God is in the news.
They are suing the church: The Texas Attorney General is trying to shut down Annunciation House. Annunciation House is a nonprofit organization in El Paso that provides shelter and other critical services to migrants. In a country that has little to no federal infrastructure for what to do with migrants once they cross the border, nonprofit organizations on the border are left to do basically all of the work. In El Paso, you really can’t talk about the migration without talking about Ruben Garcia or the all the work that Annunciation House does (providing food and shelter, arranging medical services, arranging transportation, coordinating legal assistance, etc.) — Fr. Garcia (not to be confused with Ruben Garcia) said as much in our interview this week. Beto commented. As part of Abbott’s sprawling crackdown on immigration and border communities, the lawsuit that AG Paxton brought forward accusing Annunciation House of being “engaged with human smuggling.” Ruben Garcia put it best when he said: “If the work that Annunciation House conducts is illegal, so too is the work of our local hospitals, schools, and food banks.”
And making more pro-life moves: Jill Filipovic writes in her newsletter: “The availability of in-vitro fertilization in Alabama may now be in question after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that embryos kept in clinic freezers are considered persons under the law, and protected by the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. If you want a sense of just how overtly theocratic the opposition to abortion and IVF are, I invite you to read the dissent in the Alabama decision, which was penned by the court’s chief justice and is a really really long argument that can be basically summed up as “God said so.’” Trump privately expresses support for a 16-week abortion ban, etc. A few years ago, we did an interview with Jennifer Holland about how the anti-abortion movement won the war of images — it gives a helpful cultural history to the moment.
People are talking about desire: Dirt Magazine did a poll: would you rather desire or be desired? Becca Rothfeld wrote a really great essay on desire, its power to transform, the limits of order, and reason in the face of it. “The flesh! It just makes you crazy! It just disassembles you and puts you back together in a different form! Brundlefly is disfigured and ultimately destroyed, yet I suspect that many of us would rather turn into something other, even something awful than stay siloed in the solitary and workaday self” Perhaps a reaction to what same call a “sad sterile culture.”
The day the news died — again: Vice announced that it would shut down its news operations, taking the site with it, in favor of a “studio model.” Things have not looked good for Vice in some time — last year, they filed for bankruptcy and sold for $350 million to their former lenders — as they join a long list of recent newspaper closings.