Cagle World

Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney has issued another edict. As of Monday, everyone who wanders into a public indoor space in the city must wear a mask. Or to put it in Biblical terms, So Let It Be Fastened, So Let It Be Worn.

There really is no middle ground on mask mandates: either you think they’re fine, or you think they violate your freedom. There’s no ambiguity when it comes to telling people what they need to put on their faces if they want to operate in society. There is no demilitarized zone.

I’ve been on the “Let My Nostrils Go” side of the divide since the beginning of the pandemic. I never saw the need for masks, I’m not convinced they made much of a difference unless they provided hospital grade protection, and I’m convinced that the ones who “believe in science” are the same ones willing to jump off of the Cliff of Gullibility every time an elected official or CNN commentator screams “Cases!” That cliff is right next to the Valley of No Hospitalizations.

Here’s the thing. The folks who want to keep us masked – even when the CDC thinks it’s unnecessary and even when virtually every other major metropolitan center has abandoned mandates – have decided to ignore the actual science. It’s no longer about numbers for them. It’s about morality.

Their opinions run the gamut from “Oh it’s no big deal” to “Shut up whiner” to “It’s such a small burden in exchange for saving lives” to “Republicans want us to die.” The only thing dead here, is nuance.

Two years ago, I wrote widely about my problem with masks, particularly when it came to children in schools. At the same time, I conceded that it was better to be safe than sorry. Now, however, times have changed. The newest variant, what I like to call Baby Omicron, is highly contagious. Guess what else is? The common cold. No one dies of the common cold. Very few die of the actual flu. We wheeze, we sneeze, we get headaches, we spend our nights in the bathroom, we use Vicks Vapo Rub and we feel better.

But mask obsessives do not care about this simple fact. They equate “cases” with “funerals” and make it seem as if we left COVID a few miles ago as we motor towards Ebola. I’ve read the CDC reports, I’ve listened to Fauci. The thing is now an “endemic,” something that will always be with us. The science has spoken, and it’s saying “get a grip.”

Those who support Kenney and his mandate don’t want to get a grip. They want to continue to paint their opponents as immoral creatures who are so narcissistic and concerned with their own “freedom” that they’re willing to see their neighbors die. Only their neighbors are not dying. They are sneezing.

If you support mask wearing because you’re still afraid of the virus or because someone in your family became violently ill (or God forbid, died), I respect that. I don’t agree with you, but I understand where you’re coming from.

But if you’re in favor of masks because you see it as a way to mark your “woke” territory, like a pugnacious pup that just peed all over someone else’s lawn, I don’t respect you. If you like masks because you think it distinguishes you from people like me, I don’t respect you. If you like masks because it’s just one more way to signal that “hate has no home here,” I don’t respect you. If you like masks because you see it as a sign of virtue, I actually pity you.

Columnist John Podhoretz made the interesting observation that “One of year’s few saving graces has been the pandemic’s retreat. Eastern Pennsylvania’s voters have been robbed of that small blessing.”

Yes, we have. And to make one final reference to Moses and Pharaoh, the insistence on this sort of virtue might find us swimming in a Red Sea come November.

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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].

A few years ago, someone started a campaign to make Elsa the first lesbian Disney princess. It didn’t get much traction at the time, just like the idea that Ernie and Bert were shacking up as domestic partners on “Sesame Street.”

Fast forward to 2022. Now, we have Disney executives caught in flagrante, as they describe their master plan to force adult sexual obsessions on toddlers. Christopher Rufo, who almost single-handedly alerted the country to the dangers of Critical Race Theory in elementary schools, leaked video of a high-placed employee of the Manic (er, Magic) Kingdom getting all weepy about her “pansexual” and trans kids. This woman vowed to inject as much sexual theory and wokeness into children’s fare as humanly possible, because she wanted her own little darlings to see themselves reflected in the Disney characters.

Florida has become ground zero in the fight for family values and decency, as Gov. Ron DeSantis attempts to protect children from the excesses of progressive politicos who care more about social media approval than they do about the emotional and psychological welfare of minors. He has signed into law provisions that give parents more control over the education of their sons and daughters, and has erected a necessary barrier between the youngest students and the zealotry of LGBTQ activists disguised as teachers.

The so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law did not bar the word “gay” from the Floridian lexicon. It simply, and clearly, prohibited the discussion of sexual orientation and gender issues in grades K-3, where they have no place and where inclusion of those subjects can only confuse tender minds. Of course, the folks who find fault in virtue and gain purchase through hypocrisy (protect the kids from GOP fascists and keep abortion legal!) think that a child who can’t even walk yet needs to know that Heather has two mommies, and her uncles are actually her aunts.

Excuse me if I sound flippant, but the idea that a company beloved of boomers and subsequent generations is now controlled by social engineers of the most dangerous and egotistical kind is upsetting. I have canceled Disney Plus from my streaming account, because I can no longer justify subsidizing an organization that thinks toddlers should be exposed to adult concepts. To think that poignant, life-changing films like “Old Yeller” that marked my own childhood will now be replaced by digital cartoons that erase the distinction between male and female, is infinitely sad.

When you are talking about children, the rules are different. Same-sex marriage, adults who transition to an alternate gender, playing with pronouns and even First Amendment issues at the intersection of gender identity and faith are all fair game for debate. In an open society, mature adults can engage, even when they vehemently disagree.

But children don’t have the coping mechanisms that adults have, and it’s exactly for that reason that they are treated differently under the law. That, in a nutshell, is why Florida passed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which is really just a last-ditch attempt to restore power and dignity to parents.

Those same parents used to be able to trust Disney to babysit their kids for hours on end. They didn’t have to worry that some unsavory ideas were being shoved down the tikes’ throats under the guise of inclusion and diversity. They thought that Cinderella was looking for her Prince Charming, not that Prince Charming was considering how he’d look in those glass slippers.

Childhood ends soon enough. In many cases, it ends far too soon, as with abused and neglected boys and girls who never have the chance to experience the unconditional love of caring adults. I have met those kids. I’ve worked with them. I’ve taught them. I’m related to some.

To see Disney attempt to pull the rug out from under the parents who actually do care, and destroy that wonderful magic of childhood to appease some misguided adults, the same ones who persecuted the Boy Scouts for banning “gays” (even when no one asked for a boy’s sexual orientation before signing him up) is despicable.

Are we now going to worry about the sexual antics of the Seven Dwarves? Will we get a full-blown rundown of what happens when the prince climbs up Rapunzel’s braid and into her bedroom? Does the Beast get new pronouns? Does Ariel have a closer relationship with those fish than we were led to believe? And what about Sleeping Beauty? Has she really been alone in that forest all those years?

Walt Disney had a dream. The people who kidnapped that dream are trying to turn it into a nightmare.

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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].

Recently, a friend showed me a sobering graphic depicting the gender disparity in suicide rates between men and women. While females tend to attempt suicide more often than men (and experience suicidal thoughts more frequently,) males are more “successful” in completing the act.

There are a lot of reasons for the striking difference along gender lines, but one thing is clear: men are in crisis mode, and that crisis starts from early adolescence and carries all the way through to old age.

Years ago, Christina Hoff Somers wrote a book called “The War On Boys.” It was a welcome response to the volumes devoted to exposing the horrible state of girls in society, the Ophelias who were drowning in their own despair. Years of the second and third feminist waves were devoted to examining the particular problems facing females at school, at work, in love and at every level of their lives. Men were either ignored, ridiculed or in the worst case, demonized.

I remember the disturbing trend of sitcoms in the 70s and 80s that depicted the father figure not as a dependable and honored head of the family, but as a barely-tolerated buffoon. It was as if Hollywood needed to completely dismantle the solid, respectable role models from the Golden Age of Television shown in “Father Knows Best,” “Leave It To Beaver,” “My Three Sons” and similar beloved programs.

I can only imagine the impact it had on young men, who saw themselves portrayed as fools, or on the other end, manipulative predators. Virtually every episode of “Law and Order: SVU” shows male villains stalking their innocent female victims. And while Elliot was usually on the side of the angels, he was saddled with a violent temper while his partner Olivia was basically canonized. The fact that she was the product of a rape herself was not a coincidence.

The guys I knew generally swallowed the media malpractice with as much grace as they could muster. But as Christina Hoff Somers demonstrated, the “kids were not all right.” Statistics showed over two decades ago that boys were having problems in school while girls were flourishing. Part of this has to do with the fact that females are more able to articulate their feelings of anger or upset, and are taught that it’s okay to talk while boys were taught to just be quiet and suck it up. If they dared to express any sort of anger or upset, they were saddled with the label of “toxic masculinity.”

All of this came to a head with the Supreme Court hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. I think that those of us who watched those hearings in real time are still traumatized by what was done to that man. The fact that he was ultimately confirmed doesn’t change the fact that a man was set up for destruction, based entirely on fabrications. He was attacked, vilified, defamed and abused in a way that no nominee before, or since, has experienced. His reputation was drawn-and-quartered, and he became less than human.

When I saw the statistics on male suicide, I realized that the pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction. I’ve often dealt with victims of abuse in my immigration practice, and while many have been women, a sizeable number have been men. The very first Battered Spouse Petition I ever filed was on behalf of a man who had been threatened with deportation by his U.S. citizen spouse, a woman who joked about how she could lie about him abusing her, and no one would believe him if he defended himself.

I thought of that man when I watched the Kavanaugh hearings, and I thought of that man when I read that graphic which, to be honest, scared me. A society that doesn’t provide safety nets for all of its troubled children, regardless of gender, is a society headed for extinction.

March 31 was dubbed “International Trans Visibility” Day. We say that Black Lives Matter. The entire month of March was devoted to Women’s History. June is Gay Pride Month. There are lists of people we want to honor, and protect.

Judging from the disturbing statistics on suicide, there’s an even larger group of people dying, literally, for some attention.

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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 predicted, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing were pretty boring. Almost yawn-worthy. She’s a fairly boring person to being with, which I suppose is a good thing since we don’t need to worry about high school classmates popping up with lurid stories about Michelob parties, etc.

I’m very glad that there is no way to attack the character of Ketanji Brown Jackson, because I was truly disgusted in the lack of humanity displayed by people who inhabit the same modern country I do, but who adopted the values of the old Mongol warriors. When Brett Kavanaugh was the nominee, they unsheathed their spears and went for the jugular. It was ugly, unfair, and dishonest.

But just because it was a few boring few days in the Senate trenches, that doesn’t mean it was completely uneventful. Sen. Ted Cruz lobbed some questions about Brown’s support for “critical race theory,” as did Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Later in the hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley highlighted the fact that Brown has a rather spotty history on sentencing those convicted of child pornography, departing downward from the sentencing guidelines on many occasions. And she willingly, with a full heart, represented Guantanamo detainees.

Defending the constitutional rights of truly repellent people like suspected terrorists might not be everyone’s cup of tea (I’d never do it) but it’s still well within the ethical standards of the legal profession. In fact, some people think it’s an honorable thing to do.

And the whole critical race theory thing, while troubling in most contexts, is probably not that relevant to a judge who has been very open about her political views. Brown is a liberal activist, the sort of judge who will never please a Trump voter, a Bush voter and maybe not even a (Bill) Clinton voter. None of us expected her to, after Joe Biden was intimidated into bowing down, supine, to the extreme left of his sinking party. Brown is exactly what we were promised, so the critical race theory stuff is philosophical fluff at this stage.

But the child pornography thing is troubling, and the fact that the left is going on the offensive about it is quite telling. They have tried to place her conduct in context, noting that many judges give light sentences to those who’ve been convicted of child porn offenses, depending upon the circumstances of their involvement. They’ve even pointed out, correctly, that a lot of those judges are Republicans. That’s true.

They have justified her approach as therapeutic, trying to deal with criminals as criminals, and sick people as sick people. And they have attacked anyone who raises the issue as a liar, a sexist, a racist, and all other sorts of things. I was attacked for saying that Josh Hawley was right to focus on this issue, because ignoring relevant conduct by a sitting judge is senatorial malpractice.

Or to put it another way, if having a few beers as a high school senior makes you a rapist, what does having sympathy for a child pornographer make you? Just asking, which is what Hawley did, and what he was supposed to do under the whole principle of advise and consent.

Of course, we then have Sen. Jon Osoff coming out and comparing this questioning to “cruelty,” which must have Justice Kavanaugh running the bathroom because he’s laughing so hard. Cruelty, indeed.

In the end, none of this is going to derail the nomination. There are too many “yes” votes this time around, and that’s fine. That’s how Trump was able to get three justices of his own on the court, simple math (and a very brave moment by Sen. Susan Collins, who ignored liberal attacks and death threats and voted to confirm Kavanaugh).

But I am delighting in watching liberals try and joust with shadows, and with the ghosts of their own prior villainy. They remember what they did to Kavanaugh, and to a lesser extent to Amy Coney Barrett, and are projecting their own hatred and despicable conduct onto their GOP colleagues. That makes it easy for them to attack people like Cruz, Blackburn and Hawley for doing what any senator worth his paycheck should be doing — asking the questions that need to be answered.

Just because they don’t want to hear the answers doesn’t mean they can enforce an artificial silence.

Because that would be so boring, wouldn’t 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].

I certainly hope that the hearings on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, which started on Monday, are what Sen. Dick Durbin wants them to be: “Respectful and dignified.” That would be such a pleasant change from recent experience.

I imagine that there are no friends from the nominee’s past who just now remember a high school party she “might” have attended where there “might” have been inappropriate activity on a night that no one else can actually recall. That would be a terrible shame, and trigger such an unfortunate series of events, not to mention some really mediocre “Saturday Night Live”sketches.

Let’s pray that there aren’t going to be any folks digging through the judge’s past religious affiliations, looking for evidence that she belongs to a cult. It would be so regrettable if Judge Brown’s family and former associates happened to be dragged through the mud by political partisans, who only care about ensuring that an ideologue of their particular tribe makes it to the high court.

I’m still bitter about what happened during the Trump years when Democrats treated the nomination process as successive inquisitions of conservatives they mistrusted at best, hated at worst. While they sheathed their claws when Neil Gorsuch was nominated to replace Antonin Scalia (even though they were justifiably outraged that Merrick Garland was deprived a hearing) they went nuclear when it came to Brett Kavanaugh. The character assassination of that man was so brutal and so unjustified that it dwarfed what happened to Robert Bork a generation earlier.

It’s hard to hear people plead for fairness and respect for Ketanji Brown Jackson when these are some of the same people who vilified Amy Coney Barrett for being a devout Catholic, having a lot of children and not being a judge for very long prior to being elevated to the bench. Brown Jackson is clearly a qualified candidate, having graduated with honors from Harvard undergraduate and law schools, and presiding as a federal judge since 2013. There is no reason that her qualifications should be questioned. But then again, neither should Kavanaugh or Coney Barrett (or Bork, or Clarence Thomas) have been. All of them, with the exception of Barrett, were Ivy grads and all of them had long and distinguished careers in academia or on the bench.

But legal pedigrees are not the things that excite senators and the media, who feed like vampires on the blood of nomination carnage. The real show, the real meat of the matter, is how a prospective justice thinks. If they do not align well with one particular extreme of either party (and lately that party has been the Democrats,) the hearings are turned into events that would make Nero happy.

So to hear Democrats plead for civility this time around is a bit rich, given the way they’ve treated the last Republican nominees. From accusations of rape to suggestions that one female nominee is a living incubator or a “Handmaid,” the nomination process has been macabre. So while I do hope that Republicans act with infinitely more grace than their liberal brothers and sisters shown themselves capable of, I have a big problem being preached to by those holier-than-thou hypocrites on the left.

There is little doubt that even the most unpredictable Democrats like Manchin and Sinema will vote to confirm Brown Jackson, because there isn’t anything particularly radical in her past or present. Yes, she went out of her way to represent Guantanamo detainees, but that was a personal choice that many other attorneys made, and while I don’t agree with it, I remember John Adams representing the British after the Boston Massacre and I accept it as part of the oath we take to the constitution.

The fact that there is an even 50-50 split in the Senate and that another woman of color is set to cast the deciding vote, the likelihood that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will not become Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is slim to none. And that’s fine, elections have consequences and Biden gets to choose who he wants.

But please, progressives, do not dare lecture us about “dignity and respect” after decades of spitting on those hallowed principles when the people in front of you didn’t share your values, your skin color, your sexual apparatus or your conception of faith.

That sound you’ll hear is bitter, raucous, incredulous laughter at your (excuse the pun) supreme nerve.

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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].

Years ago, when I was just beginning to practice immigration law, I remember hearing about two horrific genocides. They were almost back-to-back, happening within little more than a year of each other, and each became the focus of a war crimes tribunal at the Hague. The first one occurred in the spring of 1994 when Rwandan Hutus massacred hundreds of thousands of their Tutsi neighbors in a matter of months. A year later, in Bosnia, thousands of Muslim men and boys were murdered by their Serbian captors in a town called Srebrenica.

At the time, it was difficult to find any overt “racism” as we have come to view it in the United States, because both the victims and the victimizers in Rwanda were Black, and the victims and victimizers in Bosnia were white (although in the latter case there was the additional element of religion, which was the motivating factor for the Bosnian Serbs). All that mattered was that one group of people had terrorized and dehumanized another group of people based on hatred and ignorance, and the world looked on in horror. It was a replay of the Holocaust, only televised.

But when I listen to people like Joy Ann “Why Is She Still On Television” Reid, I realize that we Americans have lost any sense of reality. On her show on MSNBC, Reid made this statement about the deepening humanitarian crisis:

“As the world watches the devastation unfold in Ukraine, nearly 4,000 miles away, another crisis is deepening that we don’t hear much about in the U.S., and that is the war in Yemen. The coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to western media compared to their browner and Blacker counterparts, with some reporters using very telling comparisons in their analyses of the war.” She added that the world cared more for white Christians than it did for people who looked like her.

Interestingly enough, Reid has only recently become interested in Yemen, judging from her searchable public statements. I googled her name next to “crisis in Yemen” and came up with page after page of her most recent tirade against white Christians, but virtually nothing earlier than last week. Nothing. When you consider that the situation in Yemen has been going on since approximately 2011 and really picked up speed in 2014, you might think that Reid is a little slow on the uptake.

Then there were those “I can’t believe that happened!” news flashes about people of color who were taken off of refugee trains to give space to Ukrainians attempting to flee their beleaguered country. When there was the suggestion that Black and brown foreign exchange students were taken off of trains, the first reaction should have been: That’s terrible, but people become desperate during war time and lose sense of their humanity.

Instead, it became “those disgusting white people are racist, and they got even more racist when the bombs were falling on their heads and their children were being massacred. God, they are just white supremacists, like those parents at school board meetings.”

I’m exaggerating, of course. But instead of realizing that people act poorly in times of crisis, the mainstream media went right to the George Floyd narrative of “white people hating on people of color.” It never occurred to the observers that maybe, just maybe, the color of the students didn’t matter. It was the fact, equally repellent but not racialized, that Ukrainians had more sympathy for other Ukrainians than they did for foreigners.

It was the same when we were evacuating Afghanistan and my friends were saying “we need to get the Americans out,” and I was saying “we also need to rescue the Afghan allies who risked their lives for Americans.” Country first is not a good thing, in times of crisis. But it’s not about race.

People can be inhuman in many different ways. The Bosnian Serbs hated the Bosnian Muslims because they saw these men, who looked and spoke and lived like them, side by side for generations, as the “other.” It was their religion that put the target on their backs.

In Rwanda, the Hutus went after men, women and children who looked exactly like them, sounded like them, worshiped like them (mostly Catholic Christians), and saluted the same flag. They did this because of tribal loyalties, and ethnic hatreds. And skin color was irrelevant, as it was with the Serbs.

It’s sad that we have to fit every instance of horror and genocide into these nice little Black Lives Matter categories in the U.S., and twist the narrative so that it allows despicable people like Joy Ann Reid to exploit tragedy. There is a genocide going on in Ukraine, and the vast majority of the victims are white Christians.

The fact that this is a problem for people like Joy Ann Reid shouldn’t make a damn difference.

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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].

Sometimes, the stars align, and things happen the way they’re supposed to. Like starting Women’s History Month with a wonderful gift to women, or at least the unborn kind.

On the eve of the 31-day period that celebrates the beauty, the intelligence, the talent, the majesty and all of the other traits shared by the sisterhood, the Senate by a 48-46 margin rejected attempts to codify Roe v. Wade and provide women with a federal right to abortion.

The coyly named “Women’s Health Protection Act” would, if passed, have invalidated each and every state law that provided limitations on a mother’s right to terminate her pregnancy. It was a knee- jerk reaction to the prospect that Roe would be overruled at the Supreme Court, thereby allowing the 50 states to construct for themselves their own abortion landscapes.

And that scared the sort of person who thinks women’s history includes an actual “right” to abortion in the Constitution, and that women’s autonomy requires an actual “right” to become unpregnant, and that women’s dignity requires an actual “right” to ignore the dignity of nascent human life.

To be fair, women who think that the power to give life is much less empowering than the power to end it actually do have a legitimate reason to be nervous. While it’s far from certain that this court will overturn Roe, particularly with question marks like Roberts and Kavanaugh sitting somewhere in the middle of the bench, many pro-lifers are cautiously optimistic that Roe will finally be erased from the jurisprudential horizon.

But our cautious optimism translates to apoplexy for the other side, and they started to promote laws which, to be honest, would have been struck down the minute someone challenged them in a court of law. There were no exceptions for religious opposition. The legislation provided for abortion up to the moment of birth, which is something that even under Roe could have been prohibited under the right circumstances. The principle of states rights was completely ignored.

Every single Republican voted to oppose the Women’s Health Protection Act. Even Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, noted supporters of abortion rights, refused to jump on the “Federalize Abortion” bandwagon and countered with their own more moderate bill.

“I have long supported a woman’s right to choose, but my position is not without limits, and this partisan Women’s Health Protection Act simply goes too far,” Murkowski said in a statement. “It would broadly supersede state laws and infringe on Americans’ religious freedoms.”

Any celebration of women must include a celebration of their ability to give life, to nurture it, to shelter and mentor it, to teach it lessons in virtue and compassion, to protect it, to perpetuate it. And far too many women – and men – forget that. Worse still, they look on this ability as a hindrance to greater things, like a corner office.

You don’t have to agree with me about abortion. Most, I think, don’t. As the polls show, most think that women should have some ability to empty their wombs of unwanted cargo. And I am resigned to the fact that this will always be the case.

But legislation that ignores a Catholic doctor’s right to refrain from taking life, and that looks upon the states as neutered servants of some federal overlord, is repellent. Beyond that, it’s dangerous. And I’m very thankful 48 principled senators knew it.

A friend once told me that the key is in changing hearts and minds. We need, he said, to help women understand that abortion solves no problems, and creates a world of hurt. He said that legislation was ultimately ineffective.

I responded that I really have no interest in changing the hearts and minds of people who believe that destroying unborn life is a right. And that’s why working the courts, and the legislatures, is key to making next year’s Women’s History Month, the one where we can finally celebrate the glory of unborn women, a reality.

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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’m writing this as Vladimir Putin is eating up Ukraine. Did we fall asleep and wake up in 1938 to hear that Hitler had taken the Sudetenland? Who knew this could happen, in 2022?

Actually, we knew. Putin told us he was going to do it with every public statement that avoided a direct “no,” with every troop movement at the border, with every invocation of the sovereignty of the pro-Russian separatist regions. There are no surprises when it comes to Putin’s desire to reconstruct the Soviet Union. It’s not a matter of “if.” It’s always been a matter of “when.”

As I watch this invasion unfold, switching between networks and social media sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are no longer the breed of American who parachuted onto the shores of Normandy. That sacrificed lives in a bloody grave in the waters of Pearl Harbor, marched with the Fighting 69th to battle Germany a generation before them, and battled in the heat of deserts to avenge the murder of 3,000 fellow citizens.

We are now tribes, divided by loyalties and political expedience. It’s not a surprise, given what we’ve seen unfold over the past 20 to 30 years, but it’s a devastating commentary on where we’re headed as a nation.

I spent a good part of the last few days unfriending those who blamed Biden for weakness and those who blamed Trump for loving Putin. I don’t need their alternative viewpoints, and won’t be enriched by their separate “takes” on the crisis at hand. I’m done with dissent.

That’s because whatever you might think of the wisdom of putting boots on the ground in a country located thousands upon thousands of miles away, you cannot simply throw up your hands, offer “thoughts and prayers,” and believe that you’ve done your duty as an American when a dictators swallows up a sovereign nation.

You are also derelict if you try and compare what’s happening in Ukraine to our southern border, blaming liberals for caring more about a foreign nation than about our own security and national integrity. That’s comparing apples and bloody bodies, or bananas and those standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square.

We are obligated to care about our legacy in the world, which has been battered and bruised by many different, flawed men and women. Obama was one. Trump was another. Biden, the failed bureaucrat of Afghanistan, is most definitely and glaringly a third.

But those leaders are not “America.” We the people are, and when we start backing off and saying things like “Well, I don’t want my nephew or my son or my grandson or my whatever putting boots on anyone else’s territory.” I despair of ever again being proud of this nation and its history. And if that makes me sound like Michelle Obama, so be it.

On the other hand, you have liberals who are so damn obsessed with what happened on Jan. 6 – something that was regrettable but did not destroy our essential character – they ignore the absolute failure of their own tribe and reach back to blame Trump. To be clear, this invasion happened on their leader’s watch, not under the guidance of the man they despise. And yet, if they are calling for engagement, they are making penance for the repellent anti-Americanism they have exhibited in vilifying conservatives over the past years, and decades.

I am devastated to be in this middle place, because I am no moderate. I actually hate that word, because it communicates a lukewarm, tasteless, insubstantial broth. A person without values, in other words. That will anger moderates who believe that they stand on high moral ground. But only those who are willing to make a choice, a decision in moments of crisis occupy that summit. And those who try and see “both” sides are often those who see no side clearly.

Any American who takes more pleasure in attacking her political rival than in seeking comfort and protection for the threatened, or who excuses evil if it advances their own partisan goals, is someone I renounce, and excommunicate, from my life. Effective immediately.

But if you are still reading, and you are still listening, hear this: As someone who cannot shoot a rifle but who has worked with war refugees, please contact me at the below email address if you know of someone in need of assistance in Ukraine. I will try and direct you to someone who can help.

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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’m going to out myself here: I am a Bad Masker.

By that I mean I wear them when I’m forced to do so by some misguided governmental fiat, but when I do, I don’t wear them well.

I was on Amtrak this week, heading to an asylum hearing in Newark, and because Mayor Pete and the Department of Transportation have decided that all federal facilities and organizations must require masking, I had to have an ineffective piece of cloth on my nose, over my mouth and around my chin.

I can promise you that during my almost two hour train ride, that mask did as much traveling as I did. It shifted around, it sank below my lips, it got tangled in my eyeglasses and my earphones, and generally showed just how useless it really is in preventing the next plague.

That being said, when there is no mask mandate, I am not wearing one. My respiratory system, my choice. Apparently, that is a huge problem for some parents in Pennsylvania school districts, who are faced with the horrific prospect that their fragile, tender, susceptible children will be exposed to folks like me.

Recently, after two years of complying with a lot of questionable governmental regulations that changed with the “science,” we have decided to allow adults to make some decisions for themselves. The CDC has admitted that cloth masks, the ones most widely used, are ineffective against the virus, particularly the omicron variant. This has outraged the type of person most invested in the mask industry, people like public school teachers, virtue signaling baristas and employees at CNN.

So two years after the fact, some school districts are beginning to issue “Mask-Optional” policies, which allow adults to make their own decisions about whether to mummify their children, or keep them in a perpetual cocoon of anxiety. The amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution that slapped down Gov. Tom Wolf severely limited his executive emergency authority.

And so the places that have been the petri dishes for this horrific experiment in social engineering by the “Believe the Science Except When We Tell You Not To” crowd, the schools, have started to react. Yay, choice for thee, and for me. Let’s allow the kids who want to wear masks to wear them, and those who really like looking at the bottom halves of their classmates’ faces, to do that too.

Alas, the triggered parents, aided and abetted by their totalitarian cohorts on local school boards in Pennsylvania, have decided to take a different tack in trying to keep us masked forever, until the lambs are separated from the lions, or the rapture, or whatever.

Some anonymous parents have filed suit against the districts who have issued mask-optional policies. They want to force these schools to mandate masks, even on children whose parents have made a different choice. They don’t like losing the control they had, to make their neighbors “behave.”

Never mind the fact that their children are perfectly free to attend school bubble wrapped with a straw sticking out for a breathing apparatus. No one is telling them that they have to send their children into the plague-filled environment. Virtual schooling is an option too. I remember how many liberals wanted the schools to remain shut forever, and have the computer teach their little ones. What happened to that? Now they want the schools opened, but only according to their diktats.

I’m really sorry, but that’s not the way this country works. There is so little evidence that cloth masks work, the only way that you can justify an overall mask mandate is if you fit every child with a surgical mask glued to their tiny faces from 8 a.m. until dismissal time. Anything less is useless.

The Americans With Disabilities Act requires that you make “reasonable accommodations” to protect those who have illness or disability. Most schools have already done that, with filtering systems, hand-washing stations, social distancing and even plastic shields between seats. They’ve reduced the number of children in classrooms. They’ve canceled recess. They’ve made water drinking into a synchronized sport.

That’s reasonable enough. These lawsuits, on the other hand, are not.

This reminds me of when the abortion rights lobbyists decided to use RICO, the anti-racketeering statute developed to stop organized crime, to prevent pro-life protestors from picketing clinics. They treated grandmothers with rosaries as if they were John Gotti and his blood-splattered crew. It’s dangerous when you start misusing the law.

So, I’ll wear a mask on the train, and grumble about it. I’ll wear a mask on a plane, and do the same. I’ll wear a mask in stores that require it, or just choose not to shop there.

Kids don’t have these choices. They are dependent on the good will and common sense of adults. It’s time they started seeing some of it. These stupid, insulting and outrageous lawsuits need to be dismissed, now.

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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].

When I saw the title of W. Kamau Bell’s new docuseries “We Need To Talk About Cosby,” I laughed to myself. That’s all we’ve been doing for over 60 years, although the way we’ve talked about him has shifted dramatically in the past decade.

Personally, I still love Bill Cosby, regardless of the things that are now being said, but have never been proven in a court of law. And that’s the problem with “talking about Cosby” these days, because the only two words we seem to forget in these conversations about value, honor, crime, drugs, suspicions, victims, victimizers, wrong and right, are the most important ones: Due process.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had the courage to do what several juries, a few other judges, many journalists, and the vast majority of the bystanders watching the mess from the sidelines didn’t: Apply the law to the facts, and come up with an acquittal.

It doesn’t matter what you “think” an accused defendant has done. What matters is what you can prove within the limits of the law. In Cosby’s case, they didn’t do it, even though they twisted the Constitution into a pretzel to find him “guilty,” and then shoved him in prison for almost three years, an 83-year-old man. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court couldn’t give him back those stolen years, but it did give him justice.

Whenever I’ve written about these decades-old allegations of harassment and abuse, I get letters from people telling me I don’t understand the psyche of an abused woman. I’m told that if I were more empathetic, or more educated, or kinder, or smarter, or lots of other things that I clearly am not, I would never question a woman when she says that she was abused.

But these people usually forget that I don’t just write columns with uncomfortable opinions. I’m also a lawyer, and I’ve studied the legal system. And no matter how upsetting it might be to think that a woman who was abused is going to have to move on, because it’s just too late to bring her claims, that’s often the price we must pay for living in a system that keeps us from turning into an Arthur Miller play, where a pointed finger and an accusation of “witch!” is enough to get you locked up for the rest of your life. Or worse.

Bill Cosby was deprived of due process, and that’s a fact. W. Kamau Bell can “talk about Cosby” all he wants, but unless he makes that the primary and focal point of his series, it’s really worthless.

And another thing. There should be no color divide in this discussion. I had a hard time when O.J. Simpson tried to make it all about being a Black man caught up in the system, but Cosby is different. And here’s why.

The reason that so many people were willing to jump on the “I Hate Cosby” bandwagon is because he had the temerity to preach self-determination, self-respect, self-awareness, and pull your damn pants up. Over the years, he has shown the beauty of being an educated, accomplished, truly happy Black man, and he brought it mainstream with his depiction of a family that we all wanted to belong to.

And he was accused of being “white,” which is a bit rich because that insults people of color who reached the pinnacle. Why is being accomplished “white?” What does that say about our society, particularly our liberal friends who seem to be overly-sensitive about labels?

Cosby enraged people from so many quarters, including newly “empowered” women, Black men like comic Hannibal Burress who didn’t like being criticized, liberals who are squeamish about criticizing anyone except conservatives, and-let’s be honest-people who still harbor that “Black men are dangerous” prejudice, a lot of whom come from my side of the political and philosophical aisle.

So let’s “talk about Cosby,” and when we do, let’s remember that a man who was convicted of nothing spent almost three years of his life serving time to fulfill a promise made by Montco D.A. Kevin Steele on the campaign trail. When we “talk about Cosby,” let’s make sure we point out that he likely gave more in philanthropy than every single person who has sat in judgment of him, combined. When we “talk about Cosby,” let’s discuss how social movements can swiftly become witch hunts. When we “talk about Cosby,” let’s remind ourselves that we rightly criticize Jan. 6 but that some of the loudest critics endorse another sort of mob violence, the kind that dispenses with due process.

I don’t think we need to talk about Cosby, anymore. But if we do, let’s tell some truths.

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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].