What pisses me off about the ongoing fallout from the massacre in Orlando is this: non-Muslims who hate LBGT folks are pretending that their homophobia and its presence in the entire social system in the US is somehow not responsible for these murders and/or is somehow different from the homophobia of the killer because he has a Muslim name. Tangential to this is the ongoing effort by the mainstream media and the two presumptive presidential candidates to paint the massacre as an anti-American attack by a jihadist who hates our freedoms. I don’t know about you, but the first response most people I know had to first hearing the news was that the crime was an attack by a murderous homophobe. Indeed, many folks probably first thought that the murderer was a right-wing homophobe who considered himself Christian. I know I did.
What will prove interesting in the next few days is how the Trump campaign and its right-wing supporters rewrite the narrative. Despite the fact that the essential element of this murder spree was the killer’s hatred of LBGT human beings, one can be fairly certain that the right wing will find a way to deny that element. After all, doing do would not only bring into question their ongoing campaign against LBGT rights, but also raise questions as to their true motivations for the campaign. In other words, is the right wing fundamentalist Christian demographic in the Republican Party actively working to create a climate where gay, lesbian, and transgendered people can be considered legitimate targets by gunmen looking for humans to kill? Does its campaign against these US residents actively seek to
instigate brutality against LBGT members of US society? Are political and church leaders in the anti-gay movement intentionally laying the groundwork for more such murders in the future? Objectively, my answer would have to be yes, they are.