Her tactic was to censor the references to ISIS and Islam and the ISIS leader from those transcripts. Logic got in the way, though, when she went on five Sunday morning news talk shows to say, essentially, that all those "[censored]" references were to, you know, ISIS and Islam and the ISIS leader's name. That pretty much made it ludicrous to do any censoring.
Even to avoid "revictimizing" anyone.
So today I received a note from a regular reader, and I'm sure he won't mind if I quote him here:
"There is a large contingent of the gay community for whom it is an
article of faith ... that the attack was directed at Pulse due to rampant
homophobia in the country, fostered by the religious right and evangelicals in
particular, and has nothing to do with Islam. I know this as result of a
brief and heated discussion with a gay person who holds those views, but is
otherwise pretty rational."
Now, gay people are as well-distributed on the intellectual spectrum as anyone else. While I was not privy to the discussion the reader actually had with the gay person referred to, I still have trouble with the extension of logic.
For one, evangelicals don't particularly hate gay people, as a rule. They may regard gay activity as sinful, but we are all sinners and we don't hate each other for those sins. The religious right absolutely exists, and absolutely has issues with gay activity, and absolutely does not sanction them marrying. But you take 100 religious conservatives and you'd have a hard time finding any that would tell you they actually hate gay people, certainly not for being gay.
Islamic fundamentalists, on the other hand, have a whole 'nother attitude. I am not, of course, a Muslim and have not read the Koran, so I'm not going to go too far in interpreting what it teaches as far as gays are concerned. But I do know that those Islamic fundamentalists are killing gay people in the Middle East, while Christian fundamentalists (i.e., the religious right), well, aren't. It may be that the Islamists are thinking they're doing the gays they murder a favor, by getting them to Heaven faster, but Christians certainly aren't doing that.
So if there were to be a "hate gays" component of the Orlando attacks, at the very least it would have nothing whatsoever to do with the religious right, which does not hate gay people, or Christians in general, who are taught (not always successfully) not to hate people. Neither of those groups is out there murdering gay people.
If there was a "hate gays" component, then it would have to have come from the professed faith of the man who did the killing, a faith in whose name gay people in Islamic countries are being slaughtered. That faith, by the way, is not Christianity, no matter what the quoted individual above appears to believe. Muslims are not killing gays because Christians hate them, if you get my drift.
Regardless, an immutable fact is that in all the "transcripts" -- which to date are only a transcript of the first call and summaries of the other two, not word-for-word transcriptions -- there is zero mention of gay people or of gayness or anything about the Pulse nightclub.
In fact, according to the transcript, at about 3:24 AM, the murderer told the negotiator on the phone to "tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq" and that is why he was "out here right now."
He says he was out there to get America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. He says nothing about gays, gay people or the nature of the nightclub. He says he did it for reason X, and never mentions reason Y.
Yet people are willing to assume that he did it for reason Y. Those are the same people who think that Matthew Shepard was murdered because he was gay, as opposed to what the killers eventually admitted (it was a robbery) and the evidence bore out.
I have never wanted to be part of a group or class that was made to be a victim, nor have I wanted to claim to be a victim because of such group -- unless you call being fairly diminutive a victimized group. We really get the short end of the stick, you know.
Not wanting to be made out to be a class-based victim makes it hard for me to sympathize with people who seek to be made victims. But that what life in Obama's America has devolved into. Apparently it is utterly impossible for something to happen in a gay nightclub that is unrelated to its being a gay nightclub. Every criticism of a black president has to do with his color, not with his hideous, anti-American policies.
I admit that right up until the FBI agent spoke, only about an hour after the murderer was killed, I assumed that the murders had to do with it being a gay nightclub, since that was its most salient feature. Once the agent then shared the murderer's stated association with ISIS a moment later, I still assumed it was because Pulse was a gay spot, only now it was because of Islamists' hatred of gays.
So I find it ironic that it appears the attacks may have had nothing to do with Pulse being a gay nightclub, except possibly for it having been determined by the murderer to be a "soft target" without visible armed guards.
That, of course, is not enough to satisfy the attorney general "We may never know his real motivation") or the professional victim class, the latter of whose existence is only validated when they can have an "Aha!" moment interpreted as hatred of their group.
Even when it is no such thing.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
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