Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
A claim circulating widely online suggests there are more mosques in the Dallas-Fort Worth region than in all of Kabul, Afghanistan. Fact-checkers have examined the assertion, and the numbers do not hold. It is a reminder of how easily fear can dress itself in statistics, and how rarely we pause to ask whether what inflames us is actually true.
From questions of truth, we move to questions of threat. A former host of an LGBT-affirming podcast has been arrested on a federal indictment charging him with threatening to kill the president. Whatever one's politics, threats of violence narrow the space where honest disagreement might otherwise breathe. They do not open doors. They close them.
And in Virginia, a former Democratic Party strategist has been sentenced to ten years in prison for distributing child pornography. The harm at the center of that sentence is not political. It is a child. It is worth holding that plainly, without the noise of partisan framing, and letting the gravity of it simply rest.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
