Since Sunday’s shooting in Orlando, Florida — the deadliest in U.S. history — far too many people are downplaying the virulent homophobia at the heart of the massacre.

The only problem worth discussing and eradicating, they argue, is Islamic terrorism—a threat to us all — not homophobia, a threat to some.

(Why it could be both, and so much more, doesn't seem to have crossed their minds.)

The story goes that Omar Mateen, the murderer who took the lives of 49 people at Pulse Nightclub, ascribed to a fundamentalist ideology that shuns everyone who likes to go out with friends and have a gay old time – as opposed to just gay people themselves.

The shooting, therefore, was not an attack on LGBTQ life; it was an attack, in the monumentally dismissive words of Sky News TV host Mark Longhurst, on “human beings … trying to enjoy themselves, whatever their sexuality.”

Owen Jones, an openly gay British columnist and a guest on Longhurst’s TV show, was so disgusted with the comment above he walked off the set.

And I would have done exactly the same thing.

Because it appears what’s at work here, in the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, is the LGBTQ-edition of “All Lives Matter”— the cynical, mean-spirited, right wing response to Black Lives Matter; the flawed notion that giving love and support to a specific minority is tantamount to an insult to everyone else.

It’s hogwash, but it’s increasingly popular hogwash.

And I believe I know why.

It seems many heterosexuals in the West have become a little bit too comfortable with the perceived liberalism of their societies. They have grown so used to the idea of a culture that is tolerant of gay people they have forgotten that in most regions of the world and even to some degree, here at home, it is exactly that: an idea, not a reality.

Despite major gains made in North America — marriage rights, representation in politics and media — the world at large remains hostile to LGBT people, often violently so. And even on more tolerant ground, yes even in Canada, things are not absolutely fabulous. Gay men still can’t donate blood. (Ironically, gay men in Orlando who wished to donate blood to victims of the shooting were turned away because rules in the U.S. state that men who have sex with men are ineligible to donate blood for a year after their last sexual contact. In Canada, according to the Canadian Blood Services, that time frame is five years.) This spring, a gay couple was reportedly assaulted for embracing at a bar in Montreal.

Rainbow banners on Facebook and favourable ratings of the Ellen DeGeneres show are strides, not cure-alls.

I consider myself among the luckiest gays on earth and I don’t know a single same-sex-attracted person or trans person who has not at some point in his or her life been the target of verbal or physical abuse by a stranger. I don’t know a single gay male couple that shows affection in public when they are not in a hip, progressive downtown neighbourhood — or among friends.

So no, the hatred that erupted in Orlando on Sunday morning was not an aberration. It is a tradition.

And yes, Orlando is different than the attacks in Paris and Brussels (not sadder, different) not merely because gay people were the target of the shooting but because the venue of the carnage — a sprawling, awesomely cheesy nightclub — is in many ways, like a church or a synagogue, a sanctuary. Not only is the big gay club a space where gay people dance and flirt removed from the judgments and curiosity of the straight world, it’s often a point of first contact for young LGBT people with the queer community.

It’s a space, in other words, where a lot of people feel free for the first time in their lives.

Hence the massive emotional response from LGBTQ communities across the continent, and the anger at those who would dare suggest that this massacre has everything to do with homegrown Islamic radicalization and nothing at all to do with homegrown homophobia.

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