Paved Roads

I just unloaded on Ben Carson on my aunt's Facebook post.

I honestly didn't know that the event in Orlando last weekend was going to affect me as much as it did.  At the beginning, it was an item in the news that happened to other people in another state, sad, of course, horrifying even, but still far away.  But then the magnitude of the story became clearer.  There was the interview with the mother who had been getting texts from her son, waiting outside to find out if he had survived.  And another, looking for news of her son and his fiancé.  Now I'm emotionally involved.  But identifying with the victims required one more step, and that came through the Facebook posts of friends.

    Like too many people in this world, I get my feel for public opinion from Facebook, and even when I don't agree with someone, much of the time I feel I can at least understand them.  I enjoy saying that I've got clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right.   One of my jokers posted something that just didn't sit right with me.  A conversation ensued.

  Mark asked me if I thought he had some "secret unresolved hatred" toward me.  I didn't quite know how to answer that.  Mark and I have been friends for a long time, and we have a great affection for each other.  But, at the same time, he supports policies that would cause me harm.  Not knowing what else to say, I said, "If I ever feel hated, I'll let you know."  And yet when he wrote on a different post, "What happens when simply holding a view contrary to the Party in power becomes a crime? Can't happen? Checked who's in the public bathroom lately?" I let it go. A report by the Human Rights Campaign said that more transgender people were killed in 2015 than during any other year on record, but I said nothing.
    This conversation went on for a while, involving other people, and branching out into little side convos before it finally petered out.  Simultaneously, I wound up having two other conversations with another joker.  And in the meantime, Facebook goes on discussing the same topic: Does the murderer's claim of having radical Islam as a motive have any significance, or is this just another gay-bashing event in a long series of gay-bashing events?
    The position taken by the gay community by and large is the latter.  This is about us.  It's not about Islam, radical or otherwise.  It's not an attack on America.  We are appalled and disgusted by the attempts from the joker section to use our pain as an excuse to cause pain for another minority, and we are simultaneously disgusted and amused by politicians who were seeking to codify making our lives more difficult yesterday and then saying they are standing with us today.  They won't even mention who we are in their official statements.
    But for many people, "Mateen’s own loudly declared jihadist beliefs" are the only significant thing about the shooting (even though the evidence seems to show that he was lying,) and the history of gay-bashing in this country is not. In a straw man article in the National Review, one that I'm sure the author thought was scathing,  the view held by gay community is an attack on Christianity itself.

"The principles, such as they exist, seem to be this: If you oppose same-sex marriage or mixed-gender bathrooms, then you not only can’t legitimately grieve the loss of gay lives, you’re partially responsible for the massacre in Orlando. Conservative efforts to protect religious freedom and freedom of association from unprecedented infringement will kill people. Never mind that all the actual evidence in the case points to Islamic motivations extrapolated from well-known and widely shared interpretations of Shariah law, somehow those darn Baptists are to blame."

 The article also quoted Jen Hatmaker as saying that “anti-LGBTQ sentiment has paved a long runway to hate crimes,” making sure to label this point of view as "leftist" so we would know it was bad.  But the reason that the article can be referred to as a straw man argument is that Christianity, or whatever else one may use as a justification for hostility toward someone else, is still just an excuse, not a reason.  The road to hateful actions is paved by the things one is taught, though it's not a road that has to be traveled.

Robert Lewis Dear entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs last November, shooting twelve people, three of whom died.  The road that led him there was paved by the media, who kept repeating the widely discredited claim that Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of fetal tissue.    The New York Times ran a story detailing Mr. Dear's religious views and mental health issues, and yet somehow politicians and pundits have avoided the phrase "radical Christian terrorist" to people who commit such crimes citing Christianity as their motive.  They're investigating the heck out of Planned Parenthood, tho.

Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto, had his road paved by white supremacist websites.  He felt it was his duty as a white man to personally "take it to the real world" instead of just complaining online. Very little was said about how Roof had been radicalized through home-grown racism.  Few referred to him as a terrorist.  Chad Williams, an associate professor and chairman of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University, put it this way:

“Recognizing acts of terrorism requires action by the state, and I think that is something many white politicians don’t conceive of as possible when violence is inflicted against black people.  It’s much easier, given the makeup of our political racial climate, to demonize Muslims and to transform that into political talking points.”

 The problem with focusing on radical Islam is that somehow the word radical is always forgotten and we're left with just Islam.  Then we get the same kind of idiocy that led to my last post.  We get politicians and wannabe politicians proposing unconstitutional policies.  People let their fear do their thinking for them, and then they themselves become the enemy.

And we, the community that was actually attacked, do not want to become the excuse that justifies your hatred.  It upsets us when you try to minimize our pain by turning this into an All Lives Matter thing, like you did when the African-American community started pointing out the deadly flaws in your meritocratic viewpoint.  As Philippa Willitts wrote in her excellent article, "7 Things Straight People Aren’t Understanding About Orlando,"

We are not “all LGBT” now, as one person told me. Nor was this attack on the freedom of all people.
Even when well-intentioned, these comments downplay the significance of the gay-hate aspect of the attack. The killer deliberately chose an LGBT club, and deliberately chose a Latinx night at the club, to focus his hate on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans people of colour. If we ignore this, we are erasing the identities of those who died and those who suffered.