Washington Times Editorial On Renaming Columbus Day

The Washington Times offers an editorial on the Washington D. C. Council renaming Columbus Day.

In its latest spasm of virtue-signaling last week, the D.C. Council further burnished its far-left credentials by adopting “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” as a legal holiday, replacing Columbus Day, to be observed Monday, Oct. 14.

It was only a matter of time before the District followed the lead of about 130 other towns and cities across the country with liberal mayors and city councils that have jettisoned Christopher Columbus, who they characterize as racist and genocidal.

“Christopher Columbus enslaved, colonized, mutilated, and massacred thousands of indigenous people in the Americas,” asserts the resolution (without any documentation) introduced by D.C. Council member David Grosso. It would be quite a mean feat for a single man to do all that, if it were true. But it’s little more than character assassination and historical revisionism at their worst.

History records that Columbus was a deeply religious man, a devout Catholic often seen wearing the Franciscan habit. As Ben Broussard wrote in an August 2012 article for a Catholic group, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property about Columbus’ missionary zeal: “Upon his first encounter with the natives of San Salvador [an island now part of the Bahamas, where he first landed], Columbus concludes, ‘I recognized that they were people who would be better converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force.’” Columbus’ records also show he characterized the natives as “sweet and gentle.”

As to the claim the explorer “enslaved” the indigenous peoples he met, Mr. Broussard first notes that “slavery was already widespread among the native Indians when Columbus arrived.”

You can read the rest of the editorial via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/13/editorial-dc-push-for-indigenous-peoples-day-is-ba/