S.E. Cupp: Orlando massacre an act of terrorism, not politics

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It’s impossible to wrap our brains around the kind of evil that left 49 people dead and dozens more wounded in an Orlando gay club this weekend. That doesn’t stop us from trying, though. And the attempt to explain the unexplainable is human and healthy.

But the attempt to exploit an inexplicable tragedy is something else altogether, and that exploitation can have devastating effects.

The motives behind the murders appear, for lack of a better term, complicated. The terrorist may have sympathized with ISIS, may have had mental health problems, may have held anti-gay views, may have even been gay himself. These are not mutually exclusive explanations.

But this lack of clarity isn’t getting in the way of folks who are determined to turn this tragedy into a political opportunity.

Some are using the massacre to demonize the whole of Islam as a hateful, violent, anti-gay religion. Of course, as any gay person will tell you, homophobia is not the sole domain of any one religion or ethnicity. But this hasn’t stopped Donald Trump from doubling down on his Muslim immigration ban — the rank stupidity of which is exposed anew as the Orlando shooter was born in America.

As left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald has noted, one danger of this line of exploitation is that it diminishes the spotlight on LGBT abuses in non-Muslim communities around the world — parts of Christian Africa, Hindu India, non-religious Russia and China, and elsewhere.

Others are using the tragedy to call for more security and less privacy in a world with tons of the first and not much of the second.

And of course, gun control enthusiasts are renewing calls for laws that would not have stopped this shooting.

But as someone who has supported and fought to advance gay rights in America, often to the chagrin of my own Republican Party, I take the most umbrage with one particular strain of exploitation.

While the LGBT community is mourning, some of its most vocal champions are attempting to tie a senseless act of terror to anti-gay legislation and discriminatory policies in the news of late, including the transsexual bathroom laws in states like North Carolina.

My friend Sally Kohn tweeted, “We must stand against hate & discrimination. Whether in Islam or Christianity or Judaism. Whether in bullets or bathrooms.”

Self-proclaimed “queer activist” and performer Evan Greer tweeted, “ ‘Don’t politicize this tragedy,’ say the men in suits who politicize it when we try to pee.”

Chase Strangio, staff attorney for the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, tweeted, “The Christian right has introduced 200 anti-LGBT bills in the last six months and people blaming Islam for this. No.”

On June 12, 2016, 49 beautiful, young lives were taken in the worst mass shooting in American history. They were among hundreds who flocked to Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida for a night of dancing and fun that quickly turned into a nightmare.

In addition to dishonestly ascribing the same motives to a politician as to a mass murderer, and making gross generalizations about “men in suits” and the Christian right, the bigger problem with these narratives is that they fuse discriminatory policies and domestic terrorism into one seamless force — and let the terror act swallow the troubling legislative battles the LGBT community wants to spotlight.

There’s also a troubling false causality at work: the notion that discriminatory laws incite homophobic violence. But pro-gay laws could just as easily incite violence. The merits of a law should not be reliant on people liking it.

LGBT Americans are facing plenty of daily injustices, from routine assaults to unfair labor practices to the bathroom laws. All are potentially winnable battlefronts if momentum toward equality continues.

But not if Kohn et al. conflate these issues with actual terrorism. All that does is give an unsympathetic voter a chance to say, “The country was just attacked by a terrorist and you want to talk about bathrooms?”

If you do actually want to talk about bathrooms — and I do — this isn’t helping.

Contact Cupp at thesecupp.com.

This column originally appeared in the New York Daily News.

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