Once again, a mass shooting. Once again, flesh is torn by bullets and innocent lives ended. Once again, an LGBTQ nightclub is the scene.
This one hit particularly close to my core. I grew up in Colorado Springs and went to high school a couple of miles away from Club Q.
I know that the place could as easily have been where other senselessly reviled groups gather – a synagogue, a Black or Asian community center, a celebration of Latin American heritage, to name but a few. It could comprehensibly have been a school.
Thoughts and prayers generate only tears and frustration. Solutions require action.
To be sure, mental illness contributes significantly to the scenes of mass murder all too commonly witnessed in the United States. Whether speaking of the Pulse nightclub or Uvalde or any other mass shooting – there have been 689 this calendar year – you can make a strong argument that a person has to be mentally ill to commit such an act.
But do they really?
How different in fundamental character was the attack on the US Capitol from mass shootings? Many, perhaps most of those who stormed the capitol building acted because they had been told lies by those they trusted. They were fanatics, “true believers” of the malicious fable that an election had been stolen, and it was up to them to save our democracy when, in reality, they were committing violence against it.
How many mass shooters are true believers in the messages they have been bombarded with over and over again: that the groups they target are somehow genetically inferior, somehow immoral, somehow “less than” and dangerous, and should be eradicated?
Whether being mentally ill is required to be a true believer is beside the point. The salient feature is that as elected officials, community and faith leaders, and anyone with a public platform and following, we must exercise care in our language. Who among our congregations, audiences, or followers is struggling with mental illness? Who is but one lie away from becoming a true believer fanatic?
Who will absorb your statements about the LGBTQ community or any other group being “perverse”? Who will accept the passage of laws targeting and isolating the LGBTQ community as evidence that this group is less than, worthy of ridicule, ostracism, or worse? Who will be motivated to violence by your rhetoric denigrating the LGBTQ, Black, Asian, or Mexican communities?
When you tolerate hate speech at city council or school board meetings, when you condone discrimination, when you preach exclusion, you contribute to present misery and potential disaster.
Thoughts and prayers become tears and frustration. It’s past time they are accompanied by action.
15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. —-James 2:15-17 (New International Version)
Please, let’s join together. Stop hate speech. Connect with and get to know your neighbor. Resist those who would sow hate and division and enmity as ways to promote their own agenda. Try understanding. Try tolerance.
In 2023, the HELP Center for LGBT Health and Wellness will be hosting community meetings across Tarrant County to begin the work necessary to averting these tragedies. I encourage you to join us in that effort.
DeeJay R. Johannessen
President/CEO
Photos by:
RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post
Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post
Matthew Staver/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Jason Connolly/AFP