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.
Sue him right into poverty.
National Review following Bill Kristol’s external leadership.
What a blithering piece of s*** this author is. Just disgusting.
I hope this prick loses his a$$ in court.
Enjoy Bankruptcy, Nick.
L
Yep, National Review exhibiting their Bill Kristol tendencies yet again.
btw, Mark Stein has an excellent article taking these idiots to task....I’ll work on a link.
These morons think they can just get away with the same stuff they used to do 10 - 20 years ago.
It’s like they haven’t figured out there’s an internet and their lies can be spotted in real-time.
“Nicholas Frankovich is a deputy managing editor of National Review.”
The students are minors, they are not public figures by any stretch of the imagination, it’s libel on its face.
Sue the author, Rich Lowry, and NR.
The National Review has become a national joke.
I subscribed to it when run by WF Buckley - a true intellect.
Don’t know where they lost the altimeter, airspeed, VVI and attitude indicator, but those clowns are not worth spitting upon now.
I seem to remember a commandment about not bearing false witness.
I bailed when they dumped Mark Steyn as a columnist over a bit of political correctness so stupid I’ve successfully managed to suppress any memory of it.
Exactly, sue his Pajama Boy butt & make an example of him.
In the future, maybe other scumbags in the media will hit pause before writing/posting libelous drivel.
Fiction writers posing as journalists.
Author is one dumb son of a vich.
Religion
An Apology
By Nicholas Frankovich 22 minutes ago
The overheated post I wrote has been taken down. Let this apology stand in its stead.
Your apology, you blithering idiot, is not accepted. May you soon go the way of the Weekly Standard.
National Review conservatism in a nutshell: Accept the Left’s premises, then try to get to the left of them so they can’t attack you.
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