As the son of someone who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, I know that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the man who shot a security guard at the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters. I know we shouldn’t assume we know what motivated him. It could turn out that he is psychotic and his actions were driven by fantastic beliefs that are beyond our wildest imagination. Or he could be one of us and was motivated by what we all suspect. LGBT people are just people. Some of us are mentally unstable, and some of us are more violent than others.
I don’t think that shooting the security guard was helpful or justified. But I’m also surprised that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. Given the amount of hate and violence directed toward us, I’d say that, on the whole, LGBT people show an amazing amount of restraint.
The FRC has been labeled a hate group, and it has earned that label. Some would have you believe that it’s just a conservative organization that doesn’t support marriage equality. But Tony Perkins has ties to the KKK. He paid thousands and thousands of dollars for Grand Wizard David Duke’s mailing list. Jerry Boykin has devoted his life to spreading the idea that Muslims are secretly trying to take over the United States. Peter Sprigg has stated publicly that he supports the criminalization of homosexuality.
The FRC, along with a number of others, work tirelessly to promote the most vicious lies about LGBT people imaginable--we choose to be gay; we seduce children into the “lifestyle; we are pedophiles; we are diseased; we lead lives of misery and depravity and die at an early age; we are sick; we are sinners rejected by their god.
Many of our youth are living in a kind of hell. They are relentlessly bullied at school and rejected at home. LGBT youth are several times more likely to commit suicide than their straight counterparts. They are several times more likely to be homeless. Many of them are on the street because their families threw them out, or they no longer felt welcome or safe at home. And when we grow up, we aren’t allowed to get married. Until recently, we weren’t allowed to serve openly in the military. Many worry about what their employers will think if they find out. Many worry they might be fired or they won’t get promoted if they act “too gay.” And even as adults, we still face bullying and rejection from family and friends. It’s a lot easier to deal with those things when you’re financially independent and you have the freedom to walk away, but it still hurts like hell.
This past spring, Anne Graham Lotz, the daughter of “America’s Pastor" Billy Graham, warned that her god would punish America if her fellow North Carolinians didn’t vote for that state’s hate on the gays constitutional amendment. Another Christian minister who worked hard to get the amendment passed made the outlandish claims that gay men had to wear diapers and that we had a tendency to stick random objects such as cell phones up our bottoms. We heard a Christian minister tell parents they should break the wrists of toddlers who act gay, and another one said we should be put in concentration camps. And let’s not forget that the hate on the gay amendment passed.
For quite a while, some have been tracking and reporting on Chick-fil-A’s support of hate groups such as FRC. And earlier this summer, Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, haughtily admitted that he and his company did support hate groups and he claimed that LGBT people were inviting his god’s judgment on this country. When LGBT people objected, the mainstream press decided that Dan Cathy should be played up as the victim of LGBT intolerance. How dare we stand up for ourselves and tell Dan Cathy we should have our civil rights. How dare we refuse to buy his chicken sandwiches. Don’t we know that billionaire Dan Cathy has freedom of religion and speech? We should keep our mouths shut because freedom of religion and speech means that if you’re gay, you don’t get to voice your opinion or have a religious belief contrary to Dan Cathy’s.
And what do millions of Americans have to say about all of this? Nothing. What did millions of Americans, millions of Christian Americans say when thousands and thousands of people lined up to give billionaire Dan Cathy their money on August 1 for the chance to flip LGBT Americans the bird in the name of their god? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. They say nothing when fellow Americans go to the polls to vote down civil rights for LGBT people. They say nothing when they hear about LGBT kids killing themselves or living on the streets. They say nothing when they hear about evangelical Americans going around the world promoting homophobia. They say nothing while the refuse of humanity sticks its head out of the slime and claims to represent Christians and presents itself as the moral authority of our country.
But sadly a security guard took one in the arm for reprobate Tony Perkins, and I suspect that we’ll hear something about that. I doubt it’ll matter if it turns out the shooter was completely insane. I doubt it’ll matter that all the major LGBT rights organizations fell over themselves to be the first to say they don’t condone the violence. I doubt it’ll matter that most of us were shocked and horrified by this story. The narrative that many want to believe has already been offered: the shooter was a radical homosexual activist who is intolerant of Christians. And many of those indifferent Americans, many of those indifferent Christian Americans who turn their heads when monsters like Tony Perkins spread the most hateful lies about LGBT people in the name of their god, will, I suspect--suddenly and miraculously--discover their vocal cords do work, and they will use their power of speech to denounce the violence of those nasty gay people and they will claim they just don’t understand why they’re always making such a fuss.
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