Orlando massacre reaction

      

         

          For a Sunday afternoon in Orlando, it is unusually quiet. By now, normally the roads and streets are bustling, lawn mowers are humming, sidewalk joggers rush by in pairs, and there is chatter in the air; from neighborhood grill outs, get togethers, and pool parties. But today, the silence is eerie. The whole area seems to be stunned by the news that 49 people were murdered and even more injured in this morning’s shooting at the Pulse nightclub in downtown Orlando. 49 people dead! These are battlefield numbers. These are casualties that occur when at war. So this isn’t a tragedy. It’s an atrocity.

          The gunman, identified as Omar Mateen, called 911 reportedly from within the club around 2 AM with a message of support for ISIS just minutes before he opened fire. He decided, on the basis of his avowed faith in Islam, that killing people was what Allah wanted. A Texas pastor used the occasion this morning to declare the Christian god was in complete agreement. He is saying that Yahweh or Jehovah sides with Allah, and that justifies the slaughter. Would Mateen have killed if not motivated by a religious belief? Would a Christian minister have sided with an Islamic jihadist if not for his religious belief? These men are evil. They are the face of what is wrong when motivated by their holy books. When was the last time someone killed because of what they read in a Harry Potter book?

          Like that Texas preacher, a longtime FORMER friend on Facebook (who will remain nameless as I will never acknowledge them as a member of the human race again) decided to show his love and understanding of the situation this morning by quoting Galatians 6:7 from the bible: “Don't be deceived: God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows he will also reap.” When I read that, I went to his Facebook page and was astounded that he had published even more vicious, gay-bashing, and biblically-oriented rantings and ravings all in support of this mass killing. I did not bother sending him a message or ask for clarification. I immediately unfriended him. If I see him at any upcoming national meetings that we have attended together in the past, I will not shake his hand or even nod in his direction.

          This is the face of 21st century Christianity. This is what he really thinks Jesus meant in Luke 19:27 when he supposedly said “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”

          I’ll state my reaction plainly….WHAT HORSESHIT! You, FORMER friend on Facebook, are the reason more and more people find your religion not just stupid, but wicked. And YOU are stupid and wicked for quoting it. You give the word HATE a whole new meaning. The Orlando victims did not sow death and destruction anywhere. They did not reap any godly justice for any sin. It’s like saying because people were buying fatty foods at a San Ysidro California McDonalds that James Huberty has a right to come in and gun them down on July 18, 1984…or that if you watch the movie The Dark Knight Rises, you should expect someone like James Holmes to pop in and open fire as he did in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012, because clearly watching a movie or eating McDonalds food is worthy of death. And now Christian bigot, loudmouth, and homophobe Pat Robertson has claimed that this is God's judgment on our nation because same sex couples are allowed to marry. As I stated at the beginning of this paragraph...WHAT HORSESHIT!

The source of evil.

          Why did it happened? Some are already claiming that it’s the atmosphere of hate created by candidates like Donald Trump. I doubt that. I think it has more to do with holy books and people’s interpretation of what they read that led to this massacre. This is a logical extension of the Huguenot slaughter perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1100s, the wholesale murder of Mormons by Christians in the state of Missouri in 1838, the Cave of Patriarchs massacre by Baruch Goldstein on Muslim worshipers February 25, 1994 near Hebron Israel, or the mass shooting in Peshawar Pakistan by Islamic militants at a school crowded with children on December 16, 2014. The common denominator is religion. In each case, the killers indicated god told them, through their holy books, to kill. Christopher Hitchens had it absolutely right. Religion does poison everything.

Religious poison in Israel - The attack on the Gay Pride parade

Boy, do I miss Christopher Hitchens. I have read his book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” seven times. Each time I gain greater insight into what he was telling the world. He did not suffer any religion quietly, tacitly or gladly, challenging all of us to see how and why it’s become a threat to the world, and continues to be the source of unadulterated hatred wherever it is found.

He would be having a field day with the latest news out of Israel.

Dateline Jerusalem July 30, 2015 – “An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who had recently been released from prison after serving 10 years for stabbing participants in the annual Gay Pride Parade here in 2005 struck again Thursday, stabbing and wounding six marchers in this year’s parade, according to the police.

Yishai Schlissel 2015

After slashing and stabbing the six, the assailant, Yishai Schlissel, was pinned to the ground and arrested by police officers who were stationed along the route. Emergency services said two of the victims are in serious condition.

Yishai Schlissel 2005

In 2005, Schlissel told police that he was planning “to kill in the name of God” and that “such abomination cannot exist in Israel.” He was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years in prison. During that attack, police said that Schlissel dodged in between marchers, stabbing at random until he was pinned down by the police. The Israeli news media reported that he was released from prison three weeks ago.

If anything proves religion poisons everything, you can’t do much better than this. Schlissel stabs three people 10 years ago because in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, the Talmud condemns sex between males with death. Three weeks after his release from serving a ten year prison sentence for the first crime, he does it again, only this time he wounds twice as many, with two still in serious condition as of this writing. Is anyone surprised an “ultra-orthodox” believer thinks he has the right to act as god’s executioner?

There isn't any.

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Christopher Hitchens quoted that line so often he will eventually be given credit for the saying even though its originator is Dr. Steven Weinberg. Mr. Schlissel used his orthodox religious beliefs, which have been promoted as a profound good, to do something purely evil, yet he thinks he acted in the best interest of god. That’s an excuse any killer could use as justification for their action.

Every religion's God seems to love the sight of spilled blood.

This kind of religious poison isn’t anything new for Israel. Who can forget Dr. Baruch Goldstein who managed to gun down 29 Muslim worshippers and injure 125 others in the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre near Hebron on February 25, 1994 before being beaten to death by survivors? Yet even given the horror of that slaughter, at Goldstein's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin used it as an opportunity to claim one million Arabs are "not worth a Jewish fingernail". And what is it that separates Jews from Arabs? The belief that a god gave each side Palestine, all of it. Each sees the other as illegal occupiers. The poison of their religions will continue to kill thousands of people for the foreseeable future unless we finally realize that all religions…all of them…are man-made fairy tales and deserve no further attention, promotion, or endorsement in our societies. The sooner they are gone, the better off humankind will be.  

             Religions are not peaceful. They are mind control, even the pacifist ones. You surrender your free will to an ancient belief. And if that belief has an ancient book full of fairy tales, fake history, and mythical accounts that vilify another group of people, any "ultra-orthodox" interpretation of those passages will lead the reader to insist god meant for that group to be exterminated. Last week’s attack on a peaceful parade shows that Judaism is just as guilty as Christianity or Islam in warping a person’s behavior. 
           The problem with any religion is that the people who believe those myths want everyone to believe or abide by their myths too, and will go to any lengths to make that happen. The parade marchers, who were doing no harm to anyone, were assaulted with the intent to murder because years ago a parent or rabbi convinced Mr. Schlissel that some gobbledy-gook they read was god claiming He didn’t like those people, and since god wasn’t there to stab them himself, well….then it was up to Mr. Schlissel. For that reason, Mr. Schlissel should never see the outside of a prison cell again.

Bigots request the Supreme Court grant them continued discriminatory rights against gays

The fundamentalists just won’t give it up.

In a landmark 2003 decision, the US Supreme Court declared gay sex was not a crime. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Court’s opinion that “moral disapproval is not a valid justification for discriminatory laws that demean gay couples."

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent, predicted that eliminating moral disapproval as a rightful basis for a law would allow same-sex marriage. He only had to wait a few months when in May 2004; Massachusetts became the first state to declare gay couples had a right to marry. That set in motion state-by-state challenges to laws limiting marriage to a man and a woman. Many members of state legislatures still believed gay sex was a crime, therefore, gays shouldn't be allowed to marry and legitimize it, but they couldn't come right out and say that.

This created a legal black hole as lawyers defending anti-gay marriage laws scrambled to find a rational basis to continue discrimination that did not rely on “tradition”, or on the religious view that homosexuality was a sin. Initial efforts led them to suggest it was a procreation issue: Opposite-sex couples should marry because they could have children, even accidentally, and the state wanted them to wed. Ergo, it could legally limit marriage to heterosexual couples only...for the sake of the children, of course.

By 2015, Michigan had twisted Justice Kennedy's 2003 opinion about discriminatory laws by saying that they don't want to let gay people marry because getting married would demean gay people. Demeaning heterosexual couples via marriage, though, was not a problem.

 In Kentucky, they felt that their marriage ban wasn't discriminatory, since LGBTs are free to get married, as long as it’s straight-married. No, not a whiff of discrimination in that. What if we reversed it? Straights could wed anyone so long as it was only someone of the same sex.

Ohio wants to maintain its marriage ban out of concern for the people who voted for it...sort of like “Sorry folks, our ignorant voters were told by their preachers that this has to stay on the books or God’ll do really awful things to them, and they’re just filled with fear.”

Tennessee is fixated on sex….i.e. penises and vaginas. They are meant for each other and no other orifices are to be considered, except as gateways to hell. See, they use the bible to claim anything else is unnatural…as if a talking serpent is.

    A naturally occurring talking serpent charms Adam and Eve who seem equipped with something un-natural given their supposed 'origin'.

In the current case before the Supreme Court, the state of Michigan has denied a marriage license to two women who are raising four foster kids abandoned by their natural mothers. The women, who are both nurses, were allowed to adopt the children, but only as individuals, not as a couple. When asked why these women should be barred from marrying, Michigan Solicitor General John Bursch insisted the decision had nothing to do with disapproval of their lifestyle; that being gay was not the problem."Oh, gosh, no,” he said, “the state doesn't care about sexual orientation. We're not drawing distinctions based on the identity, the orientation or the choices of anyone. It's not meant to exclude." Clarifying the state’s position, Bursch said “The state's concern is that allowing the women to marry would have an effect on the rest of society. It would "de-link the idea that we're binding children with their biological mom and dad."

See the difference?                                                  

If not, let me re-interpret Mr. Bursch’s bloviating: “Oh gosh no, allowing the women to marry would have a detrimental effect on society because it would hamper our narrow-minded religious bigotry and discrimination because our holy book, written about 2 thousand years ago, before anyone had an understanding of human desire and human biology, made a claim that homosexuality was bad, (but never says why it’s bad) and therefore a sin, punishable by death. Moral disapproval is valid justification to maintain prejudiced and intolerant laws aimed solely at gay couples because the state of Michigan doesn’t want the children “de-linked” from the biological father and mother (the only ones who should be granted marriage rights), and have them “linked-up” with non-biological parents who are of the same sex.” Does Mr. Bursch actually think the four kids should be bound to the mothers and fathers that abandoned them, and not instead be linked with the two women who have loved them and raised them since? How would the women getting married "de-link" the kids from their biological parents? How does that work?
When two people of consenting age love each other, even if they are the same sex, why should it matter to anyone other than the two people involved if they get married?

I personally think the state's position should be bending over and touching their toes...while every LGBT boot in the state is screaming up from behind to land a well-aimed kick.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue its decision before its term ends in June. So, if you’re in a committed gay relationship now, plan on a June wedding.