Cagle World

The first comment I heard after the attack on Catholic schoolchildren in Minneapolis last week was from the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, who said: “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers just now. These kids were literally praying.”

Initially, it didn’t strike me as particularly problematic. But later in the evening I was watching CNN and a group of “experts” were discussing the incident, and to a person they rejected the idea that this was an anti-Catholic attack.

The mayor also made sure to criticize anyone who mentioned that the killer was a trans woman.

That’s when it hit me. What the mayor and these panelists were doing is what people tend to do every time there is an attack against a disfavored minority group: pretend that the group isn’t a target.

You might say Catholics are hardly a minority, given our numerosity in the world.

There are many more Catholics in the U.S. than Jews or Muslims, although we are dwarfed by the collective Protestant denominations.

That said, we have always been a little set apart from the rest of the country, even though we have managed to blend in quite well over the centuries.

The days of the burning of Old St. Augustine Church in Philadelphia are distant history.

What’s that? You don’t remember St. Augustine?

It happened almost two hundred years ago when the country was still young, and a church built by and for Irish Catholic immigrants was set on fire by nativist bigots.

The fire department refused to send a company to put out the flames, and the beautiful church burned tothe ground. It was rebuilt, but the memory of that anti-Catholic hatred is preserved in a historical marker, and in our hearts.

Yes, that happened a long time ago. And of course, those Ku Klux Klan cross burnings in front of other churches in the South were almost a century ago, as was the time my father was almost attacked at a Klan roadblock in 1967.

But we, too, were terrorized by the men in the white sheets.

And true, we managed to elect two Catholic presidents, but the first one had to promise that he wouldn’t be “too Catholic” for the Protestants to stomach, and the second one basically forgot that he was a Catholic and embraced abortion, trans ideology and a whole host of other positions that violate the fundamental principles of the faith.

So in order to get along, you see, we blend. But there are some things on which we cannot simply “blend.”

Our Mass is a very specific, very obvious manifestation of our faith. It is a sacred ritual that takes place in identifiable, beautiful buildings.

Unlike Catholics in other countries who are forced to hide their services underground, we have the great privilege of celebrating in public.

But that is a double-edged sword, because being public makes you a target for the deranged and the unholy.

And that is exactly what the murderer of Catholic children was: deranged and unholy.

The mere fact that the killer, who was trans, was mentally unhinged does not mean that he did not also harbor hatred for Catholics.

You do not take high-powered firearms, aim them at stained glass windows, and target little children in their neatly ironed school uniforms as they are in the middle of praying if you do not hate Catholics.

The attempts of some to try and make this a complicated issue by seeking motives that are not there upsets me, a woman who has very loudly and clearly said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and that some of these attacks on immigrants are not rooted in a desire for “order” but are rather the signs of deep-seated bigotry.

I’m able to cut through the hype and get to the truth of the matter, so it angers me when others reject it.

I am also disgusted with the attempts to empathize with the killer, trying to understand his mental illness and his pain, in the moments after an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old were gunned down in their pews.

I am repelled by the thought that we have any sympathy for him or for his mother, in the hours after other children threw themselves over the bodies of their classmates to shield them from the bullets.

This was a hate crime, and even if the rest of the world refuses to see it that way, we have an obligation to shout it to the world: “We are Catholic, and we will not let you erase us.”

That is my thought, and my prayer.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

The Amanda Knox story has always stuck in my craw. She and her narrative of persecution annoy me.

Why am I writing about her now? Because Hulu has just come out with a series about the time she was convicted of murdering her roommate in 2007. In case you want to watch it, which I suggest you don’t, it’s called “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.”

I watched the first two episodes, and I have to say it’s exactly what I expected from Knox: a weepy, millennial saga of the poor American girl caught up in the draconian Italian legal system. Of course, Hulu being a streaming service where the standards for sexual content are fairly broad, there’s a lot of talk about that, too.

Knox was a young college student spending a term abroad in Perugia. When one of her roommates, a British girl named Meredith Kercher, was found brutally murdered, Knox became one of the prime suspects. She was put on trial, convicted and ultimately exonerated after spending about four years in prison.

To be clear, Knox was the victim of shoddy police work by the Italians, including the use of contaminated DNA to convict her. She was found guilty alongside the man who actually did commit the crime and spent 16 years in jail. She then had to fight to prove her innocence. That she fought, won and survived instead of becoming some drug-addled shell is a tribute to her fortitude and character.

And it should have ended there, with gratitude towards the Italian legal system, which ultimately set her free (something that our own system takes a lot longer than four years to do,) and a desire to avoid gelato and Perugina Baci for the rest of her life.

But for millennials, and particularly for millennial women, it never ends there.

Knox has decided to continue to act like the victim, and has enlisted the aid of another famous victim of circumstance, Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton’s Oval Office fling is executive producing this project, and it shows. Monica has spent the last 20 years “reclaiming” her name, which victims like to do. They want to become survivors, not “victims.” They want to express their power and their resilience, and not be the objects of pity (except, more about that in a minute.) They want to appear as if they have vanquished all of their demons.

Knox has gone on a lot of shows, written two memoirs, appeared on a Netflix documentary and given oodles of interviews and has never “gone gentle into that good night.” She has been a presence, and the people who glory in this sort of thing have celebrated her ability to bounce back; people as diverse as Megyn Kelly and the ladies on “The View.”

Even though it’s been almost 20 years since she was arrested, and even though it’s been over 15 years since she was released from prison, and even though it’s been a decade since she has been exonerated, she keeps talking as if she were the most aggrieved person in the world.

There is someone in this scenario who rarely gets attention, and that is Kercher, the young woman who was viciously murdered in Perugia.

In her attempt to “recapture” her name and redeem her reputation, Knox has basically ignored the much greater tragedy in this story: the brutal murder of her friend. Meredith always appears in this story as an afterthought, an asterisk against the larger narrative of the horribly aggrieved Amanda.

Yes, Knox spent four years in prison. That’s a terrible thing. And she has gotten an apology, and money, and now fame. Meredith lies in anonymity, robbed of her future and her own identity. Knox has turned her into a bit player in her own drama, and while there is the obligatory nod to her friend’s sad ending, you get the feeling that the only person Amanda Knox ever shed tears over was … Amanda Knox. There is a sterility in her sympathy, a forced tone to her sadness over the murder of a young woman.

Youth and trauma are no longer an excuse. Knox is moving into middle age and is two decades removed from the event. She is married, has children and is back home in the Pacific Northwest. It would be nice if she could have perhaps written a book about Meredith, seeking the collaboration of her family. She has not done that, and it seems the family didn’t want to be involved in any of the Knox, Inc. projects.

I’m not surprised. Their grief is quite real, over the greatest victim in this scenario. The one who doesn’t get to give self-aggrandizing interviews, or do anything, anymore.

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Copyright 2025 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].

Everything changes, nothing is constant, not even death, for the soul is eternal, or taxes, thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill.

Last week, I wrote about the restoration of the Columbus Day holiday to the Philadelphia Municipal Calendar, canceled during the dark totalitarian moments of the Black Lives Matter era.

And now, this week, we are told that Frank Rizzo, the extremely beloved, equally despised, and overall iconic mayor of Philadelphia, will make his statuary return to our fair city.

That statue, well known to three decades of city dwellers as it greeted us from the Municipal Services Building, was kidnapped by a subsequent mayor who doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the Big Bambino, and hidden away under cover of darkness as BLM cut its vengeful, ahistorical swath across the architectural landscape.

The times, they are indeed changing.

Frank will not be returned to his former place of prominence, because of an agreement between the owners of the statue and the city. That agreement seems to require private placement of the artwork, somewhere not easily visible or accessible to the public.

But that, also, may be “a changin’,” depending on future developments.

The main point is this: What was torn down, painted over, hidden away and erased five years ago at the height of the cultural witch hunt is coming back. Those who were slandered, lied about, shunned and maligned by people with questionable pedigrees are finding their way back to normalcy.

And Frank is coming back.

I know that this is annoying to a lot of the people who marched in the streets calling our former mayor a racist. That word, like “genocide” and “famine” has been misused over and over again, up to the present moment, by people who want to redesign this society according to their rigid standards of virtue and equity.

Fortunately, while their voices were loud and very influential for a time, other voices have been raised to counter their anti-intellectual heresies, including the idea that you must judge a flawed human being by the puritan standards of the 21st century and refuse to place them in the context of their own times.

We are, at least most of us, done with that sort of societal Etch A Sketch where people who no longer fit the prototype of the “fully pronouned ethically excellent non-judgmental but Trump hating” individual now raised up as the standard of good humanity is erased from view.

Now, it seems,  we are allowed to honor people who might have had vices that marred their profiles by instead focusing on their accomplishments while also mentioning their imperfections.

The witch hunt, perhaps, is finally coming to an end.

Of course, there are many people who do not see it this way at all. Simply for writing these words, I will be called a Nazi, a bigot, a rape apologist, a transphobe and all sorts of other things that fill my inbox and social media every time I open my mouth.

That is perfectly fine, because at 63, one of the things that are “a changin’ ” with me besides the color of my hair and the smoothtexture of my skin is my desire to give a blank about what people think about me. I no longer do.

Neither did Frank Rizzo. And that is why he was beloved by far more people than the sum of his enemies.

There was a genuine love of this city that permeated the man, and set him apart from many other politicians who engaged in their craft to enrich themselves, or to change the city.

Rizzo did not want to change the city.

He wanted to preserve what was good about it, wanted to keep the streets clean and safe, wanted to let the folks who worked and paid taxes and rode public transportation breathe more easily, and in that way, he was the antithesis of the Dylan song.

But the times were spinning around him as he lived, and most certainly after his death.

Those times changed with the winds, first turning him into a larger-than-life icon, then transforming him into a caricature of some Marvel villain, and finally showing him to be what he always was: a great Philadelphian.

The statue is coming back. I believe that a bit of sanity is trailing right behind.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

Every time I walk by the statue of Christopher Columbus a few blocks south of my Philadelphia office, I get flashbacks about the hot, June days at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, days after George Floyd died from police brutality, a fentanyl overdose, or both.

You’ll remember that tensions were very high all over the country. The Black Lives Matter movement triggered a lot of anger against the presumed establishment.

Things were particularly heated in my hometown, and more particularly in my neighborhood. South Philly has traditionally been an enclave for first-, second-, third- and even fourth-generation Italians whose immigrant heritage stretches back to the southern part of the boot.

I am not a South Philly native, but I’ve worked and sometimes lived in the area for over 30 years, so you could say I blend.

You know who doesn’t blend? Millennials and Gen Z social justice activists who learned how to spell indigenous the same time they discovered a multiplicity of pronoun options.

As a result of Floyd’s death, there was a lot of reckoning in cities around the country. Philadelphia was no exception to that rule.

In particular, our then-Irish American Mayor Jim Kenney, who was himself a native of South Philadelphia, decided Christopher Columbus was a genocidal maniac and needed to be erased from our collective consciousness.

One Saturday evening in June 2020, he dispatched his municipal henchman to tear down a statue that at that point had presided over Marconi Plaza for decades.

The statue itself was over 150 years old, and had never been the target of anything, except perhaps itinerant pigeons. But in that hot summer of 2020, Columbus and by extension Italians who respected him, became the enemy.

Kenney miscalculated. He didn’t understand that you simply do not mess with South Philadelphia, home of the fictional Rocky and the actual Frank Rizzo, he of the nightstick-in-cummerbund fame.

A bunch of what a friend called the “Marconi Veterans” got together and protected the statue from being removed. It was an amazing display of ethnic pride.

Tattooed men in wife beaters, grandmothers in housedresses, little kids tagging along behind mothers with 87 layers of mascara, immigrant Italians in Juventus jerseys, young girls that you know went Catholic Goretti and who had not been infected with “woke,” and me.

We surrounded the statue, and it is true that some of us yelled epithets in English and Italian, including those of us who were fluent in both, but we were overall quite peaceful.

The statue stayed put. And then, our petulant and mean-spirited mayor retaliated by boarding the statue up in a wooden sarcophagus for over a year.

Unlike other cities governed by officials with linguine spines, Philadelphia pushed back. But so did our mayor.

Since he could not get his way about the statue, Kenney turned his attention to our holiday, the one celebrated every October. He took it off the city’s municipal calendar and replaced it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

It was a clear and pointed attack against the Italian community in Philadelphia. He could have simply picked another day to give to the Indigenous.

He did not do that. He deliberately replaced Columbus with the Indigenous. The symbolism was obvious.

Kenney decided to erase Columbus the way he and his fellow travelers believed that Columbus had erased the Indigenous.

The Marconi Veterans, and many others who felt that the city was engaging in a defamatory campaign against an entire group of people, hired an amazing attorney named George Bocchetto.

Through exceptional legal skill and Italian moxie, Bochetto was not only successful in keeping the Columbus statue in its original location. This past week, he obtained a unanimous victory from an appellate court, who held that erasing the Columbus Day holiday was illegal.

It is difficult to put into words what this means, but I will try.

While the judges were likely following the sterile guidelines of administrative municipal law, for those of us who dealt with the attacks on our character and our heritage for over five years, it was the sweetest of victories.

We keep our statue. We keep our heritage. We get our name back.

And our holiday, which was inaugurated in memory of innocent Italian immigrants who had been lynched in New Orleans over a century ago, simply for being foreigners, wasrestored to us.

The moral of this story is, don’t mess with Italians.

Or to put it another way: Take the cannoli if you want, but leave the holiday.

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Copyright 2025 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 first saw “Village of the Damned,” I was 11 years old, staying up late to watch the Million Dollar Movie on our local ABC affiliate.

It wasn’t a particularly scary film, but it did give me a moment’s pause, as much of a moment as an 11-year-old can spare for philosophizing.

It occurred to me, watching that phalanx of tiny blonde aliens, that people had a love-hate relationship with angelic-looking white kids. While they were desirable in a sort of Aryan way, they also personified some sort mythical creature whose perfection is destructive.

Of course, these kids were not alright, to paraphrase the Who.

They gestated in human mamas, but were the product of some toxic, intergalactic sperm that turned them into nefarious versions of the Von Trapp Family singers.

Again, I wasn’t “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” scared, but it did give me an appreciation for being a brown-eyed, chubby brunette, with the same bad hairdo.

I thought of these damned village people when I was confronted with the Sydney Sweeney controversy.

I am sure that you know who Sweeney is, even though I didn’t until five minutes ago. Apparently, she has starred on a few cable series, most notably “Euphoria” and in an annoying Dunkin commercial.

Still, I kept thinking she was Allentown’s Amanda Seyfried every time I saw her in a magazine. I will never again make that mistake.

That is because I now know that Sidney is the 21st century version of Magda Goebbels, a woman who was the prototype of the Nazi goddess.

Magda was married to Hitler’s chief minister of propaganda, and had a passel of children who themselves were the prototypes for the kids in that damned village. They were the Aryan ideal, blonde and blue eyed and athletic, with clear white skin. In other words, baby Nazis in training.

The fact that Magda poisoned the unfortunate little tykes before killing herself after she realized that Hitler’s days were numbered means nothing. These children were socially engineered for Aryan perfection.

Back to Sweeney.

She recently starred in an American Eagle ad for blue jeans. Showing off her cornflower blue eyes and her voluptuous bosom, Sidney smiles at the camera and says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My genes are blue.”

It’s a clever pun, and much less “in retrospect” icky than Brooke Shields’ “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” of a generation ago.

Now, however, the controversy isn’t about Pretty Baby and sexualizing young girls. Now, a whole slate of woke progressives believe that this is some salvo against ethnic Americans, those who have dark skin, textured hair, brown eyes and who don’t sound like they have two last names. In other words, minorities.

I won’t list all of them, but the usual suspects were out there complaining about how this “racist” ad made them feel unseen, threatened, disrespected. A lot of social media users complained that they used a white woman to promote eugenics, even though no one says anything about eugenics when Halle Berry or Beyonce come out hawking whatever it is they are selling at any given moment.

It’s a ridiculous overreaction to a culture that is now supposed to crash through the Looking Glass and pretend that those overweight and tattooed Dove models are the standard of a new sort of beauty. They are the standard of a new sort of something, but beauty isn’t even close.

I am sure that I will get a lot of pushback from the “don’t judge” crowds, who then go on to judge women who represent a classic standard of beauty, a la our own Grace Kelly.

The ones who demand tolerance for piercings, cellulite and pink hair are exactly the ones ready to attack Sweeney for being Eugenics Barbie.

And the idea that we need to have a Chinese-menu sort of casting for every print and television ad, with one from column Black, one from column Asian, one from column trans, one from column pre-Ozempic and one from column Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter — but none from column blue-eyed blonde — is much more disrespectful than Sidney Sweeney seducing the camera.

So while I am not a fan of blondes per se, and think that Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner wiped the floor with Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve-bottle blondes, but who’s paying attention.

This reflexive outrage at a pretty woman who isn’t afraid to flaunt her stuff is much scarier than that group of vanilla children out to take over the world.

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Copyright 2025 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 have a very good friend who I’ve known for decades, and he posted something on Instagram the other day that shocked me.

Apparently, there is an actual genocide happening in the world, not one that is fabricated for political reasons. The Druze, an ethnic and religious minority, are being systematically exterminated in Syria by the current regime.

You know the one that I’m talking about, right? The one that so many progressives hailed for getting rid of an admittedly terrible dictator, Bashir al Asaad.

The one filled with former members of ISIS, the terrorist group that President Barack Obama declared “declining in power.” That one.

My shock came from the fact I hadn’t heard anything about it. My social media feed fills up day after day with defamatory and antisemitic statements about the “ethnic cleansing” in Palestine, and as I write this, unemployed children are banging pots and pans outside of the Jewish Federation in Philadelphia to bring attention to the war in Gaza.

Only they don’t call it a “war.” They call it, as I suggested before, a “genocide.” They do that a lot, and it’s become their favorite word du jour, one they neither understand nor in some cases, can spell correctly.

What is happening in Gaza is the horrific collateral damage that comes when one combatant — in this case, the aggressors ofHamas — attack another combatant — in this case, Israel — and the aggressors refuse to raise the white flag.

It is the aggressors’ fault that the flag is now a deep ruby red, stained with the blood of innocent Gazan children. But that is not a genocide.

That is not the result of ethnic cleansing, or of an attempt to erase every trace of a culture and tradition from the face of the scorched earth.

What is happening in Gaza is closer to what happened at Hiroshima than what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia, where, respectively, the Tutsis and the Muslims were annihilated.

Palestinians are not being murdered because they are Palestinians. They are being killed because their leaders want Israel to disappear into the sea.

Remember that phrase, which is probably printed as a children’s rhyme in the Gazan Kindergarten readers, “From the River to the Sea?”

That is the code for a genocide, not what is happening in Gaza today.

But if the Jew haters really want to see what a genocide looks like, never fear. It’s happening in Syria.

Members of my friend’s family were assassinated this past month, as the regime in Syria ramps up its attacks on the Druze. Many people are unfamiliar with what it means to be Druze.

According to the Pew Research Center, “The Druze are a unique religious and ethnic group. Their tradition dates back to the 11th century and incorporates elements of Islam, Hinduism and even classical Greek philosophy.”

This is a proud, rich heritage. Unlike many who believe that all Druze are Muslim, they are not bound by religious affiliation since the ethnicity cuts across sectarian lines.

Many of the Druze in Israel are full Israeli citizens who have a great deal of loyalty and allegiance to the government.

I once dated an Israeli Arab, a Druze, who served in the Israeli army.

For that reason, I think I have my answer as to why there is silence from the usual suspects on the genocide.

Even Amal Alamuddin Clooney, an ethnic Druze, has not come out as of this writing with a definitive condemnation of the brutality in Syria. She had no problem signing on to an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, however.

She has been outspoken about human rights abuses against Afghan women and the Yasidi, even assisting Nadia Murad, a Yasidi survivor of genocide, in winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Amal has been virtually silent on the annihilation of her own people.

Again, I think I know why. It is popular to accuse Israel of genocide against Palestinians, because anti-Zionism is in many cases a cover for antisemitism. This is a story as old as time.

In fact, the Gen Zers and millennials banging their pots and pans at the Jewish Federation would be protesting outside of the Israeli Consulate if they really wanted to condemn a country. They do not.

They are attacking an entire group of people. That’s not genocide, but it is ethnic intimidation.

Back to the Druze. We need the U.N. to come out and condemn what is happening to these poor people, on our watch.

We need Pope Leo to show the same righteous anger and outrage at the murder of Druze as he has for the plight of Gazan children.

We need President Trump to take some time away from fending off the Epstein wing of MAGA, and call out this horror.

And we need to stop misusing the word “genocide.”

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

My favorite horror movie is the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” closely followed by the 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland.

The reason I still sleep with the lights on after watching them is the idea that we can live among facsimiles of reality, when it’s all fabrication. Inauthenticity isn’t necessarily bad.

In fact, it’s how we mate, campaign for votes, and become social media influencers. There is nothing more anathema to intimate relationships these days than having your original lips.

But now that artificial intelligence has entered the chat, I’m worried. It’s not just the sense that I’m being fooled. It’s the dangers that exist in allowing this Trojan horse of illusion into our daily lives.

The fear comes from making it increasingly difficult to identify the truth. As a former teacher, the understanding that we will never again be able to completely trust the work product of ambitious high school seniors is chilling.

When I used to grade papers, I prided myself on knowing when one of my little charges had done a cut and paste job.

Now, I’m not sure I’d be able to discern the real from the Memorex, and if you don’t get that reference you’re too young to be up this late reading.

I know that there have always been cheating scandals, and I myself sneaked a few peeks at Cliff Notes in my halcyon academic days, but this is a whole new level of dissimulation.

But that’s not the only concern I have with AI. The other day, I asked Chat GPT to write something in my own style about the pope, and the result was so similar to words I’d actually put to paper in the past that I reflexively deleted it.

Chilling. Here was a technology that had made me irrelevant.

There are some progressives who might love that, particularly after I read what Chat GPT had to say about me when I asked it for a description of “Christine Flowers, columnist.”

But I come from that last generation of people who put physical words to physical paper, and who actually had to work to erase her mistakes.

Now, we don’t even need to press the back key on the word processor. We can eliminate the mistakes before they even occur, by simply giving the job over to our friend the chatbot.

It reminds me in a sinister way of the new genetic technologies that allow parents to design children without illness, without brown eyes, without receding chins and unathletic builds.

And don’t get me started on the pathetic people who have AI boyfriends and girlfriends, which are nothing more than the virtual equivalent of blow up dolls.

A lot of folks would say that I protest too much, and that I’m ignoring the great benefits of the new technologies.

That’s a fair point. But I seriously think that we are going to lose much more by giving ourselves over to this alien sort of technology than we will ever gain.

The other day, I asked Meta, another form of artificial intelligence, to give me some versions of myself.

I uploaded a photo, and watched as the program spat out a hundred versions of Christine, in different outfits, against different backgrounds, with different levels of wrinkles and gray hair.

In some I looked like Gidget, in others like my mother, in one like my grandmother. I was thinner than I now am, and in some cases taller.

I actually liked my doppelgangers, including the ones that really did make me look like Sarah Palin.

The one with the third arm was a little weird, but whatever.

But then I noticed the eyes. In almost all of them, the pupils were either too big, or the whites had disappeared.

And the expression was, and I can’t think of another word to describe it, anesthetized.

The fake me was a prettier physical version, but rather empty looking.

And that’s what scared me so much about “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

The appearance of reality was merely the shadow of what we are when our distinct characters and personalities are gone.

And I don’t know about you, but give me a flawed, mistake-prone, wrinkled, but human, being over an idealized avatar anyday.

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Copyright 2025 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 20 children were murdered two weeks before Christmas in Newtown, Conn., my worldview shifted.

To me, the violent shooting deaths of babies who were contemplating sugar plums and Santa challenged my belief in a good and loving God.

There was no reason, no justification, no earthly or celestial explanation as to why such evil could be allowed to enter a school.

Guns, mental illness, and bad parenting were all thrown around as the cause of the catastrophe, and I even went to our state capitol to speak before our legislature about the importance of preventing people with mental health issues from ever touching the trigger of a gun.

But nothing could make the deaths of the children make any sense, and the lobbying and the anger and all of the social media posts and the letters to Congress and the promises of “never again,” which of course became “look away until the next thing happens,” were just noise.

I think that’s because children died.

Although six brave adults were also murdered that cold December day, it is hard for me to conjure their faces.

They were heroes, and tried to shield the children from the bullets, and they had families that will mourn them for eternity.

But I don’t see them when I hear the phrase “Sandy Hook.” I see the smiles of the babies, and it never fails to make something crumple inside of me, the part of me that believes in the essential goodness of people.

That is not a given anymore.

And the thing that always angered me about Newtown was that people on both sides of the aisle, but especially the gun control activists on one particular side, tried to exploit the tragedy by playing partisan politics over the bodies of 7-year-olds.

You can understand how mourning parents would beg for laws that would stop the next class of kindergartners from being caught in the scope of a mad and evil man.

But the way that some Democrats used the tragedy to attack their Republican opponents, as if the latter were rejoicing in the death of children, was repellent.

The phrase “Second Amendment” became a curse, and anyone who argued for anything less than a total ban on what was incorrectly called “automatic weapons” was told they had the Newtown blood on their hands

Using children to advance a political goal is probably the most disgusting thing human beings can do.

And adults do it all the time, including some conservatives who, for example, point to children born in this country of undocumented parents as “invaders.” But that is for another column, and another audience.

Right now, I’m angry at the left for using the deaths of little girls at Camp Mystic in much the same way as it used the death of the Newtown children: to hurt their political opponents.

I have read, and reread, comments about the tragedy in Texas. The overwhelming majority are from good human beings who have not been stripped of their compassion. That is a comfort. And virtually all, but not all, of the people I respect (or respected) have found within themselves the ability to grieve for children and the adults who loved them.

But as is so often the case, there are those who are like driftwood on the roiling sea of humanity, pushed inexorably toward the furthest shores of inhumanity. They have lost any semblance of decency. They hate President Trump, and those of us who either voted for him or did not vote for his opponent, and those who refuse to bow to their superior status as sole arbiters of a better society, so much that they are using the lifeless bodies of little girls and the emptied souls of their parents as ammunition to wound their enemies.

And for clarity, these same people lied about the damage that would be done by a bill, that while in so many ways objectionable, does not starve children, throw the elderly out of nursing homes, or arm a rising immigration Gestapo.

It is very clear to me that the hatred of a man and his politics has eaten up these people from the inside out, leaving zombie husks that appear to be human but are nothing more than mobile corpses.

That we cannot simply take a moment to pause and mourn together the extinguishing of such bright and promising lights is a terrible commentary about who we are, and who we have not stopped being since Adam Lanza stole the world from bright-eyed babies.

Actually, since well before that.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

I was leaving immigration court the other day, feeling fairly good about the fact two of my clients had avoided deportation orders, when I heard the words “Christine Flowers, you are a disgusting human being.”

At first, I thought it was a friend who was playing a joke, because we often connect in front of that building. But when I looked over, I saw a man with numerous tattoos, a beard, earrings and a Trader Joe’s bag staring directly at me. I’d never seen this rather fey specimen before in my life, and it was definitely not my friend. I approached him and said, “what did you call me?” He repeated “disgusting human being.”

And so I did what everyone does these days, pulled out my cell phone and posted a video of me asking him to tell the universe how he felt about your humble columnist. To his credit, he didn’t run away. He said, clearly and in a somewhat singsongy tone: “You are a disgusting human being Christine, inside and out.”

Ouch. It wasn’t my fault the humidity level was high and I looked like a cross between a Caucasian Chaka Khan and a Pomeranian. At the age of 63, I should be used to people insulting my looks when they dislike my politics, but I am particularly sensitive when it comes to my hair.

The interesting thing is, his attack on my character didn’t phase me at all. Since I’ve begun to express my opinions publicly years ago, I’ve been the target of a lot of anger and hatred from the sort of people who specialize in pearl clutching, even when they are exactly the sort of people who reject the whole concept of pearls, jewels, and affluence.

My words generally annoy the progressives who, like my Trader Joe fanboy, like to think that they represent a more evolved version of human. They love immigrants, especially the ones they pay to clean their studio apartments. They march for women’s rights, as long as those women make sure to consider babies an accessory like the ubiquitous Trader Joe bags. They believe in respecting minorities, except when those minorities end up having a mind of their own and don’t buy into the collective “we are victims” narrative. Then, they become obligingly preachy and Privilege-splain to the other folks just how victimized they are.

That is how I generally feel about progressives, and I am not upset when they reciprocate the “love.” As someone said to me, if you put yourself out there, expect not to be palatable to everyone.

The thing that bothers me, though, is the ones who so often embrace the concept of tolerance are incapable of tolerating those who don’t agree with them. While I have had some problems with conservatives over the years, particularly now that they seem to have just morphed into People’s Temple cult members who believe the mothership in the White House is the center of all goodness and reason, my biggest issue is with the leftists. I don’t say liberals, because some of my best friends are, you know, liberal, and they are capable of reasoning. One of my closest friends is a lifelong Democrat who has taught me more about integrity than many of my fellow travelers on the right.

But no conservative has accosted me on the street to tell me what a disgusting human I am. I’ve been called “squishy” and a RINO and Michael Smerconish in a skirt, but there has been more a sense of sadness and disappointment than anger.

It’s always the progressives, the entitled leftists who think they have a right to attack strangers. It is the spirit that allows them to march in the streets with masks on their faces, screaming about a genocide they can’t even spell correctly. It is the same thing that motivates them to hold signs saying “Abort that Jawn” in front of a pro life protest.

It’s what allows them to yell at me in a Wine and Spirits store that I am a homophobe, even when I’d just won an asylum case for a gay man from Guatemala. Obviously, I don’t hate gays. However, as I mentioned to my heckler pointing at his hands, I do hate people who buy pre-packaged Pina Colada Mix.

So while I am not exactly thrilled to have been yelled at, I chalk it up to the fact some people were raised by wolves and feel uncomfortable when they encounter another breed of animal outside of the pack. Someone like me, equally hairy in the humidity, but less feral and more articulate in her beliefs, more consistent in her values, and more inclined to avoid Trader Joe’s.

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Copyright 2025 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’m in Italy, I tend to focus on all things Italian.

I consume ridiculous quantities of pasta. I only drink Italian wines, although I did slip in a Bailey’s on the flight to Milan.

I listen to Italian music on my Spotify list, speak Italian, and watch Italian television, not that I have a choice. I do these things because I want to immerse myself fully in the ancestral way of life.

While watching Italian programming, I came across a particularly gruesome case of domestic abuse, involving a man and his pregnant girlfriend.

I am proudly and strongly pro-life. The only time I see abortion as a viable option is to save the life of the mother. But as I was watching the story of Giulia Tramontano, a woman whose boyfriend first poisoned her to kill the baby, then stabbed her to death when that didn’t work, I realized that abortion as a whole always diminishes the life of the mother while killing the baby.

That’s because it allows a woman to be seen essentially as an empty receptacle for an unwanted bunch of sinew and organs, instead of the most sacred carriers of the most precious miracle.

That’s exactly what happened in this case. The biological father Alessandro Impagniatello, had begun a new relationship and never told anyone about it.

He didn’t want the baby, which Giulia made clear was going to be born. She wanted the baby. And the fact that he did not was his problem, until he decided to make it hers by stabbing her to death, then burning her body to destroy the evidence.

Impagniatello was sentenced, again, to life imprisonment. He’d filed an appeal when he was originally convicted two years ago. This time, the court inexplicably found that the killer lacked premeditation, but nonetheless found him guilty of murder and interruption of a pregnancy. He will not see the light of day.

They didn’t say his sentence was so harsh because he’d killed two people, but that was essentially the reasoning. Impagniatello had taken two precious lives out of this world, and is now paying with the effective cessation of his own.

The Italians do not have the death penalty, so you have to have committed the most heinous of crimes to get what they call “l’ergastolo,” or a life sentence. Clearly, the judges found that trying to poison a woman to cause her to abort her deeply loved and wanted child qualified as just such an evil act.

The judges were deliberating as my pro-life friends in America were celebrating the third anniversary of the Dobbs decision, which demolished the lie that killing an unborn child is a Constitutional right.

And they were still deliberating when I spoke up at this Italian legal conference I’m attending to suggest that Roe v. Wade was a barbaric decision. Interestingly, no one heckled or mocked me, as happened at a conference I once gave for the Women’s Section of the Philadelphia Bar Association.

Those ladies were not amused by my pro-life advocacy. The Italian women I’ve met seem to have a more nuanced, empathetic and humane view of unborn life. They also dress a lot better.

And right after they handed down the life sentence, our U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision which will make it much easier to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that has only one goal: convince women they are slaves if they cannot exercise the right to kill their babies.

I feel blessed to be in Italy, for an incalculable number of reasons.

But I believe one of the most important issues is human dignity.

Sentencing a man to life for killing his pregnant girlfriend isn’t enough, especially when you don’t find premeditation.

Defunding Planned Parenthood isn’t enough. Sending abortion back to the states isn’t enough, especially in a state like ours with a governor who is giddy over his love and support for abortion.

Watching as a court in my ancestral home says “we speak for two victims,” though, is powerful stuff.

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Copyright 2025 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].