After the Saturday night slaughter a week ago at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Twitter exploded.
I wish I could say it only exploded with shock, the kind of shock most of us must have felt when we heard about the massacre. But I can’t. It also exploded with hate. Hate for people who are lesbian, who are gay, who are bisexual, who are trans. The kind of hate that could inspire a gunman to charge into a gay-friendly club and start shooting.
So sad. So scary.
Of course in this case, we don’t know for sure that that’s what happened. But with all the nightspots in Colorado Springs, is it mere coincidence that the shooter went on his killing spree in one that caters to gays? Prosecutors apparently didn’t think so. Their preliminary charges against him included not only murder, but “bias-motivated crimes.” What that means is, hate crimes. At his formal hearing in a week, we should find out whether those charges stay.
But whether the killer hated the people in the club, or hated himself, hate is hard to prove. Hard, but not impossible, and since the number of hate crimes in America is growing, that’s worth looking at.
The FBI defines a hate crime as “a criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” In the year 2020— the FBI’s most recent statistics— there were 7,759 hate crimes reported by law enforcement. That’s the most in a dozen years. A study of 52 major cities from California State University at San Bernardino says that hate crimes surged in those cities by nearly 30%. Some are anti-Black, some are anti-Asian, some are anti-semitic, but the biggest increase is anti-LGBTQ.
That coincides with an enormous increase in legislation targeting those who are LGBTQ. The Human Rights Campaign says 25 anti-LGBTQ bills have been enacted just this past year in 13 states. More than 145 anti-transgender bills were introduced in 34 states. It calculates that in this month’s midterm elections, Republican-aligned groups spent at least $50 million on anti LGBTQ ads.
As Colorado’s attorney general Phil Weiser said on NPR after the nightclub slaughter, “There’s more and more demonization based on who people are.”
Which brings us back to Colorado Springs. The shooter might have been a lone wolf, acting on his own. But if he was a denizen of the internet, he wasn’t really acting alone. He would have been aided and abetted— maybe altogether motivated— by other haters. Whether they actually inspired him or not, leaders in politics and media use everything from TV to social media to inflame people who are susceptible to arguments about the “decadence” of gay life.
That’s one word Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert has used when she fulminates against gay life: “decadent.” She is part of the drumbeat that keeps hate alive.
But she’s not the only one. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is another.
Not only was he the driving force behind the banning of books in public schools with any mention of a gay lifestyle— the authors’ organization PEN America says a third of all the books banned in the U.S. over the past year contain LGBTQ characters and themes— but he has gotten onboard with the far-right to counter what they claim is a threat to our nation called “grooming.”
The word used to refer to what perverted adults would do to befriend children for the purpose of molesting them. But in the last year or two, the far-right has perverted the word itself, redefining it to mean showing sympathy for the LGBTQ movement for the purpose of encouraging children to be LGBTQ themselves. That drove DeSantis to put his weight behind a piece of anti-gay legislation masquerading as an “anti-grooming” bill, and his press secretary to tweet, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.”
As Dan Rather wrote last week, “Hate is learned, and it is being taught.”
James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs where the massacre took place, has equated gays to pedophiles. In writing an essay a few years ago titled “Protect your kids,” about the difficult controversy over students born as boys using girls’ bathrooms and vice versa, he said, “If this had happened 100 years ago, someone might have been shot. Where is today’s manhood? God help us!”
Would it be surprising if someone read that and picked up a gun?
Hate has always been with us, but it is on the rise. And more than ever before, it targets people who are LGBTQ. How different is it from hate toward Blacks, hate toward Asians, hate toward Muslims, hate toward Jews?
Last year the Southern Poverty Law Center created a horrifying “hate map,” documenting hate and extremist groups across the country, pointing out in its annual report that “these groups now operate more openly in the political mainstream.” The Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys are only the most infamous examples.
And they’re not just part of the political mainstream, but the mainstream of the internet. Just days after Colorado Springs, Elon Musk’s Twitter reinstated several accounts that previously had been banned for breaking what were then Twitter’s policies about abuse against the LGBTQ community. Tweets like the ones after Club Q evidently now will be tolerated.
My message to Musk and Dobson and DeSantis and Boebert and everyone else of their ilk is, we can’t legislate against hate. But you are proactively encouraging it. There must have been a time in your lives when you’d have condemned a crime of hate. Now your condemnations, your “thoughts and prayers,” seem hollow. So sad. So scary.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg, I can't believe what is happening to this country, the amount of "hate" that seems to be spreading is terrifying and I don't even know where one begins to counter it. Yes, vote and live your truth but I feel like a tiny seashell on the verge of being washed away by the vast ocean....I very much appreciate your perspective and all that you write, you help me believe that there are others out there who feel the same. Thank you.
Greg....thank you for writing this, a good article and unfortunately a reminder that --as much of our writing reminds us---never gets read or considered by those who perpetrate...this image of a hate filled America must be their desired end....Look at Trump's embrace of Nick Fuentes....and all his acolytes have their own, individual hatreds ....perhaps Hell is full of hatred condos for which they're vying