So we’re seeing play out yet another example of “religion is thought to make people better but guess what IT DOESN’T (necessarily).”

The entitled young male shits who bullied Nathan Phillips are all students at a Catholic boys’ school, so that doesn’t speak very well for how Catholic boys’ schools educate their boys, does it. Teaching basic decency isn’t really the role of schools, and probably shouldn’t be, but at the same time, schools by their nature collect children together into a small space for hours every day, so in that sense teaching / enforcing basic decency is their responsibility. They have a responsibility to see to it that the students don’t brutalize each other, which means they have a duty to convey to the students that brutalizing people is not ok; there’s your basic morality right there.

The reporting I’m seeing is that CovCath (as they call it) is notorious for being a swamp of entitled bullying shits. What does that remind me of? Oh yes, Brett Kavanaugh’s school, and Brett Kavanaugh himself, and Brett Kavanaugh’s entitled bullying shits of friends.

Could this be a common pattern?

Easily. Why? Because one thing religion does is make people think they’re better than people not inside the magic religious circle. Those bullies from CovCath were in Washington to advocate for making women prisoners of their own bodies; they were there to campaign for taking away the rights of people who are not like them – people who are not male. No doubt they have all been carefully trained to think and say they’re there to Rescue the Fetus, but that’s gilding. They can’t Rescue the Fetus without forcing the fetus’s host to continue hosting it – inside her body – against her will. They’re campaigning for a law to compel all women who get pregnant to continue being pregnant whether they want to or not. They’re campaigning to take a basic right to bodily autonomy away from the half of humanity that they are not. That’s a bully move in itself. It’s a bully move when the pope does it and it’s a bully move when they do it.

The Catholic Conference of Kentucky has a statement put out by the school and the diocese (they don’t want us to forget that this is all Catholic business – ok then, we won’t):

The Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School have issued the following statement:

We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C. We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.

The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.

We know this incident also has tainted the entire witness of the March for Life and express our most sincere apologies to all those who attended the March and all those who support the pro-life movement.

They mean the anti-women’s rights movement, the take women’s bodily autonomy away movement.

Which raises the question – what do they mean “the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person”? What teachings? Is that what Catholicism is all about? Has it ever been?

I say cut the bullshit. Catholicism historically was all about what shit humans are and how far they fall short of the glory of god. The duality was central. “You are fallen and wicked; God alone is great”: that was the Church’s Teaching for most of its history. They put it a little more gently now, but only a little, and the emphasis is on obedience and submission, not dignity and respect.

There are of course many Catholics and other believers who are better than that, and who filter out the cruel oppressive stuff to make a church and ideology to match. But don’t go thinking Catholic schools as such teach their students “first, do no harm” or anything like it.