I know where I stand. The children, whose names we rarely hear, Cora, Dawson and Callan. Five, three and eight months. Gone, both from this earth and the conscience of good people. Mostly, good women.

Because it is an army of women backing up this mother, who desecrates that title. An army, reminiscent of the phalanx of “wights,” the Army of the Dead in Game of Thrones that marched in terrible synchrony against the light. I see these women as those who know what matters, what is fair and just and decent, what is virtuous and compassionate but who, out of toxic empathy and a “There but for the grace of God go I” delusion, have chosen darkness.

I will lose friends because of this, and I embrace that loss. I could never be gentle and forgiving of those who see three dead babies and have the capacity to say “but how their mommy suffered!”

The law calls for compliance with rules, and Massachusetts has strict rules about insanity. Instead of forcing Clancey to prove she was mad, the Commonwealth must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was sane. How do you prove that a woman who strangled her babies, crushed their throats, closed their mouths and squeezed the life she gave them out of their tiny bodies, Indian giver of the highest level, is sane? You cannot. By definition she is a madwoman.

But that does not mean she did not know what she was doing. She planned each step towards family annihilation with care and attention. She was organized and deliberate. Unlike Andrea Yates who saw her babies morph into demons and drowned the evil in a wild frenzy, a display of true insanity, Lindsay Clancey planned the perfect massacre.

But women defend her. They say she sought help. They say the medical profession failed her. They even, these women, say her husband did it.

No proof of that. No proof she was denied help. Yes, perhaps it wasn’t enough. But Nannies and therapists and doctors were there for her. She was not a mother in Afghanistan shielding her child against the Taliban. She was affluent.

SHE HAD HELP. 

SHE HAD CHOICES.

And the choice she made sent Cora, Dawson and Callan into a premature eternity.

If for nothing else, let us pray the jury ignores the chaos and cacophony of misplaced sympathy and locks her away, where she can no longer murder innocents and rally nihilistic supporters to her side. Push her into a corner, make her disappear and give to us the mercy she denied her babies, Cora, Dawson and Callan.

Erase Lindsay Clancey.

When I heard about the disappearance of James “Jimmy” Gracey, I felt a very real gut punch.

I do not have children, but I have a nephew that I love very much. He is close to Jimmy’s age, and like the Chicago native, he goes to a Catholic Prep school. He is kind, a good friend, compassionate, and has a smile that could truly feed an entire city power grid.

I think that all of us who have that type of young man in our lives feel a connection to Jimmy just now. And now that we have the definitive proof that he is gone, the pain is immeasurable, even for those of us who only know him from his beautiful smile, forever frozen at 20.

This one hurts. That’s not to say that all of the other ones don’t matter, of course they do. From the anonymous man who was important to his inner circle of three friends, to Savannah Guthries’ mother Nancy, the loss of anyone cuts deeply. But when you can identify so closely with a person who is in distress, it takes it out of the People Magazine tragedy of the day, and makes you text that loved one, just in case.

I spent most of my life surrounded by young men like Jimmy Gracey. I had three brothers growing up, who had exactly the same sweet smile, showing the sort of orthodenture you get when you have caring parents. They went away on Spring trips, at a time when you didn’t have to worry that you’d end up starring in a Dateline episode. They went to prep schools, like Jimmy Gracey, and they went to colleges with high hopes, and they had siblings who adored them and parents who envisioned graduations, and weddings, and grandchildren.

I have a nephew, in whom I invest my hopes and for whom I have the same dreams.

I taught at an all boys school, the sort of place where the students called each other by their last names, and wrapped their arms unselfconsciously around necks and across backs, and gave each other bloody noses with only the best of intentions. This was the opposite end of toxic masculinity, it was brotherly bonding, and love.

I am a sister and an aunt, and I was a teacher, and all of these things make me pause and reflect on this quiet afternoon about my great fortune in knowing the people I have known, and in not having to mourn them, or worry that some tragedy has entered their world.

And that brings me to a more important point, one that transcends even empathy for the grieving. When I was teaching, first at a prestigious boys’ school and then at an exclusive girls’ school, both on the Main Line, I noticed that the students were exceptionally intelligent, and equally naïve. They were not street smart and savvy, like the ones that I met when I taught at the Quaker School in center city Philadelphia. They were protected by their parents, and lived, many of them, charmed lives.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some fabulous South Philly and West Philly commuters, kids who took three forms of public transportation to make it in by the 8:05 bell. But they were the exception, not the rule.

One day, I had the brilliant idea of taking the students at the prestigious boys’ school to visit the Academy of Natural Sciences on the Parkway, right in the middle of the city. I also thought that since I don’t drive, I’d take them on the train, to give them that added urban experience.

You would have thought I’d suggested taking the boys via Black Hawk to Fallujah. The parents revolted, outraged that I would even think of taking their little kids-juniors and seniors, mind you-into the big bad city. And sothe trip was scrapped because that crazy French Teacher was not fit to chaperone their boys.

This taught me an important lesson: childrenwho grow up with a strong sense of security, bred of a loving family and a tight community of friends, carry that sense of security wherever they might travel outside of their circle. That is when security becomes the opposite, a danger. I remember traveling to Paris when I was 17 and thinking that the world was my oyster, or escargot, and almost getting myself kidnapped by a handsome Alain Delon lookalike near the Tuileries Gardens. Similarly, I remember the girls I chaperoned on a trip to Paris twenty years later, ending up crying at a police station when their passports were stolen by some “really cute guys.” Suffice it to say, La Vie en Rose almost became La Vie Behind Bars.

My point is that Americans are very trusting, and despite the impression we give of being sophisticated and savvy, we are very often far too trusting for our own good. And that can lead to tragedy.

Despite the hasty conclusion by the Spanish authorities that this was an “accident,” I am suspicious. An “accident” doesn’t result in someone’s cell phone being found among the possessions of a criminal, as happened here. I hope our State Department gets involved, anddoesn’t allow Spain to simply close this matter without even a cursory investigation, and establish a cover up to avoid embarrassment.

But above all, I will be keeping the Gracey family in my prayers, conscious at only the most superficial level of the agony they are suffering just now.

And I will reach out to the young men in my life today, and tell them what they mean to me.

I know that you will, too.

As a female in the legal profession, I have often encountered women my own age-64-and even younger, who have this sense of having “accomplished things against all odds.” There is that sort of woman who believes that our gender, even in this day and age, has shackled us, slowed us down, and made any of our eventual accomplishments that much more meaningful.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes would say, I dissent. Respectfully, of course.

For the women of my generation, which is very late Boomer through Gen X, there may have still been a few speed bumps along the highway of professional success. I encountered a bit of passive aggressive sexism, and as the daughter of a legendary Philadelphia lawyer who straddled the legal landscape of the 1970s like a Colossus, I learned how to navigate the setbacks with a smile and, when necessary, a kick in the shins.

I was not a victim, nor were most of the women I meet who might think that they were. And please spare me the “I had to balance my life as a mother with my desire to achieve excellence” mantra. One of my classmates in high school was just appointed to the bench in Montgomery County and she has four beautiful daughters. So kudos to the Honorable Mary Pugh, nee Mary Theresa Coyne, Merion Mercy Class of 1979.

My actual purpose in writing this is to highlight the career and accomplishments of a woman who, like those of her generation, really did have to battle the evils of sexism, and in some cases, racism and bigotry. These were the trailblazers of the bar, women on the national stage with names like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sandra Day O’Connor, and locally like a woman who passed this week, and who will forever be considered a legend in Pennsylvania; The Honorable Justice Sandra Schultz Newman, first woman to be elected to the highest court in the Commonwealth.

Justice Newman, or “Sandy” as her friends called her, was one of those people who would have succeeded in whatever field she chose, and she chose the law. Blessed with a Dresden doll beauty, delicate features and pale skin, she could have been a model or a movie star had she wanted to be. A character that flamboyant would have fit right in with that sort of zeitgeist.

But she had a mind, and that mind was not destined for movie scripts or being told to “strike a pose.” She graduated from my alma mater, Villanova Law School, and had the great fortune to study under Professor Howard Lurie, a man who was also my professor a decade later, and who to this day represents for me all that is great and glorious about the rule of law.

She was the first female Assistant District Attorney in Montgomery County, and her career trajectory soared from that point. In 1993, she was elected to the Commonwealth Court, an intermediate appellate court and then in 1995 was the first female in the history of the Pennsylvania judiciary elected to the Supreme Court. Imagine that, it took two centuries, or thereabouts, before they let us on the high court. Justice Newman was a pragmatic, but perceptive justice. She was extremely fair, and even though she was a registered Republican, you would really not know it. Here decisions didn’t come with a partisan time stamp, or fingerprint. She was exactly what a judge should be: neutral.

And this extended to her personal relationships. One of her closest friends was Donna Gentile O’Donnell, a lifelong Democrat of the old Kennedy mold, as fair and as feisty as the justice. They occupied different political hemispheres, but were deeply devoted to each other, up to the final moments. And to my own particular dismay, because I disagreed profoundly with his position on abortion, Justice Newman was a strong supporter of Justice Kevin Dougherty during his retention race this past November. While I was furiously opposing his retention on social media, she was doing everything possible to help him keep his seat, and believe me, her influence dwarfed my keyboard efforts. He was, as we all know, retained.

But I think that this is the hallmark of the woman who left us this week: a person who followed her own personal North Star.

She rarely complained about how hard it had been, because in some ways it hadn’t been. She had that immense spirit and was such a force of nature that I think she simply broke down the barriers by sheer will. It didn’t hurt to have her husband, the legendary Dr. Julius Newman at her side for most of the journey.

I wrote on Facebook that when he passed, she honored his legacy, cherished as it was like a Faberge Egg, precious in memory.

She had also suffered the loss of a son a short while before she herself fell ill, and found comfort in her other son Jonathan, who was the iconic Chairman of the Liquor Control Board and ushered in the “Chairman’s Selection” section.

I was not a close friend of Justice Newman, although we communicated on Facebook and despite her offers to call her “Sandy,” was forever for me, “Madame Justice.”

I write this because her life deserves to be remember far beyond the legal community, which will of course remember her.

I write this because Justice Newman was a person who lived her life fully, and well, and she was an example of how to confront obstacles with joy and a fierce but effective femininity. That word has become unpopular in these post-feminist days, but this was a legal lioness who was not afraid to show her inimitable style.

My friend Dan Cirucci, who knew her well, summed it up the best, I think:

“I was so proud to know her. I loved her. I loved that was so genuine and unaffected by title or status. She delighted in all the people she knew and was so generous and kind. There was a wonderful joy de vivre about her. I’m glad I got to see her one last time and spend some time with her when the Supreme Court’s courtroom in Philadelphia was named in her honor. It was such a wonderful day. She was old school and part of a generation that is passing on and I will miss her just as I miss all of these wonderful trailblazing woman who paved away for so many others– – others who often don’t even realize it, and sadly might not be so grateful even if they did realize it.”

She carried the weight for many women, and did it with grace.

As she now lays it down, let her memory be for a blessing.

(One of our last photos together)

The most memorable Thanksgiving I ever experienced wasn’t spent around a table with family, stuffing my face with Turkey-which I don’t particularly like-and fixins. I didn’t digest that amazing comfort food sitting in front of a television set, watching some exciting, iconic football game. There weren’t any visits to the neighbors to deliver one of my mother’s famous Apple Jack pumpkin pies, based on a recipe Lucy had found in an old issue of the Bulletin, and preserved like a family heirloom.

The most memorable Thanksgiving I ever experienced was spent alone, thousands of miles away from Philly accents and the Wanamaker Light Show, in a beautiful place that wasn’t home, at a time when all I wanted was to be close to my father eating that disgusting cranberry sauce he loved, and I hated. This was the last Thanksgiving he would spend on Earth, and I wasn’t with him.

It was 1981, and I was a few months into my Junior Year in Paris. When I signed up for the program, it seemed like a dream come true. I was a French Major at Bryn Mawr, and so it made sense that I would spend the two semesters abroad, or so I told myself. I could probably have gotten as good an education in my field by simply hanging out with Madame Catherine Lafarge, the legendary French scholar at my alma mater. But my father was the one who convinced me that this was the chance of a lifetime, and that since he was willing to foot the bill, I had no choice but to go.

And then, four months before I was supposed to get on that plane from JFK, my father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. They gave him less than a year to live. I planted my size 6 feet on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor and said “I’m not going.” Ted Flowers had stared down the Klan in Mississippi in 1967, but he was no match for his eldest child. I stared lasers through him and announced that I was not abandoning him. Violetta in La Traviata and Mimi in La Boheme could not have managed to summon more pathos and melodrama than Christine from Havertown.

And yet, I did get on that plane. My father told me that he refused to let me miss this amazing opportunity just to stay home and watch him get chemo and radiation. Besides, he said, he had four other kids. He could spare one for a few months, and he’d be here when I got back.

So I went to Paris. It was the longest plane ride of my life, both figuratively and literally. There were layovers in Brussels, and then a long bus ride across the border into France. But during the entire trip, I sobbed. I had a suspicion that I would never see my robust, red headed freckled hero again. And in a way, I was right.

The first few months kept me occupied with making friends and trying to figure out why the French I spoke in America was a far cry from the language used by these arrogant, unfriendly Parisians. It was as if I was talking in Aramaic, from the way they refused to understand what I was saying. Each one of them replied in perfect English even when I made attempts to converse en francais.

But I had already made my mind up that I was going to go home at the end of the semester, so I wouldn’t have to deal with these people for much longer. But before that happened, I had to get through Thanksgiving. The French celebrate Christmas, and they have a version of the New Year (Le Reveillon) and they even have a bizarre twist on Halloween. But Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, and for the Parisians, it was just another day among the rest.

I couldn’t find a turkey if my life depended on it. There were no pumpkins. The only Indians that I noticed were from Calcutta, other foreign students. So I bought myself an apple and dressed it up in paper feathers. I found an apple tarte and pretended it was my mother’s heirloom, booze soaked delight. I ate a sandwich au jambon. And I cried, because I didn’t even have enough money to call home.

But the next day, I got a letter, one that had taken its good time in getting to me. Ironically, it had been sent a couple of months before, from my father, on one of those feather light aerogrammes. Somehow, it had gotten lost in transit. And it held a message for this firstborn Flower child. In it, Teddy said that he was proud of me for agreeing to an adventure when the farthest I had been from home before had been Seaside Heights, NJ. He promised me that he would be there when I got back, speaking perfect French-he wasn’t aware that I had just told my host family that I knew a lot of prostitutes, instead of Protestants-and that he loved me with the entirety of his heart. I lost it, of course.

And I did get to see him one more time, a month before he died. He had held on for me, although he didn’t recognize me when I walked through the door, overcome with painkillers and trapped in a body that no longer worked. But he was there, and I was able to hold him.

You might wonder why this Thanksgiving stands out in memory. I used to wonder that myself. But as I approach my 64^thbirthday, I have come to the realization that absence makes the value of those we cherish even more powerful. In that absence, we feel the heavy weight of their importance, and that is when the truest gratitude swells in our hearts.

I hope that you all have that weight, in your own.

(One of our first…)

I also never liked Marjorie Taylor Greene. She was too far to the right, or so I thought. Too weird. Too much of a narcissist, who did things the way that she did them to attract attention, without respecting tradition, or sartorial expectations.

Admiring them both as profiles in courage, limited as that courage is, was not on my Bingo card for 2025. And yet, here we are.

Fetterman has shown himself to be a maverick, beholden to neither Biden or Trump, and willing to poke a finger in the eye of progressives who for some bizarre reason think that they own him. I had a conversation with one fellow who told me that the people who voted for him as Senator expected him to be as far left as they were, and are both shocked and disgusted that he has sliced a middle course through the political landscape, guided primarily by his own values.

The fact that in some cases, those values do not align with the uber leftist ideals of the “defund the police,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Believe Women” and “Hamas Isn’t Evil” crowds has tempered his former fans’ Trump Derangement Syndrome with a touch of Scorned Voter Syndrome.

It’s fun, actually, to watch them have a meltdown all over social media, because these are exactly the sort of people who made my life miserable for the past few years with their threats to get me fired, with their defamatory stickers (see below,) and with their attacks on city streets. To see that sort of person panic is akin to the feeling I get when I spray a roach with Lysol and watch it meet its maker, in insect heaven.

But then we have Marjorie Taylor Greene, another extremist from the other end of the political spectrum whose comments about Space Lasers and her devotion to Donald Trump, not to mention her Trailer Trash Barbie vibe, made me hold my nose whenever I saw her venting on TV about the Democrats. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that this woman would show the kind of courage that is lacking among more traditional conservatives like the Speaker of the House, a host of Justice Department appointees, the head of the Heritage Foundation and, on occasion, a few Supreme Court Justices.

It started when she told the Wizard (who appointed Dr.) Oz that Americans were not suffering, and that consumer prices were down. Her very pithy comment that he’s gaslighting the nation, because “people know what they’re paying at the grocery store, they know what they’re paying for their kids’ clothes and school supplies, they know what they’re paying for their electricity bills”was pitch perfect. Yes, we do know, and no, prices are not down. They are up. They may not be way up. But food is more expensive, clothing is more expensive and tariffs definitely have something to do with it. So you go girl, tell the Wizard that you can see behind that Oval Office screen.

And then, more tellingly, the congresswoman has been in the forefront of demanding the release of the Epstein files, as Trump promised during this campaign. She has joined other GOP leaders, mostly and not coincidentally women, in seeking access to all the records.

MTG is not doing this because she hates Trump. They had a long and fruitful romance. This is one of the people who put the knife through the heart of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, so she is no liberal. She loved Trump, she decried his two impeachments, she has stood by his side in so many battles. But apparently, she wasn’t willing to sell her soul for 30 pieces of bitcoin.

And for that, she is getting death threats from MAGA, just like Fetterman is getting them from leftists. Both of them have run afoul of the cultists, in a time when cults are gaining power and being an independent voice, even on just one or two issues, will get you excommunicated.

So I have to give this very Odd Couple credit. They might look strange, and indeed they do. But perhaps they are the new face of political courage. And at a time when people are afraid to break from the pack, that is a beautiful thing.

“He did WHAT to the East Wing?”

If someone called me up at work and said “I knocked down half of your house, and will be installing a pool in your backyard as well as a gazebo at no charge to you,” I would be apoplectic. It’s not that I don’t like pools and gazebos. It’s that if I wanted one of either, I’d build it myself. The idea that a stranger would simply decide to “improve” my property without asking for permission is a violation of my privacy, not to mention trespass.

You probably see where I’m going with this. When President Trump announced this summer that he was going to build a ballroom, very few people took notice. That’s probably because he was doing so many other things, like meeting with Putin and sending immigrants to pleasant places like El Salvador and the Sudan, that a bit of interior/exterior decorating fell under the radar. Besides that, he promised that it wouldn’t encroach on the existing structure because, as he then stated, he loves the White House.

And then he started demolishing a huge chunk of it. I know that people will have different opinions about what happened when they started excavating Jacqueline Kennedy’s Rose Garden and dismantling Eisenhower’s portico. When I posted about it unfavorably on Facebook, there were literally hundreds of comments defending the actions. The spin was so vertiginous, I had to take Dramamine before responding.

First they said that he wasn’t “demolishing” the East Wing, just a small section of it. Then, when aerial footage showed that in fact, the East Wing was now a parking lot, defenders of the president pivoted in the most admirable way to teach us history lessons about Harry Truman and Barack Obama.

In the case of Truman, they mentioned the fact that he completely renovated the building right after World War II, which makes sense because it hadn’t been renovated in decades. We couldn’t do it sooner because we’d just spent a lot of money saving the free world. Upholstering chairs in the Oval Office were farther down on the list of essentials. They neglected to mention that he had asked Congress for permission, and funding.

As far as Obama was concerned, he repainted the lines on the tennis court so he and some friends could play basketball, and I think he may have also installed a bowling alley. None of these things involved men in construction helmets demolishing an entire wing of the building.

The thing that angered me most about the MAGA response to the renovation was not the fact that they were making excuses. It was that they were trying to gaslight us into believing that only Democrats and liberals were angered by the presumptuous acts of Donald Trump.

I am a Reagan conservative. I fought against same sex marriage. I pray the rosary in front of abortion clinics and have given the keynote speech at several pro life events. I have never voted for a Democrat for president, and I believe that the way we deal with Hamas is to hunt down every one and murder them in their beds. I heckle the protestors at the Pro Palestine marches.

And did I mention that I was 100% pro life? Oh yeah, I did.

My point is that it is not only liberals who are angry at what Trump has done. It is not only Democrats trying to use this as a political card against the president they cannot stand. There are a lot of us who are offended that this chief executive assumes that the White House is “his” house, just as he assumes that the DOJ is “his” DOJ and that he can sick ICE on whomsoever he pleases, regardless of due process.

On the other hand, I don’t hate the man. As I posted on social media, I don’t need to love Trump to agree with some of his acts, and I don’t need to hate him to criticize him. It’s like an a la carte buffet: I deal with him on a case-by-disgrace basis.

So trying to diminish and discount the anger that many Americans felt when they saw their house, our house, redesigned without our permission and without even an attempt to ask for Congressional oversight is annoying.

The usual suspects will always define every critique of the president as whining from the far Left. I know that it’s uncomfortable when someone from the right pushes back, but that’s tough.

I also find the argument that we “need” a ballroom to be a bit ridiculous. When Nancy Reagan was in the White House, she was widely viewed as an ostentatious Marie Antoinette, even though I loved her style. I’m trying to figure out how she managed to function in that hovel on the Potomac for eight years.

What’s done is done. What’s lost is lost. And we will all get over it, since there are more important things to discuss. But let’s not pretend that Trump did what Harry and Barry did. They asked if we wanted the pool. He just went in and started digging.

I say “semi,” because I didn’t really watch a lot of Fox in those days. It’s not that I was against the network, although Sean Hannity annoyed me from day one. I wasn’t that politically plugged in twenty years ago, and preferred to immerse myself in whatever “Law and Order” episode or franchise was playing in prime time. But I was aware that there was a smart blonde lawyer making her way up the media career ladder, and I admired her from afar.

Then, she moved over to NBC after tiring of her title as the Conservative Contessa, and dipped her lovely toes in the main, um, stream. As we all know, that didn’t go too well, after the liberal haters wrongly accused her of being a bigot. She correctly stated that Santa Claus, a Scandinavian who lived in an Igloo, was not Black. That got her more than one lump of coal, and she was effectively canceled. That made me an even bigger fan, because of the way she flipped the bird to the woke folk.

And then during the dark days of COVID, Megyn was a beacon of light, sanity and entertainment when she started a podcast that I listened to religiously. I brushed my teeth to Megyn, did two hundred daily sit-ups to Megyn, blow-dried my hair to Megyn, did my 10,000 steps to Megyn, and fell asleep to her dulcet voice warning us about trans ideology. She was a bit weak on abortion, choosing not to come out as pro life because she sensed that her more moderate listeners would lump her with we, the crazy anti-abortion zealots, but she was on the right side of history on most things.

Then came the day when some people on the right started doing what some people on the left had always done, and began to open their minds to crazy conspiracies. The first time I realized that something was terribly wrong was when I saw people nodding their heads to Candace Owens, who simply cannot hide her anti-Semitism. Candace is in some ways a Black Megyn, who rode the conservative tide to relevance. Her whole “Blexit” con was about how Black people needed to turn their backs on liberalism. The problem is that Candace was once a very liberal, very BLM sort of chick, and she only became “conservative” when she saw how much money and celebrity she could gain by courting the disaffected people on our side of the divide.

The difference between Candace and Megyn, however, is that Megyn is both book smart and street savvy. Candace, for all of her pretensions at being learned, is all about the grift. I never believed that Megyn said things simply to get ahead. I believed, and at some level still believe, that she does in fact have a moral core and an inner North Star.

And she has done many good things, including platforming my friend Joseph Massey, a brilliant poet who was almost destroyed by the MeToo movement but who rose from the ashes like a literary Phoenix. Ironically, Megyn got some left wing cred by turning on Roger Ailes in her own MeToo moment.

But this past week, she has decided to dig in her heels and refuse to distance herself from her good friend Tucker Carlson and by extension, her sort of friend Candace Owens. The latter was dumped from the most conservative of conservative platforms, the Daily Wire, for her own refusal to distance herself from the mentally ill but morally confused Kanye West.

As far as Tucker, the guy filmed himself in Russia praising Putin, and he also has a problem with “hummus eaters” which I take to mean “The Jews Who Killed Jesus,” so I’m surprised he still has any friends left.

When criticized about her refusal to criticize them, Megyn tweeted this. You can almost see her stomping her cute little toddler feet, in lacy anklet socks:

“Look at this. No, I have no obligation to “separate” myself from anyone. I run my own media company and my own show. That show is where I express my own opinions and I will decide what/what not to opine on. If you need me to condemn Candace or Tucker for their opinions in order to listen to me, then I may not be for you. He’s a close friend and she is under enough pressure w/o gratuitous shots from me. My fight is with the left, not these two.”

And I yelled back at my IPhone, “no Megyn, we are better than that. Your fight, our fight, is with bigots and human rights violators and really bad people, no matter what side they are on.”

And the people on the subway, who never followed Megyn in the first place, looked at me as if I was crazy.

I know that there will still be conservatives who will follow Ms. Kelly. She has a huge fan base, and doesn’t need me. She has absolutely no idea who I am, even though I am likely six degrees of separation removed from her husband Doug who grew up on the Main Line

.

But I am done with pretending that she has anything of value to say, when she is incapable of using her powerful platform to fumigate the moral decay on the right, and only worries about zapping flies on the left.

I’ll miss the Megyn who fought for the rights of the Duke boys. I’ll pass on this updated version.

(Me. 5th grade. First row far right. Ironic 😏)

I first walked the halls of Merion Mercy Academy in 1970, when my family moved from Logan to Havertown, and my parents were looking for a Catholic girls school where I would get the kind of education generations of Catholic girls were privileged to receive. They focused on Merion, because one of my father’s best friends, Jack McDougall, had sent his two girls there and they were full of praise for the place. And that is how I ended up spending the next nine years of my life on the beautiful, bucolic campus in Lower Merion.

I have nothing but wonderful memories of my time at my alma mater. In fact, Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with some classmates who I now realize I was blessed to have around me in the 1970s, but didn’t understand just how blessed as I was moving through the grades. Beth, Regina, Judy, Andrea, Donna, Ellen, Dolores, Linda, Gerri, Barrie, Kathleen, Nell, Heidi, MK, and so many others who I’m omitting but who are a part of the fabric of my youth.

That’s why something I learned this weekend has upset me to the point that I actually reached out to the head of school, a dean of students and another administrator to find out if what is rumored to have happened actually did. No one has answered my emails, and since the woman who told me the story is incredibly trustworthy, I have to believe that this troubling event occurred.

This week, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, students in the conservative students club at Merion put up a photo of Kirk as an “in memoriam.” That makes absolute sense to me. He was born and baptized Catholic, married a Catholic, was rumored to be coming back to the Catholic church and was indisputably conservative. While I don’t ever remember any sort of political clubs at Merion when I was there during the Jurassic period, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that one is allowed to flourish.

Although apparently, it is a rather anemic sort of “flourishing.” When someone at the school saw the photo of the young husband and father who had been murdered in cold blood, she became offended. We don’t exactly know who “she” was, but I’m told that the poster board with his photo was in the Dean’s Office. And it appears that this poster was the only one that was targeted for censorship.

I’m also told that some of the employees at the school have posted several troubling social media memes, including one that read “Or does a death by gun violence only matter when you can co opt it to prove right wing fascists are the victims.” That person is in a position of authority over Merion students. That’s incredibly troubling.

In addition to the photo, there was this quote of Kirk’s “If you believe in something, you need to have the courage to fight for those ideas. Not run away from them, or silence them.”

One of the girls involved in creating the tribute was pulled out of a Spanish test that she was taking, and forced to remove it. As a former Spanish teacher, that really annoys me. How dare they allow some distorted sense of propriety interfere with a student’s academics?

Another student was pulled from lunch for the same reason and started crying hysterically. The administration did nothing. So compassionate and “merciful.”

No reason has been given for the removal of the picture, at least not from the people I emailed. And while I cannot confirm this, one of the parents who called to complain was hung up on. Again, I am repeating what was told to me in confidence by a reliable source who has, so to speak, saddle shoes on the ground. Had any of the three people that I emailed shown some interest in providing clarification, I would have welcomed that. But they didn’t, and I waited hours, and since nothing is forthcoming I am going with my friend’s account. By the way, this account has been confirmed by several students with knowledge of the incident.

There are a lot of things that Merion has done that I don’t agree with. They have posted rainbow flags, and discussed BLM, and done all of the equity and DEI things that would have been unheard of during my years there, things that they have somehow shoved under the banner of "Catholic Charity."

Whatever, it’s a new era and I am just a lumbering brachiosaurus in a plaid skirt and blazer. But at the very least, if in fact the school does believe in that “Catholic Charity,” they should never interfered in students expressing compassion and respect for ayoung leader who shared their ideals.

On another note, I certainly hope that the kids at the school aren’t interested in becoming lawyers, because they got a nice lesson in how not to support free speech in an academic environment. True, this is not a governmental entity and there are limitations on what a student can say in the school environment. But it is hard to figure out why a respectful expression of grief for a fallen conservative icon would turn adults into thought Gestapo.

One good thing to come out of this is that when news got out about the heavy-handed tactics of Merion’s administration, more kids signed up for the conservative club. Catholic School “Carma.”.

I still love Merion. I sometimes sing the school anthem in the shower, getting emotional with the “Three Cheers for the Blue and the Gold!” as I wave my sponge. But this is an extremely troubling commentary about how very, very different a school it is from the one I fell in love with in 1970.

(Me. 50 years later.)

My grandmother had one son, only one, and he was her prince. Louie was a great guy, and in the 49^th Street neighborhood where bad boys weren’t really all that bad, and good boys were simply aspiring bad boys, Louie Fusco was pretty typical. Handsome, a bit rough around the edges, not particularly ambitious, and an eye for the pretty girls. He ended up with a very pretty one, my Aunt Connie a woman who was not Italian and therefore did not quite understand the connection between her husband and his mother. But before settling down, he did a tour with the Marines and was stationed in Beirut, and for the rest of his life sported the most magnificent rope-and-anchor tattoo on his forearm. That made him pretty legendary for me, his favorite niece.

The thing about Louie was that he loved his mother very much, and that devotion was reciprocated so that when she died, she took a piece of his heart with her. But it’s better that she went first, because losing him would have taken all of hers.

(Handsome Uncle Louie at his sister Lucy’s wedding)

My mother, Lucy, had three sons, and they were also her pride and joy. My sister and I knew that she adored us, except when she was annoyed with me over my room or my hair or my….hair. But her boys were special. Teddy, Jon and Michael. It’s hard to explain the bond she shared with each of them separately, but suffice it to say that when she told me I had to make their beds even though they were entirely capable of doing it themselves, this was in no way a punishment for me. It was her tribute to them, her precious little princes. Italian mothers are that way. At least Italian mothers of a certain vintage. It is possible that the younger women who have vowels at the ends of their names will be raising their sons to embrace feminist principles, but not the ladies who graduated from West Catholic in 1956, or before. That was love, mixed with an almost possessory intent. This is what I meant when I said that my non-Italian Aunt Connie never quite got the zeitgeist.

When my brother Jon died before my mother, her entire heart was lost with him. That’s not to say that she didn’t live for the survivors, and that she wasn’t here for us. She was, because like all Italian mothers, she had the strength and endurance of the Spartans. But for Lucy, losing one child was like losing them all, and her grief lasted until she herself was reunited with him and my father, in heaven.

I was thinking of my grandmother and my mother, and all of the other “madri italiane” this weekend, when Carlo Acutis was canonized. Acutis, now a saint, died at the age of 15 almost twenty years ago from a fast moving Leukemia. During his short lifetime, he became a passionate evangelizer for the Catholic faith, and embraced a love for God and a devotion for Mary that are uncommon among the young, although not quite as uncommon as you might think. It seems that even though he was a saintly child on earth, he was also very much a normal child, someone who loved video games and hiking and being with his parents.

His mother was at his canonization, which has happened only one other time in the history of the church. I saw a closeup of her at St. Peter’s, watching as her baby boy was inducted into the pantheon of saints. She was, of course, incredibly moved. But there was something that I noted that reminded me that she was, in fact, like all of the other Italian mothers that I have known in my lifetime. At one point, she tilted her head, and nodded in a knowing way. It was almost a cross between a smirk and a beatific smile. I have seen that look millions of times in my own life, and it usually means “well of course, you thought my child wasn’t perfect? Of course he is.” It was a non-verbal “I told you so.” And it was probably the most moving part of the ceremony, for me.

(Lucy and her princes)

Here is a mama whose child is now part of the angelic chorus, this fruit of her own womb, and the pain that she suffered in losing him at such a tender age is still embedded in her mother’s heart. But for a moment on a brilliant September morning, in the presence of the world, she was able to brag about her special boy.

And all the Italian mothers understood.

(St. Carlo’s Mama)

The death of a young person is the cruelest of things. The elderly have had their moments of summer sun and winter twilight, and the middle aged have benefited from the glorious halcyon days of youth. But those who have just come into this world, who have not yet accumulated enough sand in that human hourglass to represent a fair share of joy and sorrow, deserve time. They were never actually promised it, because none of us are guaranteed a long stretch on this earth. But the odds were that they would enjoy friendship, and love, and marriage, and births, and a quiet retirement, as long as the cruel vagaries of fate didn’t push in to interrupt the pattern.

I come from a line of prematurely deceased men, from my father who died as a middle aged man of 43, to my grandfather who died on the edge of 60, to my younger brother who never saw his 31^st birthday. At 63, these are all, to me, achingly short lives. But when you talk about a 7 years old little girl or an 18 year old boy, even these stretches of living seem enough. My father had five children, and is remembered as a legendary lawyer. My grandfather had the complete and absolute adoration of his first grandchild, me, and many years with his beloved wife. My brother even managed to build a beautiful life on the tiny slice of time he’d been given.

But Farina, for all of the love that she experienced and gave in her short life, did not have the privilege of growing old. She is now eternal with the same wide smile in her school photos, frozen in amber. She will always be her parents’ beloved child.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m writing this. I did not know her personally, and it has been over fifty years since she left this earth. Today, had she lived, she would be one year younger than I am, and probably a wife and mother, and maybe a grandmother playing with children who are as young as she was when she left us. I am not quite certain what motivates these thoughts of loss.

Perhaps it was the tragedy in Minneapolis last week, when two other Catholic school children were ripped from us by a deranged killer who deserves no compassion, no sympathy.

Perhaps it is the thoughts that crowd my mind every September, as school starts up again and the old French teacher is overcome with overwhelming joy and exhilaration at new beginnings.

Perhaps it was the ride I took a week ago, past my beautiful old campus in Merion with the trees of varied greens, and the convent where I can still smell the cafeteria scents of the nuns’ preferred lunches, comforting and constant, and the winding red brick road that I traveled for a decade. Like the boy in The Sixth Sense, I saw dead people, ghosts. One of them was Farina.

I mourn from a distance. And yet, that is the point of this. When a young person passes, there is great sadness in the larger world

(Me, in 4th grade, age 9)

she inhabited. When that person is violently stripped from her beloved family and her inconsolable friends, the sadness is magnified to such a point that we question God, and question why He allows things like this to happen. I know that I do, even though I still pray.

What remains is family. The mother and father of Farina never forgot her. I lost track of them decades ago, but I recently came across the obituary of her father, who passed away at 80-something. They mentioned his family, all of his surviving children, and there in the heart of the obituary were the words, “his daughter Farina.” They live on, as long as their names are spoken.

I still speak the names of my father, my brother, my grandfather. Teddy, Jonathan, Michael. They were here. So was Farina. So am I, and when I am gone, I hope my name will be on someone’s lips.

That might be small comfort to those who have lost loved ones, especially the youngest ones. But perhaps the only thing that we can do in this sort of circumstance is cling to the fact that our footprints are permanent. We were here. We are here. And we will not be forgotten.

Me, in 2010 after getting a ring. See how I’m hiding my hand? And the only other thing in the photo is a bridge that has the highest rate of suicide jumps in the country. Inauspicious…

Fifteen years ago, I was engaged to be married. I didn’t tell anyone outside of my close circle of five friends, the siblings I was still talking to, and my mother. If I’m being honest, Lucy was not too happy about it. She didn’t trust the fellow. Turns out, she was right. The engagement ran out of steam after two and a half years, when my ex-fiance informed me at a rest stop on I-95 that he wanted to “take a break.” This happened right after I’d spent the entire day wining and dining him for his birthday, including the really expensive baseball game at Camden Yards and the even more expensive lunch at the Inner Harbor. Donald Trump has called Baltimore a “hellhole.” While I love my hometown, that’s kind of what I felt about it back then.

Of course, not all engagements end that way. Most result in happy marriages, or at least unions that survive long enough to get the photos back from the wedding photographer. Which brings me to the point of this column.

Weddings are big things, usually. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the affairs, the dresses, the food, and if you are Italian, more food. It is completely understandable that you would announce it to the world, take lots of staged and some impromptu photos, and preserve the memories for posterity, or for your daughter who might want to show the album to her college friends while saying: “This was mom’s first wedding, the only one of the three I didn’t attend.”

But we have now become a society where engagements are as big as weddings, orchestrated and staged and shot from every conceivable angle, as if we were starring in our own Netflix series. I first saw the trend pop up on social media before the pandemic, where I started scrolling through posts from “Susie,” whose ring finger was magnified 100 times so you could get a good look at the flawless diamond “Sam” had given her. As an aside, I have learned that when a man tells you the diamond is “flawless,” he is trying to explain why it’s so very, very small.

The quality of these photo shoots are amazing, with burnished sunsets, craggy coastlines, exotic islands and flowery gardens providing a backdrop for the impromptu and totally surprising capture of a completely authentic moment.

Which brings me to the other point of this column. It is not only private people who go all Cecil B. DeMille on these engagement announcements. Famous people who are better at being famous than we schmucks with our microscopic, flawless diamonds know who to announce their nuptials in style. And this is exactly what happened with Travis Kelce proposed to Taylor Swift.

To place this in context, no Biblical event with the possible exception of the parting of the Red Sea had as earthshaking an impact on popular history as the announced union between the Midwest Romeo and his Pennsylvania Juliet. Of course, both parties long since abandoned their roots and have become creatures of Hollywood, glowing with the incandescence of millions of LED powered twinkle lights, but it is nice to remember that they were once as simple and unassuming, as schmucky as we were.

The announcement of the engagement was inescapable. It was everywhere, on every TV, on every social platform, like another Biblical event, the plague of locusts. You simply could not avoid the Kelce-Swift phenomenon. When I went to buy a can of soup for my meager dinner, the first thing that greeted me on the shelves was a can of Kelce Chicken Noodle Soup. It was as if the universe was screwing with me, as if in perfect Old Testament style, I was living in the Book of Job. Or rather, I was on an Ark of my own making, filled with a few like-minded friends who were awash in a sea of Travlorness, trying to escape the nuptial flood.

Some have asked me why I hate Taylor Swift. I do not hate Taylor Swift. She has never done anything to hurt me directly or indirectly, because I can always turn off her insipid music or walk out of the venues where it is played. Unlike Stephen Miller, who I actually do hate and who is causing untold damage to the lives of many of my immigrant clients and friends, Taylor is a minor annoyance.

It's not that I “hate” her, but rather that I find her influence on so many other people to be distressing. She has never had an authentic moment in her life, and was trained to be “Taylor Swift” from the moment her father shoved a guitar in her hands and started parading her around to record producers twenty years ago. I happen to have known one of those producers, who told me she was very cute but he never thought she’d turn into a megastar. He underestimated American tastes.

Every move of her life has been planned, so when I see the planned photos of her engagement, it just reminded me how much I cannot stand the plastic nature of our approach to relationships, the need to “appear” instead of actually be, the desire to constantly be “on display.”

A friend said that he doesn’t think that Swift is plastic, and that is simply typical of her generation. He’s actually correct in that, and maybe that’s the saddest thing of all.

And it makes me feel better about my phantom engagement, because if I’d made a big deal about the “flawless” ring that you needed the Hubbel Telescope to locate, it would have been hard to live down the debacle on I 95.

With all of the recent publicity about the Sidney Sweeney ad for American Eagle, something equally important flew under the radar screen: the fact that woke killed Carrie Bradshaw.

Let me try and explain.

While the young, nubile Sweeney became embroiled in the whole “is she Eugenics Barbie,” something I noted in an earlier column, the older, wrinkled, not-exactly-road-kill but definitely overly-ripened-on-the-vine women of Sex and the City were informed that the magic they’d struggled to recapture from the last century (literally) had fizzled out.

The show “And Just Like That,” a sequel to the cultural watershed of the late 90’s and early aughts, was being canceled after three controversial seasons. And no one was surprised, except maybe the actors themselves.

Of course, Sarah Jessica Parker, who inhabited the role of Carrie Bradshaw for the last three decades in TV and subsequent films, knew that the trigger was being pulled, since she is an Executive Producer on the show. But it seems that the other two original cast members, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis were not in on the decision, given the shell-shocked reactions on social media.

But if they were taken by surprise, no other sentient female could have been. What they did to a show that was arguably as important to television’s historical trajectory as That Girl and then Mary Tyler Moore, was nothing less than involuntary manslaughter. I won’t go so far as to accuse them of murder, because I don’t believe the show runners deliberately wanted to put the stake through the heart of a beloved franchise. But in their own way, neglecting the true nature of their characters and the basis for the bonds that they shared while at the same time filling the episodes with cringe-worthy additions like a hostile butch love interest for sexually confused Miranda and a refusing to honorably confront the absence of the spicy heart of the show, Samantha, they starved it. Or better yet, they poisoned it,slowly, methodically, albeit unintentionally.

Whatever happened, they killed it. It flopped. It was so bad that even people like me, who didn’t love the original version, were angry at the post-menopausal carnage.

The first problem was the untimely death of Mr. Big. Chris Noth is used to being written out of shows rather brutally, as happened in his seminal (and my favorite) role as Detective Mike Logan in Law and Order. One minute he was lookingIrish Catholic raggedy guy hot, and the next he was punching a congressman, which meant that he was off the show.

“And Just Like That” wasn’t much kinder. There he was, an aging Irish Catholic raggedy hot guy, with some seriously sexy salt and pepper hair, and boom, he has a heart attack and dies. The producers were kind enough to allow him to suffer for a few hours slumped against a wall until his beloved Carrie came home and did absolutely nothing to save his life. No real CPR. No call to 911. Just a long, Carrie-like squeak of anguish, while looking fabulous in designer wear.

And that was the end of Big.

For that reason alone, I decided this was not the show I wanted to watch. That, and the fact that I canceled HBO Max in order to get unlimited Law and Order Mike Logan episodes with a new Hulu subscription. But I followed the show on social media, and in the articles that were invariably written about its increasingly sad devolution.

Carrie, to be honest, stayed pretty much the same. The only thing that changed was her devotion to Big, who went from being the center of her life to a mistake. Aiden, the Almanzo Wilder of the Upper West Side, rode back into her life in Season Two and then crashed and burned in Season Three, but no one who watched the original series really thought he was anything but a Big afterthought. Overall, though, Carrie stayed comfortably the same. Same shoes. Same hair. Same oblong features. Same actual fact, which was lovely to behold. Here we had a woman who allowed herself to actually age. That is the one uplifting part about the sequel: they did not turn Carrie into a Real Housewife.

But Charlotte simply devolved into Charlotte on Steroids, screechy, clingy, annoyingly emotional, and a mother from hell. Everything you hated about Charlotte in the old series came back with a vengeance, and the sweet, endearing pieces of her character disintegrated like the fillers in her cheeks (once she had them taken out.)

Miranda was the worst of all, but then again, hers was the character no one could stand. Brittle, narcissistic, humorless except when she wanted to use the humor to hurt, and ignorant of the great prize she had: Steve. He was far from perfect, but the man loved her. Yes, they had him have a one night fling in the first movie, and for that he was forced to beg absolution for the next two hours, but overall, Steve was a good man who loved Miranda.

Well, Miranda decided that she didn’t love Steve, that she had never truly loved Steve. And then she decided that she probably didn’t love men either. Miranda became a lesbian, and I use the word “became” on purpose. This is not one of those “I was always gay and I just never admitted it to anyone.” The sexual epiphany of Miranda seemed to be like a Tik Tok trend, something that she picked up as she moved on to a new stage in her life. It wasn’t deep, a part of her. It was the sexual orientation equivalent of Carrie’s prized Jimmy Choos.

Her relationship with the butch lesbian named Che was inauthentic, and only highlighted the fact that she had given up a great deal in leaving Steve.

And Che wasn’t the worst of the filler ladies. There was Seema, the real estate agent who was supposed to be an Indian version of randy Samantha, bedding young men (or at least a young man) with the wrinkles, but without the wry humor of Kim Cattrall. And that’s not the producer’s fault, of course, since Kim didn’t want to come back to the show. But they could have found someone else, instead of pushing a character that had absolutely no chemistry with the other women.

And that’s the sad part of the show. What came so naturally, the attachment between four diverse women, became forced and strained in the revival. The frothy frivolity of the original masked something profound: actual, true love between women of a certain age, of a certain era, at a certain time in their lives.

The reincarnation of Sex in the City fell prey to the idea that relationships are not natural, organic things, and that we all now have to have labels: the gay friend, the minority friend, the friend with abandonment issues, the friend who was born in another country, the friend who hates Trump, the friend who is “With Her,” the friend who has specific pronouns, the friend who had her own Me Too moment, the friend who wasn’t vaccinated, the friend who had a hundred booster shots, the friend, the friend, the friend!

From what I could glean from the show, it was a Mr. Potato Head amalgamation of all of these parts that might look nice separately, but that had no connection to the whole. And when you stuck them altogether, you had something that made you miss the authentic original.

Woke is all about including everything, and everyone, at all times, even when it’s not necessary. Woke is not about empathy. It’s all about appearances. And that is what this show became, all about appearances.

There is nothing wrong with having lots of different sort of friends in your life. Sometimes it enriches it, sometimes, contrary to conventional wisdom, it does not. I have excised some of the people who are so different from me in politics, philosophy, faith and the way they live their lives that nothing about them adds value any longer.

But overall, variety is nice.

Except when the variety is a sop to society’s desperate need to be hip, trendy, updated, and enlightened. The plastic people of “And Just Like That,” and the plasticized versions of the familiar and beloved women that came into our lives a quarter century ago, were a waste of our time.

Good riddance

.

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 that 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.

Far from palatable, there appear to be a lot of people we could call “Christose Intolerant.”

And that’s okay in a society where there are many opinions, many ways of viewing the world, and a myriad set of values that not all of us share. The fact that Trader Joe Boy and I would never willingly break organic, vegan, whole grain and gluten-free bread is that we should not have to. We are not the world, we are not the children, we don’t want to be in the same city, let alone on the same sidewalk.

The thing that bothers me, though, is that 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, Donna, 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-I’m sorry for making you see that-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. As an aside, 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 on Market Street, I chalk it up to the fact that 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.

Guy From Trader Joe’

Me, annoyed not to be universally love

Me, nonetheless living my best life

(From my brilliant friend Tom Stiglich)

Last Tuesday, the people of Philadelphia, at least the ones who cared enough to get out of their lounge chairs and vote, re-elected Larry Krasner for a third term as District Attorney. Despite an okay but far from perfect alternative, Judge Pat Dugan, the usual suspects (including some people I personally know and who at least on the surface seem to be sane) voted for the same old, same old.

That SOSO manifested itself in a mass shooting last night, leaving two dead, nine injured and countless more traumatized. I have to say that given the fact that so many of the people who chose Krasner live in the neighborhoods that are most impacted by crime, my well of sympathy is pretty dried up. I feel for the children who were caught in the crossfire, the ones too young to pick a George Soros protégé for the chief enforcement officer in the city.

But unless the other victims actively campaigned against Krasner and his “empty the jails” philosophy, I’m not weeping. It’s a shame, but frankly, it was a massacre foretold.

And that’s the problem with Philadelphians, my blighted and benighted siblings. I am as much of a natve of the city as you can be without being born at Pennsylvaniahospital. My parents were located in Baltimore in December of 1961, when I made my entrance into the world trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth would say (I was probably trailing other things too, if family lore is to be credited.) But they were generational Philadelphians, and my birth below the Mason Dixon was a tiny blip in the LaSalle-Flowers-Dicocco-Fusco continuum of our DNA.

I am a Philadelphian. I love my city. I weep for my city when these things happen. I do everything within my limited power to stop things like this from happening. I write. I vote. I talk on TV and on the radio. I encourage others to reject the policies of progressive anarchists like Krasner.

And I continue to see how fruitless these efforts are, because of the money pumped into these races by the aforesaid progressive anarchists who want to destroy civil society and remake it into a dystopian version of Logan’s Way, where if you don’t die by the age of 30 (meaning, you aren’t killed by gunfire) we are doing something wrong.

I also blame the aforementioned Philadelphians who care more about posting on their most recent visit to the nail salon or “influencing” bored suburban housewives or discussing which sandwich shop makes the best cheesesteak than about getting their asses to a polling place to actually vote. As between the two, I think I hate the latter a bit more. People who have too high an opinion of their mediocre selves are worse than deranged partisan zealots, who at least have authentic feelings of hatred towards civilization.

On second thought, they can both burn in hell.

Sadly, though, they are taking the rest of us with them and allowing toxicity like the arrogant DA to fester. It is turning us into people who no longer weep at the sight of children dodging bullets, because we know that somewhere, someone decided those kids were less important than being a woke asshole who fights for criminals to get out of jail.

I’m fed up with it, I’m over it, I no longer even want to pretend that I think there is a solution. There is none, as long as Philadelphians continue to vote for people and policies that make us all sitting ducks for drive by shootings.

The irony in all of this is that, when the perpetrators are apprehended, Larry and the Krasner Krew will work hard to reduce any felony charges against the offenders, who will be found to have had challenging childhoods, mottled with racism, poverty, drug abuse, absent fathers, blah blah (insert expletive in the form of an adverb) blah.

So no, I’m not weeping. My eyes are completely dry. Unless I know that the victims went to the polls and voted against Krasner, I’m not sending any sympathy cards or lighting any candles.

I reserve my compassion for those who actually have some for others.

On Wednesday evening, the United Republican Club of Philadelphia honored me with its Woman of the Year award. I wrote a speech, and then forgot to deliver it. Instead, I told some jokes and gave some thanks. But since it was a good speech, and I will never again be Woman of the Year, I decided to share it here, for posterity.

“Please let me start by saying that I am humbled, and honored, by this award. It means a great deal to me, and I say that with the sincerity of my Irish father, who never said anything he didn’t mean, and who taught me that if you are afraid to speak your mind, and tell the truth, you really don’t have a mind worth consideration. Being a crafty Philadelphia Irishman, he also taught me that there are times when you can speak volumes by simply raising an eyebrow. Everything that ever put me in the crosshairs I learned from him, and my Italian mother softened me slightly around the edges with her kindness and her Catholic spirit.

So again, it is with deepest gratitude that I accept this award, given to me in the name of a woman who I would so very much have loved to meet. I am certain that my father, a man who loved his native city as much as anyone I have ever met, would have loved to meet her as well. It’s possible that their paths crossed, because he was active on the Committee of Seventy in the 1970s and I understand that the great Mary Tierney was a ward leader in this Kensington neighborhood for decades, but daddy died at the young age of 43 in 1981 so I’m not sure. But I am certain that they have likely found their way to each other in Heaven.

To be honored with an award named after a person of such character makes me want to be worthy of it, and I am just glad that you think I am worthy of it. It is not easy, to be honest, to be a Republican or a conservative in my hometown, and it’s been that way ever since I was born over 60 years ago, and to know that Mary was one of the reasons that the party flourished and was an integral part of the system makes me realize just what an exceptional person she was. And to do it as a woman, and I don’t want to go all Helen Reddy “I am woman hear me roar” on you, but to do it as a woman in politics in an era when that was still a bit of a struggle raises my admiration exponentially. I wish I had had the honor of meeting her.

This award is given to me, but it is a reflection of all of you. It says a great deal about the Republican Club that you would choose to give this award to someone who has sometimes strayed from the reservation, so to speak. By that I mean, I have not always been in lockstep with the national party’s platforms and policies, and I have on occasion been a vocal critic of some Republicans, including quite recently. I won’t go into any detail, because this is not the place, but what is happening at the highest levels of the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice with respect to certain immigration issues is troubling. I have made that clear in my writings, my radio appearances and as recently as this past Sunday on Inside Story, a political roundtable on Channel 6.

And yet, you chose to give me this award, albeit before seeing my comments on Channel 6 (wink wink) because the Republican party is, and always has been, a big-tented organization. I was not always a Republican. In 1980, after I had just turned 18, I registered as a Democrat because that’s what my father was and that’s what my mother was, and that’s what my Italian grandparents were. I was surrounded by Democrats, the kind that loved John F. Kennedy and Frank L. Rizzo. That party, that large tent which existed to bring in the working classes of all backgrounds and faiths, no longer exists. That party, which allowed pro life voices to be heard, and did not exile them to the back of the room, no longer exists. And yet I persevered, partly because of apathy and partly because of stubbornness. And when I was writing for the Inquirer and the Daily News, from 2003 until 2020, for most of that period I was a Democrat. It helped me in my writing, to be honest, because I could legitimately preface my columns attacking Democrats by saying “and I say this as a registered Democrat.” Of course, everyone saw through that. They knew that even though my card said “D,” a large part of my heart said “R.”

Eventually I left the party years after I should have, and became a Republican, only re registering as a Democrat to vote in the primaries against Larry Krasner. And I winced when I did it, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

Today, I am a Republican who often criticizes the current party for not living up to the highest standards it sets for itself, and has always met. Republicans like Reagan were the ones who fought for the human rights of those imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, and Republicans like Richard Nixon, for all of his, shall we say, “issues” opened the West to China. I was a fan of Nikki Haley when she was the fiery Ambassador to the UN, and of Sarah Palin, to whom I was often compared because we both sported updos and glasses, and who weathered some horrific treatment from the media.

To be honest, the media has generally been quite unfair to conservatives in general and Republicans in particular, and when I was in that environment, in which I actually still find myself although in a more limited capacity, I felt the hostility. So to be a Republican and support conservative values, and be successful doing it, as Mary Tierney was, is almost miraculous. Again, that is why I am so very honored to accept this award in her name.

One other thing that makes me so proud to accept this award. Mary was a devout Catholic, and I am a Catholic as well. I derive great support from my faith, and I am incredibly proud to be a daughter of the church. To those who would say that we do not have a voice in the church and that we need to be given more respect, I would simply say that the strongest women I ever met, and the ones who had the most impact me, outside of my mother and my Italian grandmother, were the Mercy, Immaculate Heart, Notre Dame and St. Joseph nuns who taught, counseled, or worked beside me these many years. Like Mary, they were, and are, powerhouses, and they have changed the course of history. I stand on their shoulders, and I stand in their shadow, in my beloved church.

In closing, an anecdote. Once, after having been called into my editor’s office at the Daily News by a woman who shall remain nameless (other than Cruelle de Editor,) I was told that she was continuing to run my pieces “in spite” of my conservative views. She said that she wanted to strangle me, literal words, because of my pro life position. And then a few years later, after I wrote a few columns defending Bill Cosby and the need for due process, she felt it necessary to publish an editorial apologizing to the Philadelphia readership for running my column, asking, and I quote, “how can I live with myself for providing a platform to someone who stands for everything I abhore?” And that was the nice part.

When I reached out to her afterwards to see if this was really necessary, she suggested that I should be happy that I was defending me in that sort of climate. She was defending me the way Davey Crockett defended the Alamo (no offense, I loved Davey.)

My point is that it is not easy to be conservatives and Republicans in a city that is overwhelmingly not Republican and conservative. But we are still here, and we are kicking, most especially among all of you, and at the great champion of free and honest thought Broad and Liberty, and we are speaking out and our voices are still being heard, and women like Mary Tierney are a very large reason for that.

Her legacy helped secure our future.

So thank you so much for this treasured honor, and I hope that I will continue to make myself worthy of your respect.”

Over the past several weeks, I have been called schizophrenic, whether it be on social media, in emails from readers or jokingly from friends who seem to think I’m all over the map on the Trump administration. I thought a little clarification was due, before I take a flight over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

I am a conservative, through and through. I have the battle scars to prove it, and as I said in a recent column, my pronouns are Ronald/Reagan. But being a conservative, and not a “Never Trump” liberal light, does not require that I agree with everything that my president does. It does not mean that I have to “take one for the team,” when that one is a curve ball to the head that will give me a permanent concussion. Sometimes, you have to call them as you see them, and most of my friends understand that principle. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be my friends.

So yes, Donald Trump and his Keystone Cop minions acted like third world despots when they removed a Salvadoran refugee back to El Salvador, even though they knew that he was protected by an order that had been issued by a Trump era judge. There is no gilding the lily here, no “well maybe they made a mistake but it was unintentional,” no “well he was a gang member (yeah? Prove it!) so he’s no great loss,” no “Geez Christine, can’t you let this one pass, because at least he won’t rape and kill someone like poor Laken Riley.”

None of it. There is no excuse for what was done, it was an egregious error and now the error is beginning to look like deliberate illegality. A federal judge has ordered that the Salvadoran be returned to the US, and the government is pretending that it does not have the power to do so. They are lying. This is what a retired ICE agent with forty years of experience under 6 presidents wrote to me:

“Interesting what the administration is saying about their inability to return someone to the U.S. given that that person is in custody at the administration's behest. It's no different than someone being held in custody in Germany on a U.S.-issued INTERPOL Red Notice pending collection by the U.S. Marshals.”

So yeah, they are lying and they need to get the man back here immediately. If they do not, the United States will have just joined Russia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Sudan and a whole host of other lovely countries as a government that “disappears” its problems. It should also wrap the Statute of Liberty in Styrofoam and return her to France.

On the other hand, progressives are in no position to start seizing the high ground. This weekend, a bunch of people who needed to do something with their pink pussy hats and their poster board decided to hold a protest against the government. I’m fine with protests. The First Amendment is my favorite of all the amendments, except maybe for the Fourteenth, and on occasion the Sixth. But that protest was hilarious, filled with virtue signaling seniors, bored millennials and some children who were forced to carry signs that screamed about abortion rights. There were also a number of posters with Trump re-imagined as Hitler, and attacks on the GOP as the KKK.

These people, many of whom probably marched against the war in Vietnam while getting blitzed on whatever controlled substance was most available, think of themselves as noble warriors. They are not. They speak about immigrant’s rights, but most of them never defended an immigrant in court, or understand the arcane laws that govern the process. They just like to say they “defend immigrants.” Many of them do understand abortion rights, because many of them probably had them, or know someone who did. Many of them are angry about their 401Ks, as I am, but didn’t blame Joe Biden for high prices and would have forgiven him if we fell into an inflationary period.

My point is this: I can see how immoral and reprehensible Donald Trump’s administration has been with its bordering-on-fascistic initiatives in going after “illegal immigration,” while at the same time see the true faces of the people who are criticizing him in the streets. I can walk and chew gum. I am not a team player, I suppose.

You shouldn’t be, either. And if that makes me schizophrenic, just call me Sybil. And hand me a purple crayon.

(Meggie and Ralph)

If you are a woman of a certain age, and you are (or were at some point) Catholic, you have a Father Ralph. By that I mean, there is a priest who in colloquial terms is called “Father Whatawaste.” Catholics do not allow our priests to have wives. Catholics do not allow our priests to be wives. There is one flavor, one version, one type: celibate male.

That is of course fine if the gentleman taking your act of confession is nearing 80 with thick glasses, a gouty walk and the expression of someone who can see the pearly gates glinting in the distance and is perhaps a bit wary of the end game. (As an aside, after forty-five years of paying into Social Security, I’m rather skeptical of the final payout, too. But that’s another story altogether.)

My point is that if the man at the pulpit giving the homily looks more like George Clooney than George Washington, you might be forgiven for letting your attention drift, momentarily, from the divine scripture to the sublime sculpture.

I’m not saying anything we Catholic ladies haven’t considered since we first stuck out our tongues and said “Amen.” We are born with original sin and unoriginal thoughts.

(Me, at the time I first noticed Father Troy)

That is why so many of us related to Father Ralph in “The Thornbirds,” the conflicted Australian priest who was torn between his love of God and his love of sweet Meggie. Putting aside the troubling subtext of age-inappropriate relationships since the bond between Ralph de Briccasart and Meggie Cleary started when she was 8 and he was almost 20 years older, every one of us who had a crush on Father Whatawaste could relate to that sense of deep longing.

My own Father Ralph was a Hollywood handsome priest named Father Troy, who served at my old parish in Delaware County. Father Troy became very dear to my family for other, more important reasons. When my own father Ted was dying from cancer in 1981, it was Father Troy who came to the house and prayed with him, promised him he would be in heaven despite the personal shortcomings he’d confessed, helped him die with a semblance of peace, and conducted his funeral mass. The homily broke my heart, and mended it again.

But, and this is my shallow nature shining through, Father Troy was hot. He just was. Preternaturally handsome in a Richard Chamberlain way. And I was a teenager at an all girls school who didn’t have an actual date until she was 30 (I kid you not) so I projected my longing onto him.

(Priests for whom I’ve had a special and deeply platonic affection.)

Which, speaking of Richard Chamberlain, is why I so closely identified with Meggie Cleary, both in the book and then in the mini-series that was filmed a few years later. Richard Chamberlain brought back to me all the unrequited feelings I had about Father Troy, even though by that point I’d moved on to more available heartthrobs. He was classically beautiful like, yes, a sculpture. His voice was mellifluous and rich in the way that you imagine Prince Charming’s to be. In fact, that voice was very similar to Stuart Damon’s, that other heartthrob of my youth who fit the glass slipper to Lesley Ann Warren’s tiny foot on network television. Not coincidentally, Richard Chamberlain also played Cinderella’s beloved in a film called “The Slipper and the Rose,” but he will always be more compelling as a forbidden love than a fictional one.

(Me, realizing at my First Holy Communion that there were certain drawbacks to not being Protestant.)

It doesn’t even matter that he announced in 2003 that he was gay. It was just another stretch of distance between he and I, and I’d already reconciled myself to the fact that Father Ralph was as untouchable as St. Michael, my other ecclesiastical crush.

When I heard that Chamberlain had died yesterday at the age of 90, my heart dropped. Another piece of my past has peeled away and in its place, only memory left. But what a magnificent memory indeed. I heard a few years ago that Father Troy had also passed away. In some ways, I hope three of the men who meant so much to me encounter each other in the heaven he promised Teddy Flowers

.

So do immigration lawyers. And that’s why we’re dangerous these days. We may appear to be gumming up the works for Trump’s efforts to deport criminals and terrorists, but most of us are simply following the laws and increasingly complicated regulations to provide our clients with the best legal counsel possible. If that means, as I recently did, spending 5 hours in a windowless courtroom trying to get a judge to agree that being buried in a vertical grave and exposed to equatorial heat for 8 hours by your captors is torture, I’ll do it. If that means trying to convince a judge that gay men in Pakistan are being killed because they’re gay, I’ll do it (I’ve done it.) If that means begging a judge to grant asylum to a woman whose Salvadoran grandfather repeatedly raped her while adult women in the family looked away, I’ll do it (I’ve done it.)

The fact is, most asylum cases are legitimate. You will of course find applicants who lie, and people who are economic refugees. The former are easily detected given the stringent corroboration requirements of the Real ID Act, while the latter-albeit suffering, are not eligible for relief.

Yes, there are bad lawyers. There are, in fact, very bad lawyers who make up stories for their clients who, for the most part, are completely oblivious to the chicanery. The true victims of these cheaters and frauds are the immigrants themselves who usually end up getting deported or caught up, against their will or intention, in removal proceedings.

And yes, there are some bad people who should not be granted relief. But they are an infinitesimally small number of applicants, while the vast majority are either worthy of asylum or, in many cases, denied because they come before incredulous judges. I have appeared before judges who deny 95% of the cases brought before them. That means there are people with legitimate claims who are being denied their right to refuge.

Just one example of the random injustice of the system. Twenty years ago, I had the case of two siblings, a brother and sister from Kenya. They were politically active and had been persecuted by the government. Their cases, almost identical except for the gender element, were heard before two different judges in Philadelphia. The woman was granted asylum. The man was denied. We filed an appeal, and while it was pending the brother got tired and went home, essentially self-deporting. A week later, he was murdered by the government agents he said were threatening him. I will never forget what he told me before he left: “I’m tired of trying to convince them I’m telling the truth.” I’m haunted by that.

So the idea that President Trump is pointing a finger at me and my colleagues as being inherently fraudulent makes my blood boil, particularly since the immigration bar is one of the most active in trying to keep the bad practitioners from preying on the innocent. We are the ones fighting against the fake lawyers, the lying lawyers and the notarios. We don’t need people like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi and Donald Trump singling us out for punishment.

Shakespeare was being facetious when he wrote that iconic line. It’s sad that the White House is taking him literally.

I’ve done it myself. I boycotted an entire hockey season when the Flyers iced (pun intended) the statue of Kate Smith. Worse yet, and with an evil flourish, I started rooting for the Jersey Devils. I was certain that this perfidy, this profound betrayal of a team that didn’t even know I existed would strike a blow for justice.

Ultimately, I went back to rooting for the Flyers. The gravitational pull of city loyalty was too strong for me, and in much the same way I came back to bleeding green after Malcolm Jenkins and some other less-than-desirable former Eagles flew the coop. Life is too short to carry grudges, unless you’re Italian in which case you choose wisely. My relatives already know which ones have been axed from the will.

So I kind of smirked when I saw some social media friends telling me that they “weren’t watching” the Hollywood display of excess over excellence. I shared their distaste and disgust with the liberal and progressive posturing of so many misguided “artistes,” the kind who get up at the podium and talk about human rights with the sort of manicured nails that cost 50 dollars apiece, the kind who couldn’t find Gaza on a map if you gave them one, which they couldn’t read anyway because everyone asks the digital Sacajewea, Siri, for directions these days, the kind who think that wearing Black Lives Matter pins is chic but wearing Make America Great Again hats is a hate crime.

In a word, or four, I hate these people.

And yet, I do not hate the Oscars. In fact, I live for them every year. I don’t care who is wearing what (or whom.) I don’t care what comes in the $100,000.00 goody bags. I don’t care which interchangeable boy toy is on which arm. I do care about which films and actors win the awards, because regardless of what the naysayers think, an Oscar is the greatest artistic award that you can receive. It just is, and no amount of fawning over the Golden Globes will ever change that fact.

The Oscars take us back to the golden age of cinema, and even though that gold has been tarnished and is blotched with the mottled green of controversy and time, it is still an important moment to reflect on cinema. The movies are my favorite form of art, more than music, poetry or painting. It is the art of the common person, even though tickets now cost more than a mortgage payment, even though sitting alone in your room streaming a film is sad and anti-climatic, even though there are so many bad films out there.

Movies are snapshots of the different time periods that we’ve lived through, loved through, survived. They reflect our customs and our values, our desires and our hatreds, our hairstyles (unfortunately) and our fashions (worse.) They are the time capsules that we create, and reward us with moving memories.

So even though the awards ceremony misses the mark on so many occasions, the meaning of the ceremony dwarfs the pettiness in its importance.

For example. You can have two men get up there on the stage and accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing, and you can-as I almost did- wake the dead with my screams of “you butchered Jewish children, you evil monsters, get the hell off the stage!” but they are not the Oscars. They are unworthy recipients of a politically charged voting base.

And you can have a film about a “sex worker” win multiple awards and you can-as I actually did-almost get a hernia laughing at the fact that prostitutes now have resumes.

And you can have Zoe Saldana talk about her history as the first Dominican woman to win an Oscar and some other fellow talk about being the first Latvian to win an award, and some other person talk about how he was the first Black costume designer to win an award, and some other person talk about how she was the first man pretending to be a woman but still equipped with a penis being nominated as a women (without a penis,) and all this other irrelevant stuff.

But all of these people are not the Oscars. They are bit players on the stage, momentary twinkles in the firmament of the galaxy. They have none of the weight of the great ones, the Wilders and the Fords, the Davises and the Garlands, the Gables and the Grants. That little nonentity of a sex worker will be forgotten tomorrow, while we will never forget the image of Audrey on a vespa holding onto Gregory Peck’s waist. Some crazy Frenchmen can get up at the podium and sing their insipid song about a trans drug trafficker, and we will block it out as we remember the haunting melody that followed Gary Cooper down the street at High Noon, or the orchestral notes that played in the background as Vivien Leigh vowed to “never go hungry again.”

And we will ignore the lies of a disgruntled Palestinian and his claims of genocide while remembering the majesty of Moses parting the Red Sea, the righteous judgment of those at Nuremberg, and the modern exodus that created Israel. The documentary about Gaza will fade away in minutes, while the Ten Commandments, Judgment at Nuremberg and Exodus will be on a celluloid Olympus for the rest of our days.

And that is why I continue to watch the Oscars.

Pope Francis and I are not often on the same page about the world. Since his elevation over a decade ago, I have been a very vocal critic of what I saw-and in many ways still do see-as his political and progressive view of Catholicism. For example, I am not the kind of Catholic who thinks that we should abolish the death penalty, because I do not believe that people who rape women, murder children and terrorize the elderly have anything to contribute to society beyond their nicely-written obituaries.

And Francis doesn’t judge, as we all know from his notorious comments about gays and lesbians in the church. Some of his juiciest sound bites came while he was cruising at an altitude of 20,000 feet, close enough to touch the scandalized angels. I judge. I am proud of judging. I am as judgey as they come. But I am also not the leader of several million Catholics worldwide, so I don’t have to worry too much about job security.

In other words, if I were to describe our relationship in my social media profile, I’d have to write “It’s Complicated.”

One thing, though, on which we both agree is the inviolable dignity of the human being, whether in utero or fleeing persecution. As an aside, we will be excluding from this discussion of human dignity the aforementioned rapists, murderers and terrorists because they have, by their own actions, erased whatever value they carried into the world at the moment of conception.

But unborn children, innocent and filled with the fire of potential, deserve respect. Beyond that, they deserve our protection, and an understanding that they are not the property of their unwilling hosts. In fact, that is what the pregnant woman is in the most sacred of terms: the host of the most precious entity: a nascent human being. Many women don’t like to see themselves that way, pretending that it reduces them to incubators. But the Pope, and I, see it differently. Pregnant women are the refuge, the protectors, the life-giving receptacles for the future.

The Pope and I agree on something else, as well. We both recoil at the language and hostility of those who view immigrants as interlopers, criminals, and sinners. I will not use the term “illegal” here, to distinguish the so-called “good” people from the “bad.” I will not separate the human wheat from the inhuman chaff. People are people, and the fact that they may have been born across a border from you does not make them any less human. That is particularly so when they are born into blight, war, and poverty, and you have been privileged to see the light of day in a land of affluence.

These are not the words of a socialist. I am as conservative as they come, because I cling to the principles upon which our country was founded: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and a recognition that slavery is evil (I acknowledge that it took us far too long to make manifest our understanding of that original sin of human bondage.)

The Pope, and I, understand that laws exist for a reason. I think I might even understand that better than he does, since I am a lawyer. But laws need to be based in reality, not in the fantasy created by our biases and desires. We need to establish legitimate processes by which people who were born on the wrong side of the wall between light and darkness have a way to pass over that wall, into the light.

I am not saying that we have to make it easy. Laws exist to stop people from committing crimes, and even a hungry, desperate man cannot be excused for committing crimes. But crossing over borders without permission in an attempt to flee from the man who has held a gun to your head, raped your mother, killed your father and forced you to carry drugs is not a criminal act. It is a race towards freedom, and dignity.

The Pope and I disagree on so many things. But on the two things that define our conception of the world as it should be, a place where neither class, nor race, nor national origin, nor the opinion of the lady with the womb, determine our worth, we are one.

Every Catholic who professes our faith should be in that same circle with us.