As many have now died from complications as died in the attacks, the Fire Department of New York says.

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Kaitlyn: We know it’s not called “the Windy City” because of the wind, but we don’t remember why it’s actually called that. Maybe it’s because, on our eighth annual fall trip, Ashley took me and Lizzie to her hometown of Chicago for a whirlwind tour of its most important sights. Hmm?

We went to the Bean. Though its plaza is under construction and it’s surrounded by fences keeping tourists about 20 feet away, many peered hungrily through the gaps to get an unobstructed view. We went to a combination liquor store and bar where we shared one shot of the city’s signature drink, Malört (70 proof, tastes like novacaine), and glimpsed a few minutes of a Bears game. We had deep-dish pizza and hot dogs with pickles on them. The one thing that we didn’t do—because it seemed dangerous and probably too nerdy—was drive really fast through the underpasses that provide the backdrop for the car-chase scenes in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman movie, The Dark Knight, while listening to the Hans Zimmer–led soundtrack at max volume.

In short, we loved Chicago. After checking out the prices on draft Budweiser and huge apartments with river views, we resolved to invent a new type of modern woman who isn’t bicoastal (because the plane ride is too long and Los Angeles is just horrible); instead, she lives in New York and also in Chicago. (Just like Christopher Nolan’s Batman!) I guess it would be hard to figure out what to do about the winter, but she would come up with something.

Lizzie: Faithful readers may remember last year’s trip to Santa Barbara, when we “went Sideways” (by visiting all of the filming locations of 2004’s Sideways). This Chicago trip didn’t start out with quite the same level of thematic cohesion, but Kaitlyn did make sure the Batman franchise received several mentions (from her) as we touristed, and the movies’ consistent themes (like chaos, destruction, and deception) proved prescient.

Consider the night we went to the Chicago Magic Lounge, a venue dedicated to the art of “Chicago-style” magic. We went in expecting to be tricked, but we got so much more …

We began our evening at King of Cups, a gothic “craft-cocktail lounge” with an in-house tarot-card reader. By the time we arrived, there was already a waitlist for the tarot-card reader and no tarot-card reader in sight. Had he been made invisible by a Chicago-style magician? Or was this our first taste of deception? Perhaps both! While we drank happy-hour espresso martinis ($8), Kaitlyn wowed us with her own magic trick, which involved folding up a $1 bill and unfolding it until George Washington was upside down. You kind of had to be there. We figured we should keep this in our back pocket in case the Chicago Magic Lounge was holding auditions.

Kaitlyn: The Magic Lounge was the big event of the weekend. And that seemed to be true not only for us but for much of the city. When we arrived, there was a long line to get into what appeared to be a laundromat, but was in fact an Art Deco speakeasy where magic is performed. (I normally hate speakeasy culture, but this was different and not as annoying.)

Ashley had told us that Chicago was a city “full of girlies,” but I didn’t really know what this meant until we were seated at the Magic Lounge. All around us, there were girlies out on dates—one girlie wore a shirt made entirely of fake pearls; another sipped a cocktail that was the color of skim milk and garnished with a flower. They were extremely pretty and didn’t look mean.

Our first taste of “Chicago-style magic,” which is close-up magic performed right at your table while you sip a glass of lambrusco or what have you, was performed by a large man in a suit, who was wearing a pinky ring and made some self-deprecating comments about being sweaty and a deceiver. “We do call them magic tricks,” he said. He took five $1 bills out of his wallet, referring to them as his life savings, then flopped them around until they turned into $50 bills. He held one of the $50s up to the light so that we could see its watermark and everything. I was impressed and relieved. “I thought he was going to do my magic trick,” I whispered to Liz.

Lizzie and Ashley assisting a Chicago magician with a Chicago-style card trick. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: That would’ve been something! In fairness to the magician, his trick was more impressive than Kait’s (though I’m sure he spent a lot more time practicing). One thing about doing magic tableside: You really have to have some people skills. We watched as our magician made his way around the room, stopping to perform different tricks mere inches away from skeptical ticket-holders, maintaining an incredible sense of enthusiasm each time. He didn’t have the authority of the stage or a choreography of smoke machines to keep us distracted. Add to that, he was performing for amateur magicians like Kaitlyn, and you start to get a sense of how high the stakes were.

Luckily, the tableside stuff went off without a noticeable hitch, and we were buzzing with excitement by the time the lights dimmed.

Kaitlyn: The stage show was hosted by an incredible woman named Jan Rose, who had corkscrew curls and was wearing a different sequin-covered blazer each time she appeared on stage. She ran us through a surprisingly bittersweet PowerPoint presentation about the history of Chicago magic. At a certain point, it seems, there was a good chance that walking into any random bar or restaurant in Chicago would result in seeing at least a little sleight of hand. But all of these places are now gone, and this made us regret being born into dull times. I was personally insulted by fate. Why, oh why couldn’t we have gone to Little Bit O’ Magic Lounge (“Fun, food, and prestidigitation”), or the Pickle Barrel, a restaurant in which every table was given an all-you-can-eat barrel of pickles, and there was also magic and also (according to a comment on a blog post I just read) bartenders who could make balloon animals?

This reverie was interrupted by Jan Rose sharing that, when she herself was a magician, she did a trick with another magician named “Heeba Hubba Al,” which involved a sugar cube, a pencil, and her right hip (at least I think that’s what she said). Obviously this reminded me, in a jarring way, of the famous “You wanna see a magic trick?” scene in The Dark Knight. (The trick is that the Joker smashes a pencil through someone’s eye socket and presumably into their brain.) According to an oral history published in New York magazine, they used a real pencil! No CGI. That’s movie magic.

Lizzie: As Jan ran through newspaper clippings of Chicago magic shows past, I noticed that one of them used the tagline “It’s fun to be fooled!” I can’t say that I 100 percent agree with the sentiment. Take April Fool’s Day, for example, one of the most popular times for fooling and being fooled. No one likes April Fool’s Day, except maybe the people born on April 1 who love presents.

But is magic actually about fooling people? I’m not actually being fooled by the tricks. For example, you may be surprised to hear that I understand that our table magician didn’t actually turn five $1s into five $50s, because if he could do that, he would probably quit his job at the Chicago Magic Lounge. And I know that Criss Angel can’t actually levitate. But I think it’s fun to see people do things you can’t do. This is why professional sports are popular.

Kaitlyn: The first stage magician went by only his first name, Fenik, and his hair was bright white all the way down to the roots. Jan said that he is very famous in Mexico. He was funny. He mocked the typical magic-show audience by rolling up his sleeves, saying he has to do this because whenever he makes a coin disappear, everyone says, “You put it up your sleeve,” and when he makes a lemon disappear, they say, “You put it up your sleeve,” and when he makes a watermelon disappear, they say, “You put it up your sleeve.” Haha!

First, Fenik did a trick in which a bunch of ropes start out the same length and then become different lengths, which I thought I’d seen before. At one point, he held up the first rope and said it was “as long as my body” and then the second rope—“as long as my legs”—and then the third rope—“as long as my … head!” Lizzie didn’t like that joke. She said it was not offensive to her, but it’s just not her kind of humor.

I have to admit, some of Fenik’s other tricks were a bit too involved for 11 p.m. There were multiple audience-member assistants—two of whom were named Blayne and Zayn—and I kind of lost the plot at a certain point. I started yawning around the time that another Chicago girlie led Fenik through the room with a pair of silver coins taped over his eyes. He stopped in front of some guy at a distant table to tell him he was pretty sure that the item in the guy’s hand was made of green plastic, but because we couldn’t see to confirm and the guy didn’t let out a shout or anything, it was hard to be that impressed. At the end, he read Zayn’s mind. That was nuts.

Does this scare you at all? (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: Yes, I was impressed by Fenik’s mind-reading. At the same time, I hoped he couldn’t read mine. He wouldn’t like it!

Our headliner was Ryan Plunkett, a Chicago local and founding ensemble member of the Chicago Magic Lounge. Plunkett told us almost immediately that he was going to be bullshitting us, which I appreciated.

He started with a trick almost like Three Card Monte, where an audience member had to decide which plastic cup a walnut was in. Plunkett said we would never win, because he was cheating, and we never did. From there he moved on to some coin and card tricks, ending with an “Is this your card?”–style finale. I liked him, and if he were ever performing in New York I might go, except for the fact that, from our minimal research, magic shows in New York seem to be a lot more expensive than those in Chicago.

On the drive home, we discovered that many of the highway entrances were closed off because of Mexican Independence Day celebrations, and there were no clear detour routes. More deception! Eventually, Ashley got us home and Kaitlyn did some light digging into Ryan Plunkett’s personal life before we all fell asleep.

Kaitlyn: The morning after the magic show, a thick fog rolled in over the city of Chicago. We observed it moodily from our borrowed apartment on the 36th floor while eating candy for breakfast. With help from some online forums, I tried to teach myself the bill-swapping trick, but it wasn’t to be. Unfortunately, success seemed to depend on deftness, dexterity, and flair. I had hoped it would be a series of simple steps I could just memorize and follow, as with everything else I’m good at in life.

While we waited for the weather to clear up, Ashley showed us how to pretend to levitate (amazingly, she knows this), and we watched some videos of David Copperfield. “Nathan says his dad took him to see David Copperfield once,” I told Ashley and Liz. Then we watched a clip of Copperfield putting a duck through a “Duck-o-Matic,” squashing him flat. (And un-squashing him later.) Lizzie was like, “What if the camera panned over and Nathan was in the audience, looking exactly like he does now?” This video was from 1986. “We would all scream,” I said. She wondered, further, if I would take a photo and send it to him and demand an explanation. “If I found out that my boyfriend was an immortal demon, would I text him about it?” She nodded. Well if that was really the question, then the answer was absolutely not. We would be off to the dustiest library in Chicago to flip through some heavy books on the occult and figure out what Nathan might be after. Geez. You have to be able to count on your girlies for that much.

Lizzie: To me, it seems like just asking him would be the most obvious first step. What does an immortal demon say when presented with photographic evidence of his immortality? Only after we hear whatever that is do we head to the library, unconvinced and unnerved.

For the rest of the trip, we found magic everywhere—in delicious cornbread, fuzzy textile art, and, again, $3 beer and $1,800 apartments right on the river (much of the magic was price-based). We’re magic people now! And we could probably be famous magicians too, if we just worked a little on our finger dexterity.

Kaitlyn: We took the “L” (elevated rail) to the airport, and would you believe it runs directly into the terminal? Chicago really is an amazing place.

Back in the grand but not always magical city of New York, Ashley’s boyfriend drove us all home from the airport. Then, from my own Brooklyn bed, I watched a bizarrely illustrated breakdown of how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. I was shocked because the explanation is so stupid. I can’t believe anybody fell for it. It just goes to show, you’re being hustled every minute in this town. [Shaking my head, chuckling.] Ah, but you kind of like it. We like it!

Lizzie: It’s fun to be fooled! Or something like that.

On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, and Gallivanting, a collection of Famous People letters from the past five years, is available now from Zando Projects and The Atlantic.

My mother used to tell a certain story at family parties when trying to explain why my sisters and I didn’t really speak Cantonese, my parents’ primary language. It’s probably a familiar narrative, especially to kids of immigrants in America. Still, it stung every time I heard it.

When my oldest sister, Steph, was in her suburban-Connecticut kindergarten, she returned home one afternoon embarrassed and upset, and insisted that our parents talk to her only in English. Steph was young and doesn’t remember the specifics, though the scenario is easy to imagine: some kid, probably oblivious but still cruel. Our parents, who came to the United States separately from Guangzhou, China, in the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Hong Kong, spoke mostly the Chinese dialects Cantonese and Taishanese to us, but also possessed fluent English from their education in colonial Hong Kong. They conceded to Steph’s request, my father told me, and we became a primarily English-speaking household. Although my sisters and I could understand and speak some Cantonese (mine was the most limited, because I was the youngest; I was born a few years after Steph’s kindergarten incident), the ability faded as we aged.

The term for what my sisters and I experienced—the forgetting of a language by a once-proficient speaker and a family’s subsequent intergenerational dilution of the skill—is language attrition, and research shows that it occurs rapidly. Linguists say that in many cases, a heritage language becomes all but extinct by the time a family’s third generation is living in a new country. The reason is simple, according to scholars I spoke with: A language stays alive when used out of necessity. And the longer a group lives in a new country, the more likely another language will take its place.

Attrition can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration. For me, though, the outcome also feels dire. The thought of future generations of our family having even less of a connection to my parents’ language than I do stirs a specific melancholy in me, a sense of relinquishing something greater than myself—a shared history, perhaps. For a long time, I experimented with different methods of learning Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, the most common Chinese dialect and the one for which learning resources are easier to find. I tried a college course, a tutor, online classes, Duolingo, watching films from Hong Kong. Throughout, I asked myself: What was the hole that I was trying to fill by attempting to absorb my family’s language? And was it possible to reverse this attrition, so that the next generation wouldn’t have to experience it?

Three and a half decades after my sister Steph renounced her Chinese, these questions return to me when I’m visiting her in the suburbs of New York City. I’m helping her take care of her children, who suffer none of my language anxieties.

Her 3-year-old daughter is home from day care and hunched over an iPad that is playing Frozen II in Mandarin. She turns to me beseechingly. “Wo yao li,” she says. Translation: She wants something, though I don’t know what.

“‘Li’? ‘Li’ shi shenme? What is ‘li’ in English?” I ask her, translating myself.

She studies me with a cool, appraising expression. She knows the English word for li. She’s just hazing me, Steph will confirm later. Bored, my niece turns back to the movie.

I type different fruit names into Google Translate. After a few minutes, I learn with sheepish amusement that li, spoken in a rising tone, means “pear.”

My niece and her 5-year-old brother speak mostly Mandarin to their parents. My sister’s in-laws—Mandarin speakers—live nearby and often look after the kids, which has helped reinforce the dialect as the household’s dominant language. That, plus the Saturday Chinese school the kids attend every week. And—crucially—my sister’s hard work.

Steph primarily speaks to her children in a mix of English and elementary, self-taught Mandarin. She has spent hours translating her kids’ books and labeling mundane objects around the house with their Chinese names, memorizing the characters for “light switch” and “refrigerator” in the process. The family watches the Mandarin versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Bluey, and Moana, and in her free time, Steph uses Duolingo for her own lessons.

The result is that I’m constantly amazed by my niece’s and nephew’s linguistic abilities. I’ve also had a preview of the incredible parental labor required to raise children in a language one is also learning.

Much of it involves making peace with being outsmarted by children who toggle seamlessly between two languages, and who, in my case, sometimes correct my pronunciation. My nephew and niece sense that my Chinese is lacking, and converse with me in English. This behavior isn’t a snub, but kind of feels like a cause for shame, because it comes from a child. I try to cobble together my broken Mandarin to keep up. I realize that I can no longer joke that my Chinese is “toddler level,” because my toddler niece has far surpassed my abilities.

Steph has told me that having her children speak Chinese—whether that’s her Cantonese dialect or her husband’s Mandarin—is one of the most meaningful ways for them to engage with their lineage. To be proficient in a language makes you not merely a cultural spectator that passively enjoys food or classic films with subtitles, but an active participant. You can contribute information to a conversation; you can entertain others with your wit; you can give rather than just take.

I’ve always wondered about the relationship that any future children of mine might have to their family history. Yet there’s a comfort in what my sister has achieved. To me, she has wrested back some semblance of control. Her kids—and maybe even Steph herself—are connected to their past in a manner that I am not.

The key to reversing language attrition is simple in theory and difficult in practice: Expose your children to the language. “It’s really about time with that language—and high-quality time,” Krista Byers-Heinlein, a psychology professor at Concordia University, in Montreal, whose work focuses on infant development and language acquisition, told me. “When we say ‘high quality,’ we mean interactions with real people, with the things that parents and adults normally do, so just talking back and forth.”

Byers-Heinlein said the figure varies, but a child typically has to have a minimum of 20 to 25 percent of their waking time with those high-quality interactions in order to be able to speak a second language proficiently. She walked me through a hypothetical scenario: Say a kid attends a three-hour Chinese school each Saturday, and hears Chinese only in that environment. If this child were to sleep 12 hours a night (optimistic!), that would mean they were awake for 84 hours that week. The child would need at least an additional 14 hours a week of Chinese interactions.

The challenge is how to boost a child’s exposure when the parents don’t speak the language well themselves. In these cases, a parent’s key resource is a community, Maria M. Carreira, a Spanish professor at California State University at Long Beach and a co-founder of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, told me. For parents to rustle up the 20 to 25 percent of waking hours needed in a language, perhaps they can rely on schools or day-care centers that teach in multiple languages, extended family close by, play groups or library storytimes, caregivers who speak the language.

Of course, so much depends on where someone lives in the U.S. and how many generations their family has been in the country. A nationwide survey that Carreira and colleagues conducted from 2007 to 2009 analyzed people learning their heritage languages, among them Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Persian. Carreira and the late UCLA professor Olga E. Kagan noted in a subsequent report on their findings that Spanish-speaking respondents had some of the highest levels of proficiency, which they attributed to the closeness of Latin America to the U.S., as well as to the country’s large population of Spanish speakers. Though most Mandarin and Cantonese heritage-language learners surveyed were—like the Spanish speakers—born in the U.S. or had arrived before age 11, their exposure to their heritage language “was considerably more limited than that of Spanish speakers.” The researchers pointed out some potential reasons: Compared with Spanish speakers, fewer Mandarin and Cantonese speakers visited their (or their parents’) birth country each year, and nearly half of them reported never having read in their heritage language.

These data fed my curiosity about how Asian American parents in particular navigate teaching their children a heritage language they’ve lost. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed an influx of newcomers from Asian countries, my parents included; many Asian Americans around my age were thus the first in our families to be born in America. Through our immigrant parents, we understand our heritage. And we’re also, by virtue of being born here, indelibly American. How we raise children—and in what language—can feel like an inflection point for our cultures.

[Read: My novel is a love letter my mother can’t read]

These challenges are hardly unique to Asian Americans, however. Silvina Montrul, a linguist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, notes in her recent book, Native Speakers, Interrupted, that “in the United States, English is the language of power and the language children choose to speak with their peers.” She nods to the work of colleagues who found that in Miami, some children who grew up speaking Spanish at home and English and Spanish at school still chose to converse in English outside school.

Montrul, who is Argentinian, went to remarkable lengths to make sure that her two daughters spoke Spanish. She formed the University Language Academy, an after-school and summer immersion program for children ages 4 to 17. She recalls that she was particularly firm in making Spanish the primary language she used to interact with her daughters, even when one—in an echo of my sister Steph’s story—begged her not to. Montrul says that if a child picks up another language before puberty, there’s a good chance they’ll sound like a native speaker with continued exposure and use. But without that practice, the language can just as easily fade. “As I say in my work, children are great language learners,” Montrul told me over the phone, “but they are also great language losers.”

Even though America is full of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, Americans tend not to speak multiple languages. According to the nonprofit American Councils for International Education, only 20 percent of K–12 students take foreign-language classes. In Norway, Romania, and Luxembourg, by contrast, every primary- and secondary-school student takes foreign-language classes. And even European countries with lower percentages of students learning a foreign language far outpace the U.S.: Greece with 87 percent, Portugal with 69 percent, and Belgium with 64 percent. Large immigrant populations have historically brought new languages to America, yet as the scholars Rubén G. Rumbaut and Douglas S. Massey note, the country has a “well established reputation as a graveyard for immigrant languages.” This is no aberration; it is grounded in decades of policy and sentiment.

Efforts to suppress languages other than English were present even in the country’s earliest days. Starting in the 1800s, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to so-called residential schools to be educated according to white American standards; they were punished for speaking their own languages.

In 1915, speaking at Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that there was “no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.” He would proclaim four years later in a letter to the American Defense Society that the U.S. had “room for but one language here, and that is the English language.” Roosevelt’s words foreshadowed a posture of monolingualism. The following century of American hegemony allowed this approach: People in other countries have had to learn English to apply to study at American colleges, to conduct business with American companies, or to understand the nuances of Hollywood films. Americans have felt far less pressure to reciprocate by learning foreign languages.

Today, true fluency in multiple languages is uncommon in most of the United States, even as it exists in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada, where the government weaves multiple languages into daily life through street signs and official forms. Legislation in Wales and Quebec have established Welsh and French, respectively, as official languages. In Wales, nearly 30 percent of people age 3 or older can speak Welsh—about 900,000 people—according to a population survey from 2022. In Quebec, just under 86 percent of people said in a 2021 analysis that they spoke French regularly at home.

[Read: How to save a dying language]

Compare that with Hawaii, where U.S. authorities banned teaching in the native language in the 19th century. Not until 1978 was the state constitution amended and Hawaiian recognized as an official language; prior to this change, fewer than 2,500 people spoke Hawaiian, most of them 60 years or older, according to Larry Kimura, a professor of Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. To try to save the language, educators created a nonprofit preschool, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, a Hawaiian immersion program that has become a model for indigenous-language revitalization around the world. ‘Aha Pūnana Leo and its Hi’ipēpē Infant Program now have more than 6,000 alumni, and the organization has offshoots that extend Hawaiian immersion schooling all the way to college. If language can be decimated by government policies, efforts around the world have shown that language can also be saved from extinction, even if progress is often fragile.

In the U.S., bringing a heritage language back into a family usually comes down to the efforts of individuals. The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort.

Betty Choi, a pediatrician who lives outside Santa Barbara, California, and is the author of the children’s book Human Body Learning Lab, is another remarkable example of just how far a dedicated approach to language instruction can go. Choi grew up in Syracuse, New York, and wanted to connect her two young children to the memory of her late parents, who spoke various dialects of Chinese, and to her husband’s family, who live across the country and speak Korean. So Choi set about teaching herself and her children Mandarin and Korean.

Over a few years, she cycled through different methods: enrolling herself in language classes; seeking out multilingual child-care providers; and exposing her children to books, songs, and videos in those languages. (Few other Asian Americans live where Choi does, which presents a particular challenge, she told me, in her effort to expose her children to Chinese and Korean outside the house.) Eventually, Choi created her own curriculum, which she parlayed into what is now Chalk Academy, an online resource for raising multilingual children that includes worksheets; articles; and suggestions for books, toys, and activities that help facilitate learning Chinese and Korean.

Choi’s children are now conversational in Mandarin and have retained a small number of Korean words. (“It was painful to watch my children forget Korean so quickly,” Choi wrote in an email, sharing that the Korean words they mostly say now are: ttong (poop), bang-gu (fart), and saja (lion), referring to a favorite stuffed animal.) She’s worried they will start to lose their Mandarin, too, as the English terms they’re learning at school and with friends outpace the amount of self-taught Mandarin she can speak to them at home. “But my kids know that Chinese language is a family value, not simply an extracurricular activity. As such, Mandarin is still the primary language that I speak with my children,” Choi wrote. Still, the children might reply in English, Mandarin, or a mix of the two.

[Read: Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it]

There is, of course, another alternative to either total fluency or abandoning a language. Hieu Truong, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the area, has a 4-year-old son and a six-month-old baby. She’s slowly trying to introduce her children to Vietnamese, but has remained realistic about their potential bilingualism and her own abilities.

Truong, whose parents left Vietnam for the U.S. in the early ’80s, says she can understand, speak, and read only a little Vietnamese—enough to order in a restaurant, but maybe not enough to digest the newspaper. Truong sometimes reads her son children’s books in Vietnamese—through those books, she learned the words for, say, “zebra” and “giraffe” herself, and he’s now familiar with basic Vietnamese words, like the one for “numbers.” Truong also benefits from resources that didn’t exist when she grew up: Netflix shows and movies dubbed in Vietnamese; activity books and flashcards sold online; resources such as the SEAD Project, a Minneapolis-based organization that offers Hmong, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Lao language courses, and emphasizes the history and culture of the Southeast Asian diaspora through its programming.

For her son, “fluency isn’t necessarily the goal,” Truong told me. She knows personally how hard it is to maintain proficiency and doesn’t want to add that pressure. “But I do want him exposed to it. I want him to go into a Vietnamese restaurant and be like, ‘Okay, I know what’s going on.’ I want him, when he talks to his older relatives, to know how to properly greet them—know how to say ‘Thank you.’”

[Read: Forgetting and remembering your first language]

Ultimately, Truong said that a big part of teaching her son Vietnamese is “untangling” the objective for herself versus the one for her toddler. Here, I relate to her, even though our goals differ. Being far from family and a network of Cantonese speakers with whom I could interact on a daily basis makes the goal of everyday fluency difficult to attain. But I long for the emotional closeness that comes with an ease of interaction. Having only a vague familiarity with a language is like navigating the world with blurred vision. Everything appears with softened edges, and I am forever grasping for true meaning, deciphering fuzzy translations. I can see the outline of things, but I can’t be confident that I truly know what I’m seeing.

Fluency would sharpen my focus. It would allow me to see and participate in the small details of my life that are rendered in Cantonese: the textures of a conversation with extended family, the jokes that unfold at the dinner table, the subtext that is begging to be teased out with a gentle question. I’m seeking to know more of these tiny moments.

This is what I want for any potential children of mine, too. I don’t desire fluency for them merely to compensate for what I lost as a kid. Rather, I yearn for them to have a closeness to the culture and the little joys of everyday life that such proximity can reveal. Language facilitates many things: at its most basic, a transfer of information, and at its most complex, an exchange of emotion. But perhaps what I value above all else is that it grants intimacy.

Abraham Lincoln was a politician, though people like to describe him in ways that sound more noble. Contemporaries considered him a Christlike figure who suffered and died so that his nation might live. Tolstoy called him “a saint of humanity.” Lincoln himself said he was only the “accidental instrument” of a “great cause”—but he preserved the country and took part in a social revolution because he engaged in politics. He did the work that others found dirty or beneath them.

He always considered slavery wrong, but felt that immediate abolition was beyond the federal government’s constitutional power and against the wishes of too many voters. So he tried to contain slavery, with no idea how it would end, and moved forward only when political circumstances changed. “I shall adopt new views so fast as they appear to be true views,” he said shortly before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

At each step, he tried to build coalitions with people who disagreed with him. Many thought he was backward, others found him radical, and still others had different perspectives based on their experiences and lives. I studied 16 of Lincoln’s face-to-face meetings with people who differed with him, and learned that his skill in managing these differences was vital to his success.

Some of us have lost patience with that skill—or even hold it in contempt—because we misunderstand it. Right-wing figures deem talking with the other side a sign of weakness and betrayal; people on the left call it naive and morally wrong. “Changing minds” is considered almost impossible in our angry and fragmented society.

These assertions miss the point of Lincoln’s achievement. It’s not that he greatly changed his critics’ beliefs, nor that they greatly changed his. Rather, he learned how to make his beliefs actionable. He started his career in the minority party and set out to make a majority. He perceived a social problem so vast that it seemed impossible to address, and slowly found ways to address it. Through it all, he refused to surrender his bedrock beliefs, and finally led a coalition of the majority in the Civil War against a minority who tried to break up the country.

A self-educated Illinois lawyer who’d risen from poverty, Lincoln understood that he needed allies in a democracy. He found them by appealing to their self-interest. He supported the ambitions of other men who later supported his. He embraced the patronage system, giving jobs to his supporters. He even spoke of self-interest when it came to slavery, warning the almost entirely white electorate that if they didn’t resist it, slavery would expand in ways that harmed them.

[Read: The place of Abraham Lincoln in history]

His pragmatism made him the right leader for the Republican Party, an unwieldy coalition whose members agreed that slavery was wrong but disagreed about how it should end, and how freedpeople would fit into society. Could white voters ever accept millions of freed Black citizens as their equals in a multiracial republic? Lincoln generally ducked this politically explosive question, even promoting the idea of sending Black people to colonies overseas.

He could duck it no longer after January 1, 1863. On that day, his Emancipation Proclamation decreed freedom for millions in areas held by rebels in the ongoing Civil War. In the months that followed, many of the formerly enslaved enlisted in the Union army—each one providing a “double advantage,” as Lincoln said, because the Confederates lost a laborer and the Union gained a soldier. Their service ultimately forced a reckoning with their future status as citizens: having helped uphold the Constitution, they naturally wanted full constitutional rights. America’s failure to fulfill this promise became the central problem of Reconstruction, and is one we’re still wrestling with today. So it’s relevant to trace the debate back to one of its earliest moments: Lincoln’s meeting with Frederick Douglass on August 10, 1863.

Douglass was surely Lincoln’s most famous visitor that day. He had escaped from bondage in Maryland long before the war, becoming an antislavery writer and orator. Thousands came to hear him speak, and rock-throwing mobs occasionally drove him offstage. Entire slave states banned his books. His name was often linked with Lincoln’s: Conservative newspapers smeared the Republican Party by saying it was following this Black man’s agenda.

In truth, he had often criticized the president. During the first year and a half of the Civil War, he wrote in his newspaper that Lincoln had a “passion for making himself seem silly and ridiculous”; that his statements were “characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical”; that he had shown “canting hypocrisy”; and that he represented “American prejudice and Negro hatred.” He wrote that Lincoln had taken the “obvious” step of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation only after “slothful” delays.

After the proclamation, he agreed to become an army recruiter, urging Black men to sign up for a “double advantage” of their own—crushing slavery and proving they were worthy of equal citizenship. “You will receive the same wages, the same rations, the same equipments, the same protection, the same treatment, and the same bounty, secured to the white soldiers,” he assured them, throwing his reputation behind this promise. Two of his sons enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts, a newly formed Black regiment, and one of them, Lewis Douglass, became a sergeant—a noncommissioned officer.

But the elder Douglass soon came to feel that the government had made a liar out of him, failing to deliver the equal treatment he had promised. Not a single commissioned officer—no lieutenant, captain, or major—was Black. Lack of experience was no explanation: Well‑connected white men had become officers and even generals with scant military backgrounds. In addition, white private soldiers were paid $13 each month, while Black soldiers received only $7, the rate for ordinary Black laborers. One Black sergeant called the injustice the “Lincoln despotism.”

Beyond these insults, Black soldiers felt that they faced more danger than their comrades. White men captured by the rebels could expect to be kept safe as prisoners of war, but Confederate President Jefferson Davis had issued an order “that all negro slaves captured in arms” should be turned over to “their respective states” to be returned to slavery or killed. Black troops wanted Lincoln to announce a policy of retaliation, executing a Confederate prisoner for every Black soldier killed, but they heard no reply.

In only one sense did Black men gain equal status: They could be thrown into combat as readily as anyone else. When the 54th deployed to the islands around Charleston, South Carolina, the regiment asked for the honor of leading an attack on Fort Wagner. The troops climbed the fort’s wall and briefly planted their flag, but were forced to retreat; hundreds were killed or wounded. Sergeant Lewis Douglass wrote his father to say that “the splendid 54th is cut to pieces.” His sword sheath was shot off as he stood on Fort Wagner’s parapet, and he ended the letter: “If I die tonight I will not die a coward. Good bye.” Fears emerged that the rebels were executing prisoners. The New York Tribune said the soldiers of the 54th had shown their “devotion to the cause of a country which has never yet recognized their rights.”

The same article listed groups of Black men believed to have been massacred elsewhere—teamsters in Tennessee, much of a regiment in Louisiana, and every Black prisoner in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Douglass may have had this newspaper in hand when he wrote a letter to the military’s head recruiter, George Stearns, listing these incidents and announcing that he couldn’t continue encouraging men to fight: “Colored men have much overrated the enlightenment, justice and generosity of our rulers at Washington.”

Unwilling to lose his prize recruiter, Stearns met with Douglass to assure him that the administration was beginning to address his concerns. Lincoln had finally issued an order of retaliation against Confederate prisoners. When Douglass asked why it had taken so long, Stearns suggested that he take his case to Washington. Soon Douglass’s train clattered into the District of Columbia depot, where he emerged two blocks from the Capitol. Its brand‑new white dome wasn’t quite complete: Workers had not yet placed the Statue of Freedom on top.

Douglass expected a long wait at the White House: “The stairway was crowded with applicants,” and “they were white,” while “I was the only dark spot among them,” he wrote in a letter sent immediately afterward. Given his scathing critiques of the president, he had reason to wonder if Lincoln would make time for him at all. But within two minutes, a man emerged and respectfully invited in “Mr. Douglass.”

He walked in to see Abraham Lincoln sprawled in his chair, his legs so long that his feet were “in different parts of the room.” Lincoln rose and warmly extended a hand. The activist was impressed. “I have never seen a more transparent countenance. There was not the slightest shadow of embarrassment after the first moment.”

Lincoln had read one of Douglass’s speeches that accused Lincoln of being “tardy, hesitating, vacillating,” and mentioned it now to answer the accusation: “The President said to me, ‘Mr. Douglass, I have been charged with being tardy and the like’; and he went on, and partly admitted that he might seem slow; but he said, ‘I am charged with vacillating; but, Mr. Douglass, I do not think the charge can be sustained; I think it cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.’”

The president then spoke of the politics that caused him to act slowly. He said he had needed to work just to ensure that Black soldiers wore the same uniforms as white ones, because he faced resistance on every detail that might imply their equality.

[Read: A house still divided]

Why had Lincoln waited more than half a year to issue an order of retaliation for attacks on Black soldiers? “Had he sooner issued that proclamation such was the state of public popular prejudice that an outcry would have been raised against the measure. It would be said ‘Ah! We thought it would come to this. White men were to be killed for negroes.’ His general view was that the battles in which negroes had distinguished themselves for bravery and general good conduct was the necessary preparation of the public mind for his proclamation.”

The president said something similar about unequal pay: White prejudice demanded unfairness in this early stage, but that would be corrected in time. Douglass decided the president’s approach was “reasonable.” In 1864, Congress provided equal pay.

Douglass concluded: “Whoever else might abandon his anti slavery policy President Lincoln would stand firm to his.”

Douglass resumed lending his name to the Union cause. Sometimes his speeches mentioned his meeting with the president, which was itself an advertisement for equality. He said Lincoln was “wise, great, and eloquent,” but above all “honest”—about political reality. The president wasn’t in charge: “We are not to be saved by the captain at this time, but by the crew. We are not to be saved by Abraham Lincoln, but by the power behind the throne, greater than the throne itself. You and I and all of us have this matter in hand.”

They were fighting for something “incomparably better than the old Union”: a new Union “in which there shall be no North, no South, no East, no West, no black, no white, but a solidarity of the nation, making every slave free, and every free man a voter.”

Achieving this would require a change in the views of the crew, and after the meeting, Lincoln intensified his effort to shape public opinion. He received an invitation to address a mass meeting of “unconditional Union men” in his home city of Springfield, Illinois. “I can not leave here now,” Lincoln replied, but he wrote a letter for a friend to read aloud. “I have but one suggestion,” Lincoln said. “Read it very slowly.”

He seized this chance to be heard in his home state’s capital, where the Emancipation Proclamation had been disastrously received. Illinois voters had thrown Lincoln’s Republicans out of power in the state legislature. The Democrats who replaced them said Lincoln had turned the fight for the Union into “a crusade for the sudden, unconditional and violent liberation of three millions of negro slaves,” triggering “the most dismal foreboding of horror and dismay.” A peace movement was spreading across the North.

At the mass meeting, Lincoln’s friend shouted out the letter that was aimed at the president’s critics. “You desire peace,” he said, “and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it?” They could crush the rebellion, give up the Union, or compromise. But compromise was impossible, and Lincoln wouldn’t surrender the Union. That left crushing the rebellion. There was nothing for Union men to disagree about.

Lincoln named the real problem: “To be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not.” This didn’t matter, Lincoln said. The proclamation was helping save the Union. “Some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.”

Weeks later Lincoln would speak at the dedication of a battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, discussing the war from a much higher altitude. The 272 words of the Gettysburg Address were polished for the ages, while his 1,677 words to his critics in Springfield had been raw; spoken for the moment; dwelling on race, politics, and power. “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union.” Whatever Black men did as soldiers left less work for white men. “Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”

In his meeting with Douglass, he’d depended on candor: admitting he was not yet doing all that justice required. Now he was candid with white voters, reminding them that the Mississippi River was now fully in Union hands. Federal armies had captured Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana, the last rebel strongholds on the river. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln said. This colorful phrase became one of his famous lines, an irresistible description of one of the great strategic victories of the war. But Lincoln was not merely marking a success. He was saying that it had come because of a move toward racial equality. Troops from every part of the country had been involved—including some from “the Sunny South,” who were of “more colors than one.” He was telling skeptics that a measure of equality served their interests.

[From the June 1891 issue: Abraham Lincoln]

Lincoln also left certain things unsaid, which was a signature of his style. “Beneath a smooth surface of candor,” a friend said, Lincoln “told enough only, of his plans and purposes, to induce the belief that he had communicated all; yet he reserved enough, in fact, to have communicated nothing.”

Talking with both the white Illinois voters and with Douglass, he asked none of them to change their basic beliefs. He didn’t tell Douglass that he should accept a less than equal society, and didn’t ask the Illinois voters to abandon their prejudices. He didn’t even tell them what his own vision of the future was—didn’t say how he felt about the multiracial republic that Douglass saw coming and that the Illinois voters feared. He spoke instead of how his approach would advance their common cause.

It’s not hard to find modern examples of the tension between Lincoln and Douglass. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., who warned against the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism” in 1963 as he pushed white leaders for radical change—and think also of Everett Dirksen, a Republican senator from Lincoln’s Illinois. Dirksen raised various objections and amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which helped him persuade more conservative lawmakers to vote for it. In this century, Barack Obama, the first Black president, sometimes downplayed race in ways that disappointed progressives—and built a political coalition that included many white midwestern voters, winning states, such as Iowa and Indiana, that seem out of reach for his party today.

That’s not to say the pragmatists were right and the radicals wrong. It’s better to say they needed each other, as Lincoln and Douglass surely did. Each was called upon to practice the art of democracy—an art that is lately out of fashion, and that’s in our interest to reclaim.

This essay was adapted from the forthcoming Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.

Twenty years ago, a Republican president, George W. Bush, created the most successful, life-giving global-health program in history. This year, House Republicans appear determined to undermine it. If they succeed, it will be an act of extraordinary recklessness, done even while claiming to be the pro-life party.

In 2003, nearly 30 million Africans had AIDS, including 3 million under the age of 15. In some countries, more than one-third of the adult population carried the disease. More than 4 million required immediate drug treatment, yet only 50,000 AIDS victims were receiving the medicine they needed.

“To meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad,” President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” He asked Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean. PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—was the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.

In 2007, Bush asked Congress to double America’s initial commitment and approve an additional $30 billion for HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment over the next five years, which Congress did. At that point, estimates were that 1.2 million lives had been saved and that PEPFAR had helped bring lifesaving treatment to about 1.7 million people around the world.

“Calling to mind the story of Jesus raising his friend from the dead,” Bush has observed, “Africans came up with a phrase to describe the transformation. They called it the Lazarus Effect.”

PEPFAR has since been supported by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Over the span of two decades, more than 25 million lives have been saved in more than 50 countries. More than 20 million women, men, and children are receiving lifesaving antiretroviral treatment. More than 7 million orphans, vulnerable children, and their caregivers have been aided. Five and a half million babies who would have otherwise been infected with HIV have been born without it. PEPFAR has also helped train 340,000 health-care workers to deliver and improve HIV care. The program has typically been reauthorized for five years at a time, drawing support from liberals and conservatives, and from different religious groups. In an acrimonious era, PEPFAR was one program that was immune to our polarized politics.

Until now.

The deadline for the next five-year reauthorization for PEPFAR is September 30, and opposition to it is being led by right-wing groups and members of Congress, including Representative Chris Smith, a onetime champion of PEPFAR who now insists the program is promoting abortion.

That charge is carelessly false. U.S. law does not allow taxpayer money to fund abortions in global-aid programs. No credible authorities have found that the program is being used to promote abortion-related activity, and nothing has changed in how PEPFAR is administered in this respect since the advent of the program. Oversight and reporting requirements are greater for PEPFAR than for other global-health programs.

Father Richard Bauer, who spent 25 years working in clinics for people with HIV in Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia, condemned in The New York Times the “falsehoods that have been disproved by people close to PEPFAR’s daily work and governance—including me.” Bauer, who is pro-life, managed two major PEPFAR-sponsored programs through the Catholic Church in Namibia and Kenya, and “at no point was abortion part of our work or our mission. If anything, we prevented women with H.I.V. from seeking abortions, by using PEPFAR funding and treatment to provide hope that they could deliver H.I.V.-negative babies.”

Doug Fountain, the executive director of Christian Connections for International Health, a group that has supported local organizations fighting HIV/AIDS throughout Africa for decades, told Christianity Today that the abortion criticism is coming from people who don’t have “field experience.”

“If there was a concern,” he said, “the faith communities in the implementing countries would have complained.”

Instead, some 350 leaders of faith-based organizations in Africa wrote to Congress to defend the program, calling the claim that it funds abortion “unfounded and grossly unfortunate.” Identifying themselves as “steadfast believers in the right to life for both the unborn and the living,” they emphasized that, thanks to PEPFAR, “life expectancy is rising, orphanhood is falling, healthy births are increasing in health care facilities.”

And Shepherd Smith, an evangelical pro-lifer who co-founded the Children’s AIDS Fund International, wrote, “There simply is no factual evidence to support the rumor that PEPFAR is funding, or has funded, abortion or promoted abortion.” Some PEPFAR critics have claimed that organizations that receive money from PEPFAR will then have funds freed up to perform abortions. But Smith notes that grants under PEPFAR have strict compliance requirements; they require close congressional oversight; and “a total ban on funding to any entity that, with its private dollars, carries out activities contrary to moral teachings would render it impossible to invest in anything, from infrastructure to defense to anti-poverty programs to lifesaving international assistance.”

My former Bush-administration colleague Mark Dybul was one of the architects of PEPFAR and served as the United States global AIDS coordinator. He told me that U.S. rules on the funds are very clear. “Fungibility just doesn’t—and can’t—exist because of how money flows and is accounted for,” he said. Dybul explained that the NGOs that work with PEPFAR typically raise money for their other activities through grants and contracts. Very little of that money is unrestricted, which means it can’t be moved around. Large NGOs that implement PEPFAR live grant to grant and contract to contract; when they lose a grant, they sometimes have to fire hundreds of people or even close down country offices. The most notable exceptions to this pattern, ironically, are faith-based organizations (FBOs). They generally raise money with no strings attached and can decide how best to use it—but they’re not the groups that concern PEPFAR critics.

“Money dedicated to PEPFAR doesn’t free up money for abortion any more than money dedicated to abortion frees up money to fund PEPFAR work,” Dybul told me.

Dybul pointed out that African society generally remains very socially conservative. If groups funded by the United States government “were running around supporting abortion, it would be shouted from the rooftops,” he said. There’s a reason that’s not happening.

Spurious claims about PEPFAR supporting abortion have been made before, and they’ve been debunked before. But this time around, misinformation and disinformation have far greater reach. And much of the rhetoric being used by critics of PEPFAR—for example, the claim by an executive at the Family Research Council that PEPFAR is “being used as a massive slush fund for abortion and LGBT advocacy”—is not just false but maliciously untrue.

PEPFAR’s critics are not looking to defund the entire program—at least not yet; they are advocating a one-year authorization. But they have clearly turned on the program and are attempting to weaken it. If the U.S., which has provided global leadership on PEPFAR, pulls back its commitment to the program, other nations will follow. Right-wing critics of PEPFAR are insisting on changes that would sabotage it—for example, that PEPFAR must be governed by the Mexico City Policy, which requires foreign NGOs to certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” using funds from any source, including non-U.S. funds, as a condition of receiving U.S. global-family-planning and global-health assistance. (The Mexico City Policy has not been in place for PEPFAR for 16 of its 20 years in existence.) Groups opposing the reauthorization of PEPFAR are going so far as to promise to register a vote for a five-year reauthorization as a vote for abortion rights on the scorecards they issue, which would make some Republicans vulnerable to a primary challenge. This threat may well intimidate enough Republican House members to ensure that reauthorization of PEPFAR is defeated.

So House Republicans and their allies are advocating “solutions” that don’t apply to a problem that doesn’t exist, ringing alarm bells that don’t need to be rung, while in the process threatening one of the most effective and humane programs in American history.

The most generous explanation is that groups and individuals who have made defending the sanctity of life central to their work believe they are being faithful when in fact they are misinformed. In May, the Heritage Foundation published a deeply flawed report about the program, attacking what it described as “the Biden Administration’s effort to poison bipartisan support for PEPFAR by misusing it to promote abortion.” A lot of people with little knowledge of how PEPFAR actually works took the foundation’s assertions at face value. The claim that PEPFAR was funding abortion became a rallying cry in the pro-life movement, even something of a litmus test. Once people publicly committed to a position critical of PEPFAR, they became reluctant to change, despite the mounting evidence undermining their original stance. They have convinced themselves that being wrong is better than being seen as weak.

One person who is staunchly pro-life, and who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me that what is happening can’t be understood apart from what this person called “the politics of the pro-life movement.” In a post-Dobbs world in particular, I was told, “You can’t have anyone get to your right.”

I also spoke with a theologian who began to help AIDS victims in Africa decades ago. He told me that he thought “strategic cynicism” explained, at least in some cases, the newfound opposition to PEPFAR. What better way for the new right to discredit a previous Republican era, he told me, than to “tar and feather” one of its greatest and most compassionate achievements?

Nor can the attacks on PEPFAR be separated from the sensibilities of right-wing culture warriors. We have seen it in the COVID-vaccine attacks, which are baseless but powerfully resonant on the right. Those critiques, along with the ones aimed at PEPFAR, seem to be driven by a need to find a “woke” social agenda even where it doesn’t exist. An obsessive concern, animated by an unrelenting and unforgiving ideology, has now produced an entire infrastructure that fully incentivizes such attacks. This is what happens in a diseased political culture.

Almost every domain of contemporary American life, including science and health, has now been sucked into the culture-war maw. But nihilism has also come to characterize much of the American right. Attacking the establishment, burning things down, owning the libs—that’s what draws attention and attaboys. The very fact that so many “elites”—including Democratic members of Congress and the public-health establishment—want to extend PEPFAR is cause for suspicion, and evidence that opposing it embodies bravery and conviction.

What makes all of this even stranger is that, as others have pointed out, the right has significantly more power in media, the courts, and Congress than it did in, say, the 1990s. Just last year, a conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had been the pro-life movement’s top priority for the past half century. Yet catastrophism is fashionable on the American right. Some people find the belief that they’re involved in an existential struggle vivifying. It provides purpose to their life that would otherwise be lacking, and so they go in search of monsters to destroy. Even imaginary monsters. Even PEPFAR.

That the pro-life movement and many self-described Christians are spearheading this effort is sad and painful, especially for those of us who have been sympathetic to the pro-life cause and count ourselves as followers of Jesus. But it isn’t surprising. For individuals and organizations claiming to be committed to the sanctity of life to undermine a program that has saved 25 million people is only the most recent manifestation of the right’s morally inverted world. It is a world that is detached from reality and, even unwittingly, cruel. But there is a way back. There is always a way back.

In Matthew 25, Jesus teaches that to select those who will inherit the Kingdom of God, he will separate his true followers from his counterfeit followers by how they love and care for those in need. The test, presented in a parable, is a simple one: How did you treat the hungry, the thirsty, and the stranger; those who needed clothes; those who were sick and imprisoned?

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

It is not too late for House Republicans to cast a vote later this month to continue to heal the sick and the wounded, to care for the stranger, and to help the least of these. To do anything else—to do anything less—would be lethally dishonorable.