There’s a lot we don’t know about Omar Mateen, the American who just a week ago slaughtered 49 people and injured more than 50 in the deadliest mass shooting in our country’s history.
He may have been a hardened jihadist working under the direction of ISIS or a self-radicalized Islamist. He may have been a bullying wife-beater brimming over with grievances against humanity. He may have been a frighteningly angry man who in the midst of his killing spree sought a weird kind of posthumous notoriety by claiming to be motivated by terrorist organizations he clearly knew little about.
But there is something we do know about Omar Mateen.
We know that he had such a pathological hatred of gay people that on a Saturday night in Pride Month he drove more than 125 miles from his home – bypassing such tempting targets as Disney World and other Orlando theme parks – to go to Pulse, a gay nightclub that billed itself as “the hottest gay bar in Orlando,” and to slaughter as many patrons as he could.
It may have been an act of terror or Islamist-inspired vengeance. Or a desperate lashing out by a man who feared he himself might be gay. Perhaps we will never really know. But it absolutely was a hate crime, a fact that too many politicians and religious leaders don’t want to admit. But they can hardly ignore the brutal murders of so many Americans, so they are dancing around the subject while leaning hard on the possible terrorism link.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, has, according to the New York Times, assiduously avoided using the word “gay” in discussing the attack. One Texas congressman, Pete Sessions, went so far as to deny that the gay nightclub was a gay nightclub, insisting that, “It was a young person’s nightclub, I’m told.” And the Republicans, both in Congress and in many states, are moving inexorably ahead on various pieces of legislation that would attempt to undo recently developed gay legislation and judicial victories.
That includes any number of proposed laws across the country that would allow Americans to continue to discriminate against their gay fellow citizens if their “consciences” should be so inclined.
And of course a lot of the churches supporting these new and proposed laws – whose sole purpose is to overturn protections now existing for gay people now mourning the loss of life in Orlando – were lined up last week to announce their grief at the loss of life and their “love” for the survivors. Leading the hypocrisy was the Southern Baptist Convention, long a leader in the fight to deny protections to gay Americans.
Yet last week the convention hurriedly passed a resolution referring to the “tragic deaths of at least fifty” and called upon its adherents “to pray, extend love and compassion to those devastated by the tragedy, donate blood, and regard those affected by this tragedy as fellow image-bearers of God and our neighbors.”
Notably missing from the resolution? Any hint that the victims were largely gay. Maybe that’s because to participate in the convention churches have to agree with the convention’s statement of faith, which condemns homosexuality. In fact, its constitution says, “Churches which act to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior would be deemed not to be in cooperation with the Convention.”
None of this stopped the First Baptist Orlando church – a member of the convention – from stepping up to host an interfaith service mourning the deaths of mostly gay people at the nightclub and by so doing harvest a lot of goodwill despite its theological stand.
And conservative Protestants are not the only hypocrites here. Pope Francis might have toned down the harshness of the Catholic rhetoric with his soothing “Who am I to judge?” But his co-religionists are only too happy to judge. And heaven forbid any high-ranking Catholics break ranks!
Robert Lynch, the Catholic bishop of St. Petersburg, pointed out in a widely circulated blog post, that “sadly, it is religion, including our own, which targets . . . and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people,” planting “the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence.” The victims, he said, “were all made in the image and likeness of God. We teach that. We should believe that. We must stand for that.”
For expressing that decent sentiment Lynch – no surprise here – has been roundly vilified and labeled “a disgrace.”
(This is not to let a lot of Muslims off the hook, by the way. Too many have a downright cruel, medieval approach to homosexuality. But it is Christians who overwhelmingly set the moral tone for this country, and they who should be held to account.)
Here in the relatively enlightened Northeast, criticism of Bishop Lynch might have been more muted, but it would still be voiced. I have grown to believe, sadly, that hatred of LGBT people is one of our nation’s last “acceptable” bigotries, and geography doesn’t bestow immunity.
FBI statistics back this up. In a Times story, we learned that LGBT people are twice as likely as African Americans to be targeted by hate crimes. In recent years they’re even more likely to be victimized than Jews, the traditional target of haters.
Just ask my sister – who happens to be a lesbian and who lives in a tiny town in southwest New Hampshire. She is a retired insurance company executive and, now, a published poet. She is also a pillar of her small community, donating her time generously to the various boards and commissions that make such places run. And – unlike some of her siblings – she’s a person of faith who has over the years sought out churches where she is welcome.
But even in churches she encounters hatred. She particularly remembers attending a multi-faith church vigil after the horrors of 9/11. During the service she was moved to stand and offer St. Francis’s prayer for peace – “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon . . . .” Most of us have heard it often. It is benign, soothing.
And, she said, “as soon as I sat down, another participant got up and, oozing hatred, began to rave (in the form of a prayer) about how the bombings were caused by God’s wrath over homosexuals in America.” She fled the church and drove home in tears.
It was yet another reminder of the bone chilling fact that there are people out there who would see her obliterated for no other reason than that she is different. That her sexuality is more important than anything else. She can lead a good, upright life, pay her taxes, go to town meeting, sing in the church choir, counsel battered women. And yet none of this outweighs her damnable difference.
It must be almost unbearable that such palpable hatred can come from people who purport to worship the same God that she does. That they have no qualms about using against her the very thing, religion, which has given her solace through her life and so denying her its comfort.
One part of her will always live in fear.
Imagine having to live with that. I for one cannot. Can you?
Forget about hoping for even a teeny step toward sane gun laws. If the bloody, wanton slaughter of 20 cherubic kindergartners and first-graders in lovely, leafy Newtown, Conn., couldn’t budge congressional Republicans’ abject fealty to the NRA – even as bereaved parents walked the halls of Congress beseeching their aid – the gunning down of 49 mostly Latino, mostly gay men in a bar will never move the legislative needle. If something is passed, it will be toothless, defanged by the gun lobby. You can take that to the bank.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)