Three Heroes And A Mob Of Traitorous Goons

In Lucian Read’s startling photo “Hell House,” Marine 1st Sgt. Bradley Kasal – nearly unconscious from loss of blood, unable to support his own weight after sheltering a fellow Marine from a grenade blast and still holding his pistol in his right hand and his Ka-Bar knife in his left – is carried to safety by Marine Lance Corporals Chris Marquez and Dane Schaffer. Kasal’s life-threatening injuries were sustained while he protected other wounded Marines during action in Fallujah in November 2004. 

Bradley Kasal, Chris Marquez and Dane Schaffer are the embodiment of the words “No Man Left Behind.”

United States Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick was, according to news reports, bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher, when the Capitol was invaded on January 6. “He returned to his division office and collapsed,” the Capitol Police said in a subsequent statement. “He was taken to a local hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.” Prior to his burial at Arlington National Cemetery - with full military honors – he received the distinction of laying-in-honor in the Rotunda of the Capitol. 

One police officer suffered two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs; another was stabbed with a metal fence stake.

Two police officers – one from the Capital Police, one from the D.C. force – have died by suicide since the terrorist attack.

Since their defense of the Constitution and Americans’ freedom, thirty-eight Capitol Police have tested positive for the coronavirus – almost all officers and supervisors who responded to the riots of January 6.

Approximately sixty-five District of Colombia officers sustained a wide range of injuries including concussions from head blows with metal poles ripped from inauguration platforms under construction and a pole with an American flag attached to it. Other officers suffered irritated lungs after being hit with bear and pepper sprays. Officers were pushed down stairs, trampled by rioters, punched and run over in the invading stampede.

Most of these injuries were directly inflicted by delusionally self-described “patriots” who alleged that their only concern was the wellbeing of the Nation and each other. All this while these same goons called for the assassinations of the Speaker of the House and a Vice-President who was about to dare to discharge his Constitutional responsibilities. 

Perhaps the most shining example of the concern for others of these “proud” terrorists was the final moments of the life of Rosanne Boyland, a rioter trampled by her fellow terrorist. A police body camera shows the bullies charging over Boyland as her friend Justin Winchell shouted “She’s gonna die!” The death of police officers, her death and the death of three other invaders of the Capitol did not seem to matter to the barbarians at the gates. 

Let’s be clear about one thing: The thugs who assaulted the Capitol on January 6 were not heroes and they were not defending the Nation or its Constitution. They killed and wounded police officers. They killed and wounded their own. And, then the cowards fled to their homes across the country, hoping desperately not to be caught by the FBI or turned in by their families. More than one returned to living in his mommy’s basement. They know nothing of Duty and Honor or “No Man Left Behind.”

For the past five years, Americans of faith - Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews; Christians of all denominations; Shia and Sunni Muslims; Hindus and Buddhists – have watched (too often in silence) as self-appointed “faith leaders” and advocates of the “prosperity gospel” invoked Divine Providence and called angels from Africa to protect the occupant of the White House. 

Despite their hysterics and speaking-in-tongues prophecies that he was God’s “Chosen One,” he lost the election of November 3, 2020 – 81,283,098 to 74,222,958 or 306 Electoral College votes to 232. 

He lost. The numbers don’t lie. Republican governors, secretaries of state and statewide and local elections officials have not lied. There was no steal. Angels were not overwhelmed by satanic forces. And History – as History is wont to do – is moving on.

In the aftermath of the January 6 terrorist attack on the Capitol, it is time for Americans of every religious faith and no faith to unequivocally condemn the so-called proud boys, the three percenters, the boogaloo boys, the traitors and cowards who killed police and their own and fled in ignominy and every form of White-race-based nationalism. 

Whoever speaks the truth gives honest evidence,
but a false witness utters deceit.
Proverbs 12:17

“Finally, my brothers and sisters, whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest
whatsoever things are just…
whatsoever things are of god report,
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,
think on these things.
Paul to the Philippians 4:8

Do not mix truth with falsehood, 
nor conceal the truth while you know it.
Surah al-baqarah: 42, The Koran

Three things cannot be long hidden:
the sun, the moon, and the truth…
One who acts on truth is happy
in this world and beyond.
Gautama Buddha

From the pulpit and the minbar and the bimah, America’s religious leaders must call those who instigated the riots that lead to the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and Capitol invader Rosanne Boyland to turn from their lies and recognize and accept the truth.

It is time for those who would be genuine leaders of religious communities to courageously condemn public personalities, politicians and private individuals who promote the lies of anonymous website polemicists and television and radio disseminators of hatred and unreasoned revenge. It is time to say that those who encouraged angry hooligans to storm Capitol Hill and disrupt a Constitutionally mandated process are traitors, terrorists and murderers. They assaulted the Capitol with the intent to kill and they did! In fact, two Pennsylvania women arrested on January 29 bragged, “We broke into the Capitol… we got inside… We were looking for Nancy (Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives) to shoot her in the friggin’ brain but we didn’t find her.” And an untold number or terrorists were caught on video shouting that they were looking for the Vice-President in order to “lynch him.”

[No person of faith can declare him or herself “pro-life” and subscribe to a politic in which terrorists seek to “lynch” the Vice-President and hope to see someone “shoot [the Speaker of the House] in the friggin’ head.” At best, that’s theological schizophrenia. At worst, it is grievously sinful.]

If Christianity… No! If religion and religious faith are to have any future in coming generations of Americans, today’s religious leaders must call those of the same ilk as the Capitol invaders precisely what they are - murderers and murderous posses.

Having named these insurrectionists, religious leaders must call them to genuine metanoia – change of heart. In this time of national crisis, silence is the forfeiture of leadership and authority.

Your silence gives consent.
Plato

If America’s religious leaders fail to condemn the “proud boys,” “the boogaloos,” “the three percenters,” “the oath keepers” and their ilk, present and future generations of young Americans will look at the likes of New York’s smiling Cardinal Timothy Dolan, self-aggrandizing and private jet flying presidential sycophant and “spiritual advisor” Paula White, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Texas and, of course, the evangelical sexual voyeur and presidential groveler Jerry Falwell, Jr. and say, “We reject you and all you stand for – including the God you claim to serve. A plague on all your houses.”

“To remember is an expression of humanity. 
To remember is a sign of civility. To remember is a condition for 
a better future of peace and fraternity… 
To remember also means being careful because these things
can happen again, starting with ideological proposals
that claim to want to save a people but 
end up destroying a people and humanity…
Be wary of how this path of death, extermination and brutality started
[referring to the Nazis’ rise to power on a wave of extreme nationalism].
Pope Francis, January 27, 2021
International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Almost six months before the attack on the Capitol, in early June 2020, a woman stepped forward and spoke clearly about the same person who would dispatch hundreds, perhaps thousands of his goons to attack the Capitol, the Vice-President and Congress. In a series of television interviews, the Most Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., described the behaviors of the occupant of the White House as 

…contrary to the teachings of Jesus and antithetical
to everything that we as a church stand for.

She condemned his 

…symbolic misuse of the most sacred texts and 
traditions of our church… primal sin… inflammatory reports…

Bishop Budde set an example of other religious leaders – especially men who have remained silent through the past five years:

I am challenging his actions and I am saying to him
and all who will listen that the Gospel of Jesus
and the teachings of the Scriptures are antithetical 
to the messages that he is communicating and 
the way he is responding to people at this moment
and there is no spiritual mantel of authority for the actions
that he had just moments before said he would take.

[Thanks be to God for religious women who show the way to men.]

There can be no justifying or denying it. The January 6 attack on the Capitol and the declarations and events of the days and weeks leading up to it – including the calls for a “stop the steal” rally that day – were murder, terrorism and treason. 

Let us pray for the repose of the souls of those who have died, especially Officer Brian Sicknick and the two officers who committed suicide. Let us pray for the conversion of the hearts and minds and souls of the insurrectionists and traitors.

And should they persist, should they continue in their obstinacy of heart, let us declare anathema sunt.