Because, here’s the thing. We’ve seen a lot of statements and sympathy tweets from lawmakers offering their “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims. But most ignore the fact that the shooting was a hate crime against the LGBTQ community. Instead, they use it as an excuse for more xenophobia, more violence, more hatred.
The massacre in Orlando wasn’t an ISIS attack. It wasn’t a “radical Islamic terrorist” attack on the American way of life. It was a targeted hate crime against largely black and Latinx LGBTQ people by a violent, mentally unstable American man from Queens with a history of domestic abuse and an assault weapon he should never have been able to purchase. [...]
Dear weeping politicians, it is long past time for you to connect these dots. You cannot, in one moment, marginalize, demonize and cast as “other” a particular group, and then in the next moment, lament the fact that that group is being targeted for a hate crime. If you advocate for inequality—whether because of your religious beliefs, your cultural beliefs, your political aspirations, etc.—you are helping to create a culture that made LGBTQ people an easy mark for a lunatic homophobe with an assault weapon, regardless of whether his homophobia was internalized or externalized.
By failing to speak up against discrimination and hate, you have made the world unsafe for LGBTQ people, fueling their own self-loathing and inciting homophobic rage in others. You are the reason hate crimes against LGBTQ people were up in 2015, and particularly against people of color, transgender people and those who are gender-nonconforming. You are the reason LGBTQ teens are the daily targets of harassment, bullying and violence in schools. And you are the reason they too often choose suicide over the pain of living as a human target.
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