Cagle World

I once had a client from a country where the instability of the government led to widespread chaos.

He had supported a candidate who was running against the president in a hotly contested election, and was severely beaten because of his affiliation with the perceived “enemy of the state.”

He lost his job, his money, everything.

When he came to my office to file for political asylum, I asked rather naively why he had chosen the United States.

I remember with a clarity that has not dimmed over 20 years the response he gave: “In this country, you do not jail your political enemies. You only jail the criminals.”

I was thinking about that comment this week, as Donald Trump was arraigned in his hometown on 34 felony counts of what the indictment called Falsifying Business Records In The First Degree.

It was basically a cut-and-paste of the same allegation, arising out of the same basic scheme: keep Stormy Daniels from talking about an alleged affair. The only way that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg was able to turn a misdemeanor into a felony was by tying it into campaign finance violations.

Most observers who have a good understanding of the law and don’t believe in “the ends justify the means” theory think this is a dead-end case.

To be honest, though, I don’t much care whether Trump is found guilty of these charges. In terms of wanting him to skate on charges that he paid off a porn star that he very likely “dated” to protect his wife and young son, I have no sympathy.

But we all know that’s not what’s happening here. Alvin Bragg is making good on a campaign promise that everyone heard but is now pretending was never made, to get Donald Trump.

He skated into office by assuring New York Trump haters that he would prosecute the former president, as soon as he could find something to prosecute.

He already had the defendant, he just needed the right crime.

When Bragg and the Democrats who support him pushed for this indictment, they crossed an invisible line that separated the United States from many of the Banana Republics that exist in other parts of the world.

Even assuming the DA was justified in investigating a crime that no one not associated with Donald Trump would be charged with — Michael Cohen included — he was not justified in exercising his broad discretion to go after a man who has already announced his candidacy to challenge a sitting president.

You might say the problem only arises when it is the government that seeks to prosecute the rival candidate or political dissident, not someone who has no connection to that sitting president. In a normal political climate, you would be correct.

But this has not been a normal political climate since at least 2016, when Donald Trump was elected to office.

Regardless of what you think about the second impeachment effort, any honest American would have to agree that the first one, based on a flimsy phone call and chants of Russian collusion, was a partisan witch hunt.

And then there was the absolute media meltdown over every thing the man did, from mean tweets to that bizarre but ill-fated bromance with Kim Jong Il.

The hostility extended to his family, with attacks on the wardrobe choices of his wife Melania, to criticism of sweet Instagram posts that his daughter Ivanka made of her children.

We get it. CNN, MSNBC and most of the noncable networks hated Trump, except when it came to the ratings bonanza he brought.

And even Fox started getting tired of the drama. Most of us did, to be honest.

But that’s no reason to have literally compared him to some of the worst tyrants in history.

Which brings me back full circle to this New York prosecution. I know what happens when political dissidents catch the attention of those who wield great power.

And while Trump is not a dissident, and while Bragg is not exactly Stalin, there is something deeply disturbing about the prospect that a prosecutor is bringing a case against a former president for whom he clearly did not vote, in order to appease the New York mob.

What happens if tomorrow, a Republican prosecutor in a deep red state starts sniffing around Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi or even Joe Biden?

Pandora … meet Box.

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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 an entire kindergarten class was murdered by Adam Lanza two weeks before Christmas in 2012, I was paralyzed with grief.

Usually, when tragedies occur to other people, I say a prayer and move on. But that all changed with Newtown. When I saw those sweet young faces, a class portrait of promise and then immense grief, it felt as if I had lost my own family.

While most commentators were talking about gun control, I was focused on mental health, because Lanza was clearly a troubled man whose depression and sociopathy had been ignored until it was too late.

Back then, it was still possible to raise the issue of psychosis and mental illness without being labeled intolerant. People were willing to at least listen to the possibility that guns do not shoot themselves, and that the greatest danger to society is not a bullet, but a damaged and untreated psyche.

Not anymore.

Not only are those of us who want to focus on mental health accused of being mean to the afflicted and apologists for the gun lobby, we are tarred as bigots.

That came full circle last week with the mass shooting in Nashville. Like Newtown, the shooting involved little children, and was hauntingly reminiscent of what happened over a decade ago.

When children are murdered, that changes everything. The conversation rises to an entirely different level.

But unlike Newtown and to a much lesser extent Uvalde, which was overshadowed by the cowardice and incompetence of law
enforcement, the shooting in Nashville showed just how far down into the rabbit hole we have gone.

The shooter, whose name I will not repeat because she deserves to be erased from the book of humanity, reportedly identified as a trans man.

As of this writing, her entire motives are not clear, but it is clear that she targeted a Christian school, one that she had attended 20 years before.

And while no one has conclusively established that hostility toward Christianity and conservative social policy played a role in the massacre, some in the media clearly believed that this was the case.

Not only did they believe that this was the motive, they seemed to think it was justified.

For example, Terry Moran from ABC News reported on the shooting while making sure to note that the state of Tennessee had passed some so-called anti-trans legislation, a strange comment to make while the bodies of massacred children who had nothing to do with trans controversies were not even at the funeral home.

And then there was a fellow named Benjamin Miller, who tweeted out that the shooting took place in Nashville, which was also the location of a media company, the Daily Wire, that had personalities like Michael Knowles, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh who fomented transphobia. His view, not mine.

And there was pushback from people in the trans community who were angry that the media “misgendered” the assassin by refusing to call the biological female a “him,” her preferred gender identity.

I watched all of this unfold, and wondered if anyone was going to tell the emperor that he — or she — had no clothes. The person who murdered six people during a normal school day was mentally disturbed, and a lot of that illness manifested itself in her gender identity.

It is unpopular to say these things.

JK Rowling knows that, as does Abigail Shrier, as does anyone who has been vocal about the psychological disconnect among
people who claim to have gender dysphoria.

They have been so successful in gaslighting us into believing there is no mental health aspect to this that they have forced the American Psychiatric Association to drop it from the list of disorders.

Now, the furthest they will go is to admit that some people with gender dysphoria “might” develop mental problems.

This refusal to be blunt about the nature of mental illness is leading to chaos.

It hurts both the person suffering from the dysfunction, as well as the people with whom he or she comes in contact.

Society seems willing to completely ignore the needs of those who are literally dying because we choose to “affirm” their life choices as opposed to helping them deal with conflict.

The rate of suicide in the trans community is higher than the national average. Of course, trans activists say that this has to do with lack of acceptance, but the rate has not decreased as our societal acceptance has increased.

Mental illness is no longer a badge of shame, a scarlet letter. Those who are suffering from it are rightly considered courageous when they seek help.

Why, then, are we afraid to say the obvious: transgenderism can be a sign of mental illness, and mere acceptance is not compassionate.

Perhaps Nashville will be the moment when we speak frankly to the emperor.

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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].

I was thrilled when I received an acceptance letter from Bryn Mawr College.

Bryn Mawr was dedicated to educating women at the same level as many of the Ivy League institutions, like Harvard and Yale, many of which did not admit women in 1885 when the school was co-founded by M. Carey Thomas.

Thomas was an amazing woman, someone who resembled the feminists of her time: no whining, hike up your sleeves and get the job done. She saw that the way to empower women was through education, and helped establish a school that proudly touted a pedigree that rivaled any of the male institutions.

She was also an antisemite and a racist, something that was not particularly unusual, given the time period.

Context should matter, but as we shall see, it no longer does in this post-Orwellian world.

I personally remember feeling like an outlier at Bryn Mawr. Even with a respectable 1240 on my SATs and Commended Student status, I was at the bottom rung of my class in terms of academic excellence.

My guidance counselor told me that I was admitted because I was an overachiever.

Apparently, taking all of those AP classes in high school was a sign that, in the words of Robert Browning, “my reach had exceeded my grasp” and the heaven at the end of it was Bryn Mawr.

That conversation is one of the reasons I adored this school. It’s also one of the reasons that I still cherish the memory of what it once was.

But recent events, including a disturbing email that another alumna sent to me from the Board of Trustees establish beyond any doubt that this Bryn Mawr is a distant memory.

The new Bryn Mawr prioritizes having the right political opinions and an affinity for erasing history over taking AP classes.

The most objectionable part of the email states that the school has decided to remove an inscription honoring Thomas from the main library, all the while groveling over the fact that this might not even be enough to calm the triggered:

“We acknowledge the harm and hurt Thomas’ legacy of exclusion, racism, and antisemitism has caused for so many, and understand that the removal of an inscription does not alone redress that pain. We do believe that the removal of the inscription will open a door to healing and encourage the continuing work we do together to make Bryn Mawr a community of welcome and belonging.”

First things first. As a white woman at Bryn Mawr in the late ’70s, I was in a slight majority of the population.

However, women of color were widely represented, as well as sexual and religious minorities.

They were, to a person, treated with respect.

I don’t remember anyone saying to me that they felt “othered.” That might be because back in 1979, people weren’t stupid enough to turn a noun into a verb.

But I can’t be the only one who had a good experience at Bryn Mawr in the dark ages, when a woman’s college admitted actual women, and not the sort of person that identifies as a woman even though she urinates standing up.

How dare these women, who are benefiting from the blood, sweat and tears of a flawed pioneer decide that she is no longer “worthy” of being honored at the school she made possible?

How dare they presume to speak for the community when there are many of us out here who are appalled and disgusted with the censorial actions of a school we supported for many years. How dare our voices be silenced?

Frankly, if there is a student at my alma mater who is thrust into a state of mental paralysis by viewing a bronze plaque that memorializes our exceptional, troubling and human founder, perhaps we should provide she/her with a pair of sunglasses so the glare of the truth will not bring tears to her tender eyes.

I’d pay for that.

Perhaps the school should also harken back to its original mission, namely, educating “cussed individuals” who did not have a pack mentality and try and demonize those who didn’t belong in their pack.

Perhaps it should exclude from the student body that sort of woman, since she contributes significantly less to the community than a fierce and fearless feminist did, almost a hundred and forty years ago.

Reunion will be fun, this year.

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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].

Several years ago, a women’s working group at the Philadelphia Bar Association invited me to speak to their members about being a conservative woman in the legal profession.

When word got out that I was the guest, an online mutiny broke out among lady lawyers who were triggered by the idea that any female could be pro-life.

That seemed to be the crux of the problem, even though the Trump thing played into it as well. Thought to their credit, the Bar Association actually had the guts to let me speak.

It was an interesting discussion, and there was indeed a great deal of hostility. One women in particular kept harrumphing about my conservative views, and I simply said she needed to move out of her liberal Philly bubble and realize there were a lot of women who didn’t idolize the notorious RBG.

It is rare that people want to hear more than one side of any issue.

That came into focus with special irony last week at Stanford Law School. The Federalist chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to discuss cryptocurrency and gun regulations.

The Federalist Society is a conservative organization, so it’s not exactly surprising it would have invited a Trump-appointed judge to come and speak at the school.

But even before Duncan had an opportunity to open his mouth, protests broke out from law students who have no concept of free speech, freedom of assembly and common courtesy.

I hope that a list of their names can be circulated among the most prestigious law firms in the nation, because one would hope that these legal knuckle draggers would never be hired at a respected institution.

They are only fit for those places that advertise on the back of buses, and giant billboards on the interstate.

I digress.

Judge Duncan was subjected to jeers, to whining, to screeches and posters that made sexually explicit suggestions. And that was just the student body.

The administrators did little to nothing to stop the mob from shutting down the conversation, leaving the judge to defend himself. He did an admirable job.

It’s rare that a speaker who is under assault from a group of foaming-at-the-mouth radicals is able to give as well as he gets.

In this case, the judge reminded the students where they were and what they were studying, and essentially exposed them to being mediocre thinkers with bottom-of-the-barrel reasoning skills.

Of course, they wouldn’t admit it. But the rest of the world saw it as the video of the event went viral online, and Stanford was covered in shame.

That’s not to say that the media was overly critical of students.

Publications like the legal blog Above the Law attempted to justify the actions of the legal vultures by writing things like this:

“The whole point of the manufactured ‘campus cancel culture crisis’ is to make protesters look unruly and fringe speakers appear reasonable by comparison. A hate group shows up on campus, you take some disingenuously edited clips of the protest while the representative of a recognized hate group sits on stage and plays the patient victim. Rinse and repeat.”

The fact that the students were unruly is not a premise; it is a fact. You only need to look at the video of their antics.

And that “hate group” they were referring to in the blog is nothing other than the Federalist Society which, as noted earlier, is an organization of conservatives in the legal profession.

Apparently, being right of center now makes you a domestic terrorist to the sterling minds at Stanford and their allies in the media.

A recent asylum client, a journalist from Pakistan, told me about how the Taliban tried to censor him.

First, they asked him to tell their stories. When he refused, they sent letters threatening him.

When that didn’t work, they destroyed his workplace. And when he continued to defy them, they murdered his colleague.

We’re not at that point yet, where words that upset us are the justification for murder.

But those Stanford lawyers need to brush up on the concept of free speech.

Threats can come in many forms, even from kids who did well on their LSATs.

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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].

The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin embraced a philosophy that perfectly captures the official Catholic position on human value: the “consistent ethic of life,” more commonly known as the “seamless garment.”

Bernardin’s philosophy came to mind this past week, after six Pennsylvania representatives proposed a bill that would allow the terminally ill to “choose” what they term “death with dignity.”

The legislators – all Democrats but one – noted that advancements in modern medicine have been able to “extend the lives of our loved ones by leaps and bounds,” but that many people with terminal illnesses feel it prolongs “unnecessary suffering when pain management becomes impossible.”

While the legislators promise that it will be limited in scope and application, and that there will be safeguards against encouraging emotionally vulnerable people to prematurely end their lives, it will be extremely difficult to monitor just where that line is drawn.

Beyond that, though, my opposition is personal.

My own father spent a year from his diagnosis with terminal esophageal cancer until his death at the age of 43.

From May to the following May, Ted Flowers fought the hardest battle of a life filled with skirmishes.

I know that some people don’t like the term “fight” used in connection with the terminally ill, but at least in my father’s case, it fits.

He did not want to die, and he tried every modality, possible cure, hopeful — and hopeless — suggestion tendered to him like a rope to a drowning man.

And as his body became increasingly weak, whittled to an unrecognizable husk that barely hinted at the healthy ruddy Irishman I loved, his mind remained sharp.

He wanted to hold on — even through that pain, a pain I cannot imagine — because life was still a precious thing.

I understand that I cannot judge others and their final wishes.

Some people have much lower thresholds for pain than my father, and some simply want to rush into the arms of whatever eternity they imagine, divine or simply oblivion.

That is their right, and I would never tell another being to live their life according to any moral standards they reject.

This is not about religion, even though my own beliefs about the sanctity of life in its alpha and omega stages derive from Catholicism.

But I am afraid that if this bill becomes law, it could dissuade people who might otherwise fight to survive for families and for themselves, to give up.

This, to me, is not a bill that speaks to our compassionate natures. It is something darker, that has its roots in nihilism that says “suffering is bad, life is a proprietary thing that we can dispose of as we wish, and when it no longer serves us or the greater community, it can be extinguished.”

We have already sunk into the most depraved depths in our acceptance of abortion.

To me, what is the most elemental brutality and barbarity is now considered a sacred right, and when that “right” was limited by its de-federalization by the Dobbs decision, there was panic, hysteria, anger, bitterness and vengeful attacks.

The reaction of the women and men who support abortion to the overturning of Roe scared me and shocked me more than I thought I could be shocked.

There was a wild, almost feral aspect to it. That is where we are.

This bill that somehow defines euthanasia as a compassionate thing, and the premature drawing of the curtains as a virtue, strikes me as something akin to the idea that abortion is health care.

Life is a seamless garment, and even those who find themselves at the edges of it, either through illness or age, are still valuable creatures.

St. John Paul II showed us that when he allowed us to watch him die with a dignity those six Pennsylvania legislators could not begin to comprehend.

We can fool ourselves into thinking that giving people a choice to kill themselves, is a kindness.

Many of those reading these lines will be angry that I would even suggest the opposite.

But there is nothing kind in helping to end a life before its natural term.

If this bill becomes law, and there is a strong chance that it will pass, we can at least be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that yet another gash in that seamless garment has been made, and the rest is already in tatters.

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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].

In the last few years, it has become common to see people put their pronouns in their email sign-offs, and to hear the phrase “gender fluid.”

When I was growing up, “gender fluid” was something you were more likely to read about in a pornographic magazine than in polite conversation.

But that conversation has changed, radically, and it is now perfectly normal to have discussions about 12-year-olds who want full mastectomies, and grown biological men demanding entrance to the girls’ locker room.

And then, of course, there is Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who lectures the rest of us on how important it is to “affirm” a young child’s gender preference.

Talking about gender transition surgery for children and adolescents makes me angry. Calling Rachel Levine the highest-ranking “female” in the history of the Department of Health makes me angry.

The reason these things make me angry is that it appears that women are being erased under the guise of tolerance and compassion.

At the risk of wading into J.K. Rowling territory here, it is troubling that the attributes of womanhood are being stolen from us in a societal effort to give comfort and legitimacy to a very loud, very distinct minority of people who for whatever reason are uncomfortable in the bodies God and biology bequeathed to them.

But there’s a large issue at play impacting the way we think about the role of women in society.

The other day, I was watching Perry Mason on a loop, and a commercial popped up featuring a young man sitting on a sofa next to presumably his lovely wife, who said, “we are pregnant.”

It’s not as bad as a nonbinary person using the plural “they” to refer to their single, unitary self, but it is a bit jarring whenever I see a man jump onto the pregnancy bandwagon.

I come from a generation where men drove their wives to the hospital, waited patiently in the waiting room reading magazines, and then bounded gleefully into the room after baby had been cleaned up and presented in all of his or her sweet, fluffy newness.

The day I was born, my father took my mom to the hospital, and then he paced, and he waited, and he prayed and waited some more, and he smoked, and then he paced and prayed and waited until finally, someone told him I was ready to be picked up.

My father’s story about my birth helped define the very distinct roles my parents played even from the beginning: My mother gave me life, my father gave me a home.

Of course they equally contributed to my happiness, providing love and shelter and guidelines and values, but there was no mistaking the unique roles each of them played from the first moments of my tender existence.

That’s what annoys me when I hear a couple talk about being pregnant.

“They” are not pregnant. They are “having a child” together, but the act of giving life is the woman’s alone. She is the one who vomits in the dark hours of the morning, she is the one with the swelling ankles, she is the one who feels the flutter of movement within her body, she is the one whose breasts swell with nourishment and discomfort, she is the one with the headaches and the cravings and the unrecognizable body.

The woman.

Men are an integral part of a child’s development, but they cannot be “pregnant.”

That fey little phrase is actually a dangerous erasure of the woman and a muddling of gender distinctions.

And that is why it upsets me to hear these otherwise innocuous things because they lead to bigger things like a society that believes a deputy secretary of health who was a woman for less than a third of her life should be lauded as “woman of the year.”

Or to put it another way, the correct pronouns for pregnancy are “she/her/deal with it.”

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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].

My father did not have a happy childhood.

I’ll spare you the details, but the reason he didn’t end up at Holmesburg Prison can be attributed to tough love from the priests at St. Tommy More, a little more tough love in the Army, the all-encompassing love of his wife, Lucy, and a set of values that derive from that spark of the divine in most of us.

It had absolutely nothing to do with his parents.

My grandmother should never have been anyone’s mother, and my grandfather abandoned the household the moment he realized that having a good time was incompatible with having kids.

That’s what I was thinking when I heard about the murder of Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, the Temple University cop who was allegedly killed by an 18-year-old last week.

There were tears, there was anger and then came the thought that this young man’s demons were not just his alone. His parents had a role.

A child can indeed be a bad seed, but far more often, he or she is a reflection of the love (or lack of it,) values (or lack of them,) and experiences lived with family. As the child is father to the man, so does the father (and mother, and siblings) shape the child. To treat humans as deracinated plants that take no nourishment from the larger garden that surrounds them is blindness, foolish libertarianism and ignorance.

The youth who shot multiple bullets into the head of a 31-year-old cop did not come into the world destined to be a destroyer. He was likely a beautiful baby, “trailing clouds of glory” as Wordsworth wrote.

Children are clay, and the first imprints made in them are by their parents. My father had cruel sculptors for his tender years, people who treated the precious material in their hands as if it was trash. He had the ability to transcend that unjust beginning, that thwarted entrance into this miracle of a world.

Not all do. The boy (because at 18 we are still children in my opinion) who assassinated Officer Fitzgerald apparently had a troubled existence, which might have been rich in physical accouterments but lacking in the type of care and guidance that might have blunted the edges of some inner torment and disjointed thoughts.

It’s true that we don’t know everything about his upbringing, but to just completely discount the influence that his parents had on him, as a not insignificant minority of people did, is to guarantee that it will happen again.

I disagree with Hillary that it takes a village to raise a child if that means we are able to farm out parental duties to the villagers.

While neighbors and teachers and friends all play a role in forming a healthy and productive member of society, the first and most important people, the ones who are the alpha and the omega of all that amazing potential, are mom and dad.

My own father died when I was 20, and therefore I had him for a good quarter of what I hope will be a long life.

My mother had to raise my four younger siblings, children under the age of 16, by herself. She did a magnificent job, and we were blessed.

But not everyone is given that gift.

In a world where social media is constantly firing away at the ramparts of protection for children and exposing them to influences they should never encounter, and at a time when depression is a greater pandemic than the one with the actual vaccine, parents are more important than ever.

They are like the 300 Spartans, trying to keep the enemy at bay at least until the child is old enough to function on his own.

Those who reject that theory do so because they don’t want to admit failure, or responsibility, or even the possibility that all of their good actions will be irrelevant. Perhaps in the smallest of cases they will be.

Perhaps there really are bad seeds.

But the best antidote we have for that is good parents.

It costs nothing, it’s plentiful, and it doesn’t need boosters.

And the resulting benefits are permanent: immunity to the harsh and debilitating influences of life.

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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, after I’d written a series of columns about how the Catholic church had borne a disproportionate share of criticism regarding the sex abuse scandal, a number of readers responded with such negativity that they all but confirmed the anti-Catholic bias.

People generally protest when I write about the way the Catholic church has been targeted by the mainstream media and in our secular culture.

They resort to the usual tropes of “whiner,” “pedophile apologist,” and “misogynist.” That no longer surprises me.

What did surprise me was the recent revelation that the FBI had targeted traditional Catholics as domestic terrorists.

Relying on resources provided by the once mighty and now completely discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, the feds drew up a list of groups that supported the Latin Mass and described them as “radical traditionalist Catholics.”

This internal memo, which originated from the bureau’s office in Richmond, Virginia, seemed to authorize surveillance of Catholics who were simply exercising their First Amendment rights to practice their faith.

Not everyone supports the Latin Mass. In fact, Pope Francis has shown distinct hostility toward a rite and ritual that is as beautiful as it is central to Catholic tradition.

I was too young to remember much about Vatican II, which essentially eliminated the Mass in Latin, but I’ve spoken with many people who were adults at the time.

Some supported the move to the vernacular, saying that it helped bridge the divide between priests and parishioners, while others lamented the loss of beauty and mystery.

Regardless, Catholics get to decide how they want to run their show.

The federal government doesn’t have a role in that, and if we haven’t learned that lesson after 246 years, we haven’t been paying attention.

It’s also bigger than some stupid journalist in The Atlantic named Daniel Panneton trying to connect the rosary to guns, asking the rhetorical question “why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online,” calling them “rad-trad rosary-as-weapons” memes.

I might have asked him why illegitimate organizations like Catholics for Choice argue that abortion is a human right, but I’m not sure Dan would get the irony.

And not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a lot bigger than a bunch of women who insist on making cringe-inducing comments like “keep your (assault) rosaries off my ovaries” and “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

The idea that the church is anti-woman is a fallacy that only the most limited intellects have ever accepted.

That the federal government has actually begun to view Catholics as “others” is not exactly a revelation to those of use who are well-versed in the history of bigotry.

My people have always been seen as a threat to this nation by those who fear the power of the Papacy.

We all know what John F. Kennedy had to do in order to appease the anxious Protestants when he was running for office, namely, deliver a speech that included this crucial passage:

“But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

“But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith, nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.”

And he did not disavow his views, or his faith.

These days, it seems as if many in the public sphere feel the need not only to disavow their Catholic faith, but to openly ridicule it.

That, in turn, has given those outside of the faith permission to vilify people who share views that the society might find unpalatable, like the innate humanity of the unborn child and the essential dignity of the aging body.

The FBI had its reasons for targeting traditional Catholics, and those reasons derive from reliance on groups like the SPLC, which foment hatred under the guise of stopping it.

That we live in a country where the government compiles secret lists of what someone once called “deplorables” is reminiscent of the countries from which refugees have been forced to flee.

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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].

Twenty-six years ago, members of a California-based cult named Heaven’s Gate committed suicide because they thought the comet Hale Bopp, which was passing close to earth in its 4,000 year orbit across the universe, was actually a space ship that would take them home to paradise.

I used to think that people like that, who made their own continued existence contingent upon the vagaries of fate, narcissistic personalities and astrological formulations were pathetic.

And then I remembered that I was a Philadelphia Eagles fan, and found humility.

True, I’ve never considered taking a lethal combination of Montepulciano d’Abbruzzo and Drano if the Birds didn’t make the playoffs, but there is something cultlike in my devotion to the team.

I was reading about a poll which found that almost 20% of Philadelphians would miss their own weddings if they conflicted with the Super Bowl. I also read that given the choice between winning a million dollars in the lottery and winning the Super Bowl, 21% of fans would again choose the Lombardi Trophy.

I might have a slightly harder time giving up the dough because spouses are significantly more fungible than money, but I’d still come down on the side of the gridiron victory.

I say this even though we already won in 2018. I say this because I’ve been a fan since 1973 when my father got us season tickets and I was introduced to that indigenous tribe known as the “700 Section.”

Philadelphians are as devoted to their teams as Romeo was to Juliet, as King Kong was to Fay Wray, as Orpheus was to Eurydice and it really does have elements of romantic love.

This is doubly true about the Eagles.

In the week leading up to the big game, I found my normal level of obsessive-compulsiveness reached epic proportions. I turned lights on, and off, and on, and then off again, worried that the Kelce’s mother would somehow convince Jason to throw the game for family unity.

I flushed extra times, thinking that if I did not, Jalen Hurts’ shoulder would freeze.

I ground my teeth, causing Dr. Giordano, my sainted dentist, to ask if I wanted to end up at the Pearly Gates with zero Pearly Whites.

I never expected it to be this bad, especially since we’d already won one championship. But this is what happens when you grab that brass ring. You don’t want to give it back.

When I was growing up, the team to envy wasn’t Dallas. In the 1970s, if you lived in Southeastern Pennsylvania, you hated Pittsburgh. The Steelers were winning over and over again, a disgusting Steel Curtain of magic.

When I was a pre-teen, the late, beloved Franco Harris picked up a deflected pass from Terry Bradshaw and executed the most famous play in all of gridiron history: The Immaculate Reception.

They had Lynn Swann, Rocky Bleier, Mean Joe Green, John Stallworth, L.C. Greenwood, Jack Ham.

We had great guys too, like the Fred Astaire of football, Harold Carmichael, and the Minister of Defense now preaching in Heaven, Reggie White, and of course Wilbert and Randall and Tommy and Norm.

But none of them won a Super Bowl. All of them broke our hearts.

While people in the ‘Burgh kept racking up bragging rights and finger bling.

Is it any wonder we pelted Santa? A person can only take so much before she cracks. (He probably rooted for the Giants so no weeping from this quarter.)

The point of this long rumination on the Eagles after the lost Super Bowl LVII to the Kansas City Chiefs is to explain to those who probably don’t need that lesson why exactly we are the way we are.

The suggestion that there is any group of fans that loves more deeply, hates more fiercely and forgives more easily than Philadelphians is as crazy as the fellow who decided that hiring Chip Kelly was a good idea.

The idea that we can lose with the grace of a Detroit Lion or a Cleveland Brown or an Atlanta Falcon or a Minnesota Viking or a, God love them, Buffalo Bill, is as mad as the idea that Tom Brady is human.

We are Philadelphians. We cry ugly.

Now excuse me while I go flush a few more times.

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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].

I’m sure that regular readers of this column think all I ever talk about, write about, ruminate on and care about is abortion.

Those who think I write too often about abortion tend to think women should have access to the procedure with relatively few limitations, and that my continued harping on the essential inhumanity of the act is just wrong, self-defeating, offensive and my favorite recent critique, “misogynistic.”

I might even concede I spend far too much time focusing on this violation of the right to life when there is so much else going on around the world: war, famine, women being murdered for unfortunate wardrobe mistakes, child abuse, genocide and such.

My profession as an asylum practitioner actually does give me time to focus on those crises in real time, every day, so it’s not like I’m unaware of what’s happening to the sisters in Afghanistan under the Taliban or the fighters in Ukraine, or the children being trafficked across the many borders of the world, including our own.

And yet, I can’t ignore abortion precisely because people like Rebecca Traister won’t let me.

Traiser, a New York Magazine contributor, was recently interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, kept referring to abortion as “reproductive health,” which is fine since I tend to use the term “killing babies,” both of which are more hyperbolic than perfectly accurate.

Traiser and women like her keep prattling on about how one entire gender, one full half of the population is enslaved when they are unable to “control” their bodies.

In fact, Gov. Tim Walz just signed a bill in Minnesota that would essentially make abortion a right that no court could overturn. Rebecca must be thrilled.

You know who else won’t let me ignore abortion?

Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice.

As I wrote last week, the Biden administration came down hard against pro-life activist Mark Houck, making a literal federal case out of a sidewalk skirmish.

It was so obvious that this was a political prosecution that the presiding judge, Gerald Pappert, observed that the U.S. attorney’s office might have stretched the law a bit far in bringing the case.

Fortunately, a few men and women with no particular philosophical bias agreed with the judge and acquitted Houck of all charges.

The attempt by the Department of Justice to intimidate a vocal pro-life activist is chilling, but simply one of many efforts waged by those who are shocked that their monopoly on the abortion message has been hijacked by another reality.

They can no longer write the narrative that most Americans are OK with demonizing people of faith, with silencing uncomfortable voices, with vilifying those who pose no threat but who are attempting to do what civil rights activists have always done: follow the arc of justice.

And while I was angered by the Houck prosecution and gratified by his acquittal, the thing that continues to trouble me is not the attacks against adults but, rather, the continued crusade against young people.

A few years ago, it was Nick Sandman from Covington Catholic High School who was quite literally defamed for having the temerity to attend a pro-life rally wearing a MAGA hat.

While much of the ire seemed focused on the hat, it was clear that most of the then-16-year-old’s critics were more upset that he was attending the March For Life.

How dare he, this embryonic sexual abuser a la Brett Kavanaugh, protest a woman’s right to do whatever she wanted with her unborn child? We shall make him pay.

Ironically, they were the ones who ended up paying directly into his savings account.

And it never ends. This month, a group of students from Our Lady of the Rosary School in South Carolina were attending this year’s March for Life and decided to visit the Smithsonian Institute.

They were wearing pro life hats. According to reports, which were confirmed by the museum directors, the students were mocked mercilessly and then kicked out of the museum — the national museum funded by our tax dollars — when they wouldn’t take off their hats.

First Amendment, meet civil rights lawsuit.

So those who wonder why I keep writing about abortion only need to take their heads out of the sand and look around.

Being pro-life is still a big news item.

I suspect Merrick, Rebecca and Nick would agree.

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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].