Once they have faces, once we see that others are human beings with hopes and pains similar to ours, it gets harder to loathe them as a reflex.
Years ago, when I was executive director of what was then the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, we launched what at the time seemed a doomed assault on the laws banning same-sex civil unions. The legal reasoning behind our effort was unassailable—at its heart, a civil union is a contract and who’s to say that two consenting adults can’t enter into a contract to love, honor and support each other—but we knew the resistance in those days was entrenched and unreasoning.
At roughly the same time, LGBTQ activists advocated a different, less confrontational approach. It involved coming out—having citizens and neighbors who weren’t straight identify themselves to family, to friends, to neighbors, to coworkers, to the communities in which they lived.
The goal was to show everyone that, whoever we love, we all still have to pay taxes, mow the lawn, take out the garbage and go to the grocery store.
We have more in common than we think.
Back then, I was skeptical that this approach would make a difference. I thought the hostility LGBTQ people faced was too unbending to be altered by encounters with friendly faces.
I was wrong.
And the activists were right.
Our lawsuit went nowhere.
But over a surprisingly brief period of time, the approach of showing everyone that gay people were just, well, people softened attitudes and made change possible.
Once most people realized that the average LGBTQ person was a member of their family or someone they saw in church or the neighbor they chatted with when they were out for evening walks, the barriers to understanding started to fall.
It made it possible for people to listen. Once they did, reason prevailed.
That’s because most people, in their hearts, don’t want to be haters, don’t want to be constantly afraid, don’t want to be angry all the time. They don’t want to dislike people for no good reason.
This is the miscalculation President Donald Trump and his minions are making regarding the unlawful deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Largely because they don’t want to discuss their inability to bring egg prices under control or the havoc the Trump tariffs have played with the economy, they’re trying to make Americans focus, once again, on immigration.
But they’ve made a mistake, a big one.
Much of the focus in this episode has been on the president’s dangerous dance with the idea of defying court orders. He and his enablers have argued that a president’s authority should be without limits and that he is entitled to ignore any legal ruling that displeases him.
If he continues on that course, he will provoke a genuine constitutional crisis—and make it impossible for any clear-thinking American to take seriously claims that Republicans who support him also support law and order or consider themselves strict constructionists of our fundamental charter.
But that’s not mistake the Trump team made.
No, that mistake is that they’ve attached a face to this debate.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is at the center of this dispute.
He was sent to El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center as part of a Trump sweep last month. It appears he was included in the sweep in error.
It is not, however, an error the president and his aides want to correct.
That’s because they’d prefer to keep us afraid and angry all the time, thinking that faceless thugs from somewhere else are out to harm us.
The problem for them is that Kilmar Abrego Garcia has a face. He also has a wife and special-needs children, all of whom have been begging to have him home for Easter and all the days that will follow that Christian celebration of resurrection.
He fled his native El Salvador to avoid gang violence. He’s never been convicted of any crime in either the United States or El Salvador.
His wife and his children make clear they love him, just as so many other wives and children love their husbands and fathers.
It’s easier, so much easier, to hate and fear people we don’t know.
