by Guy Walker

Immediately following news of the shooting at the Orlando gay nightclub, Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, tweeted a passage from Galatians: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.” After the obvious retaliating vitriol from the Twitter people, Patrick removed the quote, apologizing for his “unfortunate timing.”

The Westboro Baptist Church tweeted another: “We thank/praise God, who in His infinite wisdom sent the shooter to: 1) execute wrath, 2) mercifully chasten.” Members of the church have turned up to protest the funerals of some of the victims. At this point, this is expected from the religious right; 46 percent of Americans think the world was created 6,000 years ago, so nearly half of us are insane and will say some pretty ignorant shit. But these types of statements are not just ignorant, but also incredibly violent and dangerous in their own way. And our backlash is merely a fainéant snort, a meager little puff of outrage that quickly fades into the scorching haze of all the other bad news.

The shooter’s father, an Afghan immigrant named Seddique Mir Mateen, said he had no idea what caused his son to gun down the gays, that it had nothing to do with religion, adding that “God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality—this is not for the servants of God.” Meaning, Omar Mateen’s own forbidden homosexuality and violent repression within his cult of intolerance had absolutely nothing to do with the attack.

Omar just wanted to hold a huge palpitating dick with both hands, to stroke tenderly the promising baton, to softly kiss the tip of beauty. But it was religion—and religion alone—that corralled him into the stifling paddock of denial, brewing all that stink of perversity, that drove him to carry out the worst mass shooting in American history.

James Wesley Howell, the man from Indiana who was stopped and arrested for driving to the Pride Parade in West Hollywood with a car full of guns and potential explosives, was a pedophile back in Indiana. Something tells us he likely wasn’t a secular humanist in pursuit of scientific literacy. Something tells us he wasn’t a Quaker.

There is a growing necessity for our own intolerance of all oppressive faiths, the need for scabrous mockery of irrational tradition and blind belief. The mainstream left, and its quiet stink of politeness for people who believe in stupid perilous things, is what will impede any meaningful progress in a society’s pursuit of scientific literacy. And the truth is we are not tolerant of some faiths, as we shouldn’t be tolerant of many more. Take for example the case of Warren Steed Jeffs, the former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FDLS). He married more than 60 women and girls, molested his own daughters and nieces and nephews, and was finally convicted by a Texas jury in 2011 on two counts of sexual assault against children, and sentenced to life in prison. Or there are the Roma gypsies, who have arranged marriages soon after the girl reaches puberty. Whenever a girl escapes a Roma community and notifies the authorities, we, as seemingly sane judicial citizens grant the girl her individual human rights above the schizophrenic claims of religion or tradition. In instances of true oppression, American society does not tolerate the freedom of a so-called religious act. The same should be true when religion tries to oppress women or homosexuals or transgender or persons of other faiths.

So, why does religion hate gays so much? As a general rule, religion hates the body and the sexual act, most likely because these cults of puerility were founded by mothball ecchymosis men who were stuck on a mountain and couldn’t get laid, so they forbade it for everyone else. And homosexuality is a complete rejection of the conservative stoicism at the heart of religion itself.

The United States may have its Dan Patricks and its Westboro Baptists, but Islam has its ubiquitous quest for death and flogging if you even get near a dick.

In 2013, the Pew Research Center published the results of a survey on gay tolerance in 39 countries around the world. When asked, “Should society accept homosexuality?” Western Europe, Australia, and the Americas, to no one’s surprise, had a generally positive response. The Middle East wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. There were no crowds of heavily-oiled men unraveling their rainbow-colored hijabs and waving them in the air above all that the scalding sand. Pakistan, most notably, had only 2 percent of its respondents affirm that its society should accept homosexuality. Gay sex is illegal in Pakistan, best articulated by the Muslim cleric, Qari Hifzur Rehamn, who said “Homosexuals must be killed—it’s the only way to stop them spreading. It should be by beheading or stoning, which the general public can do.”

However, in direct correlation with their ideological repression of sexual preference, Pakistan loves its gay porn. They are the world leader in Google searches for the most gay shit possible, leading the way with the search terms “shemale sex,” “teen anal sex,” “man fucking man,” and a close second place behind the Kenyans for “gay sex pics.”

The correlation between the religious repression of sex and sexuality, and the violent perversity that follows, is obvious: hacking off the clitorises of girls, the systematic rape of boys in the Catholic Church, the “Kill the Gays Bill” in Uganda. Denying the gorgeous carnal pleasures leave you mad and wild eyed, anxious to moisten up your nasty bits. The pleasures of the body is the only redeemable thing a god or creator gave us on this ransacked plateau of existence, and denying them leave you with absolutely nothing fun to do.

If anyone honestly critiques Islam, they are called an Islamophobe or a bigot. When Sam Harris cited a poll that said 78 percent of British Muslims said the Danish cartoonist should have been prosecuted, Ben Affleck squirms and calls him a racist. With the gays, we’re in a bit of a quandary of rhetoric: the Muslim community is predominately homophobic, but saying that makes us Islamophobic.

Jacques Lacan’s famous statement that a husband’s suspicion that his wife is cheating on him is pathological even if that suspicion is found correct. Before the attack, Omar Mateen walked into a gun store in Florida and tried to buy high-grade body armor and a large quantity of ammunition, and spoke Arabic while on the telephone, and the store owners deemed Mr. Mateen suspicious, consequently rejecting his business and immediately notifying the FBI. Is this pathological of the gun store owners? What if he was not a terrorist, but just an innocent brown man who liked to dress up in full body armor and shoot shit in the desert? Would the gun store owners’ suspicions then been deemed bigoted and racist? Probably. But their suspicions would have potentially saved 49 lives if the FBI did anything about it.

There are anti-Muslim gun stores across the United States, and one could well-argue that this kind of discrimination is proto-psychotic paranoia, that far more young white men carry out mass shootings across the country than Muslims do. Our own societal pathology and paranoia is reaching a critical breaking point. When a professor on an airplane was solving math problems with a pen and paper, and a woman, terrified that maybe the hypothetical cosine parabolas were the arcs of terrorist missile strikes, erupted in fear and the plane made an emergency landing and the man was escorted off the plane. Clearly this is pathological, clearly a symptom of our increasing fear of Islam. But what is there left to do? Because the political spectrum is so polarized in the United States today, if you criticize Islam especially, you are cast alongside the supporters of Trump and all his porcine patriots.

Following the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, major television networks and newspapers refused to publish the cartoons of Muhammad, in fear that they would put them and their staff at risk of violent retaliation. This is precisely the problem. Our mockery of archaic belief in the stupid should popularize en masse. A fake respectfulness towards the belief that an illiterate businessman transcribed the final revelation of God, or that the Earth is 6,000 years old, is a suppression in itself, and allows violent dangerous belief to propagate and spread across the world. Every newspaper and television network should have projected the cartoons for the world to see.

Christopher Hitchens postured it best. In public debates with senior Rabbis, Bishops, Muslim intellectuals, he has repeated the challenge to them all: name a moral act or thought that you can have as a religious person that I can’t as a non-believer. There is nothing. Now, reverse it, and name a crime or sinister act that you can carry out only because of your belief. And you’ve already thought of one. And now another. And yet another.