By Stephen Dietrich, Managing Editor



A lot has been made of identity politics by my fellow conservatives.

Some criticisms are fair, while some fall into a familiar trap — hyperbole.

Conservatives like myself can be just as guilty as the left of living in an opinion echo chamber, and it can lead to overblown rants about liberalism.

I say all of this for one reason — to show how very serious I am when I say:

The article, “Biphobia and the Pulse Massacre” is literally the worst thing I’ve ever read.

In it, the author, Elle Dowd, talks about her emotional reaction to the Orlando massacre as a bisexual woman.

The piece — chock full of made up gender identity buzzwords* that make little sense — has gone viral on social media. So I feel compelled to respond.

I don’t blame Dowd for having an emotional reaction to the terror attack in Florida. Nearly 100 Americans were senselessly gunned down — 49 of whom were killed — by an Islamic terrorist on a homophobic rampage this weekend.

It was a horrifying event.

But the author isn’t disturbed by radical Islamic terror, or by the slaughter of innocent people. She is not upset about gun rights or the victims or politics or the well being of her family.

She’s upset because she’s being excluded from pity.

No, really. It’s jaw dropping.

The article is a thousand word extravaganza of mental gymnastics, where Dowd laments that no one recognizes her as a victim of the Orlando massacre.

It is identity politics at it’s very worst, and proves there is some compelling need among the left to feel emotional martyrdom.

Dowd is upset, because Islamic terror against homosexuals doesn’t get her enough attention.

Why? She’s married to a man and they have a daughter together.

Dowd is bisexual, she says, but no one seems to care. And that makes her sad.

One, two, skip-a-few steps, and a 1,000 words later Dowd arrives at the conclusion that Islamic extremists killing strangers should give her special status.

Confused? I’ll explain.

Dowd complains that, because she is married to a man and a mother, no one assumes she’s gay — Dowd insists she is both 100% gay and 100% straight (???).

She’s surrounded by supportive loving people, Dowd says, and she doesn’t get spit on or yelled at for being bisexual. Dowd calls it “passing privilege” and it’s a struggle.

In this author’s world, the fact that she’s not discriminated against makes her very discriminated against.

“But the horrible thing about ‘passing privilege’ is the closeting, the erasure. And never have I felt that so keenly as I feel it today while I mourn Orlando,” Dowd writes.

It all comes down to the fact that people ignore her sexual identity (she calls it “bi erasing”).

“It means I feel alone a lot. Kissing my partner produces no hateful response from society (a privilege). So… where is my resistance? I must be doing this wrong,” Dowd says.

In other words, she feels isolated and guilty and wrong, because when an Islamic terrorist killed people, he didn’t specifically know he was supposed to hate her for her sexual identity.

She asks another bisexual friend for advice, who affirms for her that this identity is most important.

“Bi erasure shouldn’t be another effect of this violence,” Dowd’s friend texts her.

Dowd repeats that line twice, to really drive it home to the reader . The 49 dead Americans — riddled with bullet holes, who died screaming and begging for their life at the hands of a merciless Islamic terrorist — caused her to be a victim.

It’s a glimpse into the walking insanity of modern liberalism.

Dowd is a strong writer. She seems to be a loving mother and has a handsome husband and friends who care about her. That’s something to be proud of — but to her, it’s a story of victimization, and that way, the Orlando massacre is about her struggles.

The article is a personification of everything that is wrong with politically correct identity politics. This insane cult that worships at the alter of victimhood needs to stop.

Like I said, it really was the worst article I’ve ever read.

— Stephen Dietrich is the Managing Editor of The Horn News.



*[For example, her husband is “cishet” (A straight heterosexual man), she is “high femme gender presentation” (a woman that looks like a woman), and the “patriarchal male gaze of heteronormative culture” (men checking out women) is apparently just awful.]