The shooting at Club Q this weekend brings to mind other acts of terror against minority communities in recent years. Although we don’t yet know much about the motive of the gunman, we do know that the nightclub he attacked was a haven for the LBGTQ community in the Colorado Springs area. The sense of safety and community that such places provide has been deeply shaken. The enormous courage of customers and workers at the club prevented the massacre from being worse than it already was.
The investigation will continue of this latest mass shooting. Family and friends will tend to the injured and mourn those who perished. May their memory be a blessing.
The recent intensification of the scapegoating of the LBGTQ community, like the rise of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-refugee rhetoric, puts all these communities – it puts all of us – at greater risk when weapons of extraordinary lethality are so easily available. Basic acknowledgement and respect for the traditionally marginalized, even when combined with common sense gun safety laws, won’t protect everyone from senseless violence. But they would make such violent events less frequent and virulent.
As we head into Thanksgiving week, let’s try harder to create communities that don’t have to attack those perceived as different, and let’s work together to remind our lawmakers that we don’t have to live in a world where hate can be so easily connected to weapons of mass destruction. Lives depend on it.
Mr Roth, as always, chooses his victims and his events to advance a political agenda. I do not recall him commenting on, inter alia, the assassination of five policemen in Dallas by a black nationalist sniper; or the shooting of Congressman Scalise by James Hofgkinson, a Sanders supporter; or the murder of six parade-goers in Waukesha by Darrell Brooks, whose social media was full of anti white ravings. Wrong victims, wrong perpetrators? Maybe some live do matter more than others.
It seems to me that, from what we know, the perpetrator of the Colorado Springs attack, far from being the flyover country Christian Rotarian of progressive imagination, is a nearly pure product of societal breakdown; a breakdown which in every instance has followed the template laid down by the Left for decades. The Left scorns nuclear families and loves single mothers: the shooter’s dad left when he was two. The Left celebrates sexual liberation (though it has cooled on this in recent years): both parents seem to have followed liberated lifestyles; the father is a ‘porn star.’ The Left argues for the decriminalization and ready availability of drugs: the father has been involved in the marijuana trade and the assailant abused heroin. The Left has advocated for decades for deinstitutionalizing and normalizing the mentally ill: the mother has been in and out of jail with florid behavior for twenty years. The Left wants decarceration and relaxed sentencing: the assailant had charges dropped on a bomb threat against his mother only last year. Not exactly the uptight bourgeois Republican of progressive fantasy.
Worse still, it turns out (see the Denver Post) that the assailant identifies as non-binary, uses pronouns “they” and “them,” and takes the prefix “Mx.” Since ‘non-binary’ trumps ‘gay’ these days in the Index and Scale, this presents us with a dilemma: when someone higher on the scale does something to someone lower, who’s the victim? And if someone says they are non-binary, mustn’t we believe them? What implications are there for sentencing? Since this is Colorado Springs, not Philadelphia or Los Angeles, the assailant will be prosecuted, but should they be sent to a men’s prison or a women’s? Six months here, six months there? Perhaps Mr Roth can help us answer these vexed questions.