Today The New York Times reports that the “Evangelical Vatican” (their words) that is Colorado Springs makes gays feel unsafe in the wake of the gay club massacre:
This community pressed up against the Rockies was known for years as the Vatican of Evangelicals — a home base for a well-funded, well-organized conservative Christian political movement that broadcast dire warnings about the dangers of homosexuality to the nation, and in the early 1990s was instrumental in making Colorado the only state to ever pass a law making it legal to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation.
That was a long time ago, before Colorado Springs nearly doubled in size, outsiders made the city an increasingly diverse place and the community began hosting a yearly Pride parade officially sanctioned by the Republican mayor. Many in Colorado Springs believed the community had moved on.
But last weekend when a gunman stormed into Club Q, one of the city’s few L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, killing five people and injuring 18 others, many members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and their supporters found reason to question whether Colorado Springs had made as much progress as they thought — especially in an increasingly armed nation awash in extremist views.
The authorities are now holding a suspect, Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22. He was released from the hospital and has been booked in El Paso County jail, according to a tweet from the Colorado Springs police on Tuesday. His motivations were still unclear.
Some in the community saw the attack as a reason to rethink their sense of safety and acceptance in Colorado Springs.
“It was definitely a wake up call,” said Brandon Flanery, who grew up going to an evangelical megachurch in the city but left the community when he came out as gay. He said that until this week Colorado Springs felt increasingly welcoming for people like him. Now, he said, it’s clear: “It’s still not safe.”
But others say the problem is not unique to Colorado Springs, or to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. It’s something much broader.
“I feel like the hyper-partisanship is national, and this idea of the loudest voice wins, the meanest voice wins — it doesn’t feel unique to Colorado Springs,” said Tom Shepard, a filmmaker who grew up in Colorado Springs in the 1990s and now splits his time between there and San Francisco. “The national discourse is very toxic. Of course, how can Colorado Springs not be affected by that?”
Yep, it’s the fault of Christians, and conservatives from coast to coast. All right-thinking people know that. Nancy Pelosi said so:
“That fight remains more urgent than ever, as right-wing extremists target transgender Americans’ most fundamental rights and freedoms. Whether spouting dangerous rhetoric from cable news desks or openly bullying schoolchildren from the halls of power, MAGA Republicans are cruelly undermining the safety and well-being of our transgender community. Horrified by such shameless bigotry, House Democrats are proud to march alongside our trans friends, neighbors and siblings as we work to uphold justice and dignity for all. That is why we enacted fully-inclusive federal hate crime protections with the historic Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. And it is why the Democratic House has twice passed the Equality Act, landmark legislation extending the full protections of the Civil Rights Act to LGBTQ Americans.
“Heartbroken for so many beautiful souls murdered by hate and guided by relentless activists across the country, let us renew our resolve to build the future that our children deserve. Together, we will forge a safer, more just America – one where all of its people can freely and proudly exercise their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Daily Kos said so, in a piece it retracted after hearing from Matt Walsh’s lawyer:
An NBC News reporter said so:
Well, well, well, in a tweet that a NYT reporter posted a short time ago (there’s nothing in the paper about this as I write this post):
In other words, Anderson Aldrich is a self-identified queer man. We saw in earlier footage of the time last year that the SWAT team responded to the home he shared with his mother, when he threatened to blow it up, that he was a volatile lunatic. This information was widely available days ago. And yet — and yet! — the media and prominent liberal voices did not wait for more information to come out. This fit their narrative of a deranged conservative massacring gay people, no doubt urged on by Libs of Tiktok, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, and other conservative figures who dare to question the accepted LGBT narrative. It’s a replay of the Jussie Smollett hoax, in which the usual suspects accepted without question the absurd story that poor, poor black Jussie was victimized by “MAGA Country” domestic terrorists.
We conservatives have grown accustomed to this garbage. We know how the Left rolls, especially the propagandists in the media who pose as journalists. But something about this case really cracks me. They flat-out accused the strongest critics of the transgender cult, and the sexualization of children through things like Drag Queen Story Hour, of being party to mass murder. This is blood libel. It would have cost Pelosi, NBC, Daily Kos, and all the rest nothing to have waited until police released a statement about the suspected motive of the killer. But they couldn’t do it. They just knew it had to be the fault of conservatives and Christians. Even the early evidence we had that the killer was a raging psychopath did not stop them. They had the Truth. They had witches to burn.
This is not a one-off thing, as you know. I mentioned Jussie Smollett, but it goes back much further. For at least two decades now, LGBT activists have claimed that if we don’t give them whatever they want, including total affirmation of whatever they think and do, that we have blood on our hands. It is the vilest kind of manipulation, but it has worked wonders. We hear every year these fake claims that there is an “epidemic” of anti-trans violence, even though looking into the particular circumstances of all the trans people killed in a given year — as I have done before, here and here — reveals that the overwhelming majority were killed for reasons that almost certainly had nothing to do with their trans status (e.g., many of them were street prostitutes, one of the most dangerous lines of work that you can undertake).
None of that matters to activists, Democratic politicians, and the news media. Truth is inconvenient to their Narrative, which tells them to construe conservatives, Christians, and even liberals who question their radical claims and goals, as demons with blood on their hands. They did it with the horrific Florida gay nightclub massacre, which was actually carried out by an Islamic radical who swore allegiance to ISIS just before the killings, and who had a history of violence, mental instability, and who was possibly a closet case. They did it with the Matthew Shepard story, which turns out to have been about anti-gay hatred, yes, but also about rampant meth abuse. According to a journalist who reported the complexities of the story for the liberal magazine Harper’s, and who talked later to NPR, “Emblematic stories need emblematic victims. So Matthew needed to be an emblematic victim. And as soon as you have to do that, you start creating a kind of myth.”
The myth that the Left demands is that religious and political conservatives are anti-gay racists who are responsible for all the suffering of racial and sexual minorities. What they are doing is manufacturing a rationale for oppression, and even violence, against religious and political conservatives, and, on racial matters, against white people. Look, there really are anti-gay haters of the Right. There really are right-wing racists. There really are violent bigots of the Right. But these people, these credentialed hysterics, blame all of us.
We are at war. I struggle to find any other way to see this. Please challenge me in the comments, because I don’t want to believe this, because it foretells a dark future for our culture and our country. But it can hardly be clearer what many (not all!) on the Left want for America: a country cleansed of evil conservatives and Christians, where those bad people, those witches, are no longer free to work their evil among us. These blood libels keep happening, over and over again. The slanderers never, ever learn from their mistakes. Never.
I know how this works. I remind you that I was so captive to the emotional narrative I wanted to believe after 9/11 that I refused to see any evidence that warned against going to war in Iraq. I was just in Poland over the weekend, and had some painful conversations with people — good people, in my estimation — who believe that the Russia-Ukraine war is a matter of black and white, and that any claims, factual or analytical, that argue against a maximally hawkish, pro-war position are signs of cowardice or some other form of moral weakness. More personally, I am living through the excruciating destruction of my family system at the hands of people — not all of them in my family! — who have chosen to believe devastating lies that fit an emotionally satisfying narrative. Just this morning, a dear friend told me about the intense suffering in her own family, a suffering that stands to destroy it, that came because of pressure within the family to believe the narrative put forth by one of her parents, who demanded that everyone accept it, as the price of keeping the peace. When I was writing about the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal, over and over and over I saw cases in which congregations, families, and individuals turned against victims, because the testimony of those victims forced them to see things that they didn’t want to see, and challenged the settled narrative that gave them peace, and validated what they wished to believe.
Again: I know exactly how this works.
The truth is the only thing that will save us. When the stakes are high — in matters of war and peace, of life and death — it is more vital than ever to probe relentlessly for the truth. We must know that it is not possible ever to have the entire truth, but we have to struggle against ourselves often, to try to get to the bottom of things, to the most factually correct version of the truth that we can find. True, we can’t always wait for the full story to come out before acting, but the higher the stakes, the more careful we should be — and we should always work hard to be open to changing our minds in light of new facts and analysis. What is the alternative? False accusations, vengeful violence, destruction of the innocent, even war.
It emerged last week that in 2017, Rachel Levine, the transgendered doctor who was Pennsylvania’s top health official at the time, wrote to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia seeking evidence from the scientific literature justifying gender change surgeries on minors. CHOP admitted in the email below that these surgeries were taking place there, even though the hospital knew that there was nothing in the medical literature validating such radical measures:
These powerful medical industry people had no scientific backing for these irreversible, radical measures, but they determined that they were worth doing anyway, because … Narrative! And now, five years on, the dissident voices in the public square who speak out loudest against this kind of madness stood accused in recent days, in and by the national media, of inspiring mass murder in a gay Colorado nightclub. A mass murder that was in fact carried out by a queer man who has a history of explosive violence and apparent mental instability.
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What is the end game here, do you think? Whether they know it or not, these people, the Nancy Pelosis, the Brandy Zadroznys, and all the institutions that allow blood libels like this to go out unchallenged and unrestrained, are preparing America for something horrible. The national media are turning themselves into Radio Mille Collines. Wake up!
By the way, this just went up:
