I do my best to avoid talking about bad news here on this blog. But the tragedy in Orlando at The Pulse Nightclub is one of those things I simply cannot ignore.

Over 300 people went to a nightclub to dance, interact and have a good time with other kindred spirits. 49 of them were murdered in cold blood on the spot; another 53 were wounded when an allegedly self-loathing fundamentalist zealot unleashed his special brand of insanity using an AK-47.

A Baptist preacher in Sacramento broad-brushed the bloody massacre and proclaimed the victims–all 50 of the dead!–“pedophiles”. Can you imagine?!

I presume that the hottest places in hell are reserved for preachers like this one who proclaim homophobic nonsense — although, as an enlightened Christian, I do not believe in hell. (Hell was invented to control the masses.)

If not, God is one lame-brained halfwit. He/She/It certainly isn’t (the oft-proclaimed) Love!

There are just no words to adequately communicate the anguish I feel for the victims and their families and other loved ones, or the anxiety I know exists even more acutely in LGBTQ communities across the nation and around the world as a result of the biggest terrorist attack in America since 911.

As an intersex or transgender person myself (unless I pay for expensive testing, I’ll never know if I was altered at birth to present as fully female to “correct” an intersex condition as no records were kept of such “fixes” although intersex conditions are quite common; if I was, it was a huge mistake!!!), I consider myself among the individuals “targeted” by fundamentalist bigotry and zeal. I am not a pedophile. I am not sex crazed. I am not any of the awful things that have been said about those in the LGBTQ communities. And neither is a single one of the many LGBTQ people I know.

I am not just sick of the propaganda that brands LGBTQ individuals as aberrant, I am sick of what happens when people repeat the slanders they hear in church and on the street and start to hate themselves because they’re not “normal” as society has defined normal for centuries. (Homosexual and intersex individuals have existed for millennia and been soundly ostracized for orientations they do not decide for themselves any more than heterosexuals “decide” on their orientations.)

And I’m sick of the sheeple (fundamentalist zealots) who take it upon themselves to rid the planet of other people whom they’ve been told are “aberrant, sex-crazed pedophiles bent on recruiting your straight loved ones”, “baby killers,” “Muslims,” “illegal aliens” and other “others” they find somehow “scary/malicious”.

America should be better than this. I don’t know how to fix “stupid,” but I do know how to fix this:

I refuse to hate. Anything or anyone. It’s a decision. It takes sanity to decide this. But any other decision really is insane.

Hate solves nothing.

Hope solves a lot.

Love can solve anything that requires a humane solution.

We’ve tried everything else. We’ve offered only scant lip service to agape love — “the highest form of love: charity and mercy”. (wikipedia)

I am sick and tired of people dying for causes. I want to see people living for causes and loving everyone they come into contact with while doing so.

Civilization requires compassion and forbearance.  We seem to be losing civilization a little more every day. Look at the comments section at the end of every online article if you want proof. 

What has happened to civil discourse and benevolent interactions?

When I think of my role model and mentor, DeForest Kelley, I know that I, too am falling short in this regard.

De said: