In the aftermath of the Orlando night club shooting, a friend, saying that I need “to get out more,” advised me to visit the cesspool known as the Democratic Underground.
There you will already find, to the moment, no shortage of persons (well, truth be told, the vast majority there) who are quite willing to say, and with some fervor, that, no this had “nothing to do with Islam” — or, alternatively, that “all Abrahamic religions” and their followers are crazy, anti-gay, and, thus, responsible — and that this everything to do with (i) inadequate gun laws; (ii) anti-gay bigotry stirred up by Christians; (iii) Donald Trump; and perhaps even (iv) George W. Bush.
Some are also prepared to blame Hillary Clinton, but they appear to be a few leftover Bernie Sanders anarchist types.
Meanwhile an ACLU lawyer named Chris Strangio tweeted: “The Christian Right has introduced 200 anti-LGBT bills in the last six months and people blaming Islam for this. No.”
Strangio wants to absolve a religious ideology some of whose leading clerics believe things like “sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible.” He would rather blame legislators who believe that women should not have to share public restroom’s with men.
Strangio has a strange view of cause and effect. Does he think the Islamist shooter, oblivious to the interpretation of Islam he associated with, spent his days reading up on bathroom legislation before declaring his allegiance to ISIS and engaging in mass murder at a gay club?
A more plausible view of causality would hold that a tweet blaming “the Christian Right” for the death of dozens of gays might induce an unstable homosexual to murder members of the Christian Right. Unlike the scenario Strangio posits, this has happened.
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