Ocasio-Cortez Hits Back At Kellyanne Conway: ‘Are You Trying To Imply That I Am Less Christian?’
Freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, hit back at White House counselor Kellyane Conway for suggesting that she was a poor Christian, The Hill reports. Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks came in a tweet on Sunday, which she addressed specifically to Conway.
“On Easter I was away from tech visiting my grandmother in Puerto Rico, which continues to suffer from the White House’s incompetent disaster response,” she posted. “Are you trying to imply that I am less Christian? What was the point of you bringing this up on national TV?”
The congresswoman was responding to a television appearance hours earlier in which Conway expressed outrage over Ocasio-Cortez quickly condemning the New Zealand mosque shootings, yet not commenting on the more recent coordinated terrorist bombings in Sri Lanka which left more than 300 Christians dead.
“I see officials who get a lot of airtime and ink like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, congresswoman, who tweets many times about the mosque and never once about the Christians being killed in Sri Lanka,” Conway said. Her statements were made during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. Tapper was attempting to discuss President Donald Trump’s recent response to the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one protester dead.
Heartbroken to hear of the San Diego synagogue shooting, particularly so on this final day of Passover.
We have a responsibility to love + protect our neighbors.
The longer the Senate delays holding a vote on #HR8, the more we put Americans at risk.https://t.co/ef9FURMFQ5
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 27, 2019
Conway and Tapper were essentially rehashing an old discussion of the appropriateness of Trump’s response, in which he claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the rally, which many have felt sounds like a defense of white supremacists.
In a separate tweet, Ocasio-Cortez continued to hit back at Conway for criticizing her response to the attacks while deflecting from Trump’s own similar controversy.
“You are using this as an excuse to stoke suspicion around my Christianity + faith life,” she tweeted. “The Sri Lanka massacre was horrifying. No one should be targeted for their religion. If you’re so moved, let’s do more to welcome immigrants fleeing religious persecution.”
Conway also took issue with a number of Democrats characterizing the victims of the attack as “Easter worshipers,” specifically citing statements made by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in an apparent attempt to paint left-leaning politicians as somehow unsympathetic to the Christian community while acutely sensitive to Muslim worshippers in similar circumstances.
Ocasio-Cortez also responded to that line of attack by explaining that because Easter is the holiest day of the year for Christians, that phrasing was indicative of the particular horror of those attacks rather than any sort of hesitance to describe Christians as Christians.
