The Ironic Thing About the Two Black Congressional Baseball Shooting Heroes
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The two Capitol Hill Police officers recovering from the Congressional baseball shooting are receiving national praise.
As Rep. Joseph Scalise (R- La.) lay shot on the baseball field on Wednesday, Special agents Crystal Griner and David Bailey rushed in to help, also taking bullets from shooter James T. Hodgkinson. Although they were already shot, they reportedly rushed the shooter anyway.
"Crystal is one of the two Capitol Police officers who saved so many lives through her heroism, along with Special Agent David Bailey. They ran right into the fire," President Donald Trump said to the media on Wednesday. "They ran right into those guns and the bullets, and they saved a lot of lives. America salutes both of their courage. They have great, great courage."
However, people on Twitter pointed out something ironic about the heroes. Both Griner and Bailey are black and Griner is reportedly married to a woman. Scalise has been accused of attending a white nationalist meeting; he also wrote Louisiana's ban on gay marriage and voted against LGBT rights in Congress. Scalise earned a score of "0" on the Human Right's Campaign's Congressional Scorecard for LGBT legislation.
After the shooting former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke sent his best wishes to Scalise on Twitter and admonished the media for criticizing Scalise for "simply being at my meeting defending White civil rights."
Did Scalise actually attend a meeting for white nationalists?
Duke's tweet referenced a 2002 “European Unity and Rights Organization” event. The New York Times reported that Scalise accepted a speaking engagement at the event, but when questioned about it in December of 2014 he distanced himself from Duke, saying he barely remembered the speech and that he didn't know it was a white nationalist meeting.
After the story received media attention, Scalise apologized for speaking at the event.
"It was a mistake I regret, and I emphatically oppose the divisive racial and religious views groups like these hold," said Scalise in a statement. However, he also said he didn't remember speaking at it.
David Duke's political advisor in 2014, said that Scalise did speak but may not have known the event was hosting white nationalists.
“This all came about because I organized the EURO meeting for David Duke as a courtesy after he had moved to Russia. I’ve known David for 40 years so I did him a favor. As part of that, I decided to ask Steve, our local representative, to come by and say a few words before the conference started,” Knight told The Washington Post in 2014. “He agreed, believing it was going to be neighbors, friends, and family. He saw me not as David Duke’s guy, but as the president of our civic association.”
In the same 2014 New York Times article, Stephanie Grace, a Louisiana reporter said that Scalise had previously compared himself to Duke.
“He was explaining his politics and we were in this getting-to-know-each-other stage,” Grace told the Times in 2014. “He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage. I think he meant he supported the same policy ideas as David Duke, but he wasn’t David Duke, that he didn’t have the same feelings about certain people as David Duke did.”
