"Tolerance" Of Transgender People Caused The Charleston Church Massacre: Erick Erickson

It seems that any time there's a manmade tragedy or natural disaster, we are somehow blamed for it.

By "we" I mean LGBT people.  Usually, the blamers use "gay" as a catch-all term to include anyone who doesn't conform to accepted norms of gender and sexuality.  It's actually relatively rare that one group in the spectrum--e.g., gay men, lesbians or transgenders--are specifically indicted for one of the world's evils. 

Well, this time is one of those relative rarities.  Transgender people are being blamed for something terrible.  Actually, we're not being blamed for the tragedy itself; rather, someone is attributing it to acceptance of transgender people.

Yes, you read that right.  The mere fact that because of society's acceptance of trans people--or, more specifically, Caitlyn Jenner--people don't know what's right anymore.

Erick Erickson, the founder and editor of the blog Red Neck, I mean, RedState, had this to say on his radio show:

“We can’t have the conversations we need to have in this country about mental health and evil. We cannot have those conversations. It is impossible to have conversations like that in a society that can look at a 65-year-old male Olympian and say ‘Hey, he’s a girl now. We have to start calling him Caitlyn.’”

Now, if you read yesterday's post, you might have guessed that he was blaming the fact that "we cannot have those conversations" for the massacre of nine members of a Bible study group in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, South Carolina. 

OK...Calling Caitlyn Jenner who she is caused Dylann Roof to sit with those churchgoers--all of them African-Americans--and blow them away.  To be fair, Mr. Erickson is not a scientist or clinician, so perhaps he can be forgiven for some gaps in my knowledge.  And I'll admit that at times, my logic has been even faultier than his.

But I try not to repeat my mistakes.  Apparently, Mr. Erickson makes no such effort--or, again to be fair, he may have been unaware of his error.  Or he must have a very, very wide mouth that's impervious to pain:  He put his foot in it again when he repeated his sentiments in a post he wrote on his RedState:


"As a nation, when these things happen, we never have the conversation about real evil. We also never have the conversation about mental health.

...
Instead, we descend into partisan conversations where everything is political and neither side can concede or acknowledge the other's points. Everyone and everything gets blamed while ignoring the actual person who killed.
...
A society that looks at a 65 year old male Olympian and, with a straight face, declares him a her and "a new normal" cannot have a conversation about mental health or evil because that society no longer distinguishes normal from crazy and evil from good. Our American society has a mental illness -- overwhelming narcissism and delusion -- and so cannot recognize what crazy or evil looks like." 

So let me get this straight (pun intended):  It's tolerance that caused a young white man to kill nine African Americans because he believed that the races should be separate and black men "rape our women".  Hmm...I guess the word tolerance doesn't mean what I've always thought it meant.  If anything, I thought tolerance was more descriptive of those nine people who let him join them in their Bible study group before he killed them.

But, hey, what do I know?

Massacre In South Carolina: The Confederate Flag Still Flies

Today I’m not going to stick to the topic of this blog.  Instead, I want to talk about something that, I’m sure, you’ve heard about by now:  the massacre inside the Emanuel AfricanMethodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina .

One of the cruelest ironies is that members of a Bible study group—including the church's pastor, who also happens to be a  South Carolina State senator—in one of America’s oldest historically black churches were gunned down by a young white man who sat with them on the eve of Juneteenth— a few days after the 800^th anniversary of King John issuing Magna Carta.

And the Confederate Flag flies in front of the State Capitol.

A century and a half after slaves in South Carolina and Texas and other states got word that they were free men and women, a young man hadn’t gotten the message that the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees all citizens, regardless of their skin color, the rights enumerated in the first ten amendments (a.k.a. the Bill of Rights).  Heck, he didn’t even get the message thatthere’s no such country as Rhodesia anymore.  He was simply acting from the same sort of ignorance, the same sort of hate, that left earlier generations of young African Americans hanging from trees or at the bottoms of rivers.

And the Confederate Flag flies in front of the State Capitol.

More than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, in the state in which the opening shot of the US Civil War was fired, a young man entered a Bible Study group and waited for the “right” moment to shoot someone nearly as young as he is, people old enough to be his parents, grand-parents and great-grandparents.  He shattered the peace and sanctity they found in what, for many generations of African-Americans—and, perhaps, for those members of the Bible Study group—has been their closest-knit, if not their only, sanctuary.

And the Confederate flag flies in front of the State Capitiol.   

From the church's website.

A pastor was killed along with a deacon and laypeople.  Families lost sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers; friends lost friends and people lost spouses and other loved ones.  They loved and were loved; they raised families and were raised by families.  And they contributed to the lives of their communities through their professional and volunteer work, and the loves and interests they shared with those around them.

And the Confederate flag flies in front of the State Capitol.

Dylann Storm Roof, in an instant, ended the lives of Rev. (and Sen.) Clementa Pickney, Mira Thompson, Daniel Simmons Sr., Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, De Payne Middleton, Ethel Lance and her cousin Susie Jackson. All of them, one hundred and fifty years after Juneteenth.

And a Confederate flag in front of the State Capitol hasn't even been loweredto half-mast.