“Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” Hillary Clinton declared in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations last November. The inevitable Democratic presidential nominee was reflecting the official position of the administration in which she had served, which is that the Islamic character of Islamic terrorism must never be acknowledged, lest innocent Muslims be implicated.

In the wake of yesterday’s massacre in Orlando, Fla., President Obama stuck to that position—though unlike last year after the San Bernardino, Calif., attack, he did not explicitly lecture Americans against the evil of “Islamophobia.” Instead he issued this vague exhortation: “We need to demonstrate that we are defined more—as a country—by the way they [the victims] lived their lives than by the hate of the man who took them from us.”

The site of the attack was a gay nightclub called Pulse. Slate’s Mark Stern calls it “an LGBTQ nightclub,” which is a bit like calling Versailles (the Miami institution, not the château) “a Latino restaurant.” But the point is, the Islamic terrorist who carried out the deadliest attack in America since 9/11 chose as his target a sexual minority. Such an atrocity posed a test for those on the multicultural left: Would they see clearly the threat of Islamic terrorism when it targeted a minority whose interests they vigorously champion against far lesser threats?

For the most part the answer was no. Stern turned his rhetorical fire on the near enemy, in a piece titled “Republicans Are Erasing LGBTQ People From Their Own Tragedy.” He specifically faulted Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee for tweeting sympathy for the victims without noting that most of them were gay (or, as Stern again put it, “LBGTQ people”).

Stern ignored Donald Trump, who in a statement put the matter straightforwardly: “Radical Islam advocates hate for women, gays, Jews, Christians and all Americans. I am going to be a President for all Americans, and I am going to protect and defend all Americans.” He also ignored Ted Cruz, who, according to Politico, “called on Democrats as ‘loud champions of the gay and lesbian community’ to denounce ‘an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians.’ ”