Guns and Knives Don’t Kill People, Gays Do

Don’t you just love the conservative agenda? Whenever violence involving guns happens, the ultra-right wing NRA takes to the streets of whatever town the tragedy takes place in, and with no regard to the relationship between guns and violence, touts Americans’ rights to bear arms. Because one never knows when the British are going to attack us again. At the same time, the murder of an ABC radio reporter here in New York last week, allegedly at the hands of a sixteen-year-old with a penchant for knives and Satanism, has given anti-gay groups the jolt of validation it needs to proclaim that yes, rampant promiscuity in the gay community can only have one violent, deadly end. So sayeth the Lord, no?

I’ll be the first to admit that it's unseemly to troll the internet looking for rough, cocaine-fueled sex with strangers. Still, in the case of George Weber, the murdered man who will be remembered not as a respected journalist but as a pervert who engaged in sex with minors, the indictments are all aimed at him and not at the tech-savvy teen who had likely been drinking and doping up long before he crossed paths with Weber. But that isn’t the point, really. The point the conservative, anti-gay groups would like to make is that this is “part and parcel of the gay lifestyle.”

Nevermind, for instance, that the spate of family homicides in the U.S. – you know, those ghastly stories of men killing their wives, children and then themselves – have been perpetrated by otherwise upstanding, heterosexual men. These are isolated incidents, right? No one would say that they’re the product of festering homicidal tendencies that all heterosexual people harbor within. Well, I would – just to illustrate how stupid and self-serving such a statement would be.