DavidK makes a lively point here, on his RefusetheJuice blog, about the gathering of elected officials after the Orlando shooting.
Did anyone think any elected official in El Paso was for the murder of innocent people? No. No need to clarify your stance in order to enhance your public image.
This is what is wrong with today’s politician in America. It’s a constant public relations effort to elevate their popularity through meaningless declarations. In the old days the most important person on a politician’s staff was the policy guy. Now the most important person is the press secretary. What does that tell you about how far we’ve fallen away from the days of greatness in this country?
It’s kind of like when the Pope came to Juarez. We wanted to make the papal visit to our sister city all about El Paso, so we talked it up till the cops got scared. So then we spent almost a million dollars making sure that there was no way you could see the Pope from the El Paso side of the border.
If our elected officials wanted to show support for the LGBTIQX* community, they should have to gone table to table at the Briar Patch instead of trying to horn in on the news cycle. I reckon it was a knee jerk reaction by our public figures because someone who had a lot of social and political capital asked them to show up, God bless him. He probably doesn’t have as much political pull anymore.
The Orlando nightclub attack was an attack on Americans. Not hyphen Americans. Where were our elected posers for the attack on Sandy Hook, or San Bernadino? Aren’t those beautiful people which almost six percent of us voted into office just pandering to the gay vote?
(The gays love me. They think I’m fantastic, the gays. I’ve had lots of gays work for me. Fantastic people, those gays. The gays love me.)
All our elected officials together like that generate a lot of collective empathy. We probably could have lit up half of Africa with all that empathetic energy. They’ll be lucky if the El Paso Electric Company doesn’t charge them twelve bucks a month for generating that much energy.
I mean I get it. It was a shooting in a gay night club on Pride Week. Homophobia is stupid. Why should anyone care what someone else does, if it’s not too noisy and it only hurts the property values on the tax rolls? Why would anyone even think about what someone else is doing, unless it’s hurting someone else? Who cares? Get a life.
If you think that being exposed to gays might turn you gay, I have some life-altering news for you.
*I threw that X in there myself. It stands for “excetera”.
Actions speak louder than words. If the politicians truly had a strong record of supporting LGBT rights they wouldn’t need events like this to show their solidarity. I can understand feeling compelled to do something like this if the Pulse was actually IN EL PASO but since it’s on the other side of the country, I call bullshit. This is a publicity stunt. We need real change not empty rhetoric.