Beatitudes, not platitudes
That the Orlando shooting was horrific is an understatement, and over the past week there have been outpourings of anger and hurt that I can’t begin to properly enunciate. To be clear, this was an attack on LGBT* people, because they were LGBT*. And that is a very scary development for so many of my friends who are LGBT* - and indeed, the more I think about it, for me. With this appalling crime comes a threat and a promise in a simple message – we are not welcome. We are not to be accepted by society, and it’s completely OK to hate us. Hate what we do, hate what we ‘do to society’, hate everything about us. And the terrifying thought is that actually, this isn’t a one-off feeling – this is how people feel about us, day in day out. Most of them don’t carry guns (or rather, most don’t use them on us) – but most of them mean it, and most of them, tacitly or openly, support measures to suppress and oppress us, and in some cases, have us imprisoned or executed. Sup...