Want to enter a really sensitive political discussion? Mix together religion, gay marriage, Constitutional powers and a school shooting into one statement.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum felt it was necessary at CNN’s debate last week to compare a Columbine victim to Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk jailed for refusing to issue gay marriage licenses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0daofc3zmHo
“Sixteen years ago this country was tremendously inspired by a young woman who faced a gunman in Columbine and was challenged about her faith and refused to deny god. We saw her as a hero,” he said. “Today, someone who refuses to defy a judge’s unconstitutional verdict is ridiculed and criticized, chastised, because she’s standing up and not denying her god and her faith.”
Besides being unrelated topics, the anecdote about Columbine is not true — at least not as he described it. A young woman was shot after answering the fateful question, but she survived. Her name is Valeen Schnurr. However, Cassie Bernall is often mistaken for the victim who professed a love for God before she died.
Another survivor, Amanda Stair Duran, who witnessed the horrific event unfold in the school’s library posted a YouTube video responding to Santorum’s remarks and asked for an apology not just for his inaccuracies, but for ungracefully mashing together controversies for brownie points.
“As a library survivor myself … I was highly, highly offended by his comparison because not only is the story about Cassie untrue, she was never asked about whether she believed in God or anything like that, it was actually Valeen Schnurr who was asked that and that she is alive and well,” said Duran.
“Not only is Kim Davis alive and well, but the fact that she’s being compared to a Columbine victim is directly insulting because Ms. Davis never had to hide under a table while everyone got shot around her. She has never been held at gun point at any point in her life,” she said.
“I can tell you as a library survivor myself, you don’t want to experience the feeling of having everyone within 10 feet of you being shot. It’s a downright terrifying sensation. The fact that she’s being compared to somebody who’s been killed in the library isn’t even alive to tell her side of the story, it’s just degrading to all of us who survived and all of us who were there.”
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