The Misuses of a Colorado Atrocity Redefining decency. by Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-misuses-of-a-colorado-atrocity/
When the news broke that an armed man had entered Club Q, an “LGBTQ” nightclub in Colorado Springs, at about midnight on Saturday, on the eve of something called the “Transgender Day of Remembrance,” and had proceeded to kill five people and wound at least twenty-five, one thing seemed all but certain. It was too early to know what had motivated the perpetrator, Anderson Lee Aldrich (who apparently was arrested last year, after a “brief standoff with law enforcement,” for making a bomb threat against his mother). But it seemed a safe enough prediction that the usual “LGBTQ” activists and their allies in the media would soon be spinning this atrocity to their advantage.
Sure enough, within a few hours, Colorado’s largest daily, the Denver Post, had posted an article in which one Elizabeth Hernandez linked the murders to “hateful rhetoric directed toward transgender people and the broader LGBTQ community.” The recently re-elected Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, stated Hernandez, “has been vocal against LGBTQ and transgender issues, including in a June tweet saying ‘Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars’ and a 2021 speech on the House floor during which she warned of ‘young girls across America who will have to look behind their backs as they change in their school locker rooms just to make sure there isn’t a confused man trying to catch a peek.’” Hernandez also noted the controversy surrounding “all-ages drag shows at public libraries and other locations” and a Colorado librarian who was “fired from her job for planning LGBTQ youth programming.”
What do all of these specifics cited by Hernandez have in common? Simple: not a single one of them is about hatred for transgender people or anybody else. They’re all about legitimate questions of public policy. Questions about whether small children should be encouraged to attend drag shows and stuff dollar bills into the drag artists’ panties. Questions about whether teenage boys claiming to be girls should be permitted to use girls’ locker rooms and showers. Questions about the proper ages at which children should be taught about various aspects of sex and sexual orientation – and whether they should be introduced at all to gender ideology, a cockamamie new set of propositions that deny biological reality and that might well have been designed with the explicit intent of confusing the hell out of small tykes.
And then there’s the most important question of all. It’s about underage boys and girls who’ve been brainwashed by mentally unstable teachers, by dimbulb school counselors, and by pusillanimous and/or money-grubbing doctors into thinking that they want to be butchered for life. Should such kids have the power to elect to go under the knife in order to look more like a member of the opposite sex? Should teenage girls be allowed to choose to have their breasts and uteruses mutilated? Should teenage boys be able to have their penises and testicles removed on demand? These are deadly serious questions. For the overwhelming majority of rational, compassionate adults, the answers are clear.
But for professional “LGBTQ” activists, the shooting at Club Q was a splendid opportunity to connect such rational, compassionate adults to a mass murderer. “You can draw a straight line from the false and vile rhetoric about LGBTQ people spread by extremists and amplified across social media, to the nearly 300 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced this year, to the dozens of attacks on our community like this one,” Sarah Kate Ellis, who reportedly makes around $200,000 a year as president and CEO of GLAAD, told Hernandez. In fact, the bills being introduced around the U.S. are about nothing more or less than protecting minors from a frighteningly infectious and highly toxic set of ideas that have already ravaged too many young American lives.
What Hernandez fails to note is that many of the most outspoken critics of these horrible ideas are themselves gay people who profoundly resent the replacement of the words “gay and lesbian” by the term “LGBT” or “LGBTQ” and the takeover of formerly gay venues and organizations by hard-core propagandists for transgender ideology. On YouTube, a Dutch gay man named Mr. Menno and an American lesbian named Arielle Scarcella regularly stand up to the lie that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man. American gays who oppose the creepy targeting of kids by transgender ideologues have formed a group called Gays against Groomers, and their counterparts in the UK have founded the LGB Alliance. I’m only one of a number of gay writers who have repeatedly criticized transgender ideology. If you want to say that I’m therefore complicit in the mass murder at Club Q, be my guest. I’m used to it. After the 2011 mass murders in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed to be motivated by a hostility to Islam, every prominent critic of Islam, myself included, was accused of being, in effect, a Breivik co-conspirator.
So it is now. Hours after the atrocity at Club Q, its Facebook page still featured an announcement of an “all-ages drag brunch” that had been scheduled for Sunday. One of the comments included in the thread below the announcement was by Andy Humm, a veteran gay activist and broadcaster. “Blood on the hands of Republicans who spent $50 million on ads this election cycle targeting drag queens and transgender people,” Humm wrote. “Looking at you Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio and Kari Lake. Decent people MUST speak up against this hate!”
Humm, who’s pushing 70, has been a prominent figure in the gay media and in queer-left activism for decades. Not until the latter part of his career were transsexuals – newly re-branded as transgender persons – merged into the gay-rights movement and “gay and lesbian community” under the new LGBT label (which soon enough became LGBTQ, LGBTQI, and so on). No gay person that I know of voted for this change; I never heard it debated or discussed. But professional gays like Humm, whose modest career as a “gay broadcaster” was threatened by the rapid mainstreaming of gay people in America (which, for example, all but eliminated the gay bookstore), went along with it.
This meant buying into – or pretending to buy into – dogmas to which virtually nobody would have assented a generation ago. It meant pretending not to recognize that the ballooning numbers of young people claiming to be transgender was reflective of a social-media-driven trend. And, worst of all, it meant pretending that the surgical destruction of confused young people’s private parts should be celebrated as “gender-affirmative.” One of the most appalling betrayals of our time is the readiness with which veteran activists like Andy Humm, who represented themselves for decades as champions of gay rights, sold out gays and lesbians in a trice in exchange for careers in a newly overhauled movement whose goal was not equal rights but the undermining of biological truth itself – no matter how many innocent lives might be destroyed in the process.
Decent people? How dare anyone who supports such sheer evil speak of decency?
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