When multiple big stories happen in any given week, it’s hard for me to figure out what to choose as a topic. Last week, I had three choices: the Graham Platner win in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary, parents announcing that they’d aborted their Down syndrome child, and the guilty verdict of Karmelo Anthony.

Each story was compelling in its own way, dealing with issues that have fascinated me over the years: antisemitism, abortion, and the race card.

Platner’s Nazi tattoo was excused by people who are loathe to call themselves antisemites, and yet, they most certainly are.

The Fergusons’ decision to brazenly announce that they had killed their unborn child establishes better than anything I’ve ever written the eugenicist roots of the pro-choice movement.

The complaints of certain Black Americans that Karmelo Anthony was convicted because he was Black, and not because he had plunged a knife into the chest of an unarmed white boy, is a perfect example of the race card being slammed on the table.

What to do? How to choose? Each of these stories is so deserving of 800 words that it made me want to tear out my increasingly silvered strands.

But then it hit me: This is the same story. Sure, there are different details aimed at different constituencies, but there is a common thread: inhumanity.

There is a special sort of nihilism that comes from looking someone in the eye and essentially saying “Yeah, I know he used to be a Nazi sympathizer, and still might be, but he’s so much better than the old lady who doesn’t hate Trump.”

The fact that you could actually cast a vote for a man who also treats women like trash, and then makes them film videos expressing how much they don’t mind being treated like trash, is a sign that you don’t respect the dignity of your woman, and any woman.

The fact that parents can look at a photo of their unborn child and exult with joy on social media when they think he’s “normal,” then decide to just erase him after a diagnosis of “imperfection” is proof positive that five decades of legalized abortion has infected two entire generations — the ones that made it out of the womb — with a sense of proprietorship over life.

It is the same philosophy that led Oliver Wendell Holmes to famously write in his decision in Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

It confirms my belief that overturning Roe v. Wade, while a positive development, happened too late. We have already birthed too many people who were raised to believe that killing a child in the womb is a fundamental right and that banning it is abusive.

This story hit me particularly hard, because I know young adults with Down syndrome, and they are among the best human beings I have ever met or expect to meet. The thought that we would tolerate their erasure is anathema.

The scariest part of the Ferguson story is that they believed they’d get support, which they did. But they also received criticism, hostility and even death threats. I’m not thrilled about the latter, but I’m not weeping for them. I get death threats all the time, and I’ve never aborted an imperfect child. I just write about how horrible that is.

Finally, there are two mothers who have lost their sons. One of them will never be able to hear his voice or hold him in her arms again and is condemned to see his face in his remaining twin brother. While that is some comfort, it must be an unimaginable pain. The other mother will be able to visit her son the murderer for at least the next 17 years while he ruminates on his deliberate act of violence.

All over social media, I saw good-hearted people expressing sympathy for Karmelo Anthony’s mother. To me, that showed an amazing lack of empathy for his victim’s family. Anthony and his relatives expressed no sorrow, no regret, no concern for the family of Austin Metcalf. They only showed a narcissistic concern for themselves and what they were facing.

And of course, they mixed in race. They suggested Anthony would have received a much lighter sentence if he were white. They accused the jury of being racist because there were no Black people on it. They never heard of O.J. Simpson, who up until his death was looking for his dead wife’s killer.

Antisemitism, eugenics and racism are all a part of the same problem: the failure to see the dignity in others, whether because they are a different religion, are “imperfect” or don’t look like us. The past week gave us the triple crown of inhumanity.

Copyright 2026 Christine Flowers