Will Democrats Turn Against Gay Rights in the Wake of the Orlando Massacre?

So like many of you, I woke up to the news of a horrible massacre in Orlando, Florida.  This is a breaking news story, so you need to be extra leery about what you read, but currently the media seems to agree that around fifty people have died and around fifty three people have been injured.  The murder is a man named Omar Mateen, who is dead and thus sparing us the need for a trial and all of that.  Patterico has details and knowing how he runs his site, you can expect regular updates, either at the link or in subsequent posts.  I have social plans that will make it impossible to do the same, so check them out now and then.

And however one may wish to keep politics out of it, the left will not do so and we cannot unilaterally disarm.

In fact, unilateral disarmament may be a significant part of the problem in this.  Pulse nightclub, the scene of this massacre, was a gun free zone.  In fact, it couldn’t be a gun freedom zone if it wanted to, because Florida law prohibits clubs like this from allowing its patrons to carry.  I am also seeing reports that an off-duty cop was there as a security guard and armed.  Even if true, wouldn’t it have been better to have thirty people who are well-armed?  One guy might stop such and even, or he might just be the first to die.  I don’t want heroic dead cops.  I want stupid dead murderers, killed in a hail of gunfire from law abiding citizens exercising their most sacred right to bear arms and self-defense.

Likewise, I am reading that the suspect had an AR-15, but bluntly, this is most likely an incident using an automatic weapon (here, here, and here.  As I understand it, that can be an AR-15, if unlawfully modified, but regular readers know that I am not such a gun aficionado for you to take that as gospel.  Or maybe the claim it was an AR-15 is wrong.  Or maybe the claim it was full automatic is wrong—my sources don’t explain to me why they think it was an automatic and, bluntly, there is so much ignorance about guns these days I don’t fully trust a stranger’s conclusion.  (If you don’t know, a full automatic will effectively keep shooting repeatedly on one trigger pull.  By contrast, a semi-automatic will have one shot for one pull of the trigger.)  Still with around 100 dead and wounded, that’s around 100 trigger pulls for a semi-automatic, which not impossible but difficult to pull off and kill that many people.

So the killer broke at least one gun control law—prohibiting guns in Pulse—and probably broke another—possession of an automatic weapon is unlawful with only a few exceptions.  But of course gun control is the go to answer.  I even had a person who said it would have been dangerous if the patrons of Pulse were armed and fought back.  Yeah, then someone might have gotten hurt.  Sigh.

Of course when large numbers of people are killed, liberals have to decide which posture they are going to take in terms of telling us how to respond.  Of course they will always call for gun control.  This is a given, even if no gun was used, even if it was a gun free zone, even if a gun was used, but it was illegal.  But beyond that, they have to decide whether they want to shift to a “blame the victim” or “blame conservatives for encouraging the killer” mode.

Seriously, watch their responses.  When a Palestinian murders a group of Israeli teens at a pizza place, the calculus is like this.  In liberal minds, Palestinians are constructed as “brown people” who are oppressed by the “whiter” Israelis, so any violence they commit (they might add “while deplorable”) is the product of the oppression of the Israelis over the Palestinians and therefore their fault.  It is time to blame the victim.

Never mind that the Israelis are actually ridiculously genetically similar to the Palestinians and that the initial rebellion of the Jews of Israel was in response to literally a century of continual murder of Jews in that area of the world (not to mention being righteously fed up with murderous anti-Semitism in the wake of the holocaust).  The ugly truth is this.  One hundred years ago, the Palestinians were randomly murdering Jews.  During World War II, the Palestinian Grand Mufti asked Hitler to open a death camp in Jerusalem, in order to kill random Jews.  After they rebelled, the Arab nations did not focus on military targets but instead killed random Jews.  And today the Palestinian terrorists do not generally focus on military targets, but instead kill random Jews.  So any rational person would see it for what it was.  The Jews of the region had their rights trampled for years and they rebelled.  And the Palestinian terrorists killing them are like the Klansmen who every now and then decide to murder a black person: genocidal terrorists who have lost their fight, but are so filled with hate they still want to keep killing.  But that’s not how the left sees it.

Or take clash over blasphemy.  Of course liberals are perfectly fine with anti-Christian blasphemy.  They will even demand that taxpayers—who tend to be Christian—subsidize it.  Thus it was a very important free speech issue that taxpayers be forced to pay for a picture of Jesus submerged in urine.  That is because Christians are the majority, and in the liberal mind they tend to be horribly oppressive toward gay people and women who want abortions, and so anything to stick it to them is justified.  And if there is any threat or suggestion of violence in response to that kind of blasphemy then there is no suggestion that it is the artist’s fault for provoking them.  No, that is proof of how hateful those Christians are.  So they shift out of blame the victim mode, and into “blame the atmosphere of hatred” mode, trying their best to pin the blame on their political or sociological opponents.

But then when the blasphemy is directed toward Islam, suddenly things change.  See, Muslims are constructed by the left as a minority.  And further the left thinks of them as “brown people” while the left sees Christians as white.  Never mind that there are white Muslims and dark black Christians, because we’re not talking about reality, but rather perception.  You don’t believe me?  Look how often the left will claim that any comment perceived to be against Muslims is “racist.”  Further, Muslims are associated in liberal minds with the Middle East, which is a part of the world where America is supposedly the oppressor.  So suddenly the fact that there is a massive, organized and deadly campaign to suppress alleged blasphemy of Islam is not as important as avoiding hurt feelings.  So we are back to “blame the victim” mode.

And, it shouldn’t be forgotten, that I think a fair bit of fear is involved in the difference between these reactions.  The left professes loudly that not all Muslims are terrorists and their words are correct; the problem is that most of them really don’t believe that.  They believe that Muslims are uniquely dangerous and so they are willing to appease them.

Nakoula in custody; doesn't that make you
proud of your country?

One of the worst examples of that was when current presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton scapegoated the movie The Innocence of Muslims for the attack on Benghazi.  As a result of Clinton’s urging, the DOJ investigated the movie, discovered that the director had made it under a pseudonym, and that the actual director was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who was on probation for bank fraud.  And that probation included a prohibition on him using computers, which he very obviously violated.  So they sent him back to prison for about a year and last I read he was freed.

Did you get that?  A man expressed himself freely and for that he was investigated by the DOJ.  What evidence was there that a crime occurred at that point in time?  Pissing off Islamofascists is not prima facie evidence that you are a criminal.  And, yes, it was legal to imprison him, but that sends a terrible message to the Islamofascists: kill enough Americans and we will give you what you want.  We’ll find any excuse to throw this man in prison.  I wonder if the same people wringing their hands over Gawker’s demise give a crap about that?

That same ideology was reflected in this tweet Hillary put out a while back.

So the lesson was taught.  Kill people who blaspheme against Islam or criticize it, and liberals will blame the victim and tell them to shut up.  They will even try to imprison them, if they can.  They might say it is unfortunate that these Islamofascists murdered the creators of Charlie Hebdo, but they really shouldn’t have provoked them.  It’s better not to do the things Islamofascists hate.

Well, you know what Islamofascists also hate?  Gay people.  So, I suppose liberals will now say that gay marriage should be declared illegal, sodomy laws should be put in place and gays should go back in the closet, right?  Right?

Are you kidding me?  Of course not.  (And yes, that does mean my title is a tease.  Sue me.)  In the hierarchy of oppressed people, gay people trump Islamofascists.  So they will not be blaming the victims for this.  But at the same time, why shouldn’t the Islamofascists expect that the best way to suppress our “decadent” attitudes towards gay people is to kill a bunch of gay people?

See, there’s really two problems I am getting at in this post.  The first is this.  There are legitimate ways to discuss the social importance of violence.  For instance, on one extreme, it is altogether fair to blame the violence directed as civil rights protesters during the civil rights movement of the 1960’s on the atmosphere of hatred and racism that infected much of our nation, especially in the South.  On another extreme it is right to say sometimes that violence is prompted by injustice.  I mean, that’s sort of the whole point of the Declaration of Independence: because of the unjust way England treated us, we are leaving and if you try to stop us, we will fight.  The problem is for the left this has devolved into a nakedly political argument.  There is no attempt to judge with any kind of intellectual rigor whether the person being violent has a just cause for the violence or not, at least not on the left.

What do I mean by vigorous analysis?  Well, you start with the question: was the victim doing anything wrong?  So you look at Charlie Hebdo and you say, “no, speech is not really doing anything, let alone doing anything wrong.  They were not inciting violence, they were not threatening people, or doing anything else that can rightfully be made illegal.  They were just expressing an opinion.”  So, therefore, the decision to violently attack them is automatically wrong.  For most liberals, being gay is not wrong, either, so this attack is obviously not a case where they would argue that injustice causes it.  But let’s talk to those who think that being gay is wrong.  Okay, if you believe it is wrong, that’s not the end of the analysis.  The next question is “are they doing something that infringes your rights in some way?”  I don’t see how any reasonable person can say that two gay dudes kissing infringes your rights.  And to get to the last question, supposing someone it doing something that is wrong, supposing it infringes your rights, you have to exist in a context where there is no reasonable apparatus to obtain justice peacefully.  You know, like a reasonably just court system, for instance.

So, for instance, if you are Nat Turner, i.e. an American slave in 1831, you have all the pieces necessary to justify private violence.  Wrong is being done.  It is violating your rights.  And in 1831 there was no fricking way a black slave was going to get justice.  Under those circumstances, illegal private violence is utterly justified even if those in charge are likely to kill you for it.  Likewise, if you live in China and a party official commits a crime against you, the only chance you have for justice is taking the law into your own hands, because there is no real justice in China.  But those are extreme circumstances that just don’t apply here and now.

The other problem is how the left has encouraged the Islamofascists to think this is a good idea.  (And by the left, I include Donald Trump who blamed Pamela Geller for being attacked.)  The left gave the Islamofascists every impression that violence brings attention to your cause and might even get you what you want.  If the left applied a rigorous analysis, like you saw above, then most violence “for a cause” would be condemned and idiots like this wouldn’t think that their terrorism would get results.  So if this is a wake up call for anything, it is for the left to stop rewarding this kind of violence with sympathy and sometimes even suppression of human rights—such as suppressing so-called blasphemy.

I have heard reports that the killer pledged himself to ISIS just before he began his massacre.  If this is an ISIS disciple, the best response isn’t to navel-gaze and say, “why do they hate us?”  Rather it is to unleash severe massive destruction on ISIS.  Even if they are not directly guilty in the sense that they ordered, planned or even knew about this massacre ahead of time, killing them is independently morally laudable and the next idiot who is tempted to kill a bunch of Americans in the name of ISIS will know that they will be harming the very cause they are seeking to advance.  And that, dear reader, is a better way to stop the next atrocity than all the gun laws liberals can make up.

---------------------------------------

My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist (and adjudicated pedophile) Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the donation link on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

---------------------------------------

Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.