I knew in the days following the Newtown shooting, that Focus on the Family and their ilk would offer us their opinions. I was not disappointed in this assumption. James Dobson is again blaming tragedy on gay marriage and abortion. Because we have “turned our backs on God”, the almighty is punishing us.
Not being a Christian, I find it very hard not to equate this type of hate preaching with Christians in general. Maybe it’s because I don’t see much of an effort by Christians to refute this kind of fear mongering, and to show us how Christians behave.
It is not only disgusting behavior, it’s dangerous rhetoric. We are living in an increasingly desperate, scared, financially crippled society. Promoting aggression, discrimination and intolerance of different parts of the society is going to yield violent results. You don’t have to look far to see that for LGBT people in America, there is real danger of physical violence. The epidemic of young suicides ought to offer some illumination on the subject. With the prevalence of social media, kids are now being cyber stalked and terrorized, in addition to what they face every day at school. In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center had this to say, concerning hate crimes:
“According to the new report, hate crimes involve violence far more often than other crimes. The data showed 84% of hate crimes were violent, meaning they involved a sexual attack, robbery, assault or murder. By contrast, just 23% of non-hate crimes involved violence. Other studies have suggested that hate-motivated violence, especially against LGBT people, is more extreme than other violence.
The report also showed that 56% of hate crime victims identified race as the primary factor in the crimes they reported. Ethnicity accounted for another 29% of the total. Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation were 18% of the total. Given that the best studies indicate about 3% of the American population is homosexual, that means that gays and lesbians are victimized at six times the overall rate.”
What causes massacres like Newton is not gay rights or abortion. It’s a country that defends the right to own an automatic weapon with more fervor than to offer equality to all citizens. We worship militarism and guns in America, and gun lobbying spends a lot of money on Capitol Hill to keep it that way. We don’t need to arm our teachers with concealed weapons, we need to seriously address gun control. We need to open up the discourse, and talk about how we are going to meet the continuing crisis that is the 21st century.
To read the full report by the SPLC, follow this link:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/winter/hate-crime
Letters to My Generation 