So there I am on Facebook during my office hours, because of course that is what I do when I should be reading student papers or writing the great American novel or some such thing. And I see people I knew in Catholic school, people I would normally think of as “good Christians” if I ever thought of such things, complaining about Meryl Streep using her Golden Globes acceptance speech as a platform to condemn Voldemort’s bullying ways and call the press to hold his administration accountable for their words and actions.

And all I could think of was if Jesus had the opportunity to get millions of people to recognize a dangerous, disrespectful bully and call out people to hold him accountable, wouldn’t he?

Hell, isn’t that basically what the Sermon on the Mount was?

If Meryl Streep had not taken the opportunity to use her freedom of speech to speak truth to power, it would have been a dereliction of duty. When people with conviction are silent, the people without conviction take our silence as consent and agreement.

When a reader asked J.K. Rowling, “…when the bullies actually win[, ] How do we even move forward from here?” Rowling answered, “We stand together. We stick up for the vulnerable. We challenge bigots. We don’t let hate speech become normalized. We hold the line.”

And that is one of many things writing is for: using our words to hold the line.