O-blog-dee-o-blog-da

My family was once on the rough end of America’s immigration law, when faced with the threat of my same-sex spouse having to go back to her country of origin.  Because of DOMA (The Defense of Marriage Act) LGBT people could not marry with federal immigration rights to sponsor a same-sex spouse to remain in the United Sates. The possibility that I could be separated from my spouse and toddler daughter was simply terrifying. I lived with a feeling of terror – the unknown – as we sloughed through looking for solutions.  We did everything we could to hold our lives together, but it debilitated us at every level of our existence. It was costly and cruel.  That is true persecution!

Since the Obama era, we had attained marriage equality and our federal right to equality in immigration.  I had hoped America had moved forward. I had hoped we were headed for pro-family immigration reform. Yet the pro-life and pro-family platform of the Republican party is a smokescreen, especially when it comes to people of color, who have been targeted for immigration demolition through devolution.

The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen,  a renowned LGBTQ Russian American journalist and activist, compares the Trump administration’s policy of ripping children from the arms of their parents to tactics employed by Putin.

In her latest column she notes, “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.”

Read excerpts from the column by Masha Gessen below and find the entire piece here:

When my kids were fifteen and twelve, we lived through a period during which the Russian government was threatening to take children away from queer parents, and, specifically, threatening to go after my kids. I sent my son, who is adopted, to boarding school in the United States while the rest of us got ready to emigrate. My biological daughter was less at risk, perhaps even at no risk, and yet the question of whether social services would come knocking sent me into a panic.

One day, about a month and a half before we left Moscow, as I was about to go on a short book trip, my daughter asked what would happen if social services came while I was away. “Will you go crazy?” she asked. I reassured her that a small army of lawyers, activists, and embassy officials stood at the ready and would protect her.

“I know I’ll survive,” she responded dismissively. “I mean, Will you go crazy? Will you lose your mind?”

A twelve-year-old was asking me if I had the mental capacity to survive having my child taken hostage. It was the right question.

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.

When my kids were fifteen and twelve, we lived through a period during which the Russian government was threatening to take children away from queer parents, and, specifically, threatening to go after my kids. I sent my son, who is adopted, to boarding school in the United States while the rest of us got ready to emigrate. My biological daughter was less at risk, perhaps even at no risk, and yet the question of whether social services would come knocking sent me into a panic.

One day, about a month and a half before we left Moscow, as I was about to go on a short book trip, my daughter asked what would happen if social services came while I was away. “Will you go crazy?” she asked. I reassured her that a small army of lawyers, activists, and embassy officials stood at the ready and would protect her.

“I know I’ll survive,” she responded dismissively. “I mean, Will you go crazy? Will you lose your mind?”

A twelve-year-old was asking me if I had the mental capacity to survive having my child taken hostage. It was the right question.

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.

Before reading Masha’s New Yorker Article I had posted this:

MY Article Here: