Orlando shooting: thoughts and prayers from hypocrites do nothing to help

Comment: Why I light candles after a tragedy

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying would have it. Unless they're gay, in which case… awkward!

Another day, another mass killing in the land of free and easy access to automatic weapons, but having reached peak horror with the Sandy Hook atrocity (20 children and six school teachers murdered), the mass murder at Florida's Pulse nightclub, a gay venue, distinguished itself in another way. Not just as America's deadliest mass shooting, but as the most contested. 

Why? 

Because it's awfully hard to appear duly sympathetic to victims you yourself have been victimising for years.

It was sick-making to see one hypocrite after another offering up thoughts and prayers for the LGBT victims, when for years their thoughts and prayers have been fervently directed towards oppressing and even terrorising them. You might imagine that it would be exquisitely difficult, even painful, to square that circle, but Donald Trump was not the only massive idiot willing to try. One after another, conservative lawmakers, flush with funds from the gun lobby, lined up to offer their useless 'thoughts and prayers' and to drag everyone's attention away from all the dead homos and onto the killer's invisible friend, Allah.

Never mind that he was an unstable and aggressive man whose psychosis hooked onto radical Islam as the quickest way to earth for the lightning bolt of deranged violence building up within him. Never mind that the murderous arse-clowns of ISIS knew exactly nothing of him until they saw it all on Twitter and rushed out a press release to take a nice hot bath in all of the blood he'd spilled. Never mind that the gay community of Orlando… remember them, the victims? Well, never mind that they resisted any and all attempts to gather their surviving members into an anti-Muslim pogrom.

It was time for an anti-muslim pogrom.

Definitely not time for a debate about gun laws. Definitely not time for a good, long hard think about homophobia specifically and the politics of hatred in general. There are so many lines snaking into this septic mess that we will never untangle them, but one mainline does stand out.

Hatred.

We can see the evidence of the hatred boiling away inside the shooter's heart and mind, but we cannot now clinically dissect it. We can only ponder the consequences of hatred. It always ends in blood, in horror. Always.

It might take a while to get there but arrive there it will in the end. 

Some of you might think on that the next time you compare something like a Safe Schools Program to paedophile grooming. Or draw a line from marriage equality to bestiality. Some of you might consider the effect you have on weaker, smaller, more unstable minds when you point your crooked staff at a reviled minority and pronounce your very own fatwa upon them.

There will be blood and a few inconvenient drops of it might just splatter on you as they fly.

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