My heart broke as I watched a CNN anchor read the names of the 49 men and women shot dead in Orlando, while their happy faces flashed up on screen.
There was the mother who had beaten breast and bone cancer on two separate occasions, and who was out dancing with her gay son. The son survived; she was killed.
There were a couple of female bartenders and bouncers but the vast majority were men, young and good looking and full of life. And gay.
Today's column is another list of homosexuals.
It's such a long list, too long for a single page of Brunch, so it will be selective and feature just the main identities with the understanding there are dozens, if not hundreds of others.
We start with Troy King, a prominent anti-homosexual Republican Alabama Attorney-General. His public stand on sex toys was to ban them outright, but he didn't stop at that. He pushed for a ban on homosexuality and had quite a lot of support in his state, until his wife found him in bed with a male college student.
There is Paul Crouch, president and founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world's largest religious network. Crouch was instrumental in pushing TBN's anti-gay stance. He was also pushing TBN employee Enoch Ford to have sex with him, threatening him with the sack if he didn't. And so they did. Crouch ended up paying Ford $425,000 to shut him up -- which Ford didn't.
Up next is former US Senator Larry Craig, a strong anti-gay-marriage voice who twice voted against adding the words "sexual orientation" to laws about hate crimes. That made him the darling of the American Family Association -- until he tried to pick up an undercover cop in the men's toilets at Minneapolis International Airport. The ageing homosexual admitted his guilt and paid a fine, then sensing political oblivion reversed his stance. Speaking of stances, he explained his cubicle behaviour as being the result of "having a wide stance". Larry went on to become an adviser for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, which kind of ended the same way as the airport incident.
Next homosexual on the list is Ted Haggard. He was a reverend, the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, meeting the then president George W Bush weekly for spiritual advice. He gave electrifying speeches, often to children, with a focus on the disgusting sin of homosexuality. His speech calendar was severely curtailed when it was discovered he was snorting crystal meth while paying male prostitutes to have sadomasochistic sex with him.
Speaking of religious types, we must now move on to Bishop Eddie Long who incessantly reiterated the sin of homosexuality as laid out by the Bible and God. He claimed to be able to cure gays and lesbians. The black bishop, alas, never administered that cure on himself, for while he was incessantly reiterating in public, he was incessantly banging four different men.
One final religious type -- Baptist minister George Rekers, a bigwig on the National Association For Research And Therapy Of Homosexuality (or CLOSET for short). He was an advocate for banning adoption by gays. In fact he despised everything that was gay, with the exception of the cute rent boy he quietly took away on an island holiday, whom he picked up from a gay hookup site after Rekers described himself as "sensual, wild and up for anything".
We must farewell men of the homosexual cloth on our list, since there are estimates that up to 58% of all Catholic priests are either gay or paedophiles and thus would take up way too much space. Let's conclude our list with obese Republican county commissioner Bruce Barclay of Pennsylvania.
He stood for Christianity and family values and said he absolutely could not swallow homosexuality -- although in the privacy of his bedroom, his stance on swallowing was decidedly different. He videotaped himself having sex with more than 100 male prostitutes. That's like the entire contents of three gay bars on Soi Twilight.
There are so many others on our list, like US Republican Congressman Mark Foley who was staunchly anti-child pornography, while sending sexually explicit SMS messages to teenage boys saying things like "get a ruler and measure it for me." That one is more paedophilia that homosexual, but apparently Mark was happy with a male of any age, though length was clearly important.
Or British MP Jerry Hayes who voted for anti-gay legislation despite having an affair with an 18-year-old man. Or Republican congressman Edward Shrock who hated the idea of gays in the military, but didn't hate the idea of gays in his own bed. Or Republican Senate candidate Steve Wiles who this year took a hard stand against gay marriage, despite working in the past as a drag queen under the name Miss Mona Sinclair. Why so many homosexuals in the Republican Party?
Last Sunday another name was added to the list. A 29-year-old homosexual walked into a gay bar he frequented regularly with a semi-automatic rifle, and mowed down those 49 men and women, in an act of self-loathing the likes we have never seen before.
He cited religion and a terrorist group as his reasons for his actions. Don't believe the Isis part for a minute. As for religion? In a way, yes.
He was an unbalanced screwball who grew up in a society that practised Islam, a religion that despises gays, much like Christianity does. Both religions make it clear that homosexuality is evil and punishable by death.
The Vatican, run by ageing bachelors in flamboyant dresses, invokes a Catechism that states that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered" and that "under no circumstances can they be approved". If you are a willing scholar of that doctrine, it doesn't take many steps from that to genocide.
(Last Monday Pastor Roger Jiminez of Sacramento rejoiced in the Orlando massacre. Texas Deputy Governor Dan Patrick quoted the New Testament about reaping what you sow. Don't you just know they both have profiles on Jack'd or Grindr?)
How awful for any homosexual child growing up in 2016 to have to conform to edicts set out by unenlightened desert warriors of the Middle East of up to 2,000 years ago.
What can these children in strict religious families do? Many of them take the sensible road and flee their religion but at a terrible price, since it also entails fleeing their families.
Many repress their feelings, which must be unnatural, unbearable and unhealthy. Unbalanced children grow into unbalanced embittered and sometimes violent adults. After all, they have to channel their energy somewhere.
Some grow up to be gay-hating Republican Congressmen, while others turn to the priesthood, while others get married and scream their hatred of gays for all the world to hear. This seems to be the rule for the most vocal anti-gay activists -- they protesteth too much.
And some turn to arms.
What can be done about this terrible society of ours -- which fosters self-loathing, hatred and terrorism in the name of gods in the sky -- other than the dismantlement of organised religion? That's not going to happen anytime soon, so while we continue to have churches and mosques, homosexual children are going to be singled out, abused and repressed. And some will continue to explode.
Don't be surprised if more of these atrocities occur. It is natural that they do while we continue to preach the philosophy of hate and segregation. These are bleak times not just for gods, but for humanity. What can save us? It sure isn't religion. n
