Cagle World

This is addressed to the people who remain in a state of shock after Pennsylvania voters chose John Fetterman to represent them in the U.S. Senate come January.

Many have said that the reason Fetterman won is that Pennsylvanians did not like the “inauthenticity” of his opponent, Mehmet Oz. The Fetterman campaign successfully painted the cardiologist and television star as an elite carpet bagger who had a rich vocabulary.

I mean, no Pennsylvanian is smart enough to use the word “crudites” west of the Susquehanna, right?

But upon further reflection, I realized that this was just a symptom and not the true motivation for voters who would choose the former mayor of Braddock over Oz. Authenticity is nice, hoodies are cool, tattoos are like, even cooler, and having a shaved head makes you look just like that guy who hangs out in the beverage section at Sheetz while his Harley is being gassed up.

I was also told that abortion was the big issue in this election, and that is definitely true. In fact, it’s much more likely that those white suburban women called “roaches” by “The View’s” Sunny Hostin voted for the guy who said he’d fight for their right to abort their babies at pretty much any stage in the pregnancy, than that they appreciated his resemblance to a member of the Pagan motorcycle gang.

Abortion became the big draw for the triggered Madam Ovaries across the nation, and Pennsylvania was no exception.

Indeed, the hysteria after Justice Samuel Alito stated the obvious fact that there was no “right” to abortion in the U.S. Constitution was apocalyptic in scope and nature. I remember feeling triggered myself, just hearing them scream about handmaids and forced birth.

I went through menopause a few years ago, and even I was convinced that some government official was going to forcibly impregnate me. There was an entire week, in fact, that I was afraid the Angel Gabriel was going to show up at my window, accompanied by Justice Alito.

And if you don’t get that, don’t worry, it’s an inside Catholic joke.

Many women across the state, but particularly in southeastern Pennsylvania and out by Pittsburgh, were convinced that we had lost our rights.

But even after all that, even after considering that the women were so obsessed with their own reproductive autonomy and couldn’t see the forest for their uteri, it dawned on me that abortion wasn’t even the primary motivation for the decision to elect a man who cannot speak clearly and is still in the early stages of rehab, a man who has never owned his own home, a man who depends on his parents to put food on the table for his children, a man who held a shotgun to an innocent Black man, a man who wanted the murderer of my friend’s father released from jail for “compassionate reasons,” a man who supports the legalization of drugs (at least some of them) and a man who hates Republicans.

The real reason that Fetterman was elected over a competent, well-educated surgeon who saves lives instead of seeking the release of those who took them in the most brutal manner, is because more people hated us than liked Oz.

Let me put it another way: The reason that Fetterman was elected to the U.S. Senate is that his supporters cast a vengeance vote. There was nothing appealing, nothing inspiring, nothing admirable in this man who will now represent 50% of our senatorial presence in D.C.

There was nothing noteworthy, particularly commendable or even redemptive about him. The thing that Fetterman harnessed better than anyone else could was the anger, the hatred and the resentment that Democrats have harbored since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States six years ago.

It has festered, and it has corroded the innards of every progressive and even every center-left liberal for a very long time, and this was their opportunity to exact that pound of flesh at the ballot box. Simple as that.

The truth is that we now have a senator who was elected out of hatred and anger, misogyny towards conservative women, disregard for victims of crime, and a sense of gotcha.

Well, they got us, that’s for sure. And they should be prepared for what happens in 2024. Elephants have long memories.

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Copyright 2022 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 always thought that the term “October Surprise” was misleading.

It commonly refers to an incident that happens right before an election, something so intriguing or scandalous that it might have an impact on voters who would otherwise have voted predictably.

But the “surprise” part is a misnomer. There is nothing unexpected about ambush politics, and anyone who raises their eyebrows in a Betty Boop sort of “Oh no!” is either fatally naïve, or a good liar. Actually, not such a good liar.

Sometimes the attempt to turn what would otherwise be a neutral news story into a partisan hatchet job falls flat. When you examine it up close, it ends up reflecting so poorly on the “surpriser” that is manages to have the opposite effect.

In other words, you look at the guy or gal trying to slime their opponent, and you decide that the opponent looks a heck of a lot better than before.

This is happening in Georgia, with Herschel Walker.

The Democrats put out an ad on Craigslist looking for women who might have become impregnated by the former Heisman Trophy winner, and they came up with a bunch of distressed exes.

They then accused Walker, who has been outspokenly pro-life in recent years, of hypocrisy for urging those fertile gals to abort his kids. It’s interesting to note that none of these women made public claims in the past, and none of them seemed particularly desirous to have been mothers in the first place.

I mean, if you accept money for an abortion and then have that abortion, you cannot lament the fact that you’ve been victimized. To be more accurate, you’ve been subsidized.

But the Democrats pushed this story for over a month, and while it did have some traction in the early days, recent polls have shown that Walker is neck and neck with his Democratic opponent Rafael Warnock.

The Rev. Warnock has his own ethical issues when it comes to domestic relationships, including a credible claim that he’s skimped a bit on his child support.

But after a debate that saw Walker’s number climb in the polls, it seems as if this particular October surprise missed the mark.

The Walker incident pales in comparison to what the Democrats are trying to do with the Paul Pelosi tragedy.

Nancy Pelosi’s husband was brutally attacked by a psychotic, hammer-wielding vagrant last week. By every metric and measure, this was a horrific assault, and anyone who makes fun of it, as a distressing number of those in my conservative tribe have done, is a soulless creep.

But let’s be clear: Questioning the circumstances surrounding the attack is not the same thing as mocking the victim.

Wondering how the intruder was able to break into a well-guarded home, wondering why the police didn’t immediately overcome the attacker when they arrived, wondering why a man who spent most of his life as a psychotic left-winger suddenly shifted to being a psychotic right winger, wondering why the security cameras in this well-fortified home weren’t turned on, and simply wondering why the police gave out information in bits and pieces is not cruel, mocking or inhuman.

In fact, it is extremely human to ask questions about strange situations.

Because of these questions, Republicans have been accused of everything from elder abuse to white nationalism. And that has now morphed into a new Jan. 6 narrative, an attempt to remind undecided voters that the Democrats love democracy, and Republicans not only force their exes to abort their babies, they also want to revive the Third Reich, just in time for the midterms.

This is the classic October surprise: trying to turn your political opponent into a satanic figure.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive.

Democrats accuse Republicans of exploiting the assault against an 82-year-old man, but they are the ones trying to use it to win an election.

While not exactly a surprise, it’s troubling.

Obviously Democrats aren’t the only ones who do this. Who can forget Willie Horton and the race-mongering of the George H.W. Bush campaign?

Who can forget the eve-of-election revelations that Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern’s running mate, had received electro-shock therapy?

Who can forget the continual gotchas involving Whitewater and Women against Bill Clinton, even though most of them were not limited to October. And again, Gary Hart.

But exploiting the attack on an elderly man tops all of these, and it’s another example of why politics is the dirtiest game around.

And that should be a surprise to absolutely no one.

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Copyright 2022 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].

It’s not like Philadelphians haven’t been here before.

There have been moments in time when it seemed as if God forgave us our lack of couth, our insufficient grace, our loud and insistent demands on his mercy, and gave us a random championship.

It happened the year before I was born, when the Eagles handed Vince Lombardi’s Packers their only post-season loss in 1960.

It happened back-to-back in 1974 and 1975 when the legendary Broad Street Bullies, the players who were formed with the sinew of Philadelphia grit and spirit, brought the Stanley Cup home to stay for two glorious seasons.

It happened in 1980, when an escaped angel from New York, Tug McGraw, willed us into a miraculous World Series Win.

It happened again with a similar team, one with a heart made of stitched-together leather, grassy knees and bruised bones, in 2008.

The one that brought me to my own knees and convinced me that Heaven was painted Kelly green was the Eagles 2018 Super Bowl win, a millennia-or-so-it-seemed in the making.

And each time we won, each moment of athletic glory and improbable, resilient victory pulled Philadelphians together for a few moments.

I’m not just referring to the city limits. This region spills over into suburbs and exurbs, encompassing rolling hills and horse-filled pastures, cookie-cutter malls and dainty brick singles, and Wawa. Always Wawa.

There are a lot of us packed into these neighborhoods, and you only have to look at the signs on the manicured lawns and potholed streets during this political season to know how divided we are.

And yet over the last few days, my timeline has filled up with red everywhere, from people wearing Phillies gear to photos of the city bathed in crimson light, and everything in between.

It’s a love fest, and it will last for the next week or so.

I checked to see when the World Series would end if it goes the distance, and the date is Nov. 6. And I had to smile, because that’s two full days before the November elections are over.

Even though we might not have an actual winner on Nov. 8, given past experience with the mail in ballots, it’s fair to assume that the euphoria of the championship will outlast the bitter taste of the election.

My desire for a World Series championship is only slightly less compelling than my hope for a Republican sweep in Congress and at the state level.

Frankly, I want a red wave everywhere, on the baseball diamond, in Washington and in Harrisburg. Red is my current favorite color.

But I think that for a few days I will be able to separate my anger and disgust with my political opponents from the possibility that those with blue waves in their profiles and waving Fetterman signs in my face are kindred spirits when it comes to baseball.

I’m prepared to ignore the snide comments about puppy-killing cardiologists and white Christian nationalist state legislators for the few suspended hours of “Kumbaya” communion for our beloved team.

I’m inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, for a hummingbird’s moment, to the ladies who presume to tell me that a child is not a child until you can hold her in your arms, and that before that, she’s mere property.

I’m willing to suppose, long enough to hold my expectant breath, that the man who would normally call me a traitor since I voted for a certain candidate would split a cheesesteak “wit” during the seventh-inning stretch of a crucial game.

I’m hoping I can concede, with a straight face, that the woman who demanded I keep my rosaries off of her ovaries but wants to indoctrinate my nephews and nieces with her own secular form of rainbow-colored religion, has as much a love for our valiant base runners as I do.

There is something civilizing about sport, and the loyalty it triggers in beleaguered fans. That thing transcends a lot of the anger and rhetoric that rises up from the deepest, darkest depths in our psyche.

I am hoping, since hope is the last thing to die, that regardless of what happens at the midterms, we can stand together on Broad Street and cheer on our triumphant team. Without, that is, shedding anything red.

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Copyright 2022 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].

James Carville once quipped: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Although most of us care about things like crime, religious freedom, jobs and the ability of our elected officials to speak in coherent sentences, the thing that impacts everyone, regardless of race, gender and political ideology is the state of our collective bank balances.

Of course, I’m also keenly interested in how the candidates running in the midterms feel about abortion. To me, what’s not in my wallet is just as important as what’s not in my uterus. It was therefore delightful to see how Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was able to combine both issues in her response to a question from MSNBC host Mike Barnacle.

Barnacle asked Abrams if she really thought that abortion was going to be a motivating factor for Democrats in the election, given that “it nowhere reaches the level of interest of voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that.”

And Abrams, who spent the last four years insisting that she was governor even though Brian Kemp actually won the last race, and even though her claims of voter fraud were thrown out of court by an Obama appointed judge, had this response:

“Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas, it’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue. You can’t divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child.”

The price of gas, the cost of food. Abrams placed these on the same moral plane as having a child. “The economic realities of having a child” can be distilled down to “the price of a baby.” It is the most obvious, most honest and most chilling explanation of the pro-choice position on an issue which matters to millions upon millions of women, and the men who love them.

Personally, abortion is the most important issue for me. It is the center of my moral compass, the metric by which I measure the humanity of other people. If you support abortion, even for others, you are a lesser person in my eyes.

But I think it’s important to focus on the message that Abrams is communicating in clarion terms. For many in the abortion rights movement, it is necessary to look at the unborn child as a commodity. The majority of them are good people, not sociopaths, so framing the issue as a simple medical procedure to remove an annoying fibroid – that happens to have a separate digestive system – makes it easier to sleep at night.

Abrams simply takes that next logical step, putting a price tag on the fibroid. To her, and to many who think like her, having a baby is as much about the expense as it is about the miracle.

Babies are not commodities, like food, fuel and iPhones. They are separate entities with anatomies, souls, and prospects. They are at least as valuable as our pets, although some people seem more outraged at Mehmet Oz’s alleged experiments on dogs than they are with John Fetterman’s refusal to place limits on the procedure.

The way Abrams’ mind works is reflective of the way many narcissists operate: it’s all about me, my concerns, my desires, my needs. She never stops to consider that a child in utero is no one’s property, and that the only person who has a right to put value on it is the child herself. In other words, she exists above and beyond any economic concerns of the woman whose body she happens to share for a few months.

There is a beautiful biblical verse from Jeremiah which says “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” I hesitate to even quote the bible, because pro-choice activists like to paint their opponents as religious zealots. But this phrase communicates, poignantly, why people like Stacey Abrams cannot be allowed to hold positions of authority. She sees the world in terms of what it can do for her, and what it owes her.

We, on the other hand, understand that it’s not all about us. Or to paraphrase Carville, it’s the humanity, stupid.

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Copyright 2022 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].

Many years ago, we knew a family that had a little boy around my age.

I never wanted to spend time with Richard, because he was deaf, and couldn’t communicate clearly. But one day, my father essentially threatened that if I didn’t play him, I’d be punished.

Across the half-century since then, I realize that empathy for someone with a disability is the sine qua non of being human.

But that doesn’t mean that we ignore disability when it has a very real, very relevant impact on issues of importance, issues as who should be going to Washington to represent us in the Senate.

As we all now know, even though it was initially and deliberately hidden by the candidate, John Fetterman suffered a life-threatening stroke in May. He is still in the recovery phase and has refused to release medical records, which would establish just how far along he is in that recovery.

Fetterman continues to insist that he’s gotten a clean bill of health from his physician, the same one he ignored five years ago when told of a serious heart condition that might lead to a stroke. He keeps pointing to a letter from that doctor, a letter that is almost six months old, as proof that he’s fine.

But he’s not fine. You don’t have to be a neurosurgeon or a cardiac specialist like Fetterman’s opponent, Mehmet Oz, to see that he is struggling to communicate and comprehend. He admits to using a teleprompter to help translate questions for him.

In carefully curated television ads, he sounds perfectly fine, and his online persona — which is very likely crafted by campaign staff — is clever, snarky and hip. The Fetterman served up in controlled doses is every bit the Fetterman that presided over the Pennsylvania legislature with no tie, jacket and tattoos flashing.

However, when caught in spontaneous moments and asked questions by sympathetic journalists, he struggles. His team insists that it’s simply an auditory issue and not something that reflects a brain deficiency, but there are no actual medical records to prove it.

He won’t release them.

And the media have thrown their full support behind the guy by refusing to insist on those records and instead, spinning a narrative that critiques of his health are bigoted, cruel, and partisan.

I’d agree with the partisan accusation. The GOP goal is to keep him from taking that Senate seat and helping Biden gain a 51-seat majority. The goal is to keep his radical policies from destroying the commonwealth. The goal, quite clearly, is to neutralize him politically.

What I refuse to concede is the bigotry or cruelty. Putting aside the Americans With Disabilities Act, it’s fair to suggest that putting a man with a significant medical disability in such a sensitive position of authority is reckless.

Some point to the fact that Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs while piloting a helicopter in the military and Madison Cawthorne, who was paralyzed in an accident and used a wheelchair and Arlen Specter, who served while fighting cancer are examples that you don’t have to be perfectly healthy to be able to perform competently.

What they’re forgetting is that Duckworth lost her legs in service to her country, Cawthorne had a freak accident and Specter was completely transparent and forthcoming about his problems.

Fetterman had a stroke very likely because he ignored the advice of his doctor, and covered it up until he couldn’t. That’s a sign of recklessness and a lack of judgment that disqualifies him from office.

And that’s the point.

It isn’t the disability so much as it is the failure to come clean. It isn’t the disability so much as it is the attempts by friendly media and supporters to deflect attention. It isn’t the disability so much as it is the attempts to turn this whole thing into a referendum on bigotry.

My friend Jason had this to say on the subject:

“After I lost most of my hearing because of meningitis, I accepted the fact that there were some jobs that I simply couldn’t do, such as police officer, which I was on track to becoming until I got sick at 19. Fetterman needs to come to this same realization.”

That shows humility, and wisdom, two things Fetterman and his supporters clearly don’t have.

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Copyright 2022 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 write this, the clock is ticking.

I have exactly six more hours in the Facebook gulag, the last stretch of a weeklong sentence imposed by the invisible community police after I reposted a picture of Iranian women being beaten in the streets of Tehran, and added my own caption: “Ladies, burn those pink pussy hats and stand back: these are the real heroes.”

Apparently the algorithms, which are the algebraic equivalent of a sulking adolescent female, thought that using the word “burn” in proximity to “Ladies” was a form of violence. For the Facebook prison guards, I was no different from a mullah bashing in the head of an Iranian woman who wore her hijab incorrectly.

It is this sort of thing that has angered me since I first began to practice immigration law. Last week, I helped a woman from El Salvador win asylum after years of being abused by the men in her family, something that anyone who has a passing familiarity with the countries of the Northern Triangle would completely understand.

A few months before that, a woman from Egypt who’d been married to a former police officer won asylum after she proved that his colleagues covered up for him when he beat her with an ashtray, burned her with cigarettes, starved her and locked her in a room for days on end.

And I’m still dealing with the debacle in Afghanistan, as family members try and get female relatives to safety after the Taliban took control.

This is sacred work for me. I have always been surrounded by strong women in my own life, from the Italian matriarchs who raised me to the nuns who educated me to the professional mentors like Lynne Abraham, who gave me amazing examples to follow and to emulate.

That’s why, when I see women being beaten down and deprived of the rights and privileges we take for granted here, I jump to action. If I weren’t practicing in this field, I would not be practicing at all.

While I can empathize with Americans who say that our own women suffer, because I have personal confirmation that we do, there is something jarring and repellent about the naivete of my citizen sisters.

The suggestion that a woman who was improperly propositioned by a Hollywood director, ogled by a morning show host, sniffed by an elderly senator or “misgendered” by a male teacher was a victim of true abuse is upsetting in a way that I find hard to explain to someone who never sat in on an asylum hearing.

Yes, sexism exists in the United States. Women are raped and abused. Domestic violence is still a scourge that no amount of public engagement and consciousness-raising will ever completely eradicate.

But to paraphrase our president, Come on Ma’am!

There are women who are being killed in Iran because centimeters of their hair are visible to triggered men. There are girls who are being murdered in Honduras because they refuse to date a member of Mara Salvatrucha. There are female children in Mali who are having their genitals cut and sutured so that the wicked and perverted standards of purity espoused by certain tribes are satisfied.

There are lesbians in Albania being raped because of their sexual orientation.

And here, we fire professors for using the wrong pronouns and think female soccer players who are already making millions of dollars are victims because the men — who people prefer to watch — are making more.

Here, we have doctors like Leah Torres making statements like “GTFO my uterus” on her Twitter feed, after explaining how unborn babies can’t scream because she cuts their cords before a larynx is formed.

And so on, unto an infinity of voices droning on about how horrible it is to be a woman in the United States of America, a place with four women on the highest court, a woman of color only a heartbeat away from the presidency — God help us — and where men commit suicide at a much higher rate than the oppressed sisters.

I’ve written about this before, and the response is always the same: just because it’s bad over there, doesn’t mean it’s OK over here. And then I see women being beaten and killed, mauled and disappearing because of an item of clothing, and I want to scream that IT IS OK over here.

At least we have our voices, and our pens. At least we have that split second between protest and punishment, to run to safety.

At least we’re not them. And for that, we need to give humble thanks.

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Copyright 2022 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 1994, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.

It criminalized the use of physical force or threats to injure or intimidate a woman seeking an abortion, the use of physical force or threats to injure or intimidate someone from exercising their right to religious freedom at a place of worship and, the intentional destruction of an abortion clinic or place of worship.

The FACE Act was designed to address the concerns of abortion activists who were worried about some of the more radical pro-life protesters who had either killed abortion providers, or stood outside of clinics to harass female patients.

The fact that this was a statistically small percentage of those of us in the movement did not matter to the legislators, or to the media. I remember reading a number of commentaries about how grateful women should be that their right to be free from dangerous “anti-choice” terrorists had been codified.

FACE was challenged in federal court, but its constitutionality was upheld under the Commerce Clause, the reasoning being that anything that impacts interstate commerce, including abortion, falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government. The Supreme Court has rejected appeals, and it’s the law of the land.

So, however, is the right to defend one’s child against sexual harassment.

Last week, a well-known pro-life activist named Mark Houck received an early morning visit from a team of FBI agents at his home in Pennsylvania, and was arrested on charges of having violated the FACE Act.

He was handcuffed in front of his children. According to his wife, but later denied by the Department of Justice, the agents held him at gunpoint. The case is ongoing.

The thing I want to focus on, here, is the troubling increase in attacks on pro-life activism. Language is powerful, and using it to change the perception of a victim or victimizer is effective. The people who hate that Roe v. Wade was overturned have a tendency to use “anti-choice.”

Those of us who respect unborn babies almost always use “pro-life,” and the rest fall into more neutral territory.

But that territory is being encroached upon by increasingly radicalized abortion rights activists who see anyone carrying a rosary, shouting Bible verses, holding up disturbing photos of aborted children or even just imploring women not to go inside as terrorists.

Now, they have a friendly Department of Justice at their disposal, one that is ready to conduct a pre-dawn raid on a husband and father of seven young children.

In my opinion, the FACE act goes too far. One man’s free speech is another woman’s intimidation. Defining the line between criminal and constitutional has to be done on a case-by-case basis, but using the full force of the federal government to do so is troubling in this context.

Beyond troubling, it’s chilling.

You may not like the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, and that is your right. You can vote for legislators who support abortion, and you can write op-eds about reproductive rights using the same tone and reverence that I give to actual sacraments.

You can still, in fact, get an abortion.

What you cannot do is demonize people of faith under the guise of enforcing the law. What you cannot do is conflate a legitimate ethical opposition to what many of us see as “permissible barbarism” and religious zealotry.

What you cannot do is use the federal government to nationalize your poorly-hidden hostility to certain political theories. That is fascism, in its purest form.

The other night, I was scrolling through the channels, and came upon a movie called “Guilty of Treason.” It was the story of Cardinal Jozef Mindszenty, a Hungarian prelate who criticized both the Nazis and the Communists in the middle of the last century.

I only know about him because my mother told me her class at Our Lady of Angels used to pray for his safety back in the 1950s. As a result of his outspoken religious activism, he was arrested, convicted at a show trial and tortured.

He escaped, and then spent 15 years as, essentially, a prisoner at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, eventually dying in exile in 1975.

Mindszenty is unknown to most people under the age of 60. But I felt as if he was whispering in my ear in 2022, reminding me, as someone once said, that the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past.

I will remember that the next time I walk into an immigration hearing with a client who seeks religious protection from our own government, after being persecuted by another.

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Copyright 2022 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].

Every one of us has the right to defend our reputations against attack.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen reputations destroyed by people with agendas. Those agendas have been personal, political, criminal or simply borne out of the nihilistic desire to hurt a moving human target.

Many of these attacks have been unjustified from an objective standpoint, although, like Christine Blasey Ford, they have garnered the support of like-minded social predators with resentment in their arsenals.

Some have been unsuccessful, as with the Duke lacrosse debacle, but in their failure have established fearful precedents and a motive for others to keep attacking. And yet the right to defend ourselves remains.

It is enshrined in the 5th and 14th Amendments of the Constitution. It is codified in the laws against slander and defamation. It is even present, albeit severely weakened, in the wilds of social media.

But it exists, and no one should be penalized for exercising it in the moments when someone with a grudge comes for us, rhetorical weapons blazing.

I was reminded of this the other day when a friend I’ve only met through Twitter made an innocuous comment about women and their obsession with cellphones in public spaces.

He was doxed and ridiculed. They tried to get him fired from his teaching job and made life a general hell for the hummingbird spin cycle in the virtual universe.

Seeing what happened to Steve reminded me of what happened to my friend Stu Bykofsky.

“Byko” is a legendary literary presence in the Philadelphia region, having chronicled the events and characters of this city and its suburbs for almost a half century.

He started out and will always be associated with the Philadelphia Daily News, but also wrote for the sister Inquirer after a merger of sorts occurred.

Before I go any further, a disclaimer: I also wrote for the Daily News/Inquirer for almost two decades, not nearly as long as Stu but long enough to create my own following of lovers and haters.

I left the papers, not of my own will, but because an editor who is no longer there and who once jokingly said she’d love to strangle me because of my pro life views, didn’t like the way that I defended myself in emails to readers.

You might know that kind of reader, the ones who suggest that you are a sexist, a bigot, a racist, and oh, maybe someone should sexually assault you so you’d understand how victims truly feel.

I responded with some salty observations of my own, which did not sit well with the editors. So I’m not exactly an unbiased observer.

But what I went through is nothing compared to what Stu endured.

At his going away party in 2019 — a party that he really didn’t want but was forced upon him by colleagues — Inga Saffron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic at the Inquirer accused him of having a “taste” for child prostitutes in Thailand. Inga got this “scoop” about Stu’s alleged extracurricular activities from a 2011 column he’d written about a trip he took to Thailand.

I’ve read the column, and nothing in it would give anyone the idea he was guilty of that most shocking, and criminal, of acts.

She later admitted to an ongoing grudge with Stu, in large part because of their disagreement over bicyclists in the city.

Stu was shocked, as was I.

I remember standing there at the party and thinking that this was an “Alice in Wonderland” moment, and waited for someone in the newsroom to stop the verbal assault. No one did.

Stu had taken a buyout from the company, on the condition that he not “disparage” the paper to third parties. When, however, a video of the party and a story was published online by Philadelphia magazine, and the full horror of the defamation went public, Bykofsky sued to repair his reputation.

The Inquirer then did something so unprecedented that it should receive a Pulitzer for innovation: a newspaper trashing the First Amendment. It sued Stu, and sought a return of his retirement package.

The sheer chutzpah of a newspaper suing someone because of speech it doesn’t like is without precedent. Literally, I’ve looked through the annals of First Amendment jurisprudence, and I couldn’t find any examples of the Fourth Estate suing to shut someone up.

The lawsuit is still pending, by the way.

This is not just a simple contractual issue. To my mind, this is a dangerous attempt at punishing someone for defending his reputation.

We all have to deal with blowback in this hostile age. The toxic mix of partisanship, anonymity and grievance has made us vulnerable to unfair attacks.

But the idea that a newspaper would join in the attacks is astonishing, troubling and dangerous. To quote a great defender of free speech, attention must be paid.

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Copyright 2022 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].

John Fetterman, aspiring to be junior U.S. senator of Pennsylvania, recently held a rally in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

It’s a shame that Fetterman didn’t ask for my opinion about what really matters. He seems to be taking his orders from the sort of political operatives who don’t understand that making “abortion up until the moment of birth” your campaign slogan is not a great approach for winning decent hearts and discerning minds.

According to the Fetterman campaign, access to abortion is the only thing that seems to motivate intelligent females these days.

Not the economy. Not toxic educational theories shoved down the throats of children. Not harassment at school board meetings. Not the debacle in Afghanistan. Not even COVID.

The rally was designed to gin up anger among his pink-shirted followers, women who still parrot the ’70s slogan of “my body, my choice” (except of course when we are talking about mandatory vaccines and masks).

And there did appear to be a large number of these ladies, squeezed into a rather restrictive space in suburban Montgomery County, all there to support a man who has literally supported abortion without restrictions.

As a woman who has spent more than five decades living, studying and working in suburbs like Montgomery County, I understand that there are many women who do not share my pro-life views. I’d venture to say that a majority of even my closest friends support some form of legalized abortion, and were disturbed when the Dobbs ruling overturned the eminently unconstitutional decision in Roe.

At recent social gatherings we’ve made sure to steer clear of that topic, to avoid food ending up anywhere except on plates and in mouths.

But I can also state with absolute certainty that no one appreciates the pandering of Fetterman and the people who follow him like some abortion messiah.

These women exist, and they are loud, and they have the ear of the mainstream media, but they are not representative of the majority of Pennsylvania females.

I recently posted on social media a photo in front of City Hall, wherein I stated: “We live in Philadelphia too, John Fetterman. We, the women who you cannot dazzle with your promises of sexual freedom, earned on the backs of future generations of children. We’re not stupid. We’re not oppressed.
We’re not misogynists (as if.) We see through you. And we vote. We do. #Life.”

Between Facebook and Twitter, that post has gotten over 400 “likes,” and 50 shares. While that might not match a Kardashian or AOC in its level of influence, it’s one of the biggest reactions I’ve ever gotten on a political post in the past decade.

That suggests how disconnected Fetterman, and Democrats in general are to the zeitgeist of Pennsylvania women.

We are not the sort of people who blindly fall in line behind a man who promises abortion on demand and without apology. We do not generally fall for the scare tactics of political operatives who warn that if Mehmet Oz, or for that matter any other GOP candidate is elected in the fall, we will be forced to scrounge around for birth control on the black market.

We are not so naïve as to believe that Democrats see abortion as anything other than a way to demonize the other side, and win an election.

I know some folks who were thrilled when the Dobbs decision came down this June, and not because they oppose abortion. They’ve told me in confidence that this was exactly what they needed to energize Democrats for the midterms. They know that Joe Biden is an albatross for his party, and if they can scare women into believing that the United States will be changing its name to the United States of Gilead come November, they’ll score atthe polls.

My response is that women are a lot smarter than that. Of course, you will get the outliers like those pink-shirted darlings at the Fetterman rally in Montco, tricked into believing that their Handmaid capes were ready for pick up in a warehouse owned by Dr. Oz and the GOP. You will get the women who think that their worth and value depends on being able to become unpregnant without restriction.

They exist.

But Pennsylvania women are far less gullible than what the Fetterman campaign perceives us to be.

And as I said, even in the suburbs, we vote.

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Copyright 2022 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 expected the Irish schadendfruede.

Although I generally identify as Italian (primarily because of the food, family and temper) my father had red hair, freckles and some relatives in County Somewhere.

My ties to the old country are pretty attenuated, but I’ve been around Irish Americans most of my life, so I knew that they’d be a bit gleeful about the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

Mostly, I thought there’d be bad jokes and a few tasteless toasts to her “Hell-th.” But I didn’t anticipate the level of vitriol triggered by the passing of the world’s longest-reigning monarch.

It never occurred to me that people I knew, and liked, would be posting memes about dancing jigs and the potato famine (which occurred, um, almost two centuries ago and in which Elizabeth Windsor, old as she was, didn’t have a hand.) I was surprised to see some otherwise sensible friends post diatribes about the colonization of their wee bit of earth by this vandal queen.

Worse, though, was the thinly-veiled defense of the Irish Republican Army.

When I mentioned that the IRA had murdered Lord Mountbatten and his innocent 12-year-old grandson in a bombing back in the 1970s, the ones who chose to engage with me tried to do that “whataboutism” that I myself have fallen into on some regrettable occasions.

Let’s be clear: the British have been brutal in Northern Ireland, but that does not excuse the murder of an innocent child (or other innocent children that the terror group targeted.)

And when I say terror group, I mean terror group.

To call the IRA freedom fighters is to fall into the same trap set by Rashida Tlaib, who refers to the PLO with that same sort of terminology, or Ilhan Omar who has a very hard time condemning the folks who kidnap and behead Christians. Terror has no passport, no nationality.

But to be honest, the worst comments weren’t from what they’ve called “Irish Twitter,” but rather from people who like to appropriate the misery of ancestors they never met, and grievances they never suffered.

You have the typical comments like this one from a professor at Carnegie Mellon, someone named Uju Anya, who tweeted, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

The university issued a statement condemning the comments, but she won’t lose her job. Imagine if a white professor deliberately used the wrong pronouns of a prominent trans activist. They’d be suspended. They actually have (Google it.)

But a Black woman can make despicable comments about a (then) dying monarch who never harmed her, who never even met her and who likely had nothing to do with whatever phantom terrors Anya’s great-great-great grandmother suffered, and she earns the applause of thousands.

This is the world in which we live.

After my mother died, I received some lovely expressions of sympathy from my political adversaries. The vast majority of the people were kind, because in the moments of our deepest sorrow most human beings follow their better angels. There were, however, some people who emailed to gloat.

I can only imagine what the British royal family is feeling just now, if they make the mistake of actually checking social media and reading the things from mediocre creatures like the Carnegie Mellon professor, people so insensate and narcissistic that they have no room in their hearts for grace.

There has been such a hardening of discourse, fueled by the aggravating factor of social media anonymity, that it’s rare to find true, pure, kind sentiment when a public figure dies.

Even someone as universally beloved and uncontroversial as Elizabeth triggers anger and resentment in those who live to find fault, who mine grievance like the Molly Maguires mined coal, who abandon any pretense of decency to feed the gods of their cult of victimization.

Frankly, at this moment, I’m as interested in the evils of the British Empire as I am of those perpetrated by the Roman Empire.

The recent nature of the alleged atrocities doesn’t distinguish them, for me, from the massacre of Christians by Diocletian, and the bones of the persecuted in Africa bear the same weight as the bones sealed into the walls of the Roman Catacombs. History is replete with evil, and some of it was committed in the name of the empire headed by Elizabeth’s ancestors.

But she did none of this. Her legacy is one of service, duty, obligation, decency and honor.

She deserves recognition for what she did, and not for what she bears on her shoulders through some historical proxy.

Shame on those who don’t get it.

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Copyright 2022 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].