Floral Engagement
I recently came across several letters to the editor criticizing Mike Newall's recent article on Michael Flowers, the same Michael Flowers that I first met 36 years ago when he was carried into my Logan home as an infant [News, "Shock and Law," July 21, 2005]. When the article on my brother appeared, I predicted that the vast legion of anti-war readers would take umbrage. In a city that bleeds blue, groans under the weight of cars bearing Kerry-Edwards stickers and sees the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore as apocalyptic, this is to be expected. But critics need to be held to a minimal standard of reasonableness, and the letter writers fell below that standard.

Chris Randolph wrote [Mailbag, July 28, 2005] that Flowers "is simply doing a hatchet job to cover the asses of past and current federal officials, including high-ranking members of the current Bush administration." Oh, really? I thought that my brother and his colleagues had left extremely lucrative jobs and the safety of their homes to support an admirable cause, one in which justice and retribution are inextricably mixed. The tribunal and the support staff provided by the United States government are not there to obscure the alleged mistakes of this administration. They are, in fact, an apolitical (or at least bipartisan) group that includes Democrats as well as Republicans, and might even contain the random Libertarian.

We cry out for an end to the genocide in the Sudan, send planes in to bomb Serbia and lament the fact that we did nothing to halt the Holocaust, yet people are still so blinded by their opposition to this administration that they are unwilling to see the good in bringing Saddam Hussein to justice. The opponents of this administration are so myopic that they are willing to delegitimize something objectively honorable simply because it doesn't fit into their tidy rubric of "Bush = Bad and Liberal = Good."

A few days ago, I represented an individual from Romania who was granted asylum on the basis of the persecution he suffered as a member of the gypsy minority. Evil exists in the world, and it forces the innocent to flee in large numbers toward our shores. Some are fortunate and find safe haven. Hussein's victims never had an opportunity to flee. They were mutilated, gassed, decapitated, disembowled and dispatched to their deaths in ways that the normal mind finds impossible to fully comprehend. Randolph makes the incredible comment that the mass killings in 1982 were "relatively minor." Tell that to the victims.
Christine Flowers
City Paper contributor

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Born Free Information
The birth registry bill is a very small step that, while well-intentioned, will likely be of little use to the vast numbers of adoptees and their birth parents [News, "Birth Rights," Doron Taussig, July 21, 2005]. Adoptees and their birth parents face enormous, frustrating hurdles in this state. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no legal right of an adoptee to his or her birth parent's finances, and vice versa. Yet by closing adoption records, the state sends the messages that one or both parties must be kept separate for all times so that one does not interfere with the other's life, and that adoption itself is something to be kept in the closet. Which it is not, of course.

Why is the rest of the world using the Internet while adoption records seem to be stuck in the pre-telegraph era of closed information?
David Toub
Wyncote