Monday, January 21, 2019

Have Watched Additional Footage of Covington Catholic Boys, and People Are Right: Such Questions It Raises! — Here Are Mine


I've watched the additional footage of the Covington Catholic boys and Nathan Phillips circulated on social media yesterday, and it has really shifted my perspective. Now I have so many questions:

1. Why were these boys coming from March for Life with Covington Catholic labels on their clothes wearing MAGA hats?

2. Why were these Covington Catholic boys in MAGA hats coming from March for Life taunting a native American elder, making racist gestures and sounds, chanting "Build that wall!"?*

3. Why was Nicholas Sandmann, who has now identified himself, staring Nathan Phillips down, smirking at him, blocking his way — footage that has now gone around the world, appalling people around the world, demonstrating something about Catholic "pro-life" values that rightly disgusts many people?

3. Why was Nicholas Sandmann wearing a MAGA hat as he did this?

4. These young gentlemen sporting Catholic insignia and wearing MAGA hats had just come from March for Life, which claims to be all about respect for life: what's the connection between their "pro-life" Catholic values and their behavior?

5. Why were they unchaperoned?**

6. Where were the adults?*** Who permitted them to wear the MAGA hats atop their Catholic school insignia?

8. What does MAGA have to do with pro-life values? What does "Build that wall!" have to do with pro-life values?

9. Why can we count on powerful Catholic groups, anytime narratives like this reach the mainstream,  to try immediately to twist and turn them and lie about them? So that Catholics have turned themselves into People of the Lie in the eyes of many, as they shout "pro-life" slogans ….

10. Why do "pro-life" Catholics so predictably stand on the side of white privilege, of economic privilege, of racism, of "Build that wall!" — and what does all of this have to do with the "pro-life" cause?

People who are saying that the additional video coverage about what happened in this ugly demonstration of Catholic "pro-life" values raises so many questions are absolutely correct. 

These are a few of my own.

* "Jon Stegenga, a photojournalist who drove to Washington on Friday from South Carolina to cover the Indigenous Peoples March, recalled hearing students say 'build the wall' and 'Trump 2020.' He said it was about that time that Phillips intervened."

** "To Jessica Travis, a Florida attorney who was at the memorial with her mother, the students looked out of control.

'The kids really went into a mob mentality, honestly,' she said, adding that she didn’t see any chaperones trying to control the situation. She said she heard one student tell the Hebrew Israelites to 'drink the Trump water.'"

*** "For a brief moment at the beginning of the video, a priest is seen watching from behind the boys."

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