Cagle World

Every year, during the last few days of June, I sit at my computer and wait impatiently for the most important Supreme Court decisions to be announced.

Last year, the picnic brought the Dobbs decision, which ended legalized abortion, so it seemed like anything else would be a let-down.

Boy was I wrong. Last week, the Supreme Court announced that giving someone an advantage because of their race was illegal, unconstitutional and dead wrong.

If you thought that this was already the law of the land, because of the 13th Amendment and the abolition of Jim Crow and the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, you probably missed the last 50 or so years where discrimination was regularly practiced.  They called it “affirmative action,” and provided some eloquent but specious arguments about how we still needed to level a playing field that was gutted with injustice.

The court, in a 6-3 majority decision, ruled that using race as a consideration in college admissions is illegal.

The beauty, and purity of that statement is self-evident: no one should be given advantage on account of something they cannot control.

Conversely, no one should be punished for that same reason.

The mere idea that race has been used as a “corrector’ for decades is anathema to the ideals of the freedom riders and civil rights workers who died in their service.

Of course, not everyone agrees with that interpretation of the case.

Moments after the decision was announced, these were the sort of headlines that screamed with searing messages across the internet: “Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action” (CNN), “Supreme Court Outlaws Affirmative Action” (NY Post), “Affirmative Action Ruling Will Lead to Segregated Higher Ed” (The Hill), “Harvard Students Devastated After Supreme Court Affirmative Action Ruling” (NBC News), “Justice Jackson Rips Supreme Court’s ‘Ostrich-like’ Logic on Affirmative Action” (The Hill), and my favorite of all “Clarence Thomas Attacks Ketanji Brown Jackson Over Affirmative Action” (Newsweek).

That last headline was attached to an article that reflected a philosophy I have held for many years, and one that has finally gained some traction with a high court that now has a conservative majority courageous enough to finally tell the emperor that he has no clothes.

Using the term “affirmative action” allowed people to believe that what was being done was not a negative form of discrimination but, rather, a positive and “affirmative” attempt at restorative justice.

In her dissent, Justice Jackson lamented the historical racism that left many students of color lagging behind and referenced Frederick Douglas, Justice Harlan and the “pernicious” inequities that have made it difficult for Black people to stand on their own two feet.

Justice Thomas pointed out the flaws in Justice Jackson’s backward-looking dissent, writing that “As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today.”

The tension between the two Black justices delineates in the clearest of terms the divide in this country between those who see race-based decisions as wrong regardless of who is being favored, and those who think that it is OK to continue, decades on, to favor most minorities — with the exception of Asian Americans — over whites in order to continue to level a playing field that has given us a Black president, vice president, senators, Oscar winners, astrophysicists, Nobel laureates, Olympians, teachers, and at last count, three Supreme Court justices.

The fact that these things have happened gives the lie to the argument that we are still and forever a hopelessly racist society where the color of our skin must be used to measure the content of our character.

This is not to say that racism has been conquered.

It exists, it is blatant, and it will never fully disappear from the human psyche because we are imperfect creatures.

What has been happening, though, is that society has continued to evolve to the point where we no longer automatically look at the color of someone’s skin or the particular cadence of their accent to classify people.

We no longer assess merit, and virtue, based on things we cannot control.

And when we do, there are laws against that, including the most important law of all: the Constitution.

But you know what the law cannot and should not do?

It cannot use a form of discrimination against one group to advance a false narrative that another group is failing because of historical persecution.

This is unfair, and this is something that the Supreme Court had the courage to finally recognize.

And how fitting that they did so only days before we commemorate the flawed but fierce courage of our Founders, who believed that at least in an aspirational way, all men are created equal.

Perhaps we are inching closer to believing that, ourselves.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

A few years ago, around the time of the last presidential election, a friend told me a story.

She was at Mass in the Philly suburbs, and when the homily began, the priest started to tell the congregation why they could not vote for Joe Biden and still be consistent with Catholic doctrine.

He told them that while he was not telling anyone to vote for Trump, he could not in good faith remain silent about Biden’s support for abortion. The priest said if Biden were not a self-professed “practicing Catholic,” he would have kept silent. But he was angry the message of our faith was being distorted, and served up to non-Catholics as if this was legitimate.

My friend told me that she welcomed the message, but that at least 20 people stood up and left the church in protest. It was a very obvious exodus – they were angry that the priest was making a political statement from the pulpit.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that story. In my own life, I’d experienced similar reactions when I mentioned to friends that I thought Biden was, if anything, a very flawed representative of our faith.

Two friendships ended around that election, because the idea that Catholics must oppose abortion was considered an “imposition” by women who had gone through the same Catholic school training that I had. One told me I’d been “brainwashed,” and the other simply called me a Trumper.

The idea that Catholics are a monolithic bloc was shattered over the past few decades, as polls have shown increased support for birth control, same-sex marriage, stem cell research, and even abortion among the so-called faithful.

We are still much more likely to oppose abortion than to support the procedure, and we are particularly attuned to the fallacy of calling it a form of reproductive health care, but we are not your grandmother’s Catholics.

In fact, most of us are indistinguishable from the average American voter, unlike our ancestors who stood out like sore, sacred thumbs with their immigrant accents, their crucifixes, their meatless Fridays and their gruesome pictures of pierced hearts, dripping sanctified blood.

But my larger point is that for the most part, Catholics don’t really consider ourselves to be “others” in this society.

That is, at least until recently.

With the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade and the shift in rhetoric and policy on trans issues, including what is dishonestly called “gender affirming” care for minors, there has been an increase in attacks on my faith.

Earlier this month, Joe Biden, the guy who got elected despite that priest’s pleas to the contrary, invited a group of trans activists to the White House to celebrate Pride Month.

The Catholic-in-chief had no problem letting drag queens prance around on the White House grounds, shoving their identities in the faces of whomsoever might be interested, and whomsoever might not be.

One of them started baring his/her breasts and exclaiming how amazing it was to be able to do this at the nation’s capital. And the Catholic in chief seemed to have absolutely no problem with it, unless of course he was unaware of what was going on, which is not exactly improbable.

That’s not persecution, of course. It’s just really bad taste, but when the host is a Catholic, you have to wonder about motivation.

Much more troubling was what happened in Los Angeles.

Earlier this month, the Dodgers decided to honor the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” a group of queer folk who have existed for decades and who generally mock the church, including Catholic nuns.

When word got out, Catholics politely suggested that this was inappropriate, and the Dodgers backed down.

Then, somewhat less politely, the LGBTQ community started calling the baseball team homophobic, and the Dodgers backed down and apologized for insulting men who dressed up as nuns.

However, on the day of the game honoring the queer group, thousands upon thousands of Catholics showed up at the stadium in protest.

They were polite, nicely-dressed, well behaved and carrying signs that called for prayer and respect. No blood was thrown, no pictures of aborted babies were carried, no insults were shouted. And virtually no one was in the stands when the Sisters were given their award.

It was beautiful, a demonstration of the power of prayer, messaging and pent-up anger. Those Catholics, my brothers and sisters were saying: screw with us, and these are the consequences. Amen.

Whenever I write about attacks on Catholicism, I average at least 10 emails telling me to just suck it up, Christine, since so many other groups have suffered more.

Perhaps. But as someone who regularly passes by Old St. Augustine, the church that the Know Nothings burned down in the 1800s, I am keenly aware about what happens when you let bigotry fester.

It explodes.

It’s important to note those moments when we defuse the conflagration.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Facebook has a feature called Memories, which culls from old posts and allows you to see what was of interest on any given date over the years that you’ve been on the platform.

It’s an interesting window into your activities, your priorities and your relationships from the recent, or distant, past.

Recently, the overwhelming majority of my posts from mid-June 2020 had to do with a controversy involving the removal of a statue of Christopher Columbus in South Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza.

Hyperbole is my go-to when I’m angry. In one video filmed at midnight on June 14th, I’m patrolling the corner near the plaza, assuring my followers that what I called “city fascists” have not yet taken it down. There were also photos of me surrounded by other concerned citizens promising a legal fight if the city tried to erase the heritage of Italian Americans.

Viewing these posts from a three-year vantage point elicits two very different emotions in me: anger that we were so easily consumed by this Stalinist desire to control messages and rewrite history, and a cautious sense of relief that we were able to resist the most draconian aspects of the thought purges.

I say “cautious” because we are far from being out of Siberia, even today.

This brings me to a recent example of self-cancellation by acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Gilbert.

The author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” the classic memoir about a woman finding her voice and cultivating her independence after a divorce, has just announced that she is halting publication of her most recent book entitled “The Snow Forest.”

Set in Siberia in the 1930s, it was a historical novel about a family of activists under Stalin. When word got out about the book’s setting, outraged people started leaving one-star reviews at online sites like Amazon, and criticized the author’s decision to “honor” the evil Russian empire by placing her story in that setting.

Ukrainian readers were particularly incensed. So, Gilbert delivered the usual white woke progressive version of a hostage video, and announce that she was shelving her book.

I can only imagine what Boris Pasternak would have felt about that, were he not long dead. The beloved, legendary author of “Doctor Zhivago” faced deportation and persecution because he refused to bow to Stalin and his totalitarian thugs, and some well-heeled post-menopausal woman is afraid of social pressure.

There have been other cases of cancellation over the past few years, some tied to Black Lives Matter and others to the MeToo movement, and a few others are connected to the increasingly bizarre attempts to erase gender under the Trans Flag of Tolerance.

The cancellation crusade is not entirely successful, as seen with JK Rowling, who has refused to be silenced by radical trans activists for saying that women are women, and men are not.

But we are not out of social Siberia just yet.

I am grateful to Facebook for reminding me of the ordeal we endured a few short years ago, something that never should have happened.

It is important not to forget those dark times, especially when the people who were at the forefront of the censorship juggernaut now try and deny that these things actually happened.

Ironically, and with a chutzpah that I actually admire for its blatant hypocrisy, they are now the ones claiming cancellation.

For example, Amanda Gorman complained that her book of poetry “The Hill We Climb” was banned from Florida middle schools, when it was still widely available. Then we have the folks who are upset that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wanted the AP History classes in Florida to reflect actual history and not the fiction of the 1619 Project.

We also have people in the trans and drag queen communities screaming about not being able to wiggle in front of toddlers in libraries. This is not cancellation.

This is not Boris Pasternak or JK Rowling. These are embarrassing attempts to play the victim from former victimizers.

In the end, the antidote to cancellation is a very fierce and detailed memory. I remember what they tried to do three years ago in Philadelphia.

The censorship and Orwellian assaults on the truth are still vivid in my mind. Even the lost things, the murals erased and the people exiled remain in memory.

As famed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote:

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

As I was scrolling through my Facebook “memories,” a video popped up from seven years ago. I was in Harrisburg, speaking on the steps of the state capitol at a pro-life rally. The thing that struck me, other than the fact that it was such a large crowd of people, were the words I was using about … words.

More specifically, I was talking about the importance of using the correct language when talking about pro-life issues.

The abortion rights movement has been able to deflect attention from the actual nature of abortion by repackaging it first as “choice,” and then when that wasn’t working well, shifting to “women’s reproductive health.” They called people like me, who opposed abortion, “anti-choice,” and refused to use the term that we prefer, “pro-life.” They discouraged the use of the word “abortionist” and opted to use the more ambiguous “doctor” or “health care provider.”

For decades, it worked. Two generations of people grew up believing that abortion was a right, instead of a human rights violation. That’s why people were so shocked when Roe vs. Wade was overturned last year, because they couldn’t believe that this benign right that they had taken for granted for almost five decades was exposed as the sham creation of a few elderly male justices.

Words matter. Language matters. Lately, I’ve begun to describe myself as “anti-abortion” as opposed to “pro-life,” for consistency and transparency. I support the death penalty in capital cases, mostly the ones involving murder or crimes against a child. Therefore, to be morally and internally consistent with my language, I cannot call myself “pro-life.” But there is no question that anyone who thinks abortion should be legal is “pro-abortion.” That’s just common sense.

I suppose my interest in language stems from the fact that I was essentially raised by nuns. In the Catholic schools of my era, you were taught reverence for words and their place in our lexicon. We would diagram sentences, and I still know the difference between a gerund, a past participle, an adjective, adverb and a subordinate clause.

I was also a teacher of foreign languages, and I understand the importance of context and connotation. And those four years of high school Latin drilled into me the beauty that comes from unraveling knots of words, to reveal as smooth and seamless line of poetry. Gaul might have been divided into three parts, but I was more concerned with the beauty of the words, not geographical accuracy.

Beyond the abortion context, I have started to see crimes committed against language, with a view to creating false narratives. Those false narratives are then used to change society into something that is base, dishonest, and dangerous. Take, for example, the trans controversy.

It’s quite common to receive emails these days where the person provides his or her (or “their”) preferred pronouns. We are told that “trans women” are actual women, and that men can get pregnant. People tell us these things with a straight face, and if we laugh or protest, we are bigots. It is so bizarre, we now have a Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is either unwilling or unable to define the term “woman.”

I know a bunch of third-graders who are apparently more aware than Justice Jackson of the difference between men and women. When I asked one of them the other day, she said this: “Women can be mommies. They don’t have to be mommies, but they can be mommies if they want. Men can’t, even though they can look like them.”

I want to nominate that child for the Nobel Prize in Common Sense.

The words that we use determine the rules by which we live. If we accept that a person who was born with the biological apparatus of a man is actually a woman, and if we base this on the fact that the man really believes he is a woman, then we are obligated to call that person a “woman.” Frankly, I do not want to live in that sort of world, and I do not intend to.

People can lie to themselves because they mistakenly believe that is a form of tolerance, or they can lie to themselves because they know the science and it doesn’t agree with their preconceived notions of right and wrong, real and fictitious. We can call a man a woman to be polite, and we can call a baby a fetus in order to strip it of its humanity. But in the end, the words have their own life, their own value and existence separate and apart from any dishonest purpose, and I refuse to play that game.

I said that pretty clearly seven years ago. I’m saying it now.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Amanda Gorman, the young woman who read her highly celebrated poetry at Joe Biden’s inaugural two years ago, has proven herself to be quite adept at writing fiction in addition to her laureate skills.

Last week, she tweeted out a photo of two pages of her poem “The Hill We Climb,” and suggested that these pages were the reason that a Florida school district “banned” her work.

The truth is that her books were removed from the elementary school curriculum, but were still available to middle and upper school students.

That’s not banning. That’s not even “canceling.” That’s making decisions on what is, and what is not, age-appropriate.

You can argue whether the book is not appropriate for kindergartners, who wouldn’t even understand the points she was trying to make, but you cannot unilaterally jump on the “I was Banned-wagon” because it weaponizes your victimhood.

I attended a lecture the other evening by a local author named Ernest Owens, whose book “The Case For Cancel Culture” argues that not everything we call “canceling” really is censorship.

While Owens and I disagree on a lot of things, we both come down on the same side of censorship: it’s bad.

And yet, as he points out, we need to be a bit more pragmatic when defining what is, and what is not “cancellation.”

For example, the bus company in Selma, Alabama, was not canceled during the civil rights boycotts.

Bud Light is not being “canceled” by conservatives who have a big problem with a man posing as the stereotype of a woman to sell their beer.

In both cases, people used their voices and their choices to make a political point. That is what we do in a free society, and that is what Owens refers to as “pragmatism.”

The poet laureate of the Biden inauguration deliberately chose to frame the controversy as a banning, when she knew very well that nothing of the kind had happened.

Her poetry is widely available, widely exalted by those in literary circles and beyond, and she herself has become a mini-celebrity. More power to her.

But the idea that young children must be exposed to her writing or their growth will be stunted is ridiculous, and to this writer, immensely annoying. If parents want their little sons and daughters to read “The Hill We Climb,” they can buy them a copy and read it to them as a bedtime story.

The book is available everywhere, and the suggestion that what is being done in Florida is akin to Ray Bradbury’s dystopian “Fahrenheit 451” is laughable.

This is not to say that I support actual banning of books.

If you make it impossible for children to access great literature that has stood the test of time, like “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “Huckleberry Finn,” you are engaging in the same sort of conduct that we justifiably condemned when the Soviet Union and the satellite states existed.

It is the same sort of conduct that I see when working with some of my asylum clients who have fled totalitarian regimes.

But that is not what is happening with Gorman. Her poem is still out there, and will be read by generations of children in countless schools around the country.

Her little pique about being “canceled” from one district is ridiculous when viewed in the larger context of what is going on around the world.

One final thought: when we put brown paper covers on Hustler and Playboy on the newsstands, we didn’t do it to “ban” Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner. We did it because certain things are inappropriate in certain environments.

Amanda might disagree with the decision of the school administrators in Florida, but she can’t argue with the principle that not everything is good for everybody, at every moment.

Or to put it in terms she might understand:

Books are great/There’s no debate/But just like wine/They’re not all fine/If you’re too small/To read them all/Just wait a bit/

You’ll see that lit/When you’re prepared/And won’t be scared/So just be chill/You’ll read that “Hill”.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Democrats in Philadelphia just came through a bruising mayoral primary, which is basically the city’s general election.

What just happened in the city that I love and in which I have spent all but a month of my life is a very welcome confirmation that Philadelphians are not fools, nor are we dupes for promises and shiny trinkets that come from outsiders.

The key players in the Democratic primary were five equally powerful and compelling characters: two businessmen, two city councilmembers and a former city controller.

Cherelle Parker was a seasoned politician who had navigated the internecine channels of local politics for years. Allan Domb and Jeff Brown were men who had built empires from scratch, the first in real estate and the second in retail. Rebecca Rhynhart was a well-respected financial executive who was able to root out corruption and incompetence in city spending and taxation.

Each appealed to different groups, but all but one made overtures to “Philadelphians” as a unified community of people with common interests.

That “one,” was Helen Gym, a former city councilmember who continued to fill the role of divisive firebrand that had catapulted her into office in 2015, and was the hallmark of her earlier form of activism.

And even though she wasn’t the only candidate who had “come from somewhere else,” she very deliberately called on national figures to help her make her case to the voters, prioritizing star power over sincerity.

And that’s where we see how the progressive movement can be stopped, or at the very least, slowed down to a more manageable pace.

Conservatives have watched as liberals have had exceptional success at both the national and local levels over the past few years.

While no one would consider Joe Biden a natural leftist, he has embraced many of the social policies and the general “zeitgeist” of the progressives.

Then there was that blue mini-wave that erased the expected red wave at the midterms last year.

In Pennsylvania, we have a senator who, with all of his medical issues, still managed to erase a Republican presence in our congressional delegation.

And most recently, a rabidly pro-abortion woman named Heather Boyd captured a seat that Republicans could have won in Delaware County, thereby keeping a Democratic majority in Harrisburg.

Progressives, and not moderate Democrats, seem to be on the march.

Except they were blocked in Philadelphia.

Every Democrat vying for mayor this time around was either center left or reflected the traditional values of the Democratic party I belonged to for almost four decades: support for blue collar workers, support for public schools, and a healthy appreciation for law enforcement and the need to ensure the safety of Philadelphia’s citizens.

I am the product of that type of Democrat, and I have always had more of an affinity with that tradition than I have with traditional Republican beliefs in small government and low taxes.

But somewhere along the line, the left decided that traditional values were no longer good enough, that they needed to burn down that beautiful but rickety old house and rebuild it from scratch into some modern, unrecognizable monstrosity.

If you look at the numbers, the results of this primary were a very real repudiation of a progressive movement that thinks marches and bullhorns held by strangers is more important and effective than the opinions of those who have actually lived here, drunk the “wooder” and walked the potholed streets for generations.

The top vote-getter by far – Cherelle Parker – was a woman who was born in this city, who raised children in this city, who has always worked and paid taxes in this city, and who has made numerous connections with people from this city.

Parker was not my choice in the primary, but I would be happy to see her as mayor if only because she is homegrown, and understands better than Mark Ruffalo, AOC and Jane Fonda what it means to wake up and hear gunfire outside of your window.

I would have been happy with anyone but Helen Gym, because her brand of progressivism was that same sort of patronizing, “I know better than you do what’s best for you” mentality that I also see when progressives wax poetic about immigration.

Many of them never even met an immigrant, but know all about their problems and needs from those online articles they scour while using the free WiFi at Starbucks.

Unlike Chicago, which just guaranteed that it will become even more dangerous and decrepit under its new progressive mayor, Philly told the outsiders with their dangerous anti-police and criminal-as-victim philosophies to go stuff a cheesesteak in it.

And while there are a lot of conservatives who are still going to kvetch and complain that the city will remain in Democratic hands, they are foolish to ignore the real story in this last election:

The radicals lost. And the “left of” center, held.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When you want to persuade people that the thing you are doing is good, moral, and just, you throw in the word “fairness.”

That’s what the Democrats in the Pennsylvania House did last week, when they passed — by the slimmest of margins — House Bill 300 which was dubbed, duh, the Fairness Act.

This act, if passed by the Senate and then signed by Gov. Josh Shapiro will, according to the Pa. Democrats’ official website “protect LGBTQ+ Pennsylvanians from facing discrimination.”

The preamble to the bill is a little more explicit, stating that it will prevent “discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations.” This sounds good, moral and “fair.”

But what is left unsaid is what is not protected: religious freedom.

The bill initially contained a provision that would have allowed religious institutions like churches or private schools to seek a waiver from the law’s mandate that everyone be treated equally, even if that means some of these places will be forced to violate their fundamental faith principles and values.

For example, a Catholic school that does not want to employ an openly gay teacher living in a same-sex relationship will not be able to reject that applicant on the basis of sexual orientation, even though the Catholic faith prohibits same sex unions.

While you might think that this, in and of itself is bigoted, it is beyond any doubt that the Constitution protects the right to be free from interference in the exercise of religion. Pennsylvania Democrats want to eviscerate that right.

While it still facially contains a protection for religious beliefs, it has been watered down to a point where it will be nearly impossible for religious groups to seek an exemption, adding a new “substantial burden” test that those faith organizations need to prove they will suffer before being granted a waiver of the law’s mandate.

The legislation is also so broad and so ambiguous that it could force Catholic hospitals to perform what some have called gender affirming surgery on minors or adults, and what others call unnecessary mastectomies on troubled individuals.

As the Pennsylvania Family Council explained, “The Democrats on the (judiciary) committee vote gutted the right of churches and religious schools to hire all employees that share their religious beliefs about sexuality and gives a new cause of action to sue churches and schools. Those supporting this bill are listening more to special interest groups over the people of Pennsylvania.”

This is the troubling part. Now, a person who thinks that they have been discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation, identity and whatever else comes under the LGBTQ+ umbrella — note the “plus” has the ability to take the person who won’t hire them or give them the surgery they want to court.

Let’s be clear: No one should be discriminated against because of who they are.

They should not be ridiculed, denied respect, or treated as anything other than a valued human being with immense potential and equal rights under the law.

But in that law, we are always forced to balance competing rights.

A Catholic doctor’s right to refuse to perform surgery on a minor with gender dysphoria is at least as important as that minor’s “right” to obtain the questionable surgery.

An evangelical school’s right to hire staff that does not openly challenge its fundamental beliefs is at least as important as a prospective staff member who openly violates those beliefs.

An orthodox Jewish synagogue’s right to refuse drag queens at a bar mitzvah is much more important than the drag queen’s right to perform for the shocked crowds.

This is not bigotry.

The bigotry lies in expecting that a governmental fiat of “tolerance” for all forms of sexual identity be imposed on those who reject it when this violates their contract and communion with whatever higher deity governs their conduct and conception of existence.

To relegate faith to something less important than “feelings” and corporeal needs and preferences is to basically gut the Free Exercise Clause.

As of this writing, the Senate has not voted on the bill.

It is my sincere hope that it will quash this attempt to legislate morality in the commonwealth, and will honor the constitutional mandate that everyone be free to practice their faith without restriction or apology.

I write this sitting just a few blocks from the place where the First Amendment was ratified.

What a tragedy it would be if the force of that law, which defines our humanity, is undermined by some legislators who think it’s funny to mock their constituents.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When you grow up with an Italian mother, you are familiar with the phrase, “let’s go in the kitchen and have coffee.”

Most people, regardless of their ethnicity or heritage, are used to the idea of sitting down and having coffee. It’s just that with Italians, this was the female equivalent of war room discussions at the White House.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with the Italian side of my family. My mother, Lucy, would often head down to what we called 49th Street, her old West Philadelphia neighborhood, and I tagged along.

The memories of those visits are still vivid a half century later. There would be hugs, exclamations of “how big” I’d gotten, and then everyone would go into the kitchen and partake of cookies, coffee and gossip.

Not to play into old stereotypes, but women really are more talkative and interactive. That’s normally a good thing. But a group of women who now famously sit around some corporate minion’s vision of a table and engage in public conversations have pretty much ruined my memories.

Those women, the so-called “ladies” of “The View,” have turned conversation into a weapon, and their tongues into knives.

When Cousin Helen or Cousin Mary would chat about someone who screwed up, they were equal opportunity critics. Even if they liked you, they were honest about the gravity of your sins.

When Cousin Rita and Cousin Antoinette debated who needed to apologize to whom, and how many baked goods would be needed to balance the scales, they were ruthless in their honest assessment of blameworthiness.

The harridans of “The View” are as different from my cousins as the Taliban are from the Green Beret: yes, they both use guns and engage in violent combat, but my cousins and the Green Beret were on the side of decency.

This show, which started out as the brainchild of the late great Barbara Walters, was designed as a showcase for opinionated women. It was a brilliant idea, because the most amusing and entertaining discussions are always between women with strong views and stronger voices.

Barbara and her producers knew that this would make for great television, if not an esoteric dive into profound philosophical musings.

And for a while, they were right. They had a definite liberal bent, and they weren’t particularly fond of the conservatives they
had like Elizabeth Hasselback who, like her QB husband Matt, was expert at throwing (shade), but they didn’t exactly use the tar and feathers, even during the Bush years.

But any woman who was tapped to fill the “conservative” slot on the show soon found that she was going to be attacked like an egg by a slew of opportunistic sperm.

Candace Cameron Bure, Jedediah Bila and most notoriously Meghan McCain were treated like unworthy, offensive and unintelligent tools of the patriarchy before they either got the boot or chose to leave.

It became increasingly evident that the only women allowed to crow at that table were the ones who swallowed the Orwellian groupthink pill with their morning coffee.

Liberals good, conservatives evil. Now a word from our sponsors.

I have never watched an entire episode of “The View.” But like most Americans, I have seen snippets on YouTube and elsewhere, especially when one of the co-hosts says something particularly dumb.

I say particularly, because so much of the banter is mediocre, but even the gals around that table surpass themselves on
occasion.

A recent example is when they tried to distinguish between the twin firings of Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson, coming on the same day.

They cackled in glee at the termination of Tucker because he was a “fascist,” but they made excuses for the fellow who had basically called every one of them “past their prime.”

This is what Sunny Hostin had to say about Lemon: “And I will say that I don’t believe in my experience with him that he’s a misogynist. I think he loves women. He loves his mother. He loved his sister. He loves me. He loves Joy [Behar].”

That is what every mother of every killer has ever said about her felonious son, shocked that her sweet boy could have committed a crime because he brought her flowers on Mother’s Day.

Hostin is a fool.

A few days before that, Jane Fonda, whose Botox has seeped into her brain, suggested that all pro-life Republican politicians should be murdered.

She wasn’t joking, despite her attempt to walk back the comments when she saw the reaction from people online and in Congress.

These are not normal conversations from normal women.

These are not conversations worth having, or listening to anywhere outside of an institution for the mentally insane.

These are not conversations that my Italian cousins would have had over coffee and Stella D’Oro.

These women are worthless, and their conversations should be ridiculed, and then ignored.

I’ve done the ridiculing. Now, on to ignoring them.

–

Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I just donated to the March of Dimes, the iconic initiative aimed at promoting the health of children and pregnant, women at a time many women are fighting for the right not to be pregnant.

Two events captured women’s attention over the past week: the battle over the abortion pill and Florida’s recently enacted abortion ban.

I know people of goodwill have different opinions on both of these issues, although the only voices I hear supporting the pill and opposing the Florida ban are strident, ill-tempered and self-centered.

There is no talk about babies or their welfare. It is all, and only, about the rights of women.

How did we get to a point where concern for children and a desire to assist women who want to bring healthy children into the world has been replaced by a desire to appease the anger of those who have a proprietary sense of their reproductive organs?

I’ve been writing about abortion long enough to know that I’m not going to be changing any hearts and minds.

If the horrific truths of Kermit Gosnell, the butcher of West Philadelphia who was known to plunge scissors into the skulls of fetuses that had just been pulled from the mothers’ wombs didn’t convince people that abortion is a barbaric act, a loud-mouthed Catholic columnist with no children of her own won’t come close.

But I do think it’s important to examine exactly what will satisfy these victims of circumstance.

Every single abortion ban at the state level has an exception for the life of the mother. Some have an exception for the health of the mother. A few more have exceptions for rape and incest.

But for most of the proponents of abortion rights, this isn’t enough.

The “life of the mother” exception has been attacked in many jurisdictions because it wouldn’t allow a woman suffering from a nervous breakdown or other forms of mental crisis to seek an abortion to “save her life.”

An AP article from in November highlighted the so-called dilemma that pregnant women faced when they couldn’t get an abortion and there was no discernible physical threat to their lives.

The thing that struck me was the idea that someone’s temporary mental crisis could justify the permanent termination of a pregnancy, instead of providing psychiatric services to the afflicted person.

The easy fix of getting rid of the baby is an example that in this society, we have simply abandoned the most compassionate and common-sense solutions for the easiest ones.

Some have suggested that a woman who is suicidal because she doesn’t want to be pregnant deserves an abortion.

We are not talking about pre-eclampsia, a ruptured uterus, cancer, organ failure, or a possible stroke. We are talking about a woman who says she would prefer to die than give birth.

That is not what the “life of the mother” exception was designed to advance.

I argued this point with a rabbi on a radio show I once hosted, and he tried to use religion against me.

He thought that my opposition to suicide and abortion was motivated by my Catholic faith, and tried to make it appear — as they always do — that I was imposing my religion on someone else.

When I asked him if his own views were motivated by his Jewish faith, he seemed offended and rigorously denied that this was the case. He said that his position rose out of his belief that women had the right to save their own lives in any way they believed necessary.

When I asked him if he would at the very least require the woman who threatened suicide to undergo rigorous examination and documentation from at least two psychiatrists that she would commit suicide if she could not have the abortion, he demurred.

“We have no right to force a woman to prove her state of mind,” he said.

And when I asked him if a doctor needed to provide proof of a medical threat to the mother’s life, or was it OK to just “trust the woman” he said I was making an unscientific argument.

So I went from being a religious zealot to a science illiterate.

But without meaning to, he did answer my most fundamental question: Will there ever be enough exceptions for women who think that they have dominion over life and death?

That answer, clearly, is no.

I think I’m going to unseal that envelope to the March of Dimes and put in a few more dollars. It’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness.

–

Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I just saw the trailer for a movie that made me actually tear up.

The preview of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” propelled me backward in time, over 50 years, to a moment when I was in the sixth grade and sitting in a corner, falling in love with a book of the same title that changed my life.

I think it might have changed the lives of millions of 11-year-olds over the years, which means that Judy Blume, the author, had at least as much impact on the world as J.K. Rowling.

It’s the story of a young girl on the cusp of what we used to call “womanhood” back in the dark ages, a euphemism for menstruation.

I remember being told that I would soon enter “womanhood” when the pediatrician started talking about the changes that would be taking place in my body in the next couple of months.

This was when I was 11. It actually took three years before that particular “change” happened, and I thought I was abnormal.

That’s the whole point of the book, a loving exploration of the mind of a young girl who thinks she’s different and maybe broken, because she is the last one of her friends to get her period.

That book was a balm for so many of us in the 1970s who were trying to deal with all of the changes that were happening for women in the world. The radical and swiftly shifting templates for what constituted a “good” life for women left a lot of adolescents and teenagers reeling.

Like the “teenage” filter that many middle-aged people have discovered and are now using on the Tik-Tok app, seeing the film’s trailer made me a bit melancholy, too. The trans movement has begun to erase young girls and their biological identities, making the book – and these emotions – irrelevant.

I see a kinship of sorts between Judy Blume, the book’s author, and Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter franchise. Rowling became a flashpoint for so many trans activists who accused her of not respecting their lives and their identities.

The only thing Rowling has ever done, and that was done with great respect and dignity, was to defend the integrity of biological women. She has been at the forefront of telling the emperor that he has no clothes, and that if he thinks he does, at the very least it is not a dress.

Rowling has been terrorized because she is trying to preserve exactly that thing that makes Margaret such a memorable figure: the beauty of the blossoming of a young woman.

This is something that happens biologically and psychologically, but in the trans world they have completely erased the biological component and allowed us to accept that if you “think” you are a woman, you are one.

That is a huge disservice to girls, who have to deal with the onset of menstruation, with the natural shift in hormones, with all of the biological mandates that cannot be changed by simply wishing them away and attacking fabricated pronouns.

We are told to have compassion to those with gender dysphoria, as if speaking the truth is cruel. Compassion comes in many forms, and recognizing there is a component of mental illness in the race to erase is an important step in helping those who are suffering from the dysphoria condition.

But there are other people who deserve compassion.

All of the Margarets out there in the world, the young girls who are nervous and questioning yet fully cognizant of the power and obligations of their biological birthright deserve our concern.

There is great beauty in the natural process of becoming a woman, someone who has been vouchsafed the duty of bringing new life into the world.

And the trans movement, at least in its most radical form, is destroying it.

I’m thrilled that a book that helped me deal with the evolution all biological women go through is being made into a film at this particular moment.

It is a way, I hope, to underline that there is a lot more to being a female than dressing up as Audrey Hepburn and getting a few sponsorship gigs with Bud Light and, most nauseatingly, Tampax.

The fact that a biological man is now hawking sanitary products is a sign that far from cherishing young girls, we have started to mock them.

Margaret would be horrified. So, I think, is God.

–

Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].