The motivation of Omar Mateen’s hate-crime may never be fully understood.
FEW UNDERSTAND better than the gay community the power and importance of words. What somebody is called and how their actions are defined has consequences that reverberate through society. We had to fight hard to stop homosexuality being classified as a “disease”, to choose just one example from hundreds that have touched our community.
In the aftermath of the Orlando massacre at Pulse nightclub, there was something almost ghoulish in the way many people tried to spin the story to their own political advantage. As in so many instances, Donald Trump was the worst offender, insisting it was a terrorist attack and repeating his demand that all Muslim immigration be banned. This, despite the fact that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was an American citizen who, like Trump himself, was born in a district of New York.