One of the White House’s social media accounts recently declared that the Trump administration is “the most pro-family administration in history.”

To be a pro-family administration is, quite simply, to enact policies and administer justice in ways that secure the stability, predictability, and quality of life for families. This standard has not been met. In fact, the administration’s own choices—particularly in immigration enforcement, but also in USAID cuts and more—have undermined the stability, predictability, and quality of life of families in the United States and abroad.

My friends and colleagues who advocate for families and their communities tend to focus their efforts on combating the administration’s attempts to strip families of vital programs. Others are advocating for the rights of immigrants and their families. Many are doing both. There is no shortage of issues: from social programs to immigration to the impacts of AI and technology, this is a highly disorienting and destabilizing time for families.

Wanting to build more bipartisan collaboration around the needs of families, I have hesitated to speak or write about the current administration in ways that Republicans might find critical of the Trump administration. Yet, as Andrew Sullivan argued last week, “We’re through the looking glass. Who we once were—what we once were—is over.” Sullivan is speaking chiefly about the chaos of recent foreign policy decisions. But I think—especially after the recent events in Minnesota—we are through the looking glass when it comes to families and their communities too.

I am a Catholic, and I take the tradition of Catholic social teaching seriously. I have endeavored to think, to write, and to act in consonance with that tradition. I believe it is a basis not only for ordering my own thinking, but also for finding common ground with other people of good will committed to strengthening our families and promoting the public good.

As Pope Benedict XVI taught in Caritas in Veritate, the “institutional” or “political path,” when motivated by love, is “no less excellent and effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbor directly.” I consider the work of a think tank to be on this path. Thus, how we should act as a think tank should be as refined by love as the work of a soup kitchen, a legal aid clinic, or a homeless shelter. It may feel that what we do or write isn’t as valuable to the most vulnerable members of our society, but the late pope says it is. I believe him.

What, then, does this have to do with the common good? To love someone, as Benedict again reminds us, is to “desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to secure it.” Distinct from the individual good is the good of society—the common good—which “is the good of ‘all of us,’ made up of individuals, families, and intermediate groups who together constitute society.” We seek the common good not for its own sake, but so that the individuals who make up our families, society, and communities might realize their dignity, purpose, and flourishing within an ecology of interdependence.

In other words, every human being counts, and to build a “civilization of love”—the “Beloved Community” Martin Luther King often described—requires that we secure not only our own good and the good of our family, but also the good of those we’ve never met, whether they live in Minnesota or in Senegal, in Texas or in Denmark.

Which brings us back to the family. The family, as the “fundamental group unit of society” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16), is prior to the state or any other community. As a result, it enjoys inalienable rights—integrity of the family bond, the ability to transmit its values, the freedom to determine how big to grow and when to have children, and many more—which are inviolable. Thus, separating families of mixed immigration status without due process or considering the good of the children, or immediately incarcerating an undocumented parent who does not pose a threat to the common good, are violations of the inalienable rights of the family. The behavior of ICE toward families, the detention of children, the incarceration of citizens caught up in ICE raids, the killing of nonthreatening protestors, and the like are thus unjust. They are gross offenses against human dignity, the common good, and the integrity and rights of the family.

An administration that consistently violates these rights—and actively and enthusiastically celebrates their violation—is not pro-family. It is anti-family. Insisting that the administration is pro-family because the Second Lady is pregnant, or because some people in it are pronatalist zealots, might only briefly mask the sulfurous stench of their efforts to violate the rights, dignity, and integrity of families, but it will, in the end, fool no one.

All to say, we will keep doing what we are doing.

But I’d suggest that the call of the moment—and it is a hard call to answer—isn’t to be more indignant or more outraged. It’s to be more full of love, more deeply committed to the good of the other, more habitually oriented to the common good and the civilization of love. Because this is certainly not what the forces arrayed against human dignity and the integrity of the family are expecting, nor what they are about. Peace and love begin in each person, and we cannot achieve the pure end—a more just society—through the impure means of hate.

Joe Waters is Capita’s Co-Founder + CEO