As the Orlando massacre spills over into the political realm in a big way, the tragedy puts the haters in a predicament: Who do they hate more in this case, the Muslim shooter or the gay victims?
For some, all they needed to know is that the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, was a believer in Islam. The indications that he was a radical Muslim who swore allegiance to ISIS was just icing on the cake. Speaking of cakes, the ugly intolerance toward the LGBT community is already showing in the wake of the death toll in Orlando. Some religious conservatives, including some pastors and the lieutenant governor of Texas, express despicable indifference – even satisfaction – with the apparent demise of 50 gay people.
On Twitter, the haters spewed their venom. “I’m so happy people started shooting perverts instead of innocent people,” one tweeted. Others declared that the shooting was God’s work or that “gays don’t deserve to live.”
The reaction in other circles has been much more subtle. As some news outlets have noted, many Republican officials expressing remorse for the mass shooting did not mention that the victims were gay, or mostly gay. No need to irritate certain factions of the GOP base.
One of the more nauseating statements came from Sen. Ted Cruz, a Bible thumper who frequently surrounded himself with gay haters during his presidential campaign. In a statement after the shootings, the Texas Republican suggested that liberals should take a more hawkish stance against terrorism to protect their LGBT brethren.
“For all the Democrats who are loud champions of the gay and lesbian community whenever there is a culture battle waging, now is the opportunity to speak out against an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians,” he preached.
Worse yet, some conservatives have expressed outrage at radical Islamists’ harsh views on homosexuality, as if the Muslim religion had a monopoly on homophobia and hatred of the LGBT community. We should all remember that the acceptance of gay rights and same-sex marriage is a very recent phenomenon.
In 2014, a majority of Americans said they believed gay sex is morally unacceptable, and 14 percent of Americans said they believed AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
According to the most recent statistics compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that keeps tabs on hate crimes and hate speech, sexual orientation is, by far, the most common motivation when attacks occur.
In a 2011 analysis, the SPLC concluded that from 1995 to 2008, there were 15,351 anti-gay hate crime offenses against people. The LGBT community comprises 2.1 percent of the population, yet accounts for 17.4 percent of the total reported violent hate crimes — before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The CityLab website relied on SPLC analyst Mark Potok to explain that fears of organized radical Muslim attacks on the U.S. gay community are far off the mark.
The vast majority of those 15,000 hate crimes were not carried out by Muslim extremists, Potok said. “It’s a mix of white supremacists and their ilk and people who would be considered relatively normal members of society,” he said. “The majority of attacks on gay people do not come from people who are members of organized hate groups.”
Based on FBI figures, the pattern that emerged in the SPLC research is this: LGBT people are 2.4 times more likely to suffer a violent hate crime than Jews and 2.6 times more likely to be attacked than blacks. Gays are 4.4 times more likely than Muslims to experience a hate crime, 13.8 times more likely than Latinos, and 41.5 times more likely than whites.
