2016 June 12^th

Donald Trump has finally relinquished the national stage; it took the murder of fifty people and the wounding of another fifty-some to accomplish that. The murderer, Omar Mateen, was born in New York but was inspired by ISIS to do the killing. He called 911 just before the murders to announce his intentions. Mateen had come to the attention of the FBI because of remarks he had made and their agents interviewed him on two separate occasions. In each case the agents found no reason to hold him and, at the time of the shooting, Mateen was not under surveillance. As a result there was no legal basis to deny him access to automatic weapons so our gun laws provided him with the means to murder fifty people and injure more than fifty others. The price of our curious affection for lethal weaponry does keep going up.

The issue for Mateen was apparently his hostility toward gays. Acquaintances claimed that he could not stand to see men kissing each other. How he felt about women kissing each other is not recorded. In any case, he is dead so he will no longer be bothered by either situation.

This hostility toward homosexuals in not confined to Moslem radicals; many Christian radicals hold identical views and some have acted on them. In Laramie Wyoming in 1998 Mathew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was beaten and left to die by two fellow students who were convicted of his murder and are each serving life sentences.

But then we have some religious leaders who happily incite their followers to kill homosexuals. One of the prime movers in this group is Pastor Kevin Swanson. Pastor Swanson heads the “National Religious Liberty Conference.” At the meeting of this conference attended by such Republican luminaries as “Bobby” Jindal, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, Pastor Swanson put on a splendid performance.

Bible held high this man pranced up and down across the stage, quite literally screaming that homosexuals should be killed. He referenced various chapters in Leviticus and in Pauls’ letters to the Romans as his authority. Of course there is also Biblical authority for taking your disobedient son to the elders so that they can stone him to death, but few people would think that appropriate. Pastor Swanson is quite serious about instituting a death penalty for gays.

He has company too!  There is Pastor Phil Kayser of the Dominion Covenant Church who is also in favor of executing unrepentant gays. Joel McDurmon of Atlanta’s Christian Reconstructionist Church who also shares his views about killing gays.

Certain Christian churches are no different than certain Moslem sects when it comes to hatred of gays and both can easily find a scriptural basis for their bigotry. Now this hatred is turned against gays; who knows who will be the target tomorrow.