It’s been months since Omar Mateen shot over 100 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people. Surely enough time has passed that we can stop mourning the dead and start worrying about the real victims of the attack: the first responders who had to wade through all that gross AIDS blood.
On Jan. 23, Liberty Council’s Mat Staver took to his Faith and Freedom radio program to take the nightclub attendees to task for having the temerity to bleed once they were shot.
“In regards to the Pulse nightclub,” Staver said, “as tragic as it is, some of these officers have no doubt gone through trauma as well because they were going through the Pulse nightclub, it was blood everywhere and, you know, they’re having to get tested for AIDS-related conditions because they’re literally walking in pools of blood.”
Look, there’s no question that officers responding to the shooting have gone through trauma. It’s got to be hard to enter a place of such carnage and literally see piles of dead bodies. I suspect that would mess up even the most seasoned veteran of the force.
But according to Staver, what should most concern officers is the disease-ridden blood of the homos. Staver doesn’t, of course, know this. What he’s really telling us is that this is what would most concern him were he in their position.
Note, too, that he’s just assuming that the dead and wounded had AIDS. In other words, he sees the victims as diseased first, human second (if at all).
Note that Staver prefaces his barbaric comment with “as tragic as it is,” but it certainly seems like he doesn’t think it was all that tragic.
This is a guy who, right after the shooting, lamented the fact that churches who helped out the victims were too nice to them.
“Churches got involved and they led in some cases and in other cases they followed and … instead of an opportunity to pray, some of them allowed it to be a homosexual love fest,” he said. “That’s not something that we need to celebrate, this is a tragedy that is against all Americans.”
Keep in mind that the “that” and “this” coming out of Staver’s mouth refer not to the shooting, but to homosexuality, the real tragedy.
But hey, Trump promised to protect LGBT people from foreign ideologies, so I’m sure we’ll all be OK.