The two emerging narratives coming across my facebook and twitter feeds could not be more different. In the one, we need to face up to, and respond to, the fact that ISIS, and Islam in general, are hostile to homosexuality*; the attack at the Pulse nightclub is no different than ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels. In the other, the killer’s religion is immaterial, his anti-gay animus came from the wider (Christian) culture, and the way to stop these attacks is by banning semi-automatic weapons, and, with respect to the wider culture, for Christians to fully embrace sexual minorities.
Hence, the twitter hashtag “love is love” and the Lin-Manuel Miranda “sonnet” with the line “love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love.”
No, I don’t have links. Just typing up a few reflections as I’m struggling with what to do with this. That which should unite us is instead dividing us, as gay-rights activists direct their anger at Christians, and insist that professions of sorrow and sympathy by Christians are invalid unless they embrace gay marriage and welcome pre-op transwomen into the girls’ and women’s locker rooms and sports teams, and bake the cakes and sign the wedding licenses, and take sexual activities off the Sin List.
And at the same time, there are new narratives emerging. The killer had anger issues, or was mentally ill, supposedly, so that his actions are no different than other mass killers. He was, we’re told gay, so his act was a sort of self-hate — though it’s not clear whether his prior visits to the club were because he “belonged” there or because he was casing out the place.
One writer at The Federalist even rejects the premise that the club was targeted because its patrons were gay, both because he cased out Disney as well and because at no point in his 911 calls did he mention that as a motive.
To be sure, the nightclub was a soft target if ever there was one: according to an eyewitness account in the New York Times (which I can’t find any longer; here’s a similar account), the place was so loud and dark and crowded that he was able to shoot repeatedly before clubgoers fully understood what was going on. The witness describes thinking it was part of the music, or maybe a firecracker, or maybe just a hoax. It’s also easy to imagine that the killer would, due to stereotypes, consider a bar full of gay men as unlikely to fight back. It also seems to me that I read not long ago that drug use is high among gay men — it’s not reported anywhere, but if the killer figured on the clubgoers being high on drugs and all the more unable to comprehend and fight back, that’d add to his choice of target. And it was a small place, with little more than just the dance floor and the restrooms, and no easy way to flee.
But despite all these potential reasons why he’d pick a place like this, it seems unlikely that the gay clientele was not a factor in his choice.
And, not surprisingly Trump has doubled-down on his call for a moratorium on immigration from terrorist-origin countries, and Obama has doubled down on his insistence that there is no such thing as “radical Islam.”
Oh, and gun control. What can I even say here? the Left insists that an AR-15 is a military weapon wrongly in the hands of civilians, the Right says that they’re wrong on all accounts; it’s an ordinary hunting rifle. The Left further insists that we need an “assault weapons ban” and the Right replies that there’s no such thing as an “assault weapon” and the now-expired legislation banned guns based on cosmetic features that made them look “scary” but didn’t have an effect on their functionality. I don’t really know what the solution is. Maybe the Right should just shrug and say to the Left, “fine, if it makes you happy to ban scary-looking guns, go for it.”
But at the same time, in the Orlando shooting, I’ve read accounts and can’t really piece together exactly how he killed so many so quickly. Was it really as simple as “shooting ducks in a barrel”, and the dark, the noise, the crowds, the confusion, and (possibly) the drug use making the clubgoers easy prey? I have read statements that there were gun battles, but nothing I’ve seen really gives a good sense of it all. Would any sort of gun legislation, other than a total ban or a restriction to single-bullet guns, have made a difference?
So what next?
It seems rather likely that this is just the next in a series of attacks. Nothing in the way the nation, or our politicians, are responding suggests that we’ll see any actions that will prevent the next attack, or attacks months or years into the future.
(* UPDATE: I put this asterisk there intending to add a parenthetical comment that I forgot about until rereading the post. My thought was this: it strikes me as odd that “homosexuality” or “gays and lesbians” has been replaced, by those speaking the preferred lingo, as “LGBT people” (or add to the acronym as desired, e.g., LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, etc.) After all, a gay man or a lesbian woman is simply different than a transgender person who is different than an intersex person. And I would further think that an acronym would feel too impersonal for people to be willing to adopt that label as an identity. But this is parenthetical.)
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