Photo by NEOSiAM 2021
As of this writing on Sunday evening we don’t know precisely what motivated a gunman to walk into a LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs and start shooting people. We have some pretty good suppositions — the club’s owners called in a “hate crime” — but let’s allow (for the sake of not having to retract this newsletter later on) that it’s possible if surprising, that something other than violent bigotry was behind the mass shooting.
With that said…
Back in April, I wrote a short opinion post for The Week noting that Republicans were starting to slur their opponents — pretty much anybody opposed to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill — as “groomers,” a term that until this year had been used mostly to describe pedophiles preparing young children to be sexually assaulted.
This was the headline, written by one of my editors:
Now, you’ll notice that “grooming” is in scare quotes. That should convey some of my skepticism about the topic that is contained in the piece.
Accusations of pedophilia and child rape are old hat in today's Republican Party. In 2020, Trump shared a tweet falsely accusing Biden of being a pedophile. Karl Rove reportedly inspired a similar whispering campaign during an Alabama judicial campaign back in the 1990s. Sometimes the ugliness is overt, as during the QAnon conspiracy theorizing that led, in part, to the Jan. 6 insurrection. And sometimes it's a bit more subtle, as with Republicans accusing Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson of being lenient on child predators.
Those accusations and rumors were untrue, unfair, and ugly, and just another piece of performative politics. The point isn't to protect children. It's to weaponize concerns about their safety in the service of conservative political power.
The problem? A right-wing personality with a sizable following tweeted out a screenshot of the headline, without a link to the piece. Which, if you decided to ignore the scare quote, created a false picture of me blithely dismissing concerns about pedophilia. And so her followers — as well as the followers of other people and organizations on the right who amplified her — started filling up my Twitter mentions. With stuff like this:
This went on for several days. It was devastating. I temporarily deleted my Twitter account rather than sit as a target for these fools.
And frankly, it scared me a little bit.
I didn’t think many of my assailants honestly thought I was a pedophile. But I couldn’t be sure that everybody was in on the “joke.” We saw what happened with Pizzagate. Was I in danger?
Perhaps not. The crisis passed, for me anyway. But the “groomer” thing is still a popular trope on the right. So we get stuff like this:
The feeling of danger has been palpable.
Does all this have anything to do with Colorado Springs? We’ll find out — the gunman is still alive. We already know he had a history of domestic violence. In any case I fully expect figures on the right to disclaim any responsibility.
In my original “groomer” piece, I mentioned Rod Dreher and his justification of using the slur.
"I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning: an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire confusion in them, and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society," he wrote last week. "It may not specifically be to groom them for sexual activity, but it is certainly to groom them to take on a sexual/gender identity at odds with the norm."
It sounded like a bullshit excuse then, and it sounds like a bullshit excuse now. As I wrote then, “Most Americans will hear the term … and understand it to mean something much more violent than ‘encouraging kids to question their sexuality and the church.’ That misunderstanding is almost certainly intended.”
We know how that goes:
Perhaps the Colorado Springs killings will turn out to be about something else — though if I’m honest, I doubt it. Even so: The rhetoric on the right makes LGBTQ folks seem dangerous — and makes them seem dangerous to the “stand your ground” crew that glorifies the use of armed self-defense. There are too many guns in this country floating around for the rhetoric not to become a problem. If it wasn’t Colorado Springs, it’ll be some other place, some other time, possibly soon.
The rule of how to cover mass shootings is: Wait until facts are available. Do not use for political advantage until you know the facts.
Your analysis may be correct but right now, is just a guess. You should know better than to assign responsibility with zero knowledge at hand of what happened.