CNN’s Kirsten Powers: I Thought at the Time Covington Students Should Be Punished

EXCERPT:

BERMAN: “Let me just read a little bit more of what you wrote and it gets to that point. By the way, when I read it, I really took more than this is about Twitter or Covington. I do think you were making a very big statement there. You said, 'I want to stand on the side of justice and equality but also of grace. I have failed to do that. Part of grace is recognizing my own fallibilities and imperfect judgment and reminding myself that there but for the grace of God go I.' I think it’s incredibly wonderful and brave for you to do this, but does it occur to you that you are going to unilaterally disarm in a way? You are going to do this, but what if all the other people don’t do it also? The haters out there.”
POWERS: “Yeah. I did get a lot of — surprisingly, most of the feedback was pretty positive. But I did have a lot of people saying, 'No, you need to be calling these things out. You need to say these things.' And I want to say I’m still going to call things out, stand up for justice and equality. But I do think that we need to have a conversation at some point that addresses the fact that the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime. By that, what I mean is, you know, even in the case of the Covington School, I guess what I would have wanted was for them to maybe be disciplined in some way by their school and then there be some sort of reconciliation. They would apologize for whatever part they played in it. And Nathan Phillips could apologize for whatever part he played and there could be some kind of reconciliation. But the truth of the matter is, in the current climate we live in, that was very naive of me.”