Tribal loyalty, love and principles

[Jocelyn Grunow]

No: HPFGUIDX 123333

This segment is often quoted in anti-Percy posts:
> "Wonder if Percy knows all that stuff about Crouch?"  Ron said as
> they walked up the drive to the castle.  "But maybe he doesn't
> care . . . It'd probably just make him admire Crouch even more.
> Yeah,  Percy loves rules.  He'd just say Crouch was refusing to
> break them for his own son."

I do wonder at the fact that so many people seem to agree with Ron that 
Crouch refusing to break the rules for his son is a bad thing.  Here we 
are invited to place tribal/family loyalty ahead of loyalty to 
principles.

Where I see Crouch Snr going wrong is NOT in condemning his Death Eater 
son to Azkaban IF HE DESERVED IT, but in not loving the the son enough 
to bring him up right, so it never came to this point.

It was lack of love that twisted (or contributed to the twisting of) 
Crouch Junior so that he became a person who merited the WW's severest 
legal punishment.  At that point it was far too late, completely 
pointless and wrong to try to make amends by perverting the course of 
justice.

When he refused to break the rules for his son he should have been 
doing it with grief and heartbreak BECAUSE IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO 
DO, not with cold dislike.

Jocelyn