On the Washington Redskins.

Not opposed to Matriculation - even for women.

Fr. Rutler is a wonderful man. 

He makes everyone look stupid.

I love reading Fr. Rutler, as well as listening to him.  He is just so darn erudite, ain't he Trixie?  What?  Really, whenever he speaks or writes, he reminds me of how stupid we've become - even the highly educated, high school graduates and the certified Community College professionals and those grads who never got out from under, amongst us.

Fr. Rutler's essay in Crisis is one of the best commentaries I've read on the brouhaha over the Washington Redskins.  So many of us can be swayed by media and popular opinion, while language has deformed through manipulation by political activists and social engineers - I think it is safe to say many of us really do not know what we are talking about half the time. 

Ignorance of etymology.

That's it!  Ignorant Redskins all.  (He said 'ignorance'.)  Seriously, Fr. Rutler goes to the root of the problem - ignorance of language and vocabulary.  Discussing the Redskins:

There was real lack of understanding behind complaints about the trademarked name of the Washington Redskins professional football team, as racist and demeaning. That was shot down in District Court, the Court of Appeals, and finally by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009. One of the original complaints came from a Native American who was one year old when “Redskins” was registered as a mark in 1967. I myself have no case against calling Native Americans “Native Americans,” and I am well aware that the Lenni Lenapes were tilling the land on which I was born for possibly eleven centuries before my natal day. In 1684 a Scots settler, perhaps a Gordon for all we know, said they were “gentle, kind and good.” That was in New Jersey, and anyone born in New Jersey is radically native to America, so I claim the name for myself as well.

Now the case against the Washington Redskins has been revived, and it is an echo of stirrings from the 1970’s when a group of “college activists” forced Dartmouth to change its symbol from an Indian to a Pine Tree, even though pine trees lack athletic prowess. At the time, to the embarrassment of mostly pale-faced campus “activists,” chiefs of tribes across the nation said in a survey that they wanted to keep the Indian. Dartmouth was chartered by King George III in 1769 “for the education & instruction of Youth of the Indian tribes in this Land in reading, writing & all parts of Learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing & christianizing Children of Pagans as well as in all liberal Arts and Sciences; and also of English Youth and any others.”  

The term “Redskin” was a translation of the Peau-Rouge neologism of the benign and longsuffering French Jesuit missionaries. It was also self-referential, and the chief of the Sauks, Quashquame, was recorded in 1825 as referring to his “Red Skin nation.” James Fenimore Cooper popularized the term in allusion to native people he thought “comely” and never as an insult. Not infrequently did various sachems refer to Europeans as “red men” because of how they were sunburned by an unfamiliar outdoor life. - Fr. Rutler, Crisis Magazine

More interesting factoids from the article:

The term savage:

“Savage” is not a high compliment and certainly can be pejorative, but it is properly understood with detachment in the sense of its Latin source silvaticus, meaning wandering and wild, which would apply today to the typical undergraduate, whose vocabulary is much more limited than that of any of the Algonquian language groups.

The term tar baby:

Ignorance of etymology fuels the fire of such people, and consequently there is the foolishness of banning the term “tar baby” from storybooks even though it has nothing to do with race.

The term niggardly:

There is the actual instance of the forced resignation of a mayoral aide in Washington, D.C., for using the word “niggardly” with reference to the city budget. A member of the city council, who objected that the term was racist, was weak in his grasp of Old Norse, origin of the root word nigla, which means “fussing pedantically over nonsense.”

The term gay:

Things got complicated when the shocked city councilman was called “homophobic” by members of the “gay community” which defended the mayoral aide as one of their own. Even the good word “gay” has become freighted with new meaning, and I expect that the Gordon Highlanders may next object that the Scottish folkdance, “the Gay Gordons,” has become misinterpreted. This is not helped by the fact that it is danced counterclockwise. Julian Bond, as head of the NAACP, an organization that has managed steadfastly to keep its official name, sensibly said of the niggardly incident: “You hate to think that you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding.”

"I knew that."