GUNS KILL, SO DOES RELIGION – SOMETIMES

Deyan Ranko Brashich

Last week’s Orlando shooting had everyone saying again – “guns kill, we must do something”. Today it’s Orlando that prompts the politician’s comments. Yesterday it was Charleston, before that San Bernardino, Boston, Columbine and Sandy Hook. Need I remind you that guns do not kill? It is people that kill, some driven by mental illness and some driven by religious zeal.

I do not imply that religion is a mental illness. I state as fact that these are two separate, distinct and independent reasons that have resulted in these mass killings. Yet, they are sometimes somehow connected.

I was driving the morning after that night’s shootings with the news of the mass killing at a LGBT nightclub on the radio. The initial reports were sketchy and contradictory. It was 20 dead, then 50. There was one shooter maybe more. The shooter was a Muslim, perhaps not; he was an American, native born, perhaps not. He was an Al Qaeda guy, a Hezbollah wannabe or an ISIS mole or none of the above. It was a terrorist attack, a gay bashing killing or who knows what demented craziness.

As the news were sifted and facts verified it was established that the sole shooter, 29 year-old Omar Mateen was a twice married native born United States citizen born of Muslim Afghani immigrant parents. He had been investigated twice by the FBI for making “inflammatory comments claiming connections to overseas terrorists … [and hoping to die in an FBI raid] so that he could become a martyr”. He had visited Pulse, a notorious gay and lesbian nightclub numerous times. According to his father “he was a homophobe” yet had made homosexual advances, a closet case and according to his wife “a deeply disturbed man”.

My question: Was the massacre an act of a mentally deranged man or was it an act of a religious man and his political ideology?

The answer matters not to the 50 dead and 53 or so wounded. The answer, whatever it is, will not change their lives. The dead will stay dead and those remaining alive will carry their scars and life-alternating experience for life. The answer matters only in our understanding of what caused the tragedy and how to prevent another one.

If it in fact was an act of a mentally deranged man, then we should reassess our failure in providing care for the thousands of the mentally ill. In the name of cost cutting we have decimated the ranks of first responders grappling with the problem. For long term care we have seen fit to close hundreds of psychiatric hospitals and facilities and throw patients to the gutter where they are now the legion of the homeless. For those not in the streets we have made cells available in our for-profit jails at great expense.

If religious beliefs were the cause of the carnage, we should reassess our tolerance of religions and demand change, notwithstanding the existence of holy scriptures and divine exhortations.

Christianity and Islam share a common bond in the denunciation of lust, adultery and homosexuality. In their view these are not mere errors of judgment, moral lapses, and universal human frailties or, as André Malraux elegantly put it, La condition humaine [Man’s Fate]. No, these are unforgivable and unpardonable mortal sins for both “proper” Christians and Muslims – no repentances or expiation allowed, with sinners punished by torture, death or expulsion.

Over the last 100 years mainstream Christianity has tempered its views, abandoning dire punishment, and is now content, for the most part, with muted disapproval of mortal sins – no more Joans of Arc, no more burnings at the stake.

Yet Islam seems mired in the same centuries old stupid rut. Saudi Arabia and many Muslim nations provide the death penalty for the crimes of adultery, fornication, sodomy, homosexuality and lesbianism [with the proviso that “if a man or woman is sodomized by their own consent, then they will also be sentenced to death along with the sodomizer] and sexual misconduct, with execution by beheading or stoning.

Adultery, fornication and homosexuality continue to be a Muslim preoccupation especially in the latest reiteration of the Islamic Caliphate -the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL], also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS]. The Caliphate has control over a large civilian population and a good swath of territory and it wields temporal power. It is a de facto, if not de jure country, levying taxes, administering Sharia law and waging war.

Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan are well aware that domestic events are reported worldwide and have repercussions. A gang rape in India, the honor killing in Pakistan, a stoning of an adulteress in Afghanistan, the genital mutilation of a teenage girl in Sudan get world-wide attention. This impacts on foreign investment and trade and brings on the wrath of the NGO’s.

ISIS on the other hand doesn’t give a shit, it revels in opprobrium. Like Donald Trump, ISIS believes that extremes attract followers, fighters, voters and converts. It has posted images of the execution of gays convicted of sodomy – hurled from high buildings and their remains, if still alive, stoned to death. Women found guilty of adultery and fornication are spared the multi-story fall and are just stoned to death.

If that course of conduct is acceptable and conforms to Sharia Law, then Sharia Law must change or its interpretation brought up to date.  The freedom of religion guaranteed by the 1^st Amendment has limits. I doubt that Mayan, Aztec or Inca human sacrifice rituals could pass Constitutional muster and be given a pass by the Supreme Court. The same should hold true for extreme interpretations of Islam.

This has been true in cases of Christian extremes. I remind you of David Koresh and his Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; James Warren Jones’ The People’s Temple of Kool-Aid in Jonestown, Guyana and the Christian Identity Movement [Aryan Nations, Christian Identity Church and the Klu Klux Klan &tc] adhering to deviant Christian tenets.

An extreme form of Islam may be acceptable and accepted by regimes in other countries but for it to be legal in the United States it must conform to minimal standards. If not, it should be banned and outlawed.

Deyan Ranko Brashich is a contributor writing from New York. He is the author of Letters from America, Contrary Views and Dispatches. His contact and blog “Contrary Views” is at www.deyanbrashich.com