Within the space of a week, two acts of appalling barbarity – one on either side of the Atlantic – have shocked and saddened us. On the night of 11 June, Omar Mateen killed 49 people in a gay bar in Orlando. Six days later, Labour member of parliament Jo Cox was murdered on the streets of her constituency. These crimes were different from the kind of indiscriminate terrorist attacks that we have unhappily become accustomed to, which are calculated to make everyone fear that they could be a potential victim. Of course these acts were also designed to provoke terror, but the targets were deliberately chosen. They were objects of particular hate to the perpetrators – in one case, a community, in the other, an individual.
The failure to recognise this distinction in relation to the massacre in Orlando, caused journalist Owen Jones to walk out of an interview with Sky News in disgust. It is not hard to understand why it was easier for much of the media to initially cast the attack as a straightforward terrorist incident. The conventional narrative of terrorism is neatly Manichaean – pitting the entire population against people whose ideology is so twisted that they have forsaken the right to consider themselves a part of our society. Hate crimes are more problematic because they ask uncomfortable questions of all of us; the hatred of particular groups or causes does not come out of a vacuum. These crimes demand that we look at our society and act to change it.
So there was a terrible stench of hypocrisy coming from the socially conservative right in America. They sought to use Orlando to yet again demonise Islam as an inherently dangerous and intolerant religion, when their own intolerance has consistently tried to deny LGBT people the same rights as everyone else. Whilst there are liberal Muslims who have been hugely supportive of LGBT causes (of which Sadiq Khan is the most prominent example) and there are illiberal people of other faiths, or none, who are unashamedly homophobic, it makes no sense to treat this kind of prejudice as the preserve of only one religion. Whether Omar Mateen’s motivation turns out to have been primarily political, religious or personal, ultimately it must have come from a sense that homosexuality is wrong – a view for which there continues to be a disturbing amount of support across many sections of society.
It is true that LGBT rights have made huge advances in both Britain and America in recent years, but legislation cannot – by itself – eliminate prejudice. Of course the government should not compel people to be unprejudiced, it is a necessary part of living in a free country that holding unpleasant views should not be illegal. But this is not the same as saying the state should be passive, particularly when most schooling in Britain is government-funded. The fact that young LGBT people in particular, are affected by homophobic prejudice is indicated by research showing that 33.9 per cent of LGBT people have made at least one suicide attempt, compared with 17.9 per cent of young straight people, while 48.1 per cent of trans young people have attempted suicide.
Yet the Tories are pushing for more and more schools to becoming independent of local authorities. This potentially hands them over to groups which want to push their own agenda onto children, with inadequate supervision from government. In Berkeley, California, primary schools hold a Gay Pride week. One mother (incidentally a Muslim) told me how much her son had enjoyed the week, he saw the event as a fun event that was completely normal. Surely this is the direction we should be going in, rather than perpetually arguing with state funded faith schools and academies about whether they can avoid teaching what the law makes abundantly clear – that LGBT people are no different to anyone else.
Meanwhile, as the police investigation into Jo Cox’s murder continues, it is unhelpful to speculate on the precise motivations of her killer. But it is unarguable that her death was, as Jeremy Corbyn said, “an attack on democracy… It is the well of hatred that killed her.” Gordon Brown later wrote: ‘The business of politics has become more about the exploitation of fears than the advancement of hope. Temperate language has given way to the intemperate. And where there is latent prejudice, we have seen it exploited to breed intolerance – and then too often intolerance has descended into hate.’ Deliberately setting one group of people against another whether in political discourse or in wider society, is only ever going to make the tragedies we saw last week, more likely to occur.
The crowds at the vigils held for the Orlando victims and for Jo Cox were in both cases brilliantly diverse, containing people who were gay, straight, BAME, white, people who hold very different political beliefs, people who believe in different religions, or none. This was the best of Britain, a Britain where Prince William appears on the cover of a gay magazine to highlight the bullying of young LGBT people, a Britain where Tory MPs and Labour activists can completely disagree on politics, but are happy to comfort each other in the face of an inhuman tragedy. The hashtag #lovewins was Twitter’s defiant response to the Orlando killings. The finest tribute we can pay to all the dead of last week is that we work to make this a reality.
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Christabel Cooper writes a regular column on the Progress website
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