Op-Ed: Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs follows six brutal years of Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric
In the four months since the shooting at the Colorado Springs Pride Center, the question has been: How much time should be given to the shooter to reflect on his actions?
The answer we’re given is that the shooter has to be questioned in order to understand how deep his anti-LGBTQ and racist motivations are to commit the killing.
A new editorial in the Colorado Springs Gazette is calling on the community to reject the gun-control rhetoric of Donald Trump and instead “stand united as a community.”
The Gazette editorial, written by columnist Doug Martin, notes, “In the end, only the killers themselves can face the consequences of their actions and the truth will come out in the process.”
Martin calls on the people of Colorado Springs to “put their faith and hope in Christ” and to “stand united with one another, with their friends, with their families, and with their neighbors, and help this community heal.”
He’s asking us to understand that we’ve been deceived by the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric of a president who once said that transgender people should use the restroom that matches their gender identity.
The Gazette also notes that the shooter has been the target of violent online threats, which can sometimes force people to take down their social media accounts.
“The fact that you are reading this means that you are reading it online,” Martin states.
“To understand why the shooter did what he did, we have to ask who was he targeting?” he asks.
The answer, of course, is us. “The hate he was spewing comes from a hatred deep in his heart — the hatred he had as a teenager when a group of young people came to his high school and beat him,” writes Martin.
In 2016, Martin wrote about the hate and bigotry directed at the LGBTQ community in a piece titled, �
