Anti-gay community has blood on its hands: Column

Every anti-gay politician, every bigoted preacher, every self-hating bully has blood on his hands. Make no mistake about it, the shooting in Orlando which targeted the LGBT community was the end result of decades of anti-gay hate speech and gay bashings.

Every time a politician or community leader has advocated second-class citizenship for gay Americans, it has given permission to the haters to strike out — in this case in a mass slaughter.

What’s worse, the politicians themselves often don’t even see the connection. Florida Senator Marco Rubio grabbed the spotlight Sunday by denouncing “the new face of the war on terror.” And while he condemned what he called, “the way radical Islamists have targeted gays and lesbians in other countries,” he must have had amnesia about his own record. It is a record so bad that the LGBT publication The Advocate last year concluded, “Marco Rubio might be the most anti-gay presidential candidate yet.”

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At least Rubio’s call for blood donations in central Florida was the right one. And, in fact, so many people showed up to donate blood at an Orlando blood bank that they had to turn people away. You can bet many of those donors were gays, in yet another example of how the gay community takes care of its own, as it has since the early days of AIDS. (In an ironic twist, the Orlando blood bank technically bans donations from men who have had sex with other men, despite the FDA’s recent modification of that policy).

The fact is, gays and lesbians are no strangers to violence. My friend David Mixner, a gay rights pioneer, reminded his Sunday readers on the site Towleroad of the 32 gay bar patrons who died in 1973 when someone fire-bombed the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. Mixner is right when he says, “Every one of us knows someone who has been gay bashed.”

So imagine the message that anti-gay hate speech sends to someone who is mentally unstable, let alone such a person who has an assault weapon.

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Another friend, gay historian Gerard Kosovich, wrote on Sunday, “LGBTQ people face the threat of terror daily… The terror of religions that condemn us.  The terror of political parties that work to deny us full citizenship. The terror of elected officials and candidates who attack us. The terror of school authorities who look the other way as we are being bullied. The terror of media that spread hate speech. The terror of families who turn their backs on us or who in words or silence make it clear they see us as inferior. All of them have blood on their hands.”

And yet few of those who spread such hate speech and who write public policy that denigrates LGBT people will ever admit that they lit the fuse that led to so much tragedy.

Hank Plante, is an Emmy and Peabody-winning journalist who was one of the first openly gay TV reporters in the country. He is a member of the editorial board of The Desert Sun, where this column first appeared. Follow him on Twitter: @HankPlante

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