Posted on 01/21/2019 3:07:52 PM PST by Fiji Hill
It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here.
For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.
The man the crowd ridiculed is Nathan Phillips, an elder of the Omaha tribe. He was in Washington for the Indigenous Peoples March, on Friday. It coincided with the March for Life, which Covington Catholic High School organized a contingent of students to attend. According to Phillips, their confrontation with him, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, involved a disagreement about “the wall.” He’s against it. They’re for it. Some of them, including the boy who makes himself the co-star of the video by stepping forward and getting in Phillips’s face, wore “Make America Great Again” hats.
They confused issues. Over the years, I’ve heard (and perpetrated, I confess) some imaginative definitions of the “seamless garment,” or “consistent ethic of life.” It’s a matter of identifying a common principle that can be shown to underlie and unite various causes — the abolition of abortion, of euthanasia, of the death penalty, of you name it — that most people would say are disparate and unrelated. How heightened border security might be of a piece with protecting unborn children is less intuitively obvious than most such hypothetical linkages I’ve encountered.
Among the unfortunate messages that the Covington students are sending through the video, several versions of which have gone viral, is that in its heart the pro-life movement in the United States in 2019 is less concerned to advocate for human rights than to cheer for one of the two major political parties or, more broadly, for one side in the great divide between Right and Left, or red and blue, as if the abortion debate were a Yankees–Red Sox game. Don’t do that if you want to persuade Democrats and independents who are ambivalent about abortion to hear you out on why their lives mattered even when they were gestating, and on why the lives of those who at any given moment are conceived but not yet born matter no less.
In a joint statement, Covington Catholic High School and the Diocese of Covington apologized, condemning the students’ actions and noting that their conduct “is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.” I don’t know how Phillips would describe his religious affiliation. He speaks of indigenous traditions. Some people who observe them integrate them with Christianity, but some don’t. In any case, keeping in mind the parable of the proper priests and the Good Samaritan, whose religious practice Jesus’s listeners thought was wrong, listen to Phillips reflect on his experience on the Mall. Decide for yourself who is more pleasing to Christ, Phillips or his mockers. As for the putatively Catholic students from Covington, they might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with.
Nothing like indulging in a little premature virtue signaling...l
Look at it from the author’s point of view: write a few garbage columns like this and you might get invited as the token “conservative” to a Georgetown dinner party where they will have you sit at the end like you’re George Will, you can soak up the glittering atmosphere and notable people who get mentioned in the Washington Post and the hosts will throw you some bones to gnaw on after you’ve made your nasty Trump comments. If your writing slanders kids, doesn’t investigate the truth of the charges, accepts the lurid tale because you saw an old minority person pictured, and you end up defaming and endangering them and their families, well so what? The only grime you got on your hands was from eating pork chops by the bone, they were free, and the party host made you feel important.
One of the best things about the election of President Trump is that it caused publications like the National Review, and politicians like Romney, the Bush family, and so many others to show their true colors. And they just keep doing it.
Looky — Rich has an alibi. Or maybe he’s just incompetent. Thanks Fiji Hill for posting the deleted article.
EXCLUSIVE: Turmoil Inside National Review Over Covington Catholic Story, Rich Lowry Losing Control
Big League Politics | 10/20/19 | Peter D’Abrosca
Posted on 01/20/2019 5:30:04 PM PST by Impala64ssa
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3721531/posts
National Review has become “The Nation”.
It was the Michael Mann lawsuit.
Yep. Which is why they are censoring.
Nicholas Frankovich is your enemy, folks. Remember his name.
JoMa
So where’s the condemnation of the real provocateurs?
Just the title of the article alone, They might as well have spit on the cross, give me a break. It’s offensive. It’s designed to create discord and anger. It’s so over the top and we’re at a time when the right needs to clearly put forth the idea of facts over emotion. This has not been a great run for clear thinking going into this new year. Not even a month in. And the National Review thinks just deleting into some kind of memory hole makes things right. That’s not real accountability.
NRO is and always has bedn scum. Sue them!
The Diocese of Covington, and Louisville, btw, since Archbishop Kurtz put his erroneous two cents in, will be getting a lot of mail this week.
“Your apology, you blithering idiot, is not accepted. May you soon go the way of the Weekly Standard.”
Agreed. This ain’t your mama’s conservatives.
The new ones fight back and punch hard.
Goldberg fired Ann Coulter from NRO after a heated response to 9/11. Frankovich should be toast by now.vtt
One would THINK a conservative journalist would want corroboration of what appeared on the MSM before believing it.
Beware of non Christians who claim to know/care when the Cross has been violated.
National review USED to be on our side.
CBS Evening ‘News’ just ran a story on this basically saying that the extra footage showed that the incident was ‘more complex’ than first reported. They had a brief clip of the families of the students and then had the Indian ‘elder’ say that he was stepping in to defuse the situation between the militant blacks and the students as an act of ‘healing’ banging on his little drum in the kid’s face. They neglected the part where he felt he was protecting the black Israelites against the hate-filled students.
And now he’s apologized for writing an “overheated” article.
Apparently “overheated” now means “completely unverified and researched at all” over at National Review. And the guy is an editor to boot.
I think two things:
1) There really will be serious lawsuits filed and won by the families of the boys involved.
2) The outcomes of those lawsuits will do more to restore civility to social media than the combined censorship efforts of Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al, and will do so more fairly besides.
And it was based on believing a lying account of the incident.
All Christendom should take great care. The devil is in there trying to get it to go over the top. If something seems way too sensational to be true, it well could be, and ought to be investigated.
What happened: a drum-beating Indian got in a MAGA cap wearing paleface’s face, and the paleface (barely) made a face at the Indian. Good grief, what a fuss. In the old days Indians shot arrows at cowboys, who then shot guns at the Indians. We really have nothing to worry about here.
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