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Until the next Islamic assault, when the fudging and obfuscation will need to begin begin all over again, the vague narrative that blames non-specific “religion” for the slaughter of 49 gay revellers in Orlando has settled into its usual solid groove. It means that the ABC’s Julia Baird can write an entire column about the massacre without once mentioning the word “Muslim”, it and frees her editor from the professional obligation to ask why she hasn’t. It means that Baird can toss a dart or two at other religions, but only the ones of which the ABC disapproves. Hence her reference to an unnamed Baptist minister in California who is alleged to have said that more gays should have died. After that, she can cock a snook at Family First and shake her blonde locks in dismay that a Muslim gunman’s rampage is but the “continuum that starts in smaller and sometimes hidden instances of discrimination.”
Apparently, if you have ever chuckled at a pub joke about transvestites, you are as much to blame for that blood on the walls as Omar Mateen.
Baird has plenty of company in wafting fog over sharp facts, not least the current US president. Jonah Goldberg writes:
There’s a reason Barack Obama had to go back to the Crusades to compare the West to Islam in his notorious effort to talk Christians down from their “high horse”: Because in the world we actually live in right now, and by the standards of not just modernity but also of the secular Left, the West is simply better. That’s right, better, by which I mean superior.
The notion that American Christians, even the most ardent Christian conservatives, are indistinguishable from Islamists — or even the typical “moderate Muslims” of Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc. — in their attitudes and practices with regard to homosexuality is not just stupid and ignorant; it is almost literally insane. If you doubt that, read Andy McCarthy’s piece from earlier this week. Or look at global surveys of public opinion on homosexuality. Or look at the list of ten countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.
I understand why gays can’t stand it when some American Christians talk about “curing” homosexuality. But (a) that is not the law in America and (b) no matter how you slice it, wanting to “save” gays from perceived sin is just plain different from wanting to kill them. No seriously, you could look it up. Wanting to maintain the traditional definition of marriage is different from throwing gay people off buildings or crushing them with stones.
Goldberg’s column can be read in full via the link below. And Baird’s paint-by-numbers exercise in colouring the facts with her ABC palette? Well, read it if you wish, but there is nothing new about her evasions. You’ve read them all before, and thanks to the Creed That Cannot Be Named you will have plenty more opportunities not to read them all over again.
