We go round and round about what is a right and what is a privilege.
So much of what we argue involves money, whether tax money should be spent to help the less fortunate. But there’s one thing that should be very simple and shouldn’t cost anything in a free and peaceful country.
People should have the right to feel safe.
The shooting in Colorado Springs the other day that took the lives of five people in an GLBTQ+ nightclub was another horrific shock in a long list of shootings that seem to become more and more frequent.
One thing that didn’t come out at first is that Colorado Springs is a center for hard-core anti-gay Christian groups such as James Dobson’s horrible Focus on the Family.
When I first moved to Southern California in 1990, Dobson’s group was based in Pomona, and he had a daily radio broadcast in which a fairly common theme was that if you are unhappy with your children’s behavior, you owe it to them to beat the sin out of them.
He was big on corporal punishment and said parents needed to teach their sons to be more masculine.
He compared homosexuality to pedophilia.
Sometime in the early ’90s, he moved his operation to Colorado Springs.
I love the state of Colorado and lived there for two years, but Colorado Springs would be one of the last places I would want to live or to raise a family.
There was an opinion piece in the New York Times today where the writer pointed out that many people who do not tolerate homosexuality say their complaint is that gay people flaunt their behavior and shove it in their face.
If only they were more modest and less aggressive about it.
So as the author said, people went to Club Q so they could be themselves in private.
Oops, didn’t work.
I believe in the teachings of Christ, who never said anything about homosexuality, I am Roman Catholic and I believe the three most important words in my faith are “God is love.”
I know Congress won’t do even the most basic gun reform because there are too many people on the right who live their lives in fear of almost everything.
Odd, isn’t it?
Seems like they ought to believe feeling safe is a human right.