Cagle World

I do not like green eggs and ham

I do not like their colors, ma’am

I only sup on rainbow fish

I like a multi-colored dish

I will not swallow things too white

But chocolate milk is a delight

And Black-eyed peas are really nice

I’ll eat them ma’am

I’ll eat them twice

I think the thing that matters most

Is making people not feel gross

And saying what they want to hear

For if we don’t

They’ll surely sneer

So even though I will not eat

Green eggs and ham

I’ll say they’re neat

Because I do not want to be

The Grinch who stole

Diversity.

Dr. Seuss might not appreciate my rhyming skills, but I would at least hope he’d recognize the irony in my ode to inclusion.

The legendary author spent a lifetime teaching children about the importance of accepting those who were different, of avoiding bullying, of opening our arms to those who looked, sounded, and acted differently from people in our comfort zone. For children, he was a safe haven, a kindly guide through the often complicated, sometimes challenging, always memorable days of awakening.

And in spite of that, some of his books have now been placed on the “canceled list” thanks to pressure from the cultural left, which fears that little children will perceive the same racism in his fanciful illustrations as their triggered guardians have now done.

Some of the illustrations in the six books that the Seuss foundation has decided to throw down the memory hole contained pictures that might, if you stretch the point, make some adults uncomfortable, including coloring some Asian characters in bright yellow.

But it is hard to believe that children would be perceptive enough (translated as “looking for racism enough”) to be offended by what are, essentially, cartoon characters. And this idea that we need to scrub old texts to make sure that even the most delicate soupcon of offensive non-P.C. material must be hidden is the quiet second-cousin of censorship.

To put it another way, trying to make sure that nothing offends anyone ever at any given time is assuring that there will never be any authentic, original, important, suggestive, intriguing, thought-provoking material produced. It will all be “nice.” It will all be uniform. It will all be safe, although not the safety that children really deserve because it will fool them into thinking that the world is filled with sunshine and lollipops.

It isn’t. Dr. Seuss knew that, especially after his experience with war, and was attempting in his own way to prepare children for the cruelties of the world, and equip them with tools to fight them.

That’s one of the reasons this Orwellian attempt to erase his work is so disturbing. You can argue that it’s only six books out of hundreds in a lifetime of achievement, but we are only at the beginning. Once you start down that path, you tend to accelerate, not act with caution.

So I expect we’ll see some more “kindler, gentler editing” along these lines in the near future:

“Horton Hears a Who” will be labeled “ableist,” as soon as they figure out that deaf children will be offended.

“The Cat in the Hat” will be labeled “classist” by those who are upset that this particular cat has a hat. What about kids without enough money for accessories? Nice way to shame them.

“Oh the Places You’ll Go” will be deemed “xenophobic,” since there’s that subtle suggestion of, you know, deporting kids.

“The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” will be found to be borderline bigoted. I mean, just “assuming” that green kids are more inclined to a life of crime than kids of other colors is repellent. What about teal blue munchkins?

“Green Eggs And Ham?” How dare they? What about vegan kids? Trigger, much?

“Sam I Am.” Transphobic. I mean, what if Sam identifies as a “they?” Sam They Are is much more inclusive.

Go ahead and laugh. The tears can wait their turn.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I was once fired by an employer because they did not like the way that I tweeted.

They had no problem with the way that other people at this same enterprise tweeted, they just didn’t like my own flavor of rhetorical panache. They never actually came out and said it was the subject matter of my tweeting, or my style, that got me a date with the guillotine. They simply said we told you to stop tweeting, you wouldn’t, and so we are letting you go.

I’m always fascinated when somebody else gets into hot water because of her online presence. I have written extensively about Donald Trump’s effective banishment from Twitter and talked about the grownups who went after Nick Sandman, the kid who can now go to any college he wants because of that defamation case against the Washington Post, et. al.

I’ve covered the cases of teachers who were fired because they dared to question the legitimacy of “trans” science, the sidelining of professors who challenged the equity in reparations, the firing of actresses, like Disney’s Gina Carano, who posted memes about “opening up the economy” and was branded a racist and an anti-Semite.

It’s an epidemic, a pandemic really, and it’s scary. My usual point is that we all need to fight back against the silencing, and it doesn’t matter which side is being silenced, although let’s be honest: The left is much more adept at pushing the mute button on people like me and my fellow conservatives than we’ve been at shushing them.

Now, that’s starting to change. President Biden’s choice for Office of Management and Budget head, Neera Tanden, has gotten a little taste of what happens when your Twitter history ain’t exactly history. Tanden, who was previously the head of the Center for American Progress, has spent a lot of time on social media hating on conservatives. While she has also put some liberals like Bernie Sanders in her cross hairs, most of her vitriol has been reserved for people who think like me.

For example, when Roy Moore was running for the Senate from Alabama, Tanden referenced accusations of child molestation against him with this tweet: “The Republican party is gleefully supporting an alleged child molester. And everyone who gives money to the RNC is doing the same.” Regardless of how you feel about Moore, who was never even charged with a crime, calling people who supported his candidacy allies of a pedophile is pretty far over the line.

She has also called Mitch McConnell “Voldemort” and suggested that a vampire had more heart that Ted Cruz. This was before his Cancun vacation, so she can’t use that as an excuse. She also accused Susan Collins, who voted in favor of Brett Kavanaugh, “criminally ignorant,” and said that her “terrible treatment of Dr. Ford should haunt Collins for the rest of her days.”

That last tweet was sent at a time when Collins was getting death threats phoned into her office, and some suggested she should be raped so she would understand what it’s like not to be believed.

I have had that same thing said to me, by readers. Anyone who adds fuel to that fire does not deserve to be in any position of authority.

So you might be saying, but Christine, I thought your whole point was that people shouldn’t be punished for their comments. And I would reply: Yes, but.

I have no problem saying that people should be held responsible for their words, as long as we are all held to the same standards. And we are so clearly not.

Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Conservative teachers are fired. Conservative actresses are fired. Conservative writers are fired.

But people on the left keep tweeting along, with very little consequence. Sure, there are some high-profile examples like Kathy Griffin and … give me a minute … um … okay, well there’s Kathy Griffin, who lost some gigs because of her comments. But the number of liberals who have been held accountable for their words pales in comparison to the number of conservatives, mostly social conservatives, who have been deactivated.

For that reason, I’m not weeping about Neera. She deserves what’s she’s getting, and she knows she deserves it because she deleted over a thousand tweets in anticipation of her confirmation hearing.

So for all of those who were disgusted with the tweets of one Donald J. Orange Man, Karma, apparently, is a female.

–

Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Death is the one human experience that connects everyone, regardless of color, creed, class or bank account. The inequity comes only in its manner and timing.

For Ted Flowers, my father, it came on a beautiful May morning, the day before Mother’s Day in 1982. It came after a year of agony, in the form of a brutal tumor in his lungs that had exploded into the farthest reaches of his battered, beloved body. He was a 43-year-old man who looked as if he’d lived twice that span.

It would never occur to me, no matter how much I hated the person who had lost his battle, to celebrate death’s victory. Of course, people of faith understand that the so-called victory is pyrrhic and short-lived, since as Donne wrote, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more.” Still, when you are mourning the loss of someone who some people loved, it is heartless at best, inhuman at the lowest bar of decency to laugh and taunt and say “good riddance.”

I was not surprised in the age of Twitter courtesy to see that happen when Rush Limbaugh died. The conservative radio icon had accumulated a battalion of spiteful enemies, some in high places, and they unleashed a tirade of expected vitriol.

It is important to point out that the unity and compassion the Biden administration calls for will continue to be impossible as long as this cabal of faux tolerance continues to exist. Can’t we just be honest here, and say that there is hatred on both sides of the aisle and be done with it? Or to paraphrase President Trump in the wake of the Charlottesville march, there are evil people on both sides.

We can’t ignore the cruel things that were said by Limbaugh during his long tenure behind the microphone. While much of it was delightfully humorous, and warranted, some of it was indecent and inhuman, as when he celebrated the death of people who had died from AIDS. To his ultimate credit, he apologized for it.

He also called a certain breed of woman “feminazi,” which isn’t exactly original and did seem offensive at the time, although some members of my tribe did have an almost totalitarian way of dealing with opposition. The problem is that when you call anyone anything with the suffix or prefix “Nazi,” you divert attention away from any legitimate point you might have had, which is why I think the word did more harm than actual good.

But even with that, so what? Who cares if your sensitivities were offended by the caustic tongue of the man whose talent was on loan from God? Are we all these princesses sitting on our mattresses and complaining about that tiny pea, that tiny bruising kernel of truth wrapped in insults? Are we all condemned to wear that string of pearls around our necks like some shiny albatross that we clutch and finger and clutch again, any time someone uses harsh words?

We get angry if the wrong pronoun is used, if the right letter isn’t capitalized, if we don’t say things in exactly the way they should be said. Our careers will be derailed because we attended a politically incorrect college event, wearing a dress straight out of “Gone With The Wind.” Heck, our careers will be destroyed even if we only try and explain why someone else did that, as Chris Harrison from “The Bachelor” found out.

In this day and age, it’s not surprising that someone like Limbaugh would have angered so many people who wake up making lists of things that trigger them, or would trigger them if they only happened (and get upset when they don’t actually happen and they have to spend the rest of the day without any offense they can Tweet about).

But that still doesn’t excuse the cruelty exhibited by those who celebrated his death.
That is not me being triggered. That is me, desperately clinging to the facade, the chimera of human decency that I grew up believing to be the default in our relationships with other people, even those we couldn’t stand. I was taught that we do not celebrate death, even when we hated the life that was taken.

Ted Flowers was not perfect. Far, far from it. He had enemies. And yet none of them dared to laugh at his passing, and taunt those of us whose grief is, to this day, beyond imagining.

I am grateful, to God, that he died in the days when our hold on humanity was not so tenuous.

–

Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

One of my favorite allegories is the one about the frog in the pot of water, who got used to the slowing rising temperature of a warming pot and ended up boiled to death.

In some ways, I feel as if society has been on the menu for quite some time now. But here we are, in 2021, and life is very different from the way it was when I was born in 1961. It all happened incrementally, while very few of us noticed that the temperature was rising in the societal pot.

The most obvious example is abortion. Who would have thought 60 years ago that a pregnant woman could decide she didn’t want to have a child, and that with very few exceptions, no one could stop her from becoming un-pregnant? Back then, abortion was hidden in the shadows because we thought it was a shameful, cruel and immoral act. Now, though, it’s completely legal. Not only that, the “choice” is celebrated by the daughters of women who chose life. We even have a president who wants to codify abortion in our laws.

Of course, not all women approach it that way. For some, it is a soul-searching struggle to reconcile their desire to be child-free with the scientific certainty that they are carrying a human child. But the fact that society has reached a place where women are even given the option of destroying their offspring is a sign that our morality evaporated in the heat of that boiling water.

Then we have the idea that you can identify as something you are not. We can choose our pronouns to reflect the gender that we think we are, as opposed to the gender objectively evidenced by our biological plumbing. The “experts” have gotten around this problem by creating a pretextual distinction between “sex” and “gender,” and stared at us with straight faces as they dared us to contradict them.

And because we have been in the pot too long, and we haven’t noticed the bubbles dancing around about us as the steam rises, we just pretend that made up pronouns like “they” and “their” for a single, confused human being is totally normal.

And then we have the politicians. Kennedy told the enslaved East Germans that he was a Berliner. Johnson signed legislation, defying his Democrat brethren, that recognized the humanity of Black Americans. Nixon opened the lines of communication with Communist China. Carter fought bravely for peace at Camp David. Reagan dared Gorbachev to tear down that cursed wall.

These are the people I remember. But slowly, and almost imperceptibly, those men were replaced with people like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who make openly bigoted and anti-Semitic comments and are allowed to continue in office. They were replaced with Maxine Waters, who urged her followers to harass their ideological opponents. They were replaced with a woman like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was a bully at the age of 46 and is still a bully at the age of 48.

And they were replaced with the people who voted for them, all of them, in defiance of decency.

Years ago, even in the shadow of McCarthy, I seriously doubt we would have let such low-information, morally vacant people fill our public offices. And the fact that I chose women in the litany of shame does not mean that they are the only ones at fault. It just means that as a woman, I am particularly embarrassed that members of my gender (or sex, or shared pronouns) have shown themselves to be so mediocre.

There are so many other things that prove to me just how effective incremental change can be in destroying a society. We used to say that the color of skin was less important than the content of character, and now if you don’t say the correct incantation of “Black Lives Matter” you will be ostracized.

If you do not believe that critical-race theory should be force fed to little kids in schools, making white children feel the burden of a guilt for which they were never responsible, you are a bigot.

If you voted for the wrong man, you are a domestic terrorist (or you think like one). If you actually do storm the Capitol, your friends will make excuses. And if you write or say things people don’t like, they will try to shut you up. In the old days, you just choked on your morning muffin and wrote a letter to the editor.

We got to this place because we were too lazy to check out the thermostat. Now it’s too late.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The worst thing to happen in my lifetime was the massacre of 20 children almost a decade ago. The current controversy of the Capitol riots, the Antifa uprisings this summer, the Oklahoma City bombing and even 9/11 don’t carry that same, crushing weight. The other tragedies were political reckonings, making us face the terror within, and without.

But Sandy Hook was what happened when we thought there was a bottom, a basement, a level beyond which we could not sink – and then the floor crumbled. Disappeared. Evaporated like the tears of children when comforted by their parents.

Anyone who denies that it happened, who mocks the pain of parents is a vile creature that deserves to be shunned.

But a creature like that sits in Congress, and her name is Marjorie Taylor Greene. There is strong, credible evidence that she denied that Newtown ever occurred. She denied that babies lie in graves. She suggested that it was a conspiracy to take our guns from us, and thwart the mandate of the Second Amendment. She did that, and she sits, lawfully, in Congress.

One single representative can neither elevate or destroy the House. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a lightning rod for anger from the right, but she is just a very young woman with exceptional skills at self-promotion and a huge cult following. Rashida Tlaib shows anti-Semitism with every sneered attack against Israel, but she is also just one person among many.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene is different for me, because of Newtown.

I honestly don’t care that she made fun of David Hogg, a young man who became expert at an early age at dealing with his critics. He gave as good as he ever got, despite the fawning concern from cable hosts, as in “Greene harrassed this child!” He is now poised to challenged Mike Lindell as the next Pillow King. Excuse me if I don’t feel bad for his bruised feelings.

And while her sometime devotion to QAnon is bizarre, considering the group’s participation in the Capitol riots, the majority of people who believe in crazy stuff don’t do crazy things. Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, which by every metric known to worshipers is crazy, and I don’t think he’s ready to take up arms against the government. Qanon is bad, but generally, the First Amendment protects crazy beliefs as long as they remain trapped safely in the mind.

But the thing you cannot sanction, or ignore, is the willingness to suggest that dead children are figments of a politician’s imagination. Greene has backtracked and even tried to deny that she said Newtown was a myth. Too little, too late. When even the Sandy Hook Promise founders, parents who lost their beautiful angels on that tragic December day, are convinced that she said it and have condemned her, we have no choice but to accept the fact that Greene swallowed the Alex Jones Kool Aid.

No one should be defending her. That there are some Republicans who are, in fact, doing so is abhorrent. That they allegedly gave her a standing ovation in secret committee is repellent. That they themselves refused to strip her of committee positions is almost incomprehensible.

I say “almost,” because I know what it’s like to feel as if the world is coming for you, and you need to fight back. The GOP has circled the wagons around this freshman congresswoman because of the attacks against the party in general from both Democrats, their allies in the media, and some disaffected members of their own party. Fight or flee are the responses people have when assaulted, and they have decided to fight. In many ways, I can’t blame them.

But there are limits to self-defense, and when they cause you to lose your soul, you have to stop.

Any woman who has been credibly accused of slandering dead children and their parents does not deserve to be in a position of authority. It is ultimately up to the voters to cast her out, just as I hope the same is done with the toxic sisters on the left. But while she is in Congress, her voice, a voice that was raised in support of devilish and indecent conspiracy, must be muted.

I am only saddened that it took the Democrats to do the heavy moral lifting. But when faced with dead babies, political considerations should evaporate as quickly as the tears on my keyboard.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Sexual abuse is devastating. It cuts across and demolishes every single line of demarcation that we recognize in society, because it is one of the things that attack the foundations of society: Respect for the dignity of the individual person.

In my immigration practice, I have seen women and men who have been the victims of the sort of abuse that defies full explanation in the flat, sterile language of the law. I know of people who were assaulted as the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the tragic victims of random cruelty. I have seen women who, caught in the crossfire of warring governments and hostile forces, were raped in what later became recognized as international war crimes.

I say all this to frame, and to partially explain, my anger and disgust with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Earlier this week, the congresswoman from New York made herself the center of the story once again, by giving a social media interview in which she revealed that she’d once been the victim of sexual assault, to explain her horror and fear at the Capitol insurrection.

Normally, I would feel sympathy for her, even though I share none of her beliefs or values. My work and my past experiences have taught me that each story of tears and despair is particular to the person, and there is no blueprint for how a victim deals with assault. Some never speak of it, internalizing the shame. Some do not stop speaking of it, making it a permanent part of their public identity. Some fall into that middle space, acknowledging to themselves the horror and the need to move forward, but keeping the ordeal protected within some private circle of friends and support. Some, who have a public platform, use their voices to try and help others.

But some, and they are far more numerous than we are willing to recognize, have ulterior motives which become externalized at the first expression of their circumstances. I am not referring to the people who, after many years of silence, come out and reveal that they have been victims.

While that does have some legal significance, as with the decades-long revelations from the Bill Cosby accusers, it shouldn’t color the way that we assess the reality of the person’s pain. Long lapses in time are common when someone has been stripped of that most intimate part of themselves, their autonomy and sense of security, and we all deal with healing in different ways.

But Ocasio-Cortez chose this particular moment to reveal her personal story. We can all give her the benefit of the doubt and accept her words at face value. I know how powerful, and at the same time how ephemeral and unsubstantiated personal testimony can be. The default, until we are in a court of law, should be belief.

Here, we are not dealing with an identified predator. Here, we are dealing with a woman who makes a statement about her experience, and there is no likelihood of arrest, accusation and conviction in a court of law.

Here, we have someone trying to tie her own personal experience into a national tragedy, the assault on the Capitol last month. And that is the problem, a very big one.

The supporters of Ocasio-Cortez and the haters of all the people she hates, including Ted Cruz (who she basically accused of trying to murder her), will see nothing wrong with what the congresswoman is doing. They are of her tribe, and won’t break ranks.

But those who really do care about the victims of abuse should be up in arms, angered that this woman is trying to use her own assault as a hammer to come down on her political enemies. In tying her assault and the PTSD it triggered to being at the Capitol on the day of the riot, Ocasio-Cortez is trying to paint all of the people in the GOP as rapists. It’s as simple as that.
In this age of short attention spans and sound bites, a woman who is capable of accusing her fellow legislators of attempted murder is clearly not above lumping half of the population into the group “sexual assailant.”

It’s madness, and it makes the manipulation of Kamala Harris and crew at the Brett Kavanaugh hearings look almost innocent in comparison.

Anyone who has ever dealt with a victim of assault, or been one, or loved one, should condemn this for what it is: Political theater. Let’s hope they bring the curtain down on this dreadful show.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Alexei Navalny is what we need – but no longer have – in the United States: A political hero.

We have politicians, some better than others. But each one of them, from the lowliest member of the school board trying to shove critical race theory down our throats, to the president pale in comparison to this Russian dissident.

For years, Navalny has led a one-man crusade to expose corruption in Russia. He ran for office, losing in what were universally considered rigged elections. He’s been targeted for death. Nonetheless, this patriot who was living safely outside of his native country returned to Moscow earlier this month, and was promptly arrested. He is now in jail, for what was officially described as a 30-day term, but what might end up being a death sentence.

Navalny’s archenemy, President Vladimir Putin, has some experience with silencing dissidents. Putin is suspected in the murders of vocal critics over the years, including journalists who stepped too close to the flame.

And then there were the poisonings of political rivals, including former KGB agent Alexander Litivenenko, who died in one of the first documented cases of polonium poisoning. Litivenenko was a frightening example of Putin’s reach, since he was living in the U.K. at the time of his murder.

Navalny was also the target of a Putin assassination attempt. Last August, he became sick during a flight to Moscow. Evacuated to Berlin and hospitalized, he was diagnosed with a nerve agent in his system, irrefutable evidence of poisoning.

So what has Navalny done from behind prison walls? Has he kept silent in the hopes that he will be released and allowed to rejoin the resistance abroad?

No.

The day after his arrest, Navalny’s network released the results of a mammoth investigation into Putin’s wealth, exposing a massive web of corruption.

Some call this political courage foolish. What purpose, they asked, could his martyrdom serve?

Last month, we celebrated the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In life, he was a force of nature and a reckoning for the citizens of two separate Americas who could not reconcile their differences without fury and blood. And then, as a victim of that fury and in the crucible of that blood, he became a myth that resonates to this day.

That is what will happen to Alexei Navalny, if he does not leave that Moscow jail. His voice, powerful as it was even across the oceans, will become a constant crashing cymbal to those who want to listen, who care to pay attention and who cherish freedom. It motivated thousand and thousands all over the world to march with his name on their lips, demanding his freedom.

After the riots on Jan. 6, Democrats, politicians snapped into action. They sent out letters, they promised impeachment, they acted like protagonists of their own private Alamos with their claims of courage under fire. And they called for retribution, truth and “reconciliation.”

They pointed fingers at people who did not celebrate the election of Joe Biden. Conservatives, even those who had been critical of Donald Trump, were in the glare of some pitiless klieg lights. They were outed, shamed, shunned and in some cases slandered.

Last week, the most powerful Democrat and third-most important person in the U.S. government, Nancy Pelosi, accused members of the GOP of being the “enemy within,” poised to terrorize their Democratic colleagues in the House. The speaker did this with the support of many in her caucus and other progressives, like the petulant Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who all but accused Ted Cruz of trying to murder her.

It is extremely troubling that very few people on the left have stood up to criticize this dangerous rhetoric, and rail against the silencing of dissenting voices.

One who did stand up was Alexei Navalny, who opposed the social media ban on Trump and tweeted out, “In my opinion, the decision to ban Trump was based on emotions and political preferences. Don’t tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone (not that I ask for it).”

That is a profile in political courage, knowing that words are not bullets. It is therefore not surprising that the man who shamed Americans for being intimidated by words is using them, fiercely, in defense of his own people.

And he is doing it from the depths of a prison cell. To me, Navalny is actually free, and my cowed and cowardly fellow citizens are the ones in invisible, philosophical chains.

Political heroes, past present and future, would surely agree.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I am not the pope. I was never a nun. I am barely a good Catholic, even though I do the absolute minimum to keep my club membership current.

I am, however, a skilled detector of hypocrisy. Which makes me the perfect person to talk about the second Catholic president.

Joe Biden is a Catholic. He was baptized, and goes to church, so it is technically a correct description. So calling Joe Biden a Catholic is as legitimate as calling the pope a Catholic, or Lady Gaga a Catholic, or even Andrew Cuomo a Catholic. Heck, if Dr. Gosnell was baptized in the faith, he would also be a technical Catholic (although I am quite certain he was baptized in hellfire).

As I sit here, writing this column, it is the 48th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion nationwide. This is the day that our technically Catholic president decided to issue a statement that read in part:

“The Biden-Harris administration is committed to codifying Roe v. Wade and appointing judges that respect foundational principles like Roe.”

Many in the abortion-rights movement were likely dancing with joy at that announcement, given the fact that they’d had to deal the last four years with an administration that actually believed in the sacred humanity of the unborn child. Now, of course, they got their folks back in, which is fine since elections have consequences.

Or to paraphrase Oprah, “You get an abortion, and you get an abortion, and you get an abortion!”

The problem is not so much with the principle as it is with the messenger. The technically Catholic president chose the anniversary of a decision that has been condemned by his church for almost 50 years to express his devotion to the abortion rights movement.

If Catholics were honest, they would be looking at this with the same horror the disciples regarded the crucified Christ. But there are a lot of technical Catholics out there who are perfectly fine with their new president standing in solidarity with those who find nothing sacred in the unborn child. One of them is actually a technical Catholic priest named James Martin, who wrote an entire article for the Jesuit “America” magazine blaming pro-life Trump supporters for the siege on the Capitol earlier this month.

Then you have technical Catholic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi expressing her deep sorrow at the fact that her fellow Catholic voters had chosen Donald Trump, expressing her “great grief as a Catholic” and accusing us of “being willing to sell the whole democracy down the river for that one issue.”

Fortunately, a real Catholic by the name of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone reminded the distressed speaker that “one thing is clear: No Catholic in good conscience can favor abortion. ‘Right to choose’ is a smokescreen for perpetuating an entire industry that profits from one of the most heinous evils imaginable. Our land is soaked with the blood of the innocent, and it must stop.”

Yes, there are Catholics who oppose abortion but support the death penalty. I’m one of them. I am fully prepared to cop to the accusation that I am a hypocrite, and perhaps a technical Catholic in my own way. Maybe the only true Catholics are the ones who live the creed and message that all life is precious. Maybe they are the only ones who can stand at the gates of heaven and stare St. Peter in the face with confidence and conviction. The rest of us might limp up to that citadel with hunched shoulders and heavy human baggage.

But I just wish everyone would stop pretending Joe Biden is representative of my faith. I wish they would rip the halo off of his aging head, and stop pretending that he is a dutiful son of the church. Enough of this hagiography and acknowledgement of his decency. Enough, too, of Nancy Pelosi and the Jesuit father, and their political theater.

Imperfect as I am, and with the full sense that I carry the albatross of my sins with me every day, I know that I am at least innocent of calling the lost generations “a choice” and a “right.”

That’s something the technical Catholic will never be able to claim. And the saddest part is that he, and so many other technical Catholics, don’t seem to give a damn.

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Copyright 2020 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

People often try and sound profound by quoting Santayana’s apocryphal statement, “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

But Santayana had his finger on the pulse of my nation in this moment. There is a lot of hysteria spreading among the cultured classes, but since they are the cultured classes, it is repackaged as concern for social norms and national security. What appears to the naked eye and the unbiased mind as a dance with totalitarianism is described by the dancers as “damage control.”

Silencing voices that we don’t like isn’t new. It has happened since time immemorial.

Having practiced immigration law for over two decades, I am intimately familiar with what happens when governments decide that certain thoughts are dangerous, certain views are unwelcome and certain questions should never be asked.

My asylum clients have ranged from the Haitian journalist who fled the bloody regime of Baby Doc Duvalier in the 1980s to an Albanian poll watcher who had the teeth beaten out of his mouth by political opponents. I represented a Pakistani schoolteacher who thought that girls should be given the same education as boys, and saw his one room school house burned to the ground in retaliation.

Add these people to the religious refugees, the Baha’i businessman in Iran who was stripped of his license because the mullahs called him an “apostate,” the Maronite Christian police officer in Lebanon who was beaten with electrical chords by his Syrian persecutors, and the Evangelical Christian in El Salvador who was raped because she wouldn’t stop preaching to the gangs.

When the tech companies started shutting down conservative social media accounts, starting with Donald Trump’s, my friends on the left started ridiculing those of us who raised the red flag of censorship. But when a governmental role is taken up by non-governmental actors with the winking acquiescence and dog-whistle complicity of the official ruling body, you can no longer easily distinguish public acts from private ones.

Remember what happened in East Germany? The communist overlords used their Stasi secret agents to spy on possible dissidents. In order to make their jobs easier, they enlisted the help of average East Germans, the neighbors down the road and-chillingly-in the same homes as the targets. If you’ve ever seen the Academy Award winning movie “The Lives of Others,” you know exactly what I’m referring to. Tina Rosenberg also mentioned this phenomenon in her book “The Haunted Land,” which described what happened when the Stasi books were made public after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In many cases, wives found out that they had been spied on by their own husbands, children by their parents, and vice versa.

The horror was that ordinary human beings, private citizens, had been enlisted in the effort to silence the uncomfortable non conformists.

And then you have the memorable example of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who filled their Killing Fields up with the intelligentsia, professors and doctors and lawyers and other people with independent minds so they could more easily manage the masses. A friend of mind called what is happening now, this silencing from the left as a Khmer Bleu. I laughed, until I started crying.

That’s why when I hear people say that it’s whining and overkill to worry about the suspension and cancellation of conservative voices, I remember what happened in the past, and how it was excused. People are using those same excuses again, “public safety” and “keeping order” and “making people accountable.” It is chilling that they do not hear themselves echoing the words of the totalitarian elders.

I do not agree that everything should be said. There are limits, and not every move to keep someone from speaking is a human or civil rights violation.

But to suggest that someone who says “stop the steal” or who questioned the validity of an election is an enemy of the state, is itself a toxic injection into the civic body. It is also wrong to demand capitulation, penance and some sort of begged-for absolution from those who voted for and supported a president who is being compared to Hitler. As an aside, anyone who dares to compare anyone but the actual Hitler, to Hitler, is a pure and unadulterated anti-Semite, in my opinion.

So while it may seem trite to throw out quotes that end up on cards or embroidered on pillows to make a point, I don’t think it’s out of line to suggest that we crane our necks backwards to check on what happened to our ancestors. Ignoring the obvious is a very effective way to guarantee the inevitable.

You can quote me on it.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Why should we be surprised that at a time when everything is supposed to be about race, from the skin color of certain newspaper editors forced to resign to whether we should capitalize the “B” in “Black,” the most disturbing and consequential attack on our civic body in decades ends up being all about the color of the protesters/terrorists?

After Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol by desperate and angry Trump supporters, the conversation turned from “why did they do it?” to “who caused it?” to “why weren’t they stopped?” to “it’s because they were white.”

You think I’m exaggerating? All you had to do was listen to Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate WHYY, and there was interview after interview with people of color who suggested that if the protesters had been Black or brown people, they would have been shot dead before they even launched that first brick through the window.

For just one example, Penn professor of Africana studies Anthea Buter came right out and said it was “a bunch of white people wilding out.” She followed that up with, “I observed a bunch of Donald Trump followers tearing down the bastion of democracy, the Capitol … and the other thing I watched was the complacency with which the Capitol police let them crawl all over everything, and I couldn’t help but think that Black people couldn’t get past the stairs, the stairs would be filled with blood, if it had been brown people, the stairs would have been filled with blood, and this is where I think that white America gets to see what we’ve been talking about.”

Again, it’s not a shocker that one of the more important narrative threads of that tragic afternoon, one that resulted in the killing of a woman and four other deaths, is a manipulative attempt to exploit the racial divide that deepened this past year.

You see it everywhere, in newspaper headlines and the historically inaccurate 1619 Project and Netflix programming, and commercials and the politically tinged manifestos of entertainers and even in connection with the pandemic. So many want to put race front and center, even when it’s only tangential to the larger story.

Americans attacked the Capitol last week, and the color of their skin was much less relevant than the content of their character. The fact that they are trying to make it a referendum on “violent white Americans” as opposed to “peaceful Americans of color” is as despicable as it is predictable.

An interesting corollary to what I absolutely call an attempted coup or an insurgency is the fact that some people are trying to suggest that liberals don’t cause the type of damage, nor do they storm government entities, the way conservative “cultists” do.

I am quite certain that the senators who were deliberating on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court are having a bitter, rueful chuckle at that. All of us remember the hormonally crazed women (and some men) who tried to charge the Senate floor in an attempt to deprive a duly-nominated, eminently qualified nominee of his legitimate right to a seat. They marched up and down the Capitol halls, unfurling banners, chanting obscenities and saying things like “withdraw Kavanaugh, no abusers on the Supreme Court!’ They even trapped Sen. Jeff Flake on an elevator, and others made death threats against Sen. Susan Collins, both of whom voted in favor of the nominee. Fortunately, over 200 arrests of these crazed commandos were made.

I hope, with everything in me, that those who caused the carnage and damage are arrested and held accountable for their crimes. This was a coup, a terror attack, as unAmerican as it was reminiscent of juntas and strong men in South America. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that the violent ones were antifa infiltrators, just as I didn’t buy the canard that the looters of the summer Black Lives Matter protests weren’t really a part of that movement.

But I won’t stand by while some people pretend that this is all about race or political ideology. This is about people who took the law into their own hands and became violent predators on the civic body. These are Republicans who cannibalized themselves, and in the process, alienated so many of us that it will take more than a generation to fix the damage.

This was not about the color of criminals, or their gender, or what hashtag movement they embrace.

To suggest that the Capitol police let white people rampage when they would have murdered brothers of other colors is a slander. The white female Trump supporter who was shot through the heart can’t tell you that anymore.

But I can.

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Copyright 2020 Christine Flowers. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].