Speechless.

Sometimes I don't write at length about something because it upsets me to even think about it.

I can tweet, and I can post links to Facebook, but when I sit down and try to organize a set of original thoughts into a persuasive or at least coherent whole, my heart goes into my mouth and I sit dumbly at the keyboard.

I place my hands in the home position.  I put them back in my lap.

I lapse out of prose.

+ + +

So, if I detach myself long enough to think in a way that feels, to me, like clarity

(and I should acknowledge that it is a mark of high privilege that today's politics can be for me a thought experiment instead of a trauma)

I can observe that the principle of double effect is always at work,

and that it damns those who would do harm to children and families

in order to seek a particular end

(an end of any kind; even an indubitably desirable one)

by means of doing that harm and thereby instilling the fear of that harm;

likewise does it damn those who would, somehow, reason that

doing harm to children and families

is a mere side effect

of an act meant to achieve a good that is in no way proportional to the harm done.

+ + +

Are we consequentialists?  The law can be consequentialist; it is not a religious teacher, after all.

But when the lawyers wish to use religion and metaphysical morality to justify the law, 

the law had better have learned its catechism.

+ + +

The next thing that I observe comes from a detractor:

"If it's wrong as you say to separate families

[unnecessarily; that's what I say; and it usually is unnecessary]

at the border

because it harms children,

then it would also be wrong

to incarcerate a great deal of other people

for doing —

you know

— crimes!"

Well. 

You have said so.