Christine Flowers: When confronted by evil, we must speak out

By Christine Flowers
Daily Times
November 26, 2016

http://www.delcotimes.com/opinion/20161126/christine-flowers-when-confronted-by-evil-we-must-speak-out

Protesters walk with a flag during a Black Lives Matter rally in April 2015 in Minneapolis.

When the priest-abuse scandal became widely publicized about a decade or so ago, Catholics around the world began to denounce in the most passionate terms the literal breach of faith that had occurred in our church. There were denunciations from Catholic journalists, politicians, businesspeople, actors, artists, and the rank-and-file parishioner who walked away from the pews or demanded accountability from our bishops. And still, this was not enough for some. I wrote a number of articles critical of the church while, at the same time, making some demands of my own. I talked about the need for due process for accused priests, of a mandate of fairness when writing about those who had been labeled pedophiles for crimes that allegedly occurred decades ago, of the hypocrisy of those who turned a blind eye to the evil propensities of public school coaches and clerics of other faiths.

Balance in all things, as Aristotle would say.

It’s important for people of a particular group that has members accused of pernicious acts to stand up and disown them. If we don’t, we become complicit in those alleged crimes by the heavy weight of our silence. No Catholic can deny that sexual abuse occurred, and that it was widespread in certain cities and countries. No Catholic, however, should be forced to assume a communal burden of guilt for those aberrations.

So it is with Muslims. Whenever someone commits an act of terror in the name of Allah, it is incumbent upon every Muslim who has a bullypulpit (or simply the email address of a newspaper editor) to speak out forcefully and denounce those acts as “un-Muslim.” There is nothing reflexive or knee-jerk in the act; it is a required response to evident evil. Some Muslims have been very good about separating themselves from these acts of radicalism, such as the Amiddiyah Muslims, many of whom live in our own area. The morning after 9/11, many of the phone calls I received at my office were from Muslim clients who apologized for the horror visited upon our innocent fellow citizens, and denounced the hijackers as frauds and not true Muslims.

Other Muslims, perhaps fearing that their criticisms would just give racists and Islamaphobes more weapons for their arsenals of hatred, remain silent. Even after the attacks in Nice, in Paris, in Orlando, at Fort Hood, and in all of the other places where Islamic terror has been a key reason for the death of innocents (not to mention the madmen of ISIS), far too many Muslims remained quiet in the possible hope that others would speak out on their behalf. That just makes their silence much, much worse.

Then we have the LGBT community, which has perfected the art of being victims but who have not assumed the mantle of victimizer with any significant grace. In particular, I am talking about an incident where AIDS activists from Act-Up invaded a Catholic church during Mass and started throwing condoms at parishioners. Very, very few members of the community came out to condemn the sick violation of a sacred place, a place where I go to meet my God in the peace and freedom vouchsafed to me, a citizen, by the Constitution. Ten years later, in “commemoration” of that arrogant bit of Catholic bigotry, here is what members of Act-Up had to say: “We came to St. Patrick’s in 1989 to repel the church’s destructive intrusion into public policies concerning AIDS education, gay civil rights and women’s reproductive rights.” There was no apology for invading a church. There was no recognition that Cardinal O’Connor, prelate at the time in New York, had ministered to AIDS patients and personally emptied their bedpans when he visited them in church (confirmed by eyewitnesses). There was only slander and hatred against an entire faith community.

It was over 20 years ago, and my attempt at researching the event hasn’t revealed any “mea culpas” from gays, lesbians, transgenders and the rest over what is essentially a gay version of the Westboro Baptist protest bigotry. And that’s a shame, because an apology is owed.

The we have Black Lives Matter. While the organization has some legitimate goals (although they don’t express them well enough to be understood by the average well-meaning American citizen) and while police brutality is a reality, many of those in this questionable movement have argued forcefully for violence against police officers. This alleged “crescendo” of brutality against young black men has been widely documented. Police and the white community at large have been challenged to explain why young men are being shot in the streets (not by other young men, no, that’s never an issue) but the Black Lives Matter adherents often refuse to denounce and disown the violence being perpetrated against police. Sure, the random spokesperson will come out and criticize the ambush murders of police officers, another “epidemic” in the streets. But there has been very little in the way of institutional criticism of a philosophy that gins up anger against police, including many minority officers who take their lives into their hands every day when they walk out the door.

And finally, we have those despicable white supremacists who think it’s fine to strut their bigotry at an Italian restaurant in D.C. because their candidate has won the presidential election. While some conservatives, and Trump supporters, have been very vocal in saying “not in my name!,” far too many of my philosophical fellow travelers have either remained silent, or tried to deflect the blame onto liberals by saying, as someone laughably wrote on a FB post, “Libs are the real racists.” I say that this is laughable, but it’s actually tragic. For anyone to hear the tape from that idiot who said “Hail (or Heil) Trump” and the other repulsive comments about this being a country that owes its success to whites alone, and then do nothing, is beyond despicable. I denounce those conservatives, because their heavy silence or their weak denunciations (as in, “yeah, but THEY do it to!”) do not represent me.

Sadly, I will be tied to that philosophy, because not enough has been done from the top down to say that this must end. A few tweets, a long look into the camera from Donald Trump and a “stop it” on the national news is not enough. It could never be enough. And yet, it is a start. It is a start that must be followed by much more, louder voices, stronger cries of “not in my name,” hashtags that say #notmyconservatives instead of #notmypresident.

If we do not hear these protests, we are no better, we conservatives, than the Catholics who remained silent when priests raped altar boys, no better than Muslims who hide cowardly behind their veils when madmen incinerate buildings, no better than gay men who refuse to condemn their bigoted brothers and sisters, and no better than black men who only weep over the loss of civilian lives.

We all have an obligation to speak out, and say that evil men and women act and only on behalf of their bitter, sick selves. Not us.