How newsworthy is it when heterosexuals kill other heterosexuals? When white people kill other white people? When the victim and the shooter share a birth month?
Stop asking why, start asking how.
Uh oh! I wouldnāt want to be the one that had to break this news to ISIS. This might be āshoot the messengerā grade badness.
If a homophobic father contributed to his homicidal self-loathing, then yes, itās newsworthy. His father said he was sorry his son did this. Thereās a lesson here for parents that pass on their hate. Iād wager a hetero never killed a hetero because he hated his own heterosexuality. Iād wager a pale-skin never killed a pale-skin because he hated being pale skinned.
Itās not either/or.
Yeah, the lede here is what fucking poison fundamentalism is, innit?
Thatās one. I think @anon47741163 has a very valid point about asking how. Itās only elision of asking why that I find misguided.
this is important
very important
it mean you can ban only gay Muslims from entering the USA
and let the rest of us enter
Hummā¦
If a guy pulled a knife on a drag queen at any of the clubs I go toā¦
That guy would be PermaBanned and probably have the cops called on them and at least NEVER allowed back in.
Heck even ācreepy guysā get banned at some of the clubs I go to.
Pulling a knifeā¦thatās bouncer action or police action.
What? Seriously, what?
And the fight about how to best use this latest tragedy for political gain has come to bbs.
Was it a muslim? Was it a gun? Was it a homosexual? Was it a homophobe? There are so many different ways you can spin this.
Also, watch out for new political alliances. Kick out all muslims and ban all guns! Or: Make sure Muslim Americans use their second amendment rights. Ban Islam because itās homophobic. Increase Muslim immigration in order to counter the increased acceptance of homosexuality (hey, at least theyāre not atheists). Make sure people canāt get a gun without an extensive psychological evaluation - and include āgay but not outā as a reason to deny a permit.
In Europe, the latest murder in France has again displaced this as the top headline. But anti-Islamic sentiment around here is now phrased as a defense of more or less progressive values.
Just waiting for the NRA initiative to āArm the Gays.ā
The gays have been arming the gays for quite a while now.
Dude - I called this. I didnāt call this here, but I just knew this guy would turn out to be some sort of horribly conflicted self-loathing homophobe. Something in my gut.
I have read that the parents belonged to a fundamentalist, radical mosque, and thus you have the double whammy of living in a culture that teaches you to despise who you are and that you are an abomination of God and your distant relatives back home are throwing people like you off of tall buildings. If he were an android smoke would be pouring out of his ears repeating, āLoveā¦ hateā¦ loveā¦ hateā¦ā trying to grasp the paradox of his existence.
This.
So much this.
We need to stop freaking ruining people. Itās NOT okay.
That guy was a kid with all kinds of awesome hopes and dreams once and probably wouldāve been just fine and done some pretty amazing things if not for being in a completely insane situation.
Who cares about his sex life other than the academics who will study the case. The man was clearly mentally unbalanced. He could have just as easily done this as a straight man or a christian like Robert Lewis Dear or Dylann Roof.
His sexual life is good trash for the tabloids and his religion fuel for the hateful - thatās all.
Yesterday I took a walk by OutCentral, a local LGBT information center and meeting space. Itās a place where I know at least a couple of transgender kids have gone for meals after they were kicked out by their families. And itās more than a place where they could be fed. Itās a place where they were told that they were okay being who they were. It was a place that could put them in touch with people who could help them accept themselves and maybe even find a new family, a real, loving family.
Iām sure Orlando has places like that, places that offer counseling and support. While Iām glad Mateen was never rejected by his familyāalthough he might have been if heād come outāIām sorry he never got the help he needed to accept himself.
This is why we need to be vigilant about letting the media define the evolving narrative of this mass homicide; first it was a terror attack āon all of Americaā by a Muslim from an immigrant family, and now itās going to be (at least in some channels) a gay-on-gay crime by a mentally deranged American. What ties all of these stories together, whether he was gay or simply scouting his attack, whether he was ISIS inspired or mentally deranged, Muslim, agnostic or confused, is that it was intolerance that caused this. The same intolerance that the right wing/conservative/Trump/Fox Industrial Complex would have us react with.
Everyone seems to be trying very hard to come up with any other explanation besides terrorism. Although I am sure that the guy had all sorts of issues, there has not been any information that conflicts with the basic theory of Islamic terrorism. He visited gay clubs, and used gay apps to ask about the locations of gay clubs. That sounds like recon to me. And it does not surprise me at all that he might have had some conflicted feelings about homosexuality. He was born in the US, but his parents are from Afghanistan, which has some traditions about relations with young boys that seem to western eyes to be at odds with Islamic rules. The shooter also was a domestic abuser, which would seem to be completely normal for an Islamic extremist.
He also pledged support for several Islamic terror groups, which have conflicts with each other. But they also have much in common, especially in regards to their basic feelings about the west.
What? CNN just had an āexpertā on that expressed the idea that because Isis and Al-Nusra sometimes are in conflict with each other, and with other groups that the shooter supported, he was probably not actually a terrorist. But it is entirely possible that he read and watched the online messages of those groups, and took inspiration from all of them.
