Cagle World

I am no longer surprised at the depths to which some people will sink in these fraught and tortured moments.

A friend recently posted something on her Facebook page honoring the life and tragic death of Cannon Hinnant, the little 5-year-old from North Carolina who was shot through the head by his next-door neighbor. I also posted about the death, and made the child’s picture my social media profile photo. We both did it to call attention to the loss of another innocent to senseless, ubiquitous violence.

But by friend was told her posting smacked of racism. Why, you might ask? Because the killer of Cannon Hinnant – a white child – was a black former drug dealer and felon. Apparently, recognizing that this child was the victim of a felon who happened to be the same race as George Floyd was engaging in race baiting, even though race was barely mentioned in any of the posts about the child’s death. For that matter, the parents and family of Cannon Hinnant have come out saying that they don’t believe race was a factor in the murder.

Yes, there are some conservative outlets that have tried to make it about race, and that’s wrong. This is about the death of a child, one whose blood is the same color as the spilt blood of Black and brown children in the inner cities.

So focusing on the race of Cannon Hinnant and his killer is wrong.

But let’s take a closer look at what’s going on here. Some people don’t seem to like the fact that we are talking about a child who isn’t Black or brown. There is the not-so-subtle suggestion that even focusing on the tragedy of his lost life is an attempt to deflect attention from the larger national conversation on racism and the “mattering” of Black lives, and the bigotry of Republicans.

There is the sense that if we dare to mourn this child’s passing with the same passion and fervor and anger that we should give to the death of any martyred human, we are disrespecting the memory of Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and Ahmad Aubury, and all of the other names that we have heard and stories that we have absorbed over the past five or so months. It is the crazy, tone deaf premise that we cannot care about all of the senseless crimes committed against innocent people at the same time.

This is also the type of reaction you get when you say that “Blue Lives Matter” or the hated “All Lives Matter.” We’ve been told if you refuse to say the right words, the magic incantation that shows how “woke” we are, it is a direct and deliberate exhibition of racism. To depart from the script written for us by the activists and their “allies” is to assent to the violence being done to racial minorities in this country, at this time. And that is, if you will excuse the poetic flair, total B.S.

I do not think that Cannon Hinnant’s life was more important than that of any minority child’s. I do, however, think that we are making him “lesser than,” when we attack people who try and bring attention to his passing. The suggestion from the tolerant progressives that calling attention to the murder of a little boy riding his bike in front of his house is somehow racist shows just how brainwashed these people are. Their compassion is written on lawn signs, their furrowed brows and their carefully curated social media pages, but not on their hearts.

We are at a very dangerous place when people have to be afraid to mourn the death of a child because it might offend or trigger someone. I refuse to capitulate in that, and pander to the type of person who only has a limited amount of compassion, all of which was exhausted after the Floyd funeral.

I will be keeping Cannon’s image alive on my Facebook page, not as a challenge to a social justice movement and not as a way to disrespect George Floyd, but in defiance of those who think that only some lives matter.

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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].

I watched the opening night of the Democratic National Convention because it was news, not because I was particularly interested in the outcome. It wasn’t really inspiring, and it wasn’t really moving, and it wasn’t really exceptional, but at least it wasn’t really offensive.

That is, until Kristin Urquiza opened her mouth. Urquiza is the daughter of Mark Anthony Urquiza, whose died on June 30. His death has been attributed to COVID-19. His daughter, however, attributes it to Donald Trump. After having been introduced with the fanfare accorded to heads of state, Urquiza came on to talk about how her father died:

“He had faith in Donald Trump, he voted him, listened to him, believed him and his mouthpieces when they said coronavirus was under control and would disappear, and that it was OK to end social distancing rules before it was safe. In late May, after the stay-at-home order was lifted in Arizona, my dad went to a karaoke bar with his friends. A few weeks later, he was put on a ventilator. And after five agonizing days, he died alone, in the ICU, with a nurse holding his hand.”

And then, to make sure that we hadn’t missed her point, she added, “My dad was a healthy 65 year old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life.”

For a moment, I just sat there in silent shock. No one expected the Democratic National Convention to tiptoe around its animus toward the president. I certainly didn’t expect the powers that be to navigate a middle ground where they focused on the attributes of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris while criticizing the policies and accomplishments of this administration.

But Urquiza’s use of her father’s death to advance a political agenda hit me in the solar plexus. She is, like so many of her generation and political formation, a master of social media, where appearance matters much more than substance. If we can convince people that what they see is the actual reality, perhaps it will prevent them from thinking for themselves and searching for the truth. If we can go after a despised president in the process, so much the better.

We don’t know how Mark Anthony Urquiza contracted COVID, although it is possible, as his daughter suggests, that he was infected after that ill-advised visit to a karaoke bar. But Donald Trump did not tell him to go to that bar with friends. Donald Trump did not pay his bar tab, and did not tell everyone that the virus was a hoax. In my personal view, the president has been far too cavalier about the virus and has not listened to his more seasoned advisers. He has not, in my opinion, set the best example. I do not look to him for medical guidance.

Which is exactly my point. Anyone who actually believes that people who became infected because of acts they took of their own volition were killed – figuratively – by the president are using those tragic deaths as bullets for their partisan artillery squads. I don’t care if it hurts the president’s feelings, and I’m not here to praise his conduct during this pandemic which, as I stated earlier, is mediocre at best.

My anger is focused upon a daughter who would prostitute her own grief in the service of a partisan message, playing upon our emotions and trying to make it seem as if one political party supports death. I seem to recall how angry the Democrats were when Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama’s health care mandates of being “death panels.” Funny how they’ve changed their tune.

This isn’t about who wins in November. This is about how base, how low we in this society have become when we can milk our loved ones deaths for political purchase. Apparently, the bottom is lower than even I thought possible.

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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].

I’ve been all over the place with Kamala Harris. Before Joe Biden picked her as his running mate, I was convinced that of all the possible choices, she was the most palatable.

Harris has a lot of experience, is highly educated, is a P.R. genius and has fielded almost as much hate from the left as she has from the right. Her years as a prosecutor have put her on the wrong side of the law for Black Lives Matter activists and allies, so to say that the extremists on the far left aren’t happy is to say that Alyssa Milano is only mildly annoying.

But once Biden picked her, all I could see was the woman who bared her fangs at Brett Kavanaugh, essentially accepting Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations that 100 years ago the future Supreme Court justice tried to rape her. Or assault her. Or maybe he was in the room when someone else tried to rape her. Or maybe he looked like the guy who was friends with the guy who tried to rape her. And then there were those orgies and everything.

It’s tempting to make cruel comments about someone who has herself made cruel comments but it doesn’t help us keep that moral high ground when it comes to women. The “we” I am referring to is conservatives, and the moral high ground that I sincerely believe we own is soaked in the blood of Sarah Palin’s reputation.

We cannot treat Kamala with brutality and then complain about how Palin was virtually destroyed by both the Democrats and the GOP operatives who hated her as much, if not more, than the political enemy.

Palin ushered in an era of what I call “justified misogyny,” where men and women – especially and enthusiatically women – felt entitled to ridicule her every move. She was stupid. She was a Jesus freak, a religious zealot who wanted to force women to have babies. She was a vengeful hack. She raised white trash kids. She was a nepotist (but likely couldn’t spell the word). Her Downs child didn’t emerge from her vagina. And it continues to this day.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve blocked on social media who think they curry favor with me by saying, “Oh you look like her but you’re much smarter.” The visceral hatred is real. And how has Palin reacted? Most recently, with profound grace, by issuing advice and good wishes to Harris. Which has angered her critics even more.

Before Kamala was confirmed as Biden’s pick, a bunch of nervous ladies took a pre-emptive strike and issued a statement announcing their intention to combat the misogyny that the pick would likely trigger. This absolute lack of self-awareness on the part of these women made me laugh. They and their older sisters were part of the braying pack of political hyenas that came for Palin. And they really thought we wouldn’t notice?

The thing about hypocrites is that they rarely look in the mirror. But I’m looking straight at them. And this is what I have to say:

I won’t be coming for Kamala’s smarts.

I won’t trash her educational pedigree.

I won’t examine her romances.

I won’t criticize those pearls or that hair.

I won’t harass her stepkids.

I won’t attack her faith, or lack thereof.

I won’t make fun of her cadence.

I won’t ridicule her reading habits.

I won’t snicker at her hobbies.

I won’t stalk her neighbors for intel.

I won’t research her husband’s associations.

I will go after her politics, which are generally anathema. I will ignore her ovaries and skin color and ethnicity. I will do her the favor the hypocrites on the left refused to extend to Palin.

I will treat her like a human being. That’s all anyone of us deserves and these days, rarely gets.

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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].

I’ve been pretty lucky in the name department. With the exception of that brief period when I hated the fact that “Christine” became a symbol for women who couldn’t keep their hair out of their faces and whispered before Congress about an alleged assault no one else could remember, I’ve never been ashamed to, as Beyonce sang, say my name.

That’s why I feel so bad for women named Karen. It’s a lovely name, and I have some equally lovely female friends who share it. There is Karen from Pittsburgh who has the most beautiful little grandsons I have ever seen. There is the Karen from Narberth who is fiercely and courageously pro-life. There is the Karen, loving mother and cat owner from Chester County who exudes kindness.

Karen is an honorable, consequential name.

Lately, though, some people have tried to make it a scarlett letter, but instead of the “A” that poor Hester Prynne sported because of her adultery, it is a bright and burning “K” which apparently stands for, alternately, busy-body, entitled suburbanite or the most common (and worst) connotation: Racist woman.

Can we first just agree that we are dealing with the most obvious form of misogyny here? “Karen” is virtually always applied to women, even though a few men have been tagged with the moniker. There seems to be a great deal of animus out there for people who speak out, particularly if they have ovaries.

My good friend Joan pointed out that Karen memes reminder her of the Jewish-American princess stereotype. She wrote both “have a way of making prejudice… socially acceptable, which shouldn’t happen.”

The use of a name to dehumanize someone and make them feel as if they are “lesser than,” is as old as the Bible. I mean, ever heard of the word Philistine used in a good way? And there are words that we absolutely cannot, and should not, use these days which demean people because of their faith, their race, their gender, their ethnicity, and even their political affiliations.

So why, all of a sudden, is it okay to define women with opinions as “Karens?” Have you seen poor women called “Karens?” Have you seen Black women called “Karens?” Have you seen Asians or Latinos or Muslim women called “Karens?”

If you have, please send me some examples so I can include them in my next column about how I always address my mistakes. But I sincerely doubt you will find a significant quantity of Karen stories that are not accompanied by memes of attractive, middle-aged and affluent white blonde women with that Kate Gosselin hairdo.

Recently, a women in Delaware County in Pennsylvania was publicly shamed on social media for counter-protesting at a Black Lives Matter rally. I do not remember any social media posts criticizing the people who called her names, gave her the finger or essentially dehumanized her. At best, they would call her a “Karen,” a woman who has no right to have an opinion unless that opinion is sanctioned by a certain section of society.

Also, recently, a columnist at another paper used the term “Karen” in a pejorative manner to describe that class of well-to-do folk who never had to deal with the harsher vicissitudes of life in this post George Floyd landscape. Clearly, her use of the term Karen was not complimentary.

My point is that when we start to objectify people – usually women – with labels, we run the risk of looking like rank hypocrites when we talk about how bigoted other people are, how intolerant, how prejudiced and sheltered.

Think about it, before your next round of “Karenization.” And purchase a larger mirror.

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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].

I wrote a column a short while back about teachers who didn’t want to go back to school until they could be guaranteed that everything was safe. The reaction to my suggestion that teachers shouldn’t demand absolute guarantees of safety, which is pretty much what they’ve been doing, made me think about other “essential” workers during this time of crisis, people who really have no other choice than to show up for work and hope that the gods and a competent Secretary of Health are protecting them.

In particular, I thought about sanitation workers. In the Philadelphia area where I live, the trash has been piling up. That is a function of several things, including a number of personnel calling in sick, a larger volume of trash produced by the hoards of stay-at-home workers, and the difficulty of dealing with other people’s waste products when you are trying to stay safe yourself. I understand this, and I haven’t opened my mouth once to complain about the piles of trash on my street. I really haven’t.

You know why I haven’t? His name was Michael Fusco. Mike, as his friends called him, was a sweet-tempered beanpole of a man, with a mischievous expression in his brown eyes, a weathered faced even in his early 40s, calloused hands, and a contagious smile. His loves were his wife Mamie, unfiltered Chesterfields, flannel shirts, and his first grandchild: Me.

Mike was also the hardest worker I’ve ever met, and in my 58 years I’ve met a lot of conscientious people. But my “Pop Pop” woke up before the crack of dawn, had his coffee, Stella D’Oro and first cigarette, then went out to clean up everyone else’s messes. In the Philadelphia of the 1940s and 1950s, before the days of recycling and the “greening of America,” there were mountains of unsavory messes.

But Mike went out there every day, and then came home and scrubbed up before he allowed Mamie to kiss him. Ironically, he was the cleanest man in the 49th Street neighborhood of West Philly. Spending your hours around the refuse made by strangers makes you understand the importance of soap. It also whips any sort of pretention out of your system.

Mike encountered a lot of things in his travels that were rejected by their original owners, but when he got a hold of them, they gained new life. I was the beneficiary of dollhouses, and rocking chairs, and stuffed animals, and a vanity set that was grander than anything Princess Diana would have owned. He painted, polished, carved, glued and hammered the trash of others into beloved memories for his granddaughter.

And before I was even born, that job took a year of his life from him. Traveling on the back of a truck, he fell off and broke his back when the driver awkwardly navigated a corner. By some miracle, he was not paralyzed, but spent months in bed convalescing while his wife had to support a family of five on a few dollars a week. They did it. They managed. They didn’t complain.

Today, we complain about everything. We are a weaker breed. And we are much more arrogant toward others, which is ironic since some of us are wedded to this P.C. ideal of not saying the wrong thing. We refuse to give offense with our words. But our actions, they speak volumes.

So these days, people don’t generally care about the sensibilities and sensitivities of the folk who clean up after them. They don’t tie their bags completely, they don’t separate their garbage, they don’t think how disgusting it might be for a stranger to handle the remains of last night’s hangover or that moldy bread you forgot was in the back of the cupboard. One of the likely reasons they don’t is because, as one man told me when I mentioned Mike’s story to him, they “Pay taxes, dammit, and it’s a service.” Someone else told me that the sanitation workers willingly entered the field, so they shouldn’t be complaining.

And the interesting thing is, unlike the teachers, most of them haven’t complained, despite the snide comments and preachy editorials from what I like to call the Perpetually Offended. I suppose there are just certain types of folk who roll up their sleeves, walk out the door, and do the jobs they are paid to do.

Mike Fusco was one of them. I wish, I so truly wish, there were more.

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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].

Teachers are now complaining about having to go back and do what they profess to love: Teach in a classroom.

While I have had some unfortunate experience with teachers unions in the past (as an observer, not a member) I was always convinced that the grievance from the professionals was based upon their desire to better the lives of and conditions for students. It really never occurred to me that someone who would enter one of the “service professions” would be hyper focused on their own needs to the exclusion of their kids.

Sadly, that’s what I see happening these days as some school districts announce they will reopen in the fall.

It is reasonable that some of these adults are wary of being exposed to a virus that has not yet been tamed by science, and which is still wreaking havoc in some parts of the country. I know that the uncertainties attached to this disease give one pause, and provide significant challenges to reopening the schools. And yes, I am fully aware that there is not enough money, time or even initiative at the local level to guarantee a fool-proof, completely sanitized, thoroughly germ-free environment.

But by the same token, the only ones I see engaging in finger pointing and “end-times” sort of rhetoric are teachers who do not want to return to the classroom, and their supporters. I have seen on social media that virtually anyone who wants their child to return to the classroom in September is not only considered tantamount to a child abuser, but also wants teachers to die. I do not need to reproduce the posts here, because they are legion and you can do your own research, but there is no question that those of us who think it is imperative that children get back to the business of normalcy, or at least near-normalcy, are considered anathema. Worse than that, we are selfish, dare I say it? Trump supporters.

And that is what angers me the most. When I was a french teacher, politics were irrelevant. That is likely because I taught in private schools, and my specialty wasn’t all that controversial. But now, everything must be squeezed into the “pro-Trump” or “never-Trump” categories, with those of us who simply want to recapture the evanescent beauty of childhood for our kids turned into beastly creatures with a death wish.

I understand that politicians would engage in that sort of gamesmanship. I even get that some parents would do the same, having had my own battles with the sort of person who says, “I am paying your salary, dammit, I get to tell you what and how to teach.”

But I would have never expected that from members of a profession I always loved, admired, cherished and held in the highest esteem. These men and women who are comparing a premature return to classrooms to a “death sentence” should speak to soldiers who have taken incoming fire on a foreign battlefield, EMT workers, emergency room doctors or the police officers who are on the front lines every day, including those when we are not dealing with a pandemic.

I don’t mean to dismiss the real concerns of teachers who might feel particularly vulnerable to infection, including those who are older, have pre-existing conditions or don’t want to expose vulnerable family members to what they perceive as a risk.

But that is not what we have been doing, because some people see this as just another opportunity to attack a president they despise, or advance some agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with their own health, or the welfare of children. The nuns who taught me would have told these fainthearted professionals to act like adults, study the facts and charts, and dispense with the hysterics. The children are watching.

Months ago I wrote about the toll being taken on high school seniors who were losing out on all of the important rites of passage, markers like graduation, parties, senior weeks and final farewells. Many of the emails I received in response were sympathetic, but also suggested that it was necessary to do everything possible to stop the spread of COVID.

Back then, I grudgingly agreed. Now, as I see teachers in particular (not all, but far too many) moving the chains and pushing back the goalposts, I am beginning to wonder if we even want to see the light at the end of this tunnel, or if it is in the best interest of some people to freeze us in a holding pattern indefinitely.

This cannot continue. Again, the children are watching us. Let’s be worthy of the trust they place in us, and bring them back into a world they recognize, and deserve, before they become used to sitting in their bedrooms with absolutely no human contact.

Christa McAuliffe once said, “I touch the future, I teach.” It’s time some of these educators stopped living, scared and anchored in the past.

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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].

One of the few things that seem to unite all three levels of government these days – local, state and federal – is the astounding and blatant level of hypocrisy exhibited by their leaders.

Starting from the bottom up is the “Honorable” James Kenney, the mayor of Philadelphia, who issued an edict which essentially and effectively cancelled the Mummer’s parade, the Thanksgiving Day Parade and all other outdoor activities in the city until February.

Of course, there is one big exception to the draconian rule: If you are social justice warriors who hate the police and amble down the avenues in a mass showing of virtue signaling, you are free to gather. Mayor Kenney and those who agree with him are afraid that the garden variety Mummer, Santa or even the long-suffering and loyal Eagles fan is Patient Zero and a toxic menace, but the folk who shout “abolish the police” while defacing property are no threat whatsoever.

Some lawyers with a background in constitutional law might call that “viewpoint discrimination,” in that the government is giving favorable treatment to one group because it agrees with their message, while punishing other groups with equally valid “viewpoints.” I hope that someone from the ACLU picked up a copy of this paper today, so they can figure out when to file their lawsuit.

Moving on from incompetent local administrators, we then have Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a man who has turned his Twitter feed into an hourly update about masks. I am not kidding, or engaging in hyperbole. I counted four tweets about the importance of wearing masks, how to wear masks, why we wear masks, who is wearing masks and what he will do to us if we do not wear masks, in about as many days. If Wolf had his way, he would personally Saran wrap every Pennsylvanian so that we would not be in a position to infect our neighbors.

Wolf says he cares about the welfare of children, but he is on the verge of keeping schools in Pennsylvania shut down for 70-80 percent of the scholastic year. Yet this is the same man who made sure that abortion clinics stayed open during the height of the pandemic. While churches were shuttered for months and people of faith were denied their sacraments, women who wanted to get rid of their pregnancies had carte blanche to access those “life sustaining services,” the term used by Wolf when deciding which business could remain functioning, and which had to close.

Now we get to the federal government, which has not covered itself in glory during this pandemic. The mixed messaging from the Trump administration is particularly obvious when you talk about immigration. Day after day has brought inconsistent and, to my mind, cruel policy directives from the White House. The fact that they are then modified and rescinded when the public displays its open-mouthed horror doesn’t change the fact that there are some bizarre things going on in Stephen Miller’s mind.

First, there was the news that the Supreme Court had spared DACA. Despite the fact that the high court declared the program to be legal (at least in the short run), the Department of Homeland Security refused to accept DACA applications.Then, the president goes on Spanish network television and says he wants to preserve DACA. (Pause to scratch your head here.) Then, administration puts out a rule requiring students, kids who paid exorbitant fees to attend school in the United States, to go home if they weren’t going to be on campus.

This was so outrageous that Harvard and MIT filed a lawsuit against the government. Apparently, the lawsuit worked because the White House again reversed course and suspended that rule. And then we have the outrageous restrictions on asylum applicants, for whom they are making life impossible. I don’t think anyone would blame me for believing that stripping people of the right to obtain work authorization and other “regulatory” changes to the asylum process was opportunistically slipped in under the cover of COVID.

You might say that the administration’s actions are less a sign of hypocrisy and more a sign of incompetence, or even malice. I could even agree with you. But hypocrisy manifests itself in many forms, and one of them is pretending to care about the welfare of people and their lives and livelihoods while at the same time doing everything to undermine those goals.

So the mayor of Philadelphia bans public gatherings, except for protests he supports.

And the governor of Pennsylvania shuts down all businesses for “life-sustaining” reasons, except the one business that traffics in death.

And the president of the United States defends his organizational skills and his magnificent job managing this crisis, and then changes his mind every five minutes on key initiatives.

How blessed we are in our leaders.

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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].

There were church burnings this month, and statues of the Blessed Virgin were vandalized. You wouldn’t know it, though, if you depended on the local media for your news.

When I searched the internet for “Catholic churches vandalized” near “the newspaper of record,” or used the terms “Catholic relics destroyed” near “papers for which I do not write,” the only thing that came up were cases from almost ten years ago. And there was scant mention in the national media as well.

So I will talk about hate crimes, the kind that rarely gets the type of attention they deserve. The following incidents happened in July:

– Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Marion County, Florida, was set on fire after a man named Steven Anthony Shields (why do they always have three names?) rammed his vehicle into the vestibule and poured gasoline in the foyer;

– The Church of San Gabriel in Los Angeles caught fire under suspicious circumstances, right before its 250th anniversary;

– A statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary which had been set up decades before in honor of World War II veterans was set on fire outside of a Boston church;

– A similar statue of Mary was vandalized outside of Cathedral Prep School and Seminary in Queens, N.Y.

And in June, the statue of Father Junipero Serra was forcibly pulled down from its pedestal in the park bearing his name in Los Angeles. Serro was a Franciscan friar who is credited as the principal architect of the California Mission system when that part of the country was under Spanish colonization. Native Americans have long argued that Serra was behind the forced conversion of indigenous to Catholicism, and that the terms of that conversion were often brutal.

While I strongly oppose the removal of that piece of history from its legitimate location, just as I condemn the attacks on statues of Christopher Columbus in Philadelphia and other historical figures, and while I definitely place this trend to “cancel the culture we don’t like” in the category of vandalism, there is an argument to be made that controversial figures can be expected to attract this sort of attention in contentious times.

What is not legitimate, what is not acceptable and what is not something that the media should be ignoring with the blithe attitude of “what the public doesn’t see won’t hurt them” is the deliberate, obvious, coordinated and (to my mind) condoned attacks on my faith. As someone once told me, anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice.

There are those who object to the term “anti-Catholicism” when it comes to anything that smacks of a hate crime. They prefer the sanitized phrase “anti-clericalism,” which acts as a form of gaslighting. In other words, if a Catholic such as myself dares to raise the specter of sectarian bigotry, we are generally told that it’s not the Catholics that people hate, it’s the people and the policies of the church. This is commonly employed when those self-styled “cleric-haters” criticize the church’s position on same-sex marriage, or abortion, or most commonly when they want to describe my faith as a training ground for pedophiles. “We don’t hate Catholics,” they say with a straight face. “We hate what they stand for.”

Well I am here to say that when you burn a church to the ground, you are setting me on fire. When you paint vile words on a statue of the Blessed Mother, you are smearing those words onto my own skin. When you throw rocks through the windows of a chapel to destroy the jewel-like stained glass, you are bruising my body. And when you are a member of the media, and you look away as this is happening but make sure to point out every offense perpetrated against every other group that has you as its free P.R. director, you are ignoring my righteous cries and my pain.

Just as swastikas painted on tombstones at a Jewish cemetery are evidence of bigotry, and just as the vilification of women in hijabs is bigotry, and just as crosses burning on an African-American’s lawn is bigotry, so is the torching of my spiritual home and the defiling of my mother’s image.

The difference is that I need to scream louder to get noticed. And that, in and of itself, is the most insidious sort of prejudice.

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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].

Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson isn’t the kind of person a father points to and says, “Son, I want you to grow up to be just like him!”

While D-Jax has made some Philadelphia hearts melt and flutter with his pyrotechnics on the playing field, I can no longer “deal” with Jackson. He has shown himself to be a bigot of the highest order, someone who thinks that making Hitler references and posting anti-Semitic remarks on his public social media pages is acceptable.

Over the July 4th weekend, the one where some people were out in the streets protesting against a holiday that honors “white male slaveholders,” Jackson decided to share a post from one of the most hateful, vile and bigoted people in the history of bigots, the “Minister” Louis Farrakhan. The post essentially stated that World War III would be started to stop white Jewish people in America from oppressing the Black community. It allegedly quoted Hitler, and has been universally discredited. There is no doubt, however, that it traffics in the foulest form of Jew hatred.

After initially receiving criticism, Jackson doubled down, reposted the quote and highlighted a portion, then said he had no “hate in my heart” for Jewish people.

How nice. How delightfully nice.

And then, when the Philadelphia Eagles front office got wind of the non-apology, they came out with their own statement condemning Jackson. However, they haven’t yet decided what type of penance he needs to perform in order to retain his position on a team that is run by a lot of Jewish people for whom, apparently, Jackson has no hate in his heart.

At this point, the weight of the world should be coming down on the shoulders of this man, who thinks that Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam treachery should be anyone’s source of inspiration. Just like the communities of color (including all the hues in the rainbow) came after Drew Brees for saying that he would never disrespect the American Flag (the nerve!) so should those same pearl clutchers take a hold of their freshwater gems once more and condemn Jackson.

But while there has been some criticism, it has hardly reached the crescendos that accompany any perceived offense against communities of color. And that is why I’m angry.

If you look at the history of persecution, Jews have suffered as much as any defined demographic. I would venture to say that they have suffered more. They were slaves. They were stripped of their legal rights, their land, their names, their legitimate patrimonies. They were turned into refugees. They were rounded up into camps and systematically murdered. So I don’t think I am alone in writing, in large letters, JEWISH LIVES MATTER.

But each time someone like Jackson reposts some fabricated filth, that principle gets lost in the muck of bigotry. More importantly, if it is not condemned with the same power and passion as we condemn the attacks on our brothers and sisters of color, we are condoning it by implication.

Most Black people understand this. Most white people understand this. Most good people, who don’t need to look in the mirror and check out their skin color before having an opinion understand this. Jackson trafficked in the same crude and hateful rhetoric as those who drop the “N” word into casual conversation. He needs to be held accountable for it.

In 1964, two young Jewish men named Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner went down south to Philadelphia, Miss., to show how much they believed Black lives mattered. Because of their commitment and in spite of their courage, they ended up in a ditch, beside their Black companion James Chaney. Black and Jewish lives have been intertwined in the struggle for dignity and justice.

DeSean Jackson needs to learn his history. Maybe he can study it while on the bench this season, wearing his Jewish Lives Matter special edition jersey.

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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].

I’m a sucker for horror movies, but not the new ones filled with blood, gore and articulate zombies. My tastes trend toward the classics, and my favorite is the original “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

We all know the story – the kindly Dr. Jekyll who drinks a potion which unleashes the sinister part of his being, something we are meant to understand was always there. That’s the horror: the chemicals didn’t create the monstrous Mr. Hyde, they just opened the door and let him free.

Chief Justice John Roberts is very much a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or a Justice Jekyll and Mr. Roberts, if you like. He’s not a monster, and in many ways he is quite an admirable man because he really does try and follow his True North. But the problem is he doesn’t always remember where that point or pole is, and flounders around looking for it. Sometimes I like the exploratory path he takes, sometimes I hate it. Last week, he managed to enrage and delight me within a 24-hour period.

Roberts was the only conservative to vote in favor of striking down what his four conservative brethren felt to be a perfectly reasonable restriction on abortion. In June Medical Services v. Russo, the majority of five justices struck down a Louisiana law that would have required abortionists to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The law was nearly identical to one from Texas that the court had struck down in 2016.

In the earlier case, Roberts had written a dissent, finding that it was not too great a burden to require abortionists to have those admitting privileges, a requirement common in a variety of other circumstances. But in this new decision, Roberts threw his support to the liberals because, in his words “stare decisis instructs us to treat like cases alike.” In other words, Roberts felt that since the Louisiana case was almost identical to the Texas case, he was required by precedent to vote with the liberals.

This, of course, seems reasonable. However, it is not. Roberts placed his desire to preserve the so-called “integrity” of the court as an institution above his previously-stated position that there is nothing unconstitutional in requiring abortionists to have those important admitting privileges. In fact, those privileges could easily have been defended under the ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a nearly thirty year old case which upheld a number of equally “burdensome” restrictions on a woman’s “right” to abortion.

After the ruling, I spent much of the afternoon cursing Roberts in the privacy of my own office. But the next morning, Roberts wrote the majority decision in another case, “Espinoza v. Montana.” The court held that an educational funding program that provides funding to private schools cannot exclude religious institutions under some convoluted reading of the First Amendment. Roberts stated that “[A State] cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

To that I said, “Hallelujah.” And I apologized under my breath for the mean things that I’d said about Roberts just the day before. The irony is that he could have just as easily written the type of scathing dissent that Justice Sotomayor wrote wailing about the separation of church and state, if Roberts really was concerned about his blessed “precedent.” That’s because there are enough prior decisions that would give him cover to find that providing money to religious schools is a violation of the Establishment Clause (I think those decisions are wrong, but they’re on the books).

It’s almost as if there is a good angel and a bad devil warring for the soul of the chief justice, and on any given day he’s not sure which one he wants to listen to. It’s obvious that Roberts is a decent man, despite the scurrilous things that have been written about him by others. But he is so desperate to make it seem as if he really is that “umpire” he referenced at his confirmation hearings that he ends up being Casey at the Bat, who keeps striking out at the crucial moment.

I hope when he finally settles down and realizes that the reputation of the institution is much less important than the integrity of the law itself, Roberts will reconcile the two sides of his complicated nature and choose to follow that better angel.

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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].