From a post I just put up on the main site (this is just a snippet of the entire post):
The Family Research Council has decided to treat this tragedy as yet another opportunity to defame its victims. First, they blamed the shooting on the Southern Poverty Law Center for standing up to the Family Research Council's decades of hate and defamation against gay and trans people. Then they went so far as to blame President Obama for the shooting.
Since the FRC has been shameless in playing the blame game in an attempt to milk this tragedy for political benefit, then so be it. Let's do what they're demanding we do, and talk about whose rhetoric is to blame for the shooting.
The Family Research Council has claimed for 20 years that gay men are after America's children - either to convert said children into a Satanic lifestyle of emptiness, disease and death; or we simply want to rape the kids, a lot.
Now, I'm not a parent, but I am an uncle. And if I met someone who wanted to rape, or kill, my nieces and nephews, God help him. That's all I'll say on the matter. The suggestion that such language might not inspire violence in the defense of children is ludicrous.
The Family Research Council, and more generally the anti-gay right, can't have it both ways. Either words can incite violence or they can't. Falsely labeling someone a bad person can either provoke violence, or it can't. The FRC would have us believe that our admonitions incite violence but theirs couldn't.
But if words can incite violence, then it's fair to examine all the words of all the parties to the dispute, not just the words of one side.
And if you examine what the Family Research Council, and really the entire religious right, has said - lied - about gay and trans people for the past two decades, not only is what the they've said far worse than what any of their critics have said in response, but their language is so hateful, so damning, so incendiary on its face (and false, which only makes it all the more incendiary), that I believe it's difficult not to consider the possibility that the religious right might share some of the blame for recklessly inciting the violence that finally, and sadly, unfolded this past week.
