Christine Flowers: The speech I would have given

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 eighteen, 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 abhor?” 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 + 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.”

Christine Flowers is an attorney and lifelong Philadelphian. @flowerlady61