Must read article: "The Politics of Mass Murder" and the Liberty Counsel in Orlando is cited

Emma Green at The Atlantic has this article subtitled, "After Sunday’s shooting in an Orlando gay club, some politicians and advocates have emphasized homophobia and gun control, while others have focused on Islamic extremism." Here is an excerpt:

     And many American conservatives have widely condemned these murders, but some have also been at the forefront of rhetoric against same-sex marriage and bathroom restrictions. Mara Keisling, the head of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in an interview that this kind of rhetoric creates a culture of fear.
     She pointed to a April tweet from Anita Staver, the head of the conservative legal-advocacy organization Liberty Counsel, who said she would bring a “Glock .45 to the ladies room” because of the transgender-bathrooms issue in North Carolina. [emphasis added] “We’re creating a super-heated environment here,” Keisling said. “People are calling us predators. It is not surprising that some unstable people are going to think something of that.”
     [Chad] Griffin, the head of the HRC, argued it this way in his statement on Sunday:

Let’s get one thing clear. And this is what disgusts me most about this whole tragedy. The maniac who did this was somehow conditioned to believe that LGBT people deserve to be massacred. And he wasn’t just hearing these messages from ISIL. He was hearing it from politicians and radical anti­-LGBT extremists here in our own country. Every time we see legislation that puts a target on the back of LGBT people; every time a preacher spews hate from the pulpit; every time a county clerk says that acknowledging our relationships violates her “religious beliefs”—it sends a signal that LGBT people should be treated differently, and worse.

“No one is born hating,” he added in an interview. “One is taught to hate.”