Ex-Congressman Says Parkland Students ‘Need A Belief In Jesus Christ’
Image by Getty Images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis March 2, 2018
Former Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz told Fox News that the survivors of the Parkland, Florida school shooting “need a belief in God, in Jesus Christ.”
Parkland is in a heavily Jewish part of Florida, and many of the victims and their classmates are Jewish. Media Matters highlighted the clip, which was part of a conversation about the funeral of evangelical leader Billy Graham.
Chaffetz, who was born Jewish but converted to Mormonism in college, said on Fox News that he believed that a belief in Jesus Christ “would help” the students returning to Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks after the shooting.
The massacre at Stoneman Douglas killed 17 people, many of them students, and has set off a new wave of calls for gun control. Chaffetz had an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, and the endorsement of its associated political action committee in his last election.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
