GOP Congressman’s Campaign Attacked Emma Gonzalez for Her 'Communist' Clothing

The Facebook page for a Republican congressman's campaign attacked Emma Gonzalez, a Cuban-American Parkland survivor who has become a poster child for the gun control movement, for wearing a Cuban flag patch on her jacket at Saturday's March for Our Lives demonstration.

Representative Steve King of Iowa mocked the 18-year-old for the patch on Sunday, one day after hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., and worldwide, to protest gun violence.

"This is how you look when you claim Cuban heritage yet don't speak Spanish and ignore the fact that your ancestors fled the island when the dictatorship turned Cuba into a prison camp after removing all weapons from its citizens, hence their right to self defense,” the @KingforCongress Facebook page wrote in a post that included a photo of Gonzalez on stage on Saturday, her eyes closed and a tear running down her cheek. Gonzalez, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, has emerged as one of the most recognizable faces advocating for gun control after a gunman killed 17 people there in February.

It borders on tragic that Iowa, a state with so much to commend it, above all its people, has as its spokesperson on the national stage, an avowed racist, Steven King. The University of Iowa goes out of its way to recruit minorities to its campus, to promote diversity, but above all, to prepare its white students for the big world of which Iowa is such a small part. In turn, minority students have the opportunity to experience the realities of farm and small town life, if not in Iowa City itself, all around it. The tragedy is that today King is the voice of rural America. Let me rephrase that. King claims to be the voice of rural America. If no other voices from there to condemn him and, more important, replace him, then his voice is what it claims to be. When a racist takes the stage, everyone within hearing who stays silent becomes his audience.