We are now fully through the looking glass. A Muslim man walked into a gay nightclub and gunned down 49 men and women, most of them gay or lesbian. He paused in the middle of his massacre to call 911 and a local television station, making clear that he wanted the world to know he had pledged allegiance to ISIS. There are no dog whistles here. This is a textbook example of jihadism in action, plain and simple. Yet somehow, Omar Mateen’s massacre has put American Christians on the defensive.
Yesterday, Anderson Cooper grilled Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, accusing her of hypocrisy for expressions of support for slain Floridians. Why was she hypocritical? Because she opposed same-sex marriage. . . .
The so-called “reality-based community” ignores the actual evidence in the attack — Mateen’s own loudly declared jihadist beliefs — in an attempt to shame a community whose primary “sin” is opposing the sexual revolution.
But there is something even more sinister at work than garden-variety anti-Christian bigotry . . .: Americans are being purposefully and intentionally distracted from our true enemies. Once again, the jihadist threat is being minimized.
Some on the left simply refuse to believe what terrorists say about themselves and about their intentions. Osama bin Laden couldn’t have really attacked the World Trade Center in part out of a desire to avenge Christians’ 15th-century conquest of Muslim Spain. Iranian leaders don’t really mean “death to America.” Muslim nations that mandate the death penalty or other draconian criminal punishments for homosexuality don’t truly express the will of their people.
The result is bigotry running two ways — an unreasoning, irrational hatred of American Christians and a comprehensive denial of Muslim moral agency. American Christians are responsible for things they don’t believe. Sharia-observant Muslims, by contrast, aren’t responsible for the things they do believe.
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The reasoning, though, is that gays have been mistreated by Christians and in Christian-dominated societies. So this creates a climate of hostility to gays. So someone like Omar Mateen picks up on that and so launched his attack.
First, one would think that when people who have been against gay causes suddenly starts to sympathize with them,, gay partisans would consider that a good thing. Tragedy has a way of humanizing its victims, creating sympathy and empathy where it might not have existed before. Why would Anderson Cooper oppose an expression of sympathy, especially from someone who seemed unsympathetic before?
Second, where did Omar Mateen get his hostility? He wasn’t part of the Christian sub-culture that is getting accused. His hostility came from radical Islam. (Also, apparently, from his own self-loathing. There is reason now to believe that he himself was gay. Often, the harshest, cruelest opponents of homosexuality are themselves subject to same-sex desires that they are ashamed of, so they project their own self-hatred outward. But, again, the norms that were tormenting him were from Islam, not Christianity.)
And while conservative Christians don’t believe in the morality of homosexual acts, gays are surely treated better in Christian-influenced cultures than in Islamic cultures. There are no gay nightclubs in Islamic countries, where homosexuals are often subject to capital punishment.
Meanwhile, in Orlando, Christians are responding to the tragedy by reaching out and supporting the LGBT community, and some genuine reconciliation seems to be happening, which does not seem to require either side abandoning its beliefs.
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