ISIS: Who Will Rid Us of this Meddlesome Nation? Becket Speaks to America

A man walks into #Pulse, a nightclub that is intentionally welcoming to LGBQT folk. He is armed with a handgun and a Sig Sauer MCX rifle, and, apparently, hundreds of rounds of ammo. In the narratives released so far, he proceeds, by fits and starts over an extended late night period, to murder 49 people and wound some 53 additional folks.

While on his rampage, he speaks with 9-1-1. In one of his three calls, he pledges allegiance to ISIS.

Later, we learn

• that he had scouted this location; 
• that he had used gay dating applications or websites; 
• that his former wife suspected he was gay and that she heard his father call him gay; 
• that he was incensed when, with his three year old son, he witnessed to men kissing in public; 
• that he had been the subject of FBI investigation at least once (after making threats against co-workers); and 
• that, when he recently sought to purchase ammo and body armor, he was denied and reported to law enforcement.

Was he a radical Islamic terrorist? Was he a self-loathing and closeted homosexual? Was he just a whacko?

If you need to be spoon fed the conclusions, just monitor the White House, DOJ, and FBI websites, they will tell you what to think.

So far, what they've told you to think is that there was no direct connection to ISIS, no evidence that his actions were "ordered" from abroad.

Okay. Am I to be comforted by that story?

Let me answer this way.

In 12th Century England, Henry II of England appointed his friend, Thomas Becket as Chancellor. When the opportunity created by the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury arose, Henry named Becket to that additional post. Henry's design was that he could consolidate power over the Catholic church if the principal prelate of England were "his man."

A dispute subsequently arose over the power of the Crown courts to try clergy for crimes. The immediate context was that a cleric alleged responsible for a murder had been acquitted by an ecclesiastical court. Great public outcry led the Crown to take advantage of the moment and insist that the Church acquiesce in a civil trial.

Becket refused. Instead, he stood with the authority of the Church to try its own. When two other English bishops disagreed and consented to this shift in power, Becket interdicted them. As personal risk grew great, Becket fled to France.

Henry and Becket made up, it seems, when Henry was in France, and Becket returned to Canterbury. While still in France, Henry learned that his restored friend refused to lift the interdiction of the bishops or to tolerate the assertion by England's civil courts over Roman clergy. In a rage, it is reported that Henry cried out:

"What sluggards, what cowards have I brought up in my court, who care nothing for their allegiance to their lord. Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest."

Taking the king's words as a command, knights took it upon themselves to confront Becket. He would not relent. When he refused to relent, they slew him on the alter of the church.

In the circumstance of the time, Henry had a thing politicians call "plausible deniability."

He didn't, it seems, mention murder or death, nor did he instruct anyone to execute Becket. He was better situated than that. He had the kind of men surrounding him whose hearts were inclined to run ahead of the king's commands and meet his needs.

Hard to relate to?

Maybe or maybe not.

If you've ever been out to dinner and noticed that your beverage glass is replenished without request, you recognize that there is a kind of servant of need that doesn't wait for need to be stated, or for the giving of instructions on how satisfaction to be given.

The murderer Mateen -- self-loathing gay or clever straight, devout Muslim or radical Islamic terrorist or madman -- didn't receive orders from ISIS (or Hamas, or al Qaeda, or the Taliban). What cold comfort that is for the hundreds of family members binding up the wounded minds and bodies of the lucky shooting survivors! What solace it must offer to the bereaved!

I think not.

ISIS has 20,000 to 35,000 armed militants (the commonly reported number dating to late 2014) or 200,000 militants (the number asserted by certain Kurdish leaders). Neither end of that range begins to illuminate just how terribly dangerous Mateen's actions show these times to be.

We are, for the most part, untouched by the acts of 20,000 or 200,000 ISIS soldiers in Iraq and Syria. Certainly, we know that we need not send to see for whom the bell tolls, that the deaths of so many touch us in a way.

But those far-flung battlefield deaths do not touch us as do the murderous rampages of Orlando, San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Fort Hood. For these acts are taken by those among us. Those who live with us, and, as in Fort Hood and San Bernardino, who work with us. Or, as facts have developed in Orlando, by those that dance with us and go clubbing with us.

And yet "no connection has been made between the shooter and ISIS."

Does ISIS have to quote Henry II before this administration realizes that the instructions of radical Islamic terrorists abroad could not be more clearly given to radical Islamic terrorists at home? What must ISIS do for this administration to come to terms with this mortal enemy? Must they send telegrams or Instagrams or Tweets to particular wolves among us, naming particular targets among us for the Obama collective to grasp the fact that ISIS is not just waging war against Iraq, against Syria, against Israel (after all, why else would it call itself the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant).

As surely as Henry II caused the death of Becket by his plaintive cry in the hearing of willing hearts, ISIS has placed a contract on America through its messages.

In fact, we know that ISIS is waging war against social services workers (San Bernardino), military recruiters (Chattanooga), soldiers and civil servants (Fort Hood), and members of the LGBQT community (Orlando). The simpering foolishness that comes from Obama, in a televised tantrum over the insistence that he call these attacks instances of radical Islamic terrorism, shames him and embarrasses us. The nonsensical and now failed effort to shield from public view the direct evidence of radical Islamic terrorist motivation evidenced in the remarks of Mateen shames Attorney General Lynch and embarrasses us.

But I've been embarrassed and survived. You probably have survived embarrassments too. The problem with Obama's pandering pedantry is that it produces results that are NOT survivable. Results such as being ventilated by a madman with a gun. It is past time, hopefully not impossibly past time, for the insanity to end. All our lives may depend on it.

Requiesce in pace, mi anime

Let's not pretend.

Some blame the AR-15, a rifle that was NOT EVEN present at the scene.

Some blame all ISLAM, when all ISLAM was not at the scene.

Some blame a public display of affection, two men observed kissing in a time and place where the killer saw them do so.

Some blame the killer's latent homosexuality, his conversion to radical Islamic jihad.

Some blame churches for creating a culture where violence against LGBQT folk is acceptable.

What matters?

Forty-nine dead humans.

Perhaps some were gay, after all ‪#‎Pulse‬ was a place were the owners intentionally created an environment welcoming to LGBQT folk.

We know many were Latino or Hispanic.

Yet every one of them was ... human.

Some have posted on here that the greatest crime of these murders is that in killing these people at that time, Mateen was sending their souls straight to Hell.

What the hell?

You sit in the judgment seat of Christ? You sifted the hearts and reins of men?

What matters is that these deaths robbed us all.

Yes, I know it robbed us of some part of our sense of safety and security. Followed by word of an as yet to be released list of 8,000 Americans targeted by ISIS, it was bound to have that effect when the shooter took the time out of his murderous spree to call 9-1-1 and state a pledge of loyalty to ISIS.

But that isn't the robbery -- of our safety -- to which I refer.

Yes, I know it robbed us of the peace we enjoy -- to the extent we do -- both in the murder and in the vile disputations that follow. Not just a disgusting tirade by the President, but disgusting tirades from at least pulpits in which "Christian" pastors celebrated the deaths of those killed.

But that isn't the robbery -- of our peace -- to which I refer.

No. These deaths robbed us of those lives lost.

I didn't know anyone of those who died. Yet, I know everyone of them. They are my brothers and sisters, my sons and daughters, my fathers and mothers. They are my neighbors. They are my co-workers.

Oh. Yes. I saw photographs of the inside of #Pulse. I know it was a bar. I know there is every likelihood that many of those killed were LGBQT folk. I didn't love them more for their sexual identity. Nor did I love them the less for it.

I loved them as I love every man and every woman, because early in my fractured, broken and disreputable walk with Jesus, I learned a truth that I find easy to hold onto because of my own overpowering brokenness: each of us -- the poor, the rich, the criminal, the upstanding citizen, the black, the white, the gay, the straight, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, the Sikh, the Hindu, the Muslim -- is the object of God's love and affection.

Now it is enough to suffer the sorrow of these losses, to mourn with those who mourn. To bind up the brokenhearted. To walk alongside the fearful.

Another day is sufficient to continue conversations and collisions over guns, over radical Islamic terrorism, and over the questions our society confronts as LGBQT folks stand up for themselves in the matters of how they choose to live.

When those days of argument and collision come, I hope that all involved can bear in mind that the "others" with whom they engage are, like the lives we lost this weekend, made worthy of decent and respectful treatment because they are too the objects of Creator God's love and affection.

Attorney Strangio Blames Orlando on the Church: Though Wrong, His Charge Warrants Self-Examination

An ACLU attorney, Chase Strangio, who works on LGBQT issues for the organization, tweeted his accusatory tweet, laying responsibility for the Orlando Massacre at the feet of churches in the United States. You can read Chase Strangio's tweets, including his no more than 144 character indictment of the church on his Twitter profile. I've linked it here.

I don't agree with his indictment.

Yet.

Yet.

There is something I would ask you to think about in the light of his accusation.

The Holocaust did not spring fully formed from Adolf Hitler's head, as Athena did from the head of Zeus. Rather, there preceded the Holocaust more than a century of continuous invective, bile, recriminations, and remonstrances against Jews in the journals, papers, and broadsides of Germany. By the time Hitler developed a Final Solution, the people of Germany were conditioned to view the Jews as a problem that cried out for a solution.

I've mentioned before the devastatingly detailed examination of the rhetorical conditioning of the German people for the eventual Holocaust conducted by Professor William Brennan, Professor of Social Work at St. Louis University. His analysis helps illuminate how an otherwise "decent" people could become the fount of horror that Nazi Germany became. Again, I just want his idea that language can condition the mind to miss the humanity in others to linger in your head.
Let's go back to ACLU attorney Chase Strangio. He is just as unable to prove the assertion he made as anyone else currently is to prove Mateen acted out of self-loathing, or that he acted as a Jihadi -- his telephonic statement a contrary signal marker of seeming reliability.

But suppose I don't want to prove Strangio wrong ... or right.

Suppose I just want you to hear is a caution: the LGBQT community sees and hears what Christians do and say, and finds in it, at some level, personal hostility above and beyond what I would hope Strangio could, in turn, recognize to be concerns for the protection of deeply held beliefs of long-standing about topics like marriage.

While Fred Phelps and his cultic Westboro Baptist Church are the clumsy, misshapen blade of hate, I have seen -- in my own life, expressed in my presence, deeply vituperative and hateful language about LGBQT people. Whether you agree with Phelps -- and you celebrate the deaths of Gays and Soldiers as proof of God's righteous judgment -- or whether, with me, you are stunned at the breathtaking temerity of those that speak as though they were God's Appointed Executioner, surely you understand that how we speak of others  today can be just as dangerous as the Nazi regime proved it could be?

I'm okay with you disagreeing with me.

I'm okay with you deleting me for your false perception that I am agreeing with the charge Strangio has made. I think it's worth taking the time to ask, each of himself, How Jesus-like am I seen to be by those who need to see Jesus in me?

If your retort is that Steven L. Anderson's version of Jesus is just fine with you ... dancing on the not yet dug graves of young men and women ... well, I just don't see Jesus in that, or in your dance. I hope you'll reconsider.

If you are among those that are cheering Chase Strangio's indictment of the church, I hope that you find the toleration that you indict the church for lacking.