God, Guns and Gays, a Collision in Orlando

The amount of pandering to religious zeal varies according to political expediency and the nuisance level of the complainers. On the gay rights issue there are enough votes to be won in the central and southern states by condoning homophobia for it to be exploited by t-partyish American politicians; Kim Davis is your f’rinstance there. Huckabee was well aware of Kim Davis’s use-by date and he milked it until its expiration. The last thing he said to her was, “Lose my number.”

So you can still make a little hay by persecuting gays in America, but cake by cake, license by license, soldier by soldier, the majority has come to welcome and celebrate the LGBT component of their workplaces,  their social scenes and their families.

In the rest of America we pretty much all have gay friends or family members at this point so it has become less practical for politicians and government officials to gave a wink and a nod to sub rosa gay persecution, especially in large cities, which has in turn made more gay men and women comfortable coming out of the closet and integrating into a diverse and functioning democratic society. That cow is out of the barn and closeted homosexuality, once the norm, is now largely a relic of an ignorant past. It is difficult to imagine even small American cities not having open, thriving gay social scene.

That's a bad mix with the Islamic form of zealotry. A scene that could eventually birth a gay bar could never exist under Islam, so someone becoming an Islamic zealot in America is going to have a dissonance with homosexual acceptance in society. Islamic zealotry is about as vile as it gets. It is Christian zealotry’s ugly cousin. It has all of the smug superiority of its Christian counterpart but with a small-minded, thuggish vocabulary of expression that now includes suicide vests, high-capacity semi-automatic rifles and car bombs. 

Christian zealotry has a different cut to its jib. It thinks big when it objects to a particular sexuality. It stalls AIDS research. It humiliates entire classes of people over bathrooms. It seeks to destroy psychology and inflict shame. Muslim zealots don’t do the vision thing. Instead they reach for the largest scope of terror their pathetic imaginations can devise that day and take it as far as they can take it. In this case it was shooting up the gay bar.

Three worlds collided in Orlando. America's phlegmatic though palpable easement of morays pertaining to sexual orientation, the NRA’s lock on Congress, and religious fundamentalism. Facts continue to be revealed about the case, but the moral of the story fits both the Koran and the Bible, and indeed, numerous Christian pastors and Dan Patrick, Texas’ Lieutenant Governor, have already given the mass murderer their pats on the back, thumbs up and atta boys.

The murderer believes mankind's godlessness to be the problem. I and millions like me believe mankind's vision of God to be the problem. What that means is, we have a real problem.