Kiersten Hening refused to kneel. The young soccer player firmly declined to participate in the pagan ritual of collective kneeling in homage and submission to that Marxist deity known as BLM.
Since then, we have learned that her coach, enraged by the girl’s decision, benched her, insulted her and made her life miserable until he managed to force her off the Virginia Tech Hokies. Here’s an edifying lesson in progressive feminism that you will not read in the left-wing press, which is busy today harassing police officers, or perhaps saving the planet, or proposing that we all eat synthetic steaks.
Only two of the girls on the team had the courage to refuse to participate in the charade. Kiersten wouldn’t kneel, despite knowing such actions would earn her the label of a racist, a fascist and worse. Like Kiersten, only a handful of men in the world have rejected supporting this woke mob when it ambushed them to kneel in public, as if it were a sieve of identity purity.
But Kiersten has taught us all a lesson. This has nothing to do with racism (actually, BLM has nothing to do with racism, either), but rather the innermost being of man. Kneeling is very serious.
Animals don’t kneel. You won’t find it in the iconography of most ancient tribes. And it is not a gesture void of meaning. Kneeling is a religious act of genuine humanity.
Since ancient times, man alone has knelt to pray before God. That’s because kneeling is an immense spiritual symbol. Thus, man prostrates himself before God, but without stripping himself of his particular human dignity, represented in the fact of not abandoning verticality.
Whoever kneels worships God without ceasing to be a man. Freely. He gives up his pride. But there is no slavery, no total prostration. Kneeling establishes a profound relationship between man and his Creator.
There is a fascinating connection, in Latin etymology, between the knees and the cheeks. And although it would take a long time to explain it — and I don’t think Kiersten’s coach is going to read it — in relation to crying, the same tears fall down the cheeks, which in the womb we usually keep glued to our knees.
Also, our knees allow us to be vertical and it’s not a coincidence that they are the largest and most complex joint in the human body.
Throughout history, outside of the religious context, we only find the custom of kneeling as an expression of solemn reverence in certain medieval rituals, and in the marriage proposal since the times of courtly love. However, even in these cases there are traces of the religious sense.
In the belief that it is God who establishes rulers, the medieval man thus renders his servitude, or accepts as coming from the divine will the title that is granted him.
In short, never before have we knelt before other men.
When BLM made bending the knee, or knees, fashionable to defend its cause, it unwittingly reflected its true obsession, which has nothing to do with racism: The Marxism underlying BLM implies the submission of man to its ideology, which is incompatible with freedom and human dignity. We have seen it throughout history: Marxist regimes fall when men decide to stand up.
Kiersten Hening is just a normal girl; that’s why I like her story. It is not about a whole soccer team, like the Poland players who didn’t take a knee at the World Cup last March, nor is it about a great politician known throughout the world.
Kiersten is any one of us, trying to separate soccer, her passion, from the compulsory and public immersion in the single thought of the left. She’s exercising her right to live on her feet, even if a coach, in very strange behavior, demands that she kneel.
No one should kneel for anything other than God — unless they have lost a contact lens.
This article first appeared on The Western Journal en Español.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
