Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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I find it interesting that Democrats are ganging up on Joe Manchin. It’s not exactly surprising, since the West Virginia senator hasn’t been a team player for a while, despite the fact that he is not now and never will be a Republican. But he is not the kind of Democrat that gets fawned over by mainstream media, because he won’t vilify conservatives. Manchin voted to impeach Trump, but he respects the folks (many of his own constituents) who voted for the man. He has this...
When I lived in France many years ago, I went to Mass regularly at Notre Dame Cathedral. My French was not so good at the time, so the ability to attend Mass in Latin was a blessing, because I was able to understand much of what was going on. It occurred to me that while the Second Vatican Council did some good things for the church, it stripped the ceremonies and celebrations of a great deal of their beauty by eliminating Latin from the Mass. It also unintentionally...
Mark Ruffalo came out on Twitter the other day and angered a lot of people, but not the people he usually tends to anger. “I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide.’ It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad,” Ruffalo wrote. “Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.” I actually missed his comments about Israel committing geno...
I’m not going to change your mind about abortion. This is not a “hearts and minds” sort of essay, seeking common ground on a battlefield bloodier than Gettysburg. This is a simple acknowledgement that, for the first time in 48 years, there is a strong possibility that the most cited, most manipulated, most controversial Supreme Court decision of the last century will be consigned to the margins of history. This month, the Supreme Court decided to take up the most conse...
If you’re the sort of person who sees no difference between the Israeli military defending its citizens and Hamas terrorizing civilians, you might want to pass on this column. This column is for the sort of person who realizes that violence is horrible, that killing civilians is horrific, that politics is dirty and that the world is not designed for the peacemakers. This column is also for those who will disagree on how we get to a point where warring tribes can come to s...
Shortly after I turned 18 in December of 1979, I marched myself down to the local firehouse down the street in Llanerch, Pa., and registered as a Democrat. In those days, nothing was done online, and it was a solemn moment when I signed the application and became a full member of civic society. About 11 months later, I cast my first vote. It was for Ronald Reagan. Pretty much every vote thereafter was cast for Republicans, but I remained a Democrat because I assumed it was par...
I have renewed respect for Keith Ellison. The former congressman and current Attorney General of Minnesota appeared on “60 Minutes” recently and said he didn’t charge Derek Chauvin with a hate crime because “we only charge those crimes that we had evidence that we could put in front of a jury to prove.” In other words, they didn’t find the requisite hate. Ellison did something I would not have expected him to do, given his past comments and actions. He honored the law, honore...
When the Nazis wanted to march through Skokie, Ill., many of the residents were horrified. A large percentage were Jewish, and some had been interned in concentration camps. The memory of those camps was still vivid, since this was 1978, a mere three decades after World War II had ended. I was in high school when the controversy erupted. At the time, the ACLU defended the Nazi group, which never ended up marching. But the fact that the storied civil rights organization swooped...
At a time when police are being attacked on all sides for brutality, racism, recklessness and all sorts of social sins and criminal acts, I hesitate to write this column. I hesitate, not because I think that what I am about to say is wrong, but because words have been used as weapons and in the wrong hands, they misfire and they wound. I hesitate, because the very last thing I want to do is wound the good men and women of the fragile blue line. On Dec. 5, 2020, Caron Nazario,...
The first person I thought about when I heard that Prince Philip had died was Elizabeth, a queen in the greater world but only and always a wife to the man who’d been by her side for longer than I’ve been alive. The second thing I thought was that Harry and Meghan better stay in L.A. and not show their “respects” to the grieving monarch. Well actually, I expect that Harry will come to say goodbye to a grandfather he reportedly loved very much, and who was closer to him tha...
I am so glad the whole white supremacy and gun nut narrative is over, so we can get back to the one about voter suppression. Those horrific shootings late last month diverted our attention away from what President Joe Biden has called “Jim Crow on steroids,” namely the recent controversial voting reform legislation passed in Georgia and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp. Anyone who has actually read the almost 100 pages of the Georgia law would know that it is not an attempt to kee...
Tom Wolf, lame-duck governor of Pennsylvania, announced on Twitter that he wanted the commonwealth to legalize pot. His comment was hailed as timely, necessary and courageous by many of his lame-duck followers on social media. There is a huge constituency in Pennsylvania, and nationally, for ending what some call a prohibition and others view as a common-sense limitation on recreational marijuana. It is important to note that neither Wolf nor I are referring to medical...
The Vatican came out this month and confirmed that it would not be “blessing” same-sex unions, a move that should have surprised no one. The church changes certain things all the time, adapting and updating as it sees fit. Beyond changes in language and style, there have been some more substantive changes, including allowing for “altar girls,” allowing lay persons to distribute communion, allowing women to participate more fully in the liturgy and delighting butchers everywher...
I’m pretty open about my pro-life views. I want abortion criminalized, banned and recognized as an act of inhumanity. I agree with Mother Theresa that “abortion has become the greatest destroyer of peace, because it destroys two lives, the life of the child and the conscience of the mother.” I am also a Catholic, and I am quite proud of the fact that my church is the most vocal, most unapologetically pro-life among the three great monotheistic traditions. I know there are s...
I do not like green eggs and ham I do not like their colors, ma’am I only sup on rainbow fish I like a multi-colored dish I will not swallow things too white But chocolate milk is a delight And Black-eyed peas are really nice I’ll eat them ma’am I’ll eat them twice Dr. Seuss might not appreciate my rhyming skills, but I would at least hope he’d recognize the irony in my ode to inclusion. The legendary author spent a lifetime teaching children about the importance of accepting...
I was once fired by an employer because they did not like the way I tweeted. They had no problem with the way other people at this same enterprise tweeted, they just didn’t like my own flavor of rhetorical panache. They never actually came out and said it was the subject matter of my tweeting, or my style, that got me a date with the guillotine. They simply said we told you to stop tweeting, you wouldn’t, and so we are letting you go. I’m always fascinated when somebody else...
Death is the one human experience that connects everyone, regardless of color, creed, class or bank account. The inequity comes only in its manner and timing. For Ted Flowers, my father, it came on a beautiful May morning, the day before Mother’s Day in 1982. It came after a year of agony, in the form of a brutal tumor in his lungs that had exploded into the farthest reaches of his battered, beloved body. He was a 43-year-old man who looked as if he’d lived twice that spa...
The worst thing to happen in my lifetime was the massacre of 20 children almost a decade ago. The current controversy of the Capitol riots, the Antifa uprisings this summer, the Oklahoma City bombing and even 9/11 don’t carry that same, crushing weight. The other tragedies were political reckonings, making us face the terror within, and without. But Sandy Hook was what happened when we thought there was a bottom, a basement, a level beyond which we could not sink — and the...
Alexei Navalny is what we need — but no longer have — in the United States: A political hero. We have politicians, some better than others. But each one of them, from the lowliest member of the school board trying to shove critical race theory down our throats, to the president pale in comparison to this Russian dissident. For years, Navalny has led a one-man crusade to expose corruption in Russia. He ran for office, losing in what were universally considered rigged elections....
I am not the pope. I was never a nun. I am barely a good Catholic, even though I do the absolute minimum to keep my club membership current. I am, however, a skilled detector of hypocrisy. Which makes me the perfect person to talk about the second Catholic president. Joe Biden is a Catholic. He was baptized, and goes to church, so it is technically a correct description. So calling Joe Biden a Catholic is as legitimate as calling the pope a Catholic, or Lady Gaga a Catholic,...
People often try and sound profound by quoting Santayana’s apocryphal statement, “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” But Santayana had his finger on the pulse of my nation in this moment. There is a lot of hysteria spreading among the cultured classes, but since they are the cultured classes, it is repackaged as concern for social norms and national security. What appears to the naked eye and the unbiased mind as a dance with totalitarianism is descri...
Why should we be surprised that at a time when everything is supposed to be about race, from the skin color of certain newspaper editors forced to resign to whether we should capitalize the “B” in “Black,” the most disturbing and consequential attack on our civic body in decades ends up being all about the color of the protesters/terrorists? After the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by desperate and angry Trump supporters, the conversation turned from “why did they do it?” to ...
My father had terminal lung cancer. He fought like a Spartan at Thermopylae, his body riddled with chemo and radiation, his stomach filled with macrobiotic foods lovingly prepared by my mother, his mind steeped in the defiance of death as exhibited by Dylan Thomas who wrote the words that were buried with him, in his coffin: “And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage a...
Civil rights legislation always has its genesis in humanitarian principles: Protecting the weak, advocating for the voiceless, providing opportunities for the disenfranchised. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were remedies for institutional and generational racism that blocked many minorities, primarily African Americans, from obtaining equal status with their fellow citizens. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which marked its 30th year in 2020, mandated that this co...
I have always thought that Planned Parenthood got a pass on its origins. While most people know that Margaret Sanger was an avid eugenicist, defenders of the organization she founded have tried to downplay her philosophy for decades. Fast forward to the pandemic. Today, we are in the midst of a crisis that sees widespread fatalities and limited resources to address them. Now that at least two vaccines have been approved for widespread distribution, it is only natural that our...
