Guyger claims she entered Jean's apartment by accident (she lived on the floor above) and, mistaking him for a burglar, shot him dead. Jean was eating a bowl of ice cream.

Following Guyger's sentencing, Jean's 18-year-old brother Brandt embraced Guyger.

"I forgive you," he told her; "I love you as a person, and I don't wish anything bad on you."

Most of us would call this a model act of mercy.

Yet, astonishingly, many Americans quickly took to social media expressing their disapproval of Brandt.

One newspaper columnist called it a "disappointing display of yet another person of color too ready to absolve a white person who harmed them."

Apparently, forgiveness is no longer a virtue in this country.

In the case of Guyger and the Jeans, there are complicating factors.

Guyger, a white woman, was sentenced to ten years in prison for sneaking into the home of an unarmed black man and killing him.

Many believe her sentence to be unacceptably light.

"I think this whole act of forgiveness has gotten black people where they are in this country right now," Ryan Williams, a black man, told The Washington Post.

African American historian Jemar Tisby similarly argued that "black people, when they experience injustice, there's almost an expectation that we will immediately forgive and therefore can sort of move on."

Not so, says Tisby: "We have a right to be angry, a right to grieve, and a right to want justice."

This rising reticence about forgiveness goes beyond racial politics.

Recently, television personality Ellen DeGeneres was castigated by left-wing celebrities and activists for sitting next to former president George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game.

As one of the first celebrities in Hollywood to "come out" as same-sex attracted, Degeneres has long been a progressive icon.

Yet even that didn't get her a free pass.

Actor Mark Ruffalo of Spotlightfame tweeted: "Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead [sic] torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars—emotional & otherwise—inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even begin to talk about kindness."

Meanwhile, our current cultural distemper is one in which any celebrity or politician, dead or alive, risks having some comment or action revisited for public censure—the so-called "cancel culture."

Black comedian Kevin Hart was pressured to step down from hosting the Oscars because of a 10-year-old tweet that disparaged homosexuality.

Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray was publicly censured for several homophobic tweets he wrote when he was 15 years old.

And, of course, we can't forget the rapid return of that ancient Roman practice, damnatio memoriae—the "condemnation of memory," where any figure in American history found to have violated modern standards of political correctness may be unceremoniously purged from public memory.

We as a nation are rapidly dispensing with forgiveness.

In its stead, we favor resentment, vengeance, and even hatred.

This cultivation of animosity is a thoroughly un-American trait, and one that seriously threatens the Christian foundations of our republic.

Christ himself, more than anyone else in human history, had a right to bitterness and revenge.

His own people betrayed him to an oppressive foreign regime, who then visited the full force of government-sanctioned violence upon him.

Mocked, scourged, stripped, and crucified, this sorrowful servant refused to indulge in hate.

Rather, as he asphyxiated on the Cross, he gasped those unforgettable words: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Continue reading

• Image: YouTube/KENS 5

I was 27 when I landed an early-morning anchor job at the ABC News affiliate in Dallas. Each weekday, I set my alarm for 2:30 a.m., showered, put on makeup and dressed as though I were competing in a fashion show.

Then I jumped into the driver's seat of my blue Honda Accord and sped south down the highway.

The biggest impediment to my success as a morning news anchor wasn't the hours, my wardrobe or my on-air delivery. It was the enemy next door.

My next-door neighbour had a Yorkshire terrier that barked incessantly in the evenings, running along the chain-link fence just outside my bedroom window.

To get enough sleep to function in my job, I was under the covers with lights out no later than 8 p.m.

I asked my neighbour to please take her dog inside for the night. She ignored my request.

Morning after morning, I dragged myself out of bed, smeared concealer under my eyes and guzzled coffee to make up for lost sleep.

My resentment boiled like hot lava.

How could an eight-pound dog sabotage my best efforts to excel in a competitive television market?

I lay in bed at night listening to the dog's shrill bark and imagined all the ways I could silence it.

It wasn't pretty.

When I began to fantasize about lacing a juicy steak with poison and dropping it over the fence, my dark passion caught me by surprise.

Who was I becoming?

This woman who sang in church on Sundays, and on Mondays dreamed up ways to hurt her neighbour's pet.

Instead of silencing the Yorkie, my husband and I filed a noise complaint with the city.

The court set a hearing date for Dec. 24.

My neighbour, in retaliation, baited a trap on her property with cat food, lured my tabby over the fence and sent him to the pound.

By the time my husband's parents arrived for their Christmastime visit, I was obsessed.

My in-laws were my heroes and spiritual mentors, so I asked them what they would do about the dog.

"If you're going to be a follower of Jesus," my father-in-law said, "you'll love your enemy, not sue her."

He was a man who had suffered in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II and had forgiven his brutal captors.

Over the years I had seen him epitomize what it looked like to "love your neighbour as yourself."

As Christmas approached, I had to choose which voice would control my next move: the contemptuous one that demonized a neighbour or the empathetic and self-sacrificing one being seriously tested.

I walked reluctantly across the driveway dividing our houses, climbed the front steps and knocked on her door.

My neighbor faced me with a steely grimace. Continue reading

• Image: A Quiet Refuge

Certainly if you are white she will think you are pretty disgusting.

She thinks that you, like ‘all white people', partake in ‘racial violence'.

She thinks you have built your ‘existence, privilege and success' on ‘the backs, blood and death of people of colour'.

In short, you're scum: you are racially violent and blinkered to your role in the spilling of black people's blood.

Who wouldn't hate someone like that? I would.

And don't even start Ms Bergdorf on homosexuals who support the Tory Party (‘special kind of dickhead[s]'), the Suffragettes (‘white supremacists'), or homeless people (the white ones apparently ‘have white privilege' - lucky bastards).

For someone who blathers on about acceptance, Ms Bergdorf seems curiously unaccepting of certain groups of people.

That Ms Bergdorf, a trans-woman and sometime model, poses as a promoter of tolerance and diversity and yet at the same time sanctions hatred or at least disdain for large sections of society has got some people scratching their heads.

How can this be?

This week she stepped down as an equalities adviser for the Labour Party following a media storm over her past hateful comments. (Literally everything you need to know about the Corbynised Labour Party and its trading of class politics for identity politics is contained in the fact that it wanted advice about equality from someone who thinks the white man on methadone who lives in a skip enjoys ‘white privilege'.)

Now some people are laughing, and it's a confused laugh, at the fact that an aspiring equalities adviser could be so mean about certain social groups.

But it makes sense. Perfect sense.

Hatred, demonisation and the treatment of large swathes of society as backward are key elements of the politics of identity.

It is not an accident that many identitarians hold extremely intolerant views of certain social groups.

They are not going ‘off-script' when they casually write off white people or straight people or Christians as dickheads, supremacists, ignorant, evil, etc.

Rather, such a callous painting of ordinary people as ‘problematic', as creatures to be wary of, is central to this politics that relies for its very survival on the idea that minority groups are victimised and thus require help and flattery from those in authority.

For in order to sustain this beneficial status as ‘victim group', identitarians must continually construct a fantasy army of victimisers.

Their social and political status is utterly dependent on their ability to depict other people, ordinary people, you and me, as horrible, hateful, and perilous to their identity or their ‘existence'.

The fuel of their worldview is fear and hatred of others, of us.

They're all at it

Every identitarian activist devotes an extraordinary amount of energy to uncovering and complaining about the alleged backwardness of ordinary people.

Witness how gay-rights groups now scour for evidence of homophobic hatred.

So desperate are they to prove, against the evidence of everyday experience, that gays suffer horrible prejudice in 21st-century Britain that they have taken to flagging up schoolkids' use of the word ‘gay' as an insult to bolster their claim to victim status.

Or see how Muslim community groups trawl for evidence of ‘Islamophobia', gathering every stupid tweet or anti-Koran comment made on a bus into dossiers of dread that they might present to the media and the government.

They need this; it guarantees their funding; it grants them access to the sainted circle of threatened groups requiring special resources.

To ensure their survival in a politics that rewards those who suffer, they must set out to prove that non-Muslims are a problem; they must encourage hatred of non-Muslims. Continue reading

• Image: Metro