OSV News did some fact-checking:
Claims circulating among right-leaning influencers about legislation under consideration in Congress to counter antisemitism on college campuses are not an accurate reflection of the legislation, according to an analysis by OSV News.
In a now-viral commencement address to Atchison, Kansas-based Benedictine College, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who is Catholic, claimed that “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”
But that is not an accurate description of the bill recently passed by the House that aims to crack down on campus antisemitism, according to a review of the bill’s text. It also appears to be a misinterpretation of Catholic teaching promulgated by the church’s magisterium regarding both the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and Catholic-Jewish relations.
Butker was not the only one to make such a false claim about the bill: social media influencers including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed the legislation banned the New Testament. A handful of hard-right House lawmakers also voted against the bill, making similar claims.
On May 1, amid unrest on some college campuses across the country amid protests of the war in Gaza, the House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act with broad bipartisan support in a 320-91 vote. As of May 16, the Senate has not yet taken up the bill, and its future in the upper chamber is uncertain.
The bill would require the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal anti-discrimination law. The bill targets federal funding for colleges and universities that fail to restrict antisemitic behavior.
Contrary to Butker’s claim, the bill does not impose jail sentences on anyone, including for such behavior.
And there’s this important fact regarding anti-semitism:
Catholic magisterial teaching rejects the assertion that the Jews collectively killed Christ.
The claim that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ — rather than Christ freely giving his life to atone for the sins of each individual person — prompted centuries of violence against Jews at the hands of Christians, particularly in Europe.
Since the Second Vatican Council, which took place 20 years after the systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust (known in Hebrew as the Shoah) during World War II, the Catholic Church has denounced “hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone,” while affirming the “spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews,” as stated in the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” a council document better known by its Latin name “Nostra Aetate,” promulgated in 1965.
Specifically, Nostra Aetate states that Christ’s voluntary submission to his passion and death for the redemption of humankind “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” The text also declared that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
