Orlando Murders A Reckoning for Us

by Kilian SC · July 1, 2016

From Iswamo Kapulu, Johannesburg – Earlier this month a gunman murdered 49 people and injured a further 53 in Orlando, Florida.

Jose Louis Morales cries as he kneels June 21 at a makeshift memorial for his brother Edward Sotomayor Jr. and other victims of the Pulse night club shootings in Orlando, Fla. (CNS photo/Carlo Allegri, Reuters)

As the gunman went through the club, indiscriminately hunting down his victims, one young man hid in a bathroom, texted his mother and told her he loved her, then that the shooter was coming, and finally that he was going to die. That is the last thing she heard from the child she had brought into this world.

As responders worked through the bloody aftermath of the shooting, they had to drown out the sound of ringing phones — desperate fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and friends and lovers, all holding on to the hope that the person they love wasn’t among the dead. With every missed call, the reality became clearer that their loved one was dead.

This is the human cost of homophobia and every imam, priest or pastor who has turned their minbar or pulpit into an altar of hate is culpable for blood that has been spilt in hate’s name.

They are responsible for the grieving mothers left in the wake of their hate. Every father who sat next to a hospital bed, praying that God spare his only son, is there in part because of the hate preached “in Jesus’ name”.

[pullquote-rightEvery woman who won’t be allowed to properly grieve the woman she loved and wanted to spend her life with — because of the very homophobia that killed her — owes her pain to a failure of humanity when faced with defunct theology.[/pullquote-right]

We have been brought to this place by the failure to love and uplift the dignity of those who love differently to how we believe they should. This is a place of reckoning.

Some have doubled-down and called this tragedy the “just rewards” of a “lifestyle” the victims “chose”. But those who value the dignity of every human person — which is an absolute for the Catholic Church — must take this opportunity to reflect deeply on what they believe and teach.

]Therefore, any message that emboldens hateful “believers” to tell fellow men and women that God abhors them must be condemned. Those who live from a place of love must abandon teaching and language that incites homophobia or condones the hateful who pick up assault rifles and end lives.

For those who value human dignity, no measure of homophobia should be acceptable in our churches or at our dinner tables. Communion with God must impel us to be vessels of love, not hate.

Don’t commune with God unworthily if you refuse to love all — as God loves.