Migrants and drag queens: Sacramento as the epicenter of America’s culture war | Opinion

Political theater is a way of life in Sacramento, but it took a dangerous turn this week when two very different incidents with a common thread played out in California’s capital.

At Sacramento Executive Airport, a second plane arrived containing undocumented immigrants originally detained in Texas and sent to Sacramento by way of New Mexico. As he did in 2022 when claiming credit for shipping a plane load of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis confrimed on Tuesday that he had struck again — this time in Sacramento.

“Through verbal and written consent, these volunteers (the migrants) indicated they wanted to go to California,” a DeSantis spokeswoman said in an email to The Bee.

“A contractor was present and ensured they made it safely to a 3rd-party (Non-governmental organization). The specific NGO, Catholic Charities, is used and funded by the federal government.”

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Meanwhile, in the chambers of the California State Senate, Democrats honored Sister Roma of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence over the objections of the chamber’s Republicans.

Part of America’s political war is very much a cultural war where neither side respects the values of the other. As the center of power of the fourth-largest economy in the world, Sacramento is vulnerable to being an epicenter in this war. Once a swing state, California leadership is squarely in one camp, with a governor engaging in battle on a near hourly basis on social media.

The political and cultural war is beginning to feel like an arms race, with one side trying to impose its will on the other.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a unique and frankly remarkable organization. On their website, they describe themselves as a “leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns.”

“We believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty,” their website states. “Since our first appearance in San Francisco on Easter Sunday, 1979, the Sisters have devoted ourselves to community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promote human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.”

The organization’s mockery of established religious rituals, particularly those of the Catholic Church, has created a cultural fault line. What is hilarious to some is insulting to others.

Within American culture, ridicule of the Catholic Church has become mainstream nearly 40 years after a Louisiana priest named Gilbert Gauthe became one of the first Catholic priests identified for abusing minors. Since Gauthe admitted his guilt in 1985, unspeakable revelations of sexual abuse by priests have come to light from around the world, and subsequent lawsuits have threatened the financial solvency of the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento among many others. But it is ridicule of Catholic rituals by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence that divides the room.

Last week, Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher of Yuba City asked on Twitter if The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence would be honored at the state Capitol if they mocked Muslim or Jewish religious groups. I don’t believe they would have. It was easy — too easy — for California Democrats to make devout Catholics collateral damage in their zeal to fight a culture war, even if said Catholics had nothing to do with the sex abuse scandal.

That’s the thing about culture wars: Innocent people get hurt in the name of strongly-held beliefs upheld.

This observation aside, the worst Sister Roma did on Monday was offend some grown-ups who got to go home at the end of the day and live their lives. What happened to the immigrants who found themselves in Sacramento, hapless pawns in some political game, is so much worse.

The ad-hoc transport of detained immigrants across state lines is a complete breakdown of government; it is a breakdown of the public safety institutions that are charged to care for these humans; a breakdown in communication between states; and a breakdown of basic law and order.

It also illustrates the differences between DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom DeSantis is presumably trolling with planes full of immigrants. DeSantis has no problem using vulnerable brown people to make political and cultural points. Newsom would never do that, but he did have to be shamed into signing a watered-down law that strengthened the organizing rights of California farmworkers, many of them immigrants from Mexico.

There is also a powerful cultural thread to this that speaks to many in this country, particularly in swing states, which is why this kind of theater is deployed in the first place. For one side in this cultural war, there’s a sense that the country has lost its ability to govern and manage itself due to unmanaged migration at the U.S.-Mexican border. There is outrage that their concern isn’t heard by the other side. So ensues one backlash after another.

Most Americans are so deeply invested in their respective political encampments that they see no possible common thread between undocumented immigrants being airlifted to Sacramento and Sister Roma being honored in the Senate. But there is one: Each side in this war willingly enrages the other. Our ability to behave as a functioning democracy was evident and at risk the other day in Sacramento.