I’m so very sad about this most recent school shooting, as I know all here are as well.
After hours of thinking, unable to come up with any reason we have to live with and accept this, here are my thoughts:
I’m aware that I will likely get push-back on this, but it’s from my heart and my long life experience.
I see this time as a confluence of the “rights” that our country has afforded us.
These rights, carried to the extremes we see today, are in conflict and exacerbating each other. I’m speaking of the right to free speech, the right to the religion of our choosing (or none at all) and the right to own a gun.
What we are witnessing today:
1. Freedom of speech: Yes, this is alive and well. But the freedom to read (words/speech) is being highly restricted to our youth in many places. This is primarilydriven by the fear of children being “groomed” to be something they are not or at best not old enough to understand.
This belief is unfounded as children are aware of gender and sex much younger than many think. Parents fear “grooming” children to be deviant. However, “grooming” (or indoctrination) cannot permanently take hold of a person if it is outside of their nature and instincts.
Abuse does occur but does not “convert” the abused to a different gender or sexual preference. They will need counseling and compassion, not fear and condemnation.
2. Freedom of religion: We are witnessing the greatest effort yet to force our country to legally enforce “Christian” values. Christians want to define who god is and what we must do to stay in good graces with god.
First, the Europeans who came here were running from a state religion, they wanted their freedom of their faith and instituted the right to believe in your own faith choice. This is in our Constitution.
Believe what you wish, practice what you wish, but do not force it on anyone else. There is never to be a government-installed religion!
3. We have the right to own guns under our Constitution. But everyone seems to forget (or ignore) the caveat of a “well-regulated militia.” Thus, have a wildly unregulated gun culture and more guns than living citizens.
Now we have the latest school shooting. There has been more than one-per-day mass shooting in the U.S. since the first of the year. Over 300.
Guns are the top killer of children, above any illnesses or accidents. Yet, the politicians are already telling us “it’s too soon” to act, the environment is too emotional. This is the standard stall. They don’t want to lose the donations that flood to them from the NRA.
Now, looking deeper into this particular shooting, and why I say it’s a confluence of rights gone awry:
The shooter: This young (28-year-old) woman was a trans woman. She had been sent to this Christian school when a child. Christians believe that “gay” or “trans” is a sin, against god’s will. They also believe (like many, even non-Christians) that children have no concept of sex or gender until some nominal age, and that any variation on the assigned sex is a “choice.”
She was likely taught to hate herself. Christians believe you can “pray away the gay,” or in this case, the trans.
People cannot seem to comprehend that one’s sexuality/gender is complex and, like everything else in humanity and life, it’s on a continuum.
Human intellect is on a scale between genius and unintelligible. Our physiology ranges from extremely tall to extremely short, thin to fat, skin color from palest of white to darkest of black. Hair color, eye color, shoe size, everything is on a continuum. Perfect health to very sickly.
“Male” sexual expression ranges from extremely macho and aggressive to sensitive and tender. “Female,” likewise, can range from soft and emotional to “tomboy,” or the insulting “butch.”
Why would gender be the only thing we’ve arbitrarily decided to be fixed in place at birth, even pre-birth?
None of this is to say that there is any excuse for this shooting. There is not.
But we must learn the consequences of destroying one’s life by forcing identities and behaviors onto a person and condemning them when they don’t/can’t comply.
Pat Reid
Byram