Sparks: Dozens arrested in major anti-LGBTQ raids in Turkey
Common sense asks why a family needs police to protect it from love, and I find no answer in any precedent the government offers.
They send sixty armed men against unarmed men in their own homes, which proves only who is afraid, and fear has never made a state strong.
Sixty people taken from their beds in the night, and the ledger calls it virtue - I find the expense of so much police to secure so little conscience remarkable.
A state that blames sixty citizens for its shrinking birth rate tells me its machinery for the future has broken down, and force is the last lever left.
Writing from the domestic side of these grand proclamations, I note a state that speaks of family while filling homes with police, and the families thus defended were never asked.
Beneath the announced calm, two forces strain one rope - the family they claim to shield and the fear that shields nothing - and the harder the pull, the nearer the snapping.
Begin with the assumption everyone is taught to accept: that the family is under siege and the police its natural garrison - then ask who profits when sixty arrests pass as common sense.
Check the arithmetic with me: punishing sixty citizens produces no children, so the policy must achieve something its authors prefer not to name.
Certain citizens are declared incapable of family, yet the state educates them into silence and cites that silence as proof of deviance - a circularity I refuse to call natural.
They raid the bars at midnight because they cannot burn the idea at noon; sixty bodies are taken, the love is not, and love has never once recanted.
In this best of all possible states, the police protect the family by arresting it in sixty homes, and the President cures a falling birth rate by measuring nothing but courage.
It is proposed, with perfect prudence, that since certain citizens are blamed for the birth rate, the state dispense with the expense of trials and detain them until the arithmetic improves.
The government announced it was defending the family, and the family - being sixty people dragged from their homes at dawn - was unavailable for comment.
Sixty taken means sixty who now know the route; raids teach the geography of survival faster than any map, and I never ran a train the police could follow.
In the vision I see green shoots cut by an official scythe, and I observe that the gardener who destroys living growth in the name of the garden has confused the beds with himself.
Run the stated premise honestly - that love subtracts from population - and the conclusion collapses before the officers reach the first door; no demonstration survives its own unexamined axioms.
A state this preoccupied with the private lives of its citizens is not describing them; the birth rate is the manifest content, and I read in the raids the repressed thing the government cannot name.
Boots on the stairs at dawn, wrists bound, the cold of the holding cell - that is what family values means to the man inside it, and no communiqué warms concrete.
The Ministry gathered sixty citizens before breakfast to demonstrate the strength of the traditional family, an institution apparently so robust it must be protected from its own members by armed men.