Commerce, Blood and Religious Extremists

Warnings of increasing violence and Target's decision to pull LGBTQ merch are related.

On Wednesday, May 24, the Department of Homeland Security put out this chilling advisory:

Lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances continue to pose a persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland. Both domestic violent extremists (DVEs) and those associated with foreign terrorist organizations continue to attempt to motivate supporters to conduct attacks in the Homeland, including through violent extremist messaging and online calls for violence. In the coming months, factors that could mobilize individuals to commit violence include their perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle and legislative or judicial decisions pertaining to sociopolitical issues. Likely targets of potential violence include US critical infrastructure, faith-based institutions, individuals or events associated with the LGBTQIA+ community, schools, racial and ethnic minorities, and government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement. (Emphasis mine.)

The next day - THE NEXT DAY - Target announced that they were pulling LGBTQ merch from some stores because of “threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and well-being while at work.”

These two pieces of information are connected.

Target did not cite the Homeland Security warning. Strangely, though, neither did the New York Times or any other paper I read about Target pulling Pride merch. The Times blamed Target’s decision on the “political climate” - a bland euphemism to end all bland euphemisms.

The “political climate” is that people are afraid that someone with an AR15 is going to walk into their store and start shooting employees and customers. The “political climate” is terrorism, plain and simple.

The “political climate” played itself out in El Paso in 2019, when a 21-year-old man posted a white supremacist manifesto before he killed 23 shoppers and employees at a Walmart. Because they were Latino. And, likely, immigrants.

The El Paso shooter - who pleaded guilty in February - was from Allen, Texas. Which is where another shooter - this one with Nazi tattoos all over his arms and torso - killed eight people, including children and their parents, in a shopping mall on May 6.

Of course, these weren’t the only white supremacist terrorist shootings - I’m sorry, “political climates” - that we’ve seen in the last few years. A teenager traveled 200 miles to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo in May 2022 to kill people in a grocery store. He posted his white supremacist manifesto a couple of days before.

In November of 2022, a 22-year-old man was so distraught that a gay nightclub was hosting a drag show, he showed up with an AR-style rifle and killed five people before being subdued by patrons. He ran a “Neo-Nazi white supremacist” website.

Then there’s The Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. And the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooting. And the AME Church shooting in Charleston in 2015, where the killer - who prayed with his victims before he murdered them - was 21, white and - you guessed it - had written a manifesto.

The DHS bulletin lists a number of white supremacist attacks that happened or nearly happened just this year:

• An attempt in March to blow up a church in Ohio that was planning to host a drag event

• A pair of white supremacist men who shot at and disabled an electrical substation in Maryland

• A group of white supremacists targeting law enforcement and a “safety training facility” in Atlanta

In addition, multiple Target stores in Utah were cleared because of bomb threats related to its LGBTQ merch.

It makes perfect sense for Target employees to feel unsafe and for Target to listen to them. In fact, the man whose clothing line was the object of most of the hate was relieved when Target made their decision.

Who’s the Groomer?

Now let’s look at some other things that happened in the last few months.

Illinois - where I lived for most of my adult life - just came out with a report that identified over 500 priests who abused children since the 1950s. These were just the priests they were able to identify, with more than 1,900 victims who were still alive and talked to the Attorney General’s investigators.

This comes just weeks after a similar investigation in Maryland identified 150 abusive Catholic priests and more than 600 victims over the last eight decades. Surely the commission was not able to talk to all victims or all priests who may have committed abuses starting in the 1930s.

And, if you haven’t seen the movie “Spotlight,” I encourage you to watch it. In fact, watch again if you have seen it.

Let’s move on to other groomers - oh, I mean, religious icons.

Last spring, a report came out about the Southern Baptist Convention covering up sexual abuse by pastors for decades. This included sexual assault of adults, child sexual abuse and grooming adolescents.

Decades. The Justice Department is investigating.

In February, a Missouri man was arrested for touching adolescents and showing pornography to a girl starting when she was four. The charges came after he spoke up at two school board meetings complaining about LGBTQ books that he said were hurting children.

Also in February, a former elder at John MacArthur’s megachurch in California was forced to resign after he concluded that the church had been wrong to tell a woman who wanted to leave her husband because he was abusive to her and her children that it was her duty to stay and “not provoke her husband.” This mirrored a case at the same church from two decades earlier, when a teacher in the church was sent to jail for abuse and child molestation after church leaders counseled the mother to stay with her husband.

And here’s a guy who was a preacher for a United Pentecostal church. He was arrested on child pornography charges in 2021.

Oh! And can we say Roy Moore? Who defended his child sexual assault allegations by saying the parents gave him permission? Roy Moore? That upstanding religious state Supreme Court justice who wanted to put the Ten Commandments in a state courthouse?

I suppose the Ten Commandments don’t say, “Thou shalt not rape children,” so maybe it’s not hypocritical.

These are just a few of the sexual harassment and grooming stories involving religious leaders I have collected over the last few years. Sexual abuse is rife in fundamentalist religions. Even Jewish ones. 

But we, as journalists, don’t note, when we’re talking about a mass shooting and/or attack on queer culture, that gay people do not have a history of sexual assault or child abuse. But fundamentalist religious sects - which spawn most of the hate-based action against queer books and trans children - most definitely are steeped in sexual assault, misogyny and child abuse.

Sherrilyn Ifill pointed this out on Twitter Friday. But I haven’t seen any mainstream news pieces that have made this connection. They simply report that Target employees were threatened. They report supposed LGBTQ “grooming” as reasons for everything from murder to book banning, but they never report the actual sexual predation statistics of the group of people being accused with the group of people who make the accusations.

We need this context. Without it, the press is complicit in the terrorism.

This is worth saying again: Target was faced with a terrorist threat from a group of people whose adherents have murdered people for supporting queer rights. Recently. And the corporation made the decision to keep its employees and customers safe.

So this is the lede I would write about Target pulling Pride merch:

“Target, fearing the possibility of violence by fundamentalist Christian sects who project their history of child sexualization and abuse onto queer people, pulled Pride merchandise from a number of stores.” 

Let’s do better folks.

Thanks to Brent Holmes for helping make the perfect image.