn’t, then God’s not going to prevent any of the harm Trump is inflicting on us which, as bad as it is, isn’t nearly as bad as what Nazi Germany did to the world, not yet anyway. So I don’t think that either God or our faith in God necessarily averts our despair.

Rather, God is with us in our despair. God feels our despair over human acts that destroy the faint trace of the realm of God on earth that we have been able to create. God holds me up in my despair and gets me through it. That, however, is a long way from preventing or curing it. So my Christian friends and colleagues, please don’t expect me to be happy these days. Don’t try to “cure” or “resolve” my anger and depression. You can’t, and I don’t even want you to. Grief is natural. Grief can be healing. So I’ll live with my grief, with my anger and my despair for now, thank you very much. And I’ll pray that some day I’ll get over it because its cause, Donald Trump, is no longer part of my life. May I live long enough to see that blessed day.

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[1] http/pps:camerontrimble.com/-about me.

[2] All references to Kübler-Ross and her theory of grief come from the first thing that comes up in a Copilot search for stages of grief.

[3] I saw a grief counselor once after my wife died. She told me I task was not to make it all right. It wasn’t all right. My task was to live with it not being all right. Apparently she knew her Kübler-Ross, and she was absolutely right. I shared this wisdom with a number of grieving people when I served as a parish pastor.

[4] As the one year anniversary of her death passed I felt a strong sense of release. Not relief. The grief was there every bit as much as it had been before. I felt release to go on with my life. It wasn’t long thereafter that my current wife and I got engaged. The grief is still there more than two decades later, but at least I was able to get on with my life in quite a wonderful way.

[5] I was serving as a parish pastor at the time. I found keeping up with that work to be healing, and I thank God I had that work to do. The care my wonderful parishioners extended to me in my time of loss helped too.

[6] I suppose death is the ultimate moving on though I doubt that that’s what Kübler-Ross meant by her term acceptance.