When thoughts and prayers are about hate, not healing

Thoughts and prayers can cut many ways. They can be expressions of sympathy and bring comfort. They can divide and bring pain. Or they can be a dodge.

As we’re rightly offering our prayers to the victims of the mass murder of 49 people by a domestic terrorist at an LGBT club in Orlando early Sunday morning, we need to remember another prayer that was offered up just two weeks ago, before an important congressional vote.

Roll Call, a newspaper on Capitol Hill, reminded the world on Tuesday that “House Republicans at a conference meeting heard a Bible verse that calls for death for homosexuals shortly before the chamber voted … to reject a spending bill that included an amendment barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Georgia Rep. Rick W. Allen led the opening prayer, reading from Romans 1:18-32, and Revelations 22:18-19, Roll Call reported. While there’s disagreement over Allen’s intent, there’s no question what “worthy of death” means.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who sponsored the anti-discrimination amendment, didn’t mince words: “To suggest that protecting people from being fired because of who they are means eternal damnation, then I think they are starting to show their true colors.”

It’s disgraceful, and it’s far too common.

A tribute to the victims of the Orlando shooting in Manila on Wednesday. Erik De Castro | Reuters

A tribute to the victims of the Orlando shooting in Manila on Wednesday. Erik De Castro | Reuters

Despite enormous gains in efforts to protect gay and transgender people from discrimination — including the 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states — there has also been a dangerous backlash.

LGBT people have come under political attack. Local ordinances protecting people from discrimination have been rolled back in nasty campaigns, like the one in Houston that overturned that city’s equal rights ordinance.

In that campaign, ordinance opponents relied on fear and myths to portray transgender people as sexual predators. It’s blood libel and a lie. Fear mongering at its worst.

As the editorial board of the Bangor Daily News has said, it’s transgender people — and particularly transgender kids — who are at risk of bullying, assault and suicide. They aren’t threats to anyone.

In North Carolina, the governor and a Republican-controlled legislature enacted HB 2, which overturned a non-discrimination ordinance in Charlotte. The insidious bill has cost the state dearly with lost jobs and lost investment.

Bigotry and the desire to score cheap political points have overcome common sense and decency. Now, North Carolina is at risk of losing education funding for violating federal law and is in a legal battle with the federal government.

The rhetoric around these efforts victimizes a population that has been a target for legalized discrimination, hatred and violence, and it’s wrong.

In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage has thrown his lot in with the forces of discrimination. He’s blocked implementation of rules to protect transgender students in Maine, supported a lawsuit in Virginia targeting a transgender student and joined a lawsuit opposing Obama administration guidance directing public schools to allow students to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity.

And then there’s Michael Heath, a longtime opponent of LGBT rights in Maine. Right now, he’s collecting signatures to rollback our state’s non-discrimination protections for gay and transgender people.

Heath has sent his own prayers. He’s called homosexuality “intrinsically harmful and evil,” and said that it is rooted in sorcery and is the child of the devil, the enemy of everything that is right. He’s even said that supporters of same-sex marriage should be “cast into the sea with a millstone hung about their neck.”

The list of places where this kind of hatred is finding a new breath is growing.

A Baptist preacher in California felt comfortable enough with his hate on Sunday to say the Orlando massacre was great. “The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die.”

Dangerous, hate-inspired bigotry isn’t limited to any one religion or one people.

As Robert Lynch, the Catholic bishop of St. Petersburg, wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post earlier this week, “Sadly it is religion, including our own, that targets, mostly verbally, and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence.”

The Orlando terrorist proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS during the attack, but his motivations aren’t entirely clear even as more information becomes known. But we do know that he targeted the LGBT community and he was inspired by hate.

So here are my thoughts and prayers: It’s time that we stop dehumanizing people who are different, whether that difference is their sexual orientation, gender identity, skin color or religion.

And I pray that we find the courage and the conviction to stand up to the fear mongers who would turn neighbor against neighbor and reject bigotry and hatred wherever we find it.

David Farmer

About David Farmer

David Farmer is a political and media consultant in Portland, where he lives with his wife and two children. He was senior adviser to Democrat Mike Michaud’s campaign for governor and a longtime journalist. You can reach him at dfarmer14@hotmail.com.