This to me is a horrifyingly fascinating example of the paranoia that drives the extreme right in this country, a twisted mindset in which they are somehow the “victims” of people whom they have never met and who have done nothing to cause their troubles. Adkisson seems to have had an unhappy life – lost his job, lost his wife (whom he battered), didn’t have much positive going on – and somehow had been convinced by the phalanx of rightwing gasbags typified by Rush Limbaugh that “liberals” were to blame for his woes. What happened last Sunday is proof that if you pour enough gasoline on wood, sooner or later someone is going to strike a match around it and a conflagration will break out. Yet no one seems to hold these commentators responsible for creating the mindset that made it seem reasonable for Mr. Adkisson to walk into a church where children were performing Annie on a quiet July Sunday and shoot people he didn’t know. They were, after all, the hated liberals who are to blame for all of our nation’s ills. I wonder if he now has a job and his wife has taken him back. Somehow I doubt it.
The other thing that amazes me if how little attention this has gotten. I try to imagine what would have happened if the shoe had been on the other foot. Let’s imagine that, say, a lesbian couple in Massachusetts, enraged by Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s decision to force Catholic Charities to drop out of offering adoption services rather than comply with a state law that bars discrimination against adoptive families because of the sexual orientation of the parents, had walked into the Cathedral in Boston’s South End a week ago today and opened fire. Or if a gay couple living in a state where the Church of Latter Day Saints played a major role in passing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage had walked into Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle last Sunday and opened up. The round the clock coverage would have gotten even Brad and Angelina’s new baby out of the news. Yet shooting down some liberals gets barely a day’s notice.
And the media’s got a liberal bias? Please.
Unlike Mr. Adkisson, the folks in my hypothetical examples above could make a concrete case that their lives had actually been harmed because of the actions of these denominations. But you don’t see gays doing what Mr. Adkisson did. Maybe it’s because we, unlike our religious opponents, remember Christ’s words about those who persecuted him as he hung on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Here, here! Perhaps part of why this didn’t get huge coverage was because the Unitarian Universalist community is not considered part of the mainstream religious sector of our country. They may not be large, but, by God, they know what inclusion and love are all about. Can’t say the same for many other denominations. Now that you are in your final stretch at GLSEN, what’s on the agenda when you leave?
Left by wrestlefreestyle150 on August 3rd, 2008