It’s that time of year again, an annual event that we all look forward to. No, it’s not Thanksgiving, it’s “Keep Living in the Sixties” weekend. The usual suspects of gray-haired, tie-dyed, plainclothes-wearing nuns and priests along with unwashed, dope-smoking, flea-infested, sandal-clad, Grateful Dead-listening college kids who think they were born two decades too late are descending on Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the School of the Americas. The hippies and their followers claim that the school trains right-wing despots and their soldiers to oppress their people in Latin America, something which has been disproven time and again, even by a congressional inquiry.
But that doesn’t deter these liberal priests and nuns, who have apparently decided that their vocational calling includes splashing their own blood on the base’s gates and flinging verbal abuse upon the soldiers serving their country. I guess liberal political activism trumps old-fashioned evangelization and sacramental living any day.
Yes, I know social justice is part of the mission of the Church, but, contrary to what they would have you believe, social justice doesn’t necessarily mean liberal politics. In fact, conservative principles can—Horrors!—fulfill the mandate of the Church in that area just as well, just differently.
