One can raise the same question every time: how many people were killed in other places in the world yesterday, and not just in the what-happens-there-always-grabs attention United States? It's a good question. I'm not sure what to say about yesterday specifically -- though I can say that it was reported that the Syrian government began barrel-bombing the town of Daraya but hours after the Assad junta begrudgingly allowed food aid into the city for the first time in years. No one knows how many were killed. Twenty-eight barrel bombs were dropped, however, as people began to distribute the aid amongst themselves. I'm no military expert. However, it sounds like the kind of thing where some number of dozens could have easily been killed (see Al-Jazeera 2016). We'll wait for the numbers to come out.
Be that as it may, roughly fifty people (forty-nine plus the shooter) were killed in Orlando yesterday in what's the deadliest shooting attack in the U.S. since a twenty year-old took a semi-automatic assault rifle and killed twenty-plus mostly-children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. Orlando was confusing. On one hand, it seemed to play directly into the global "war on terror" as the gunman, Omar Mateen (an American) apparently called 911 to pledge his loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the so-called Islamic State. It's something one can do: "lone wolf it" -- that as long as one finds a way to publicly give credit to the group (see Myre 2016). Still, if Orlando was an IS event, one has to say they choose a totally new target: LGBT American life. Of course, the massively conservative Islam to which IS adheres is no friend to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual world. Nonetheless, the Pulse nightclub is a very different target than the symbols of cosmpolitan thought and empire (e.g., Charlie Hebdo or the Twin Towers) traditionally topping the list of first al-Qaeda and now Islamic State terror targets. That's if Orlando was an "IS event." Though professing support for al-Baghdadi, the group itself seemed largely unaware of what happened (no one asked Mateen to call), and there is a reasonable question to ask about what heavily armed Americans are doing roaming the ally ways and byways of their own city streets. Combined with Mateen's mental instability, the event mashed a heavy dose of international politics into with the American social cake. The result was a wafer whose different flavors are hard to taste. That's except for the fact that forty-nine innocent lives were lost: voices and presences whose individuality will never be replaced.
There's much that can be said about this. However, I'd like to make two short points. Firstly, Orlando rammed directly into the American electoral cycle -- the guaranteed-to-be wild showdown just kicking off between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump -- and one of those figures (Trump) will ask us to make a human rights for security trade-off in the name of being "smart" (his vocabulary, not mine [see McCaskill and East 2016]). This isn't new. Trump's long been known for his proposed "Muslim ban" -- a concept contradicting the right to seek asylum discussed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948, article 14) -- and in the wake of the November attacks at the Bataclan and Stade de France, Trump proposed reinstating what in New York, anyway, had been a post-9/11 practice of placing extra surveillance on various locales grounding Muslim life (mosques, e.g.).* Now, that's racial profiling, and it contradicts the non-discriminatory nature of any human right (see Vandenhole 2005). I will admit, rights-for-security isn't an illegitimate idea. It's been well-noted that in times of emergency, states have the right to "derogate" otherwise essential human rights (Mégret 2014). Still, one has to be extremely careful with what one calls an "emergency" as if one isn't, one opens oneself to always living in a state of emergency and any conflict, heightened level of suspicion or degree of international strife becoming the grounds for eliminating due process as well as other potential basic freedoms and civil rights (the right to privacy, e.g.). Drumming up political popularity via curtailing civil liberties, or suggesting that one might, is an extremely dangerous idea. It cuts against any agreed-upon thinking about, and certainly the intended spirit, of universal justice. Of course, that might be the point. Trump's argument might be that rights don't belong to all; they exist in the context of specific states and, within those, rights really pertain to groups one thinks are "acceptable." Of course, that relies on a cultural imagination -- intuitive senses of who an entire people might be. That's whether or not those senses bear any relation to what anyone's particular sensibilities may be or not.**
Clinton, of course, will take a more measured approach. Thank god; if 2016 was just about one-upsmanship and competitions regarding who's genuinely "tough," the whole electoral exercise would push the boundaries of mental pain. Still, the United States' second female Secretary of State has her exceptionalisms as well. In debating Bernie Sanders during the primary season, e.g., Clinton carefully noted that regarding policies foreign and domestic, one was dealing with "the United States of America" and not the practices of other states or political polities (CNN 2015).*** She's talked little about it in the 2016 campaign. Historically, however, while not explicitly opposing the International Criminal Court, she's also noted her reservations about the now fourteen year-old international justice organ (Vote Smart 2005).**** No doubt: Hillary Clinton's rhetoric will be radically less inflammatory and noticeably more inclusive than that of Trump. She seems to think that the American Dream involves some basic adherence to civil rights (see Pierce 2015). Still, we need to be careful that sympathetic reactions to an American event doesn't translate into a plague of drone strikes, shady "rendering" practices or surveillance practices violating various levels of privacy and security of person -- to say nothing of the right to life. Again, rights are complex. They are utopic. As legal scholar Learned Hand once said, however, "Thou shalt not ration justice" (in Minor and Rawson 2005, 352). Laws should principally come from our inherent worth. That's based on the notion that all are equal and that one's committing a crime if one leaves others without the full range of rights and freedoms.
That's point one. Point two, however, is that I'm astounded how far American, if not global, society has come in accepting LGBT subjectivity and life. Orlando was an attack on precisely those things and, regardless of what the shooter's most particular motives were -- whether he was an IS surrogate or not -- it's clear he acted on ideas that queer life is somehow a "sin." It's a medieval mindset who's traction may be loosing in the modern world. As far as yesterday goes, however, Mateen stood totally alone. No one but no one made common cause with the idea that gay life is "wrong," and no one heard any beyond unacceptable vocabulary that one might have heard at other ties suggesting that someone got what they "deserve."***** Of course, there were differences in tone. A pro-LGBT White House made solidarity with the gay community a point (The White House 2016); an attack on "sexual orientation," Barak Obama offered, was an attack on us all. However, even those parts of American society with intensely conservato-religious views held their tongue. The general tenor was that what happened really was an attack on some larger sense of American life. As opposed to the outcry when the Supreme Court supported gay marriage, or the attempt of some states to institute vaguely bizarre "bathroom laws," there seemed to be assent to the idea, at least momentarily, that lesbian, gay, transsexual and bisexual lives were as of much value as the lives of anyone else. It's hard to find solace in the murder of forty-nine people. If -- if -- any good is to come out of it, however, that might be it: the winding down of a debate as to whether there's a choice about non-discrimination on the basis of sexual preference or whether one might "choose" to accept the existence, reality and legitimacy of LGBT life. There isn't. The recognition of such equalities has arrived. If one isn't of such opinions oneself, suck it up and get used to it (on LGBT human rights, see Kollmana and Waitesa 2009).
Our are dangerous and troubling times. American is a political and cultural empire whose ups and downs may sometimes dominate headlines more than they should. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2016) notes, e.g., between 2003 and 2005, the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region cost upwards of 250,000 -- 250,000! -- lives; how much mainstream press coverage in Europe or the United States did that get? Still, what any humanitarian or supporter of basic rights knows is that it's a holocaust in singularity anytime bigotry and prejudice results in the end of a human life. When, in the name of "I know better than you," someone is denied the right to live, we enter a chasm of the dastardly from which we risk finding no way back. Orlando brought us forty-nine such moments; moments of the deepest despair. It brought us forty-nine miniatures of what Elie Wiesel (1982 [orig. 1956]) termed "night" -- the journey into the darkest of part of the human soul. It's saddening; tragic. Maybe, though, what's emerges from such trials is the fecund soil of greater acceptance's grounds; that the good join hands and with a quiet stare indicating that those who don't value tolerance and inclusion might wait someplace else (or perhaps book some time on a therapist's couch). That's because for those of us who value rights' spirit, there's work to do. That's building peaceful social orders -- orders where weapons of death are hopefully in not in everyone's hands -- blame isn't assigned scattershot and we strive to protect everyone's rights. That's perhaps especially when, connected to a particular individual, some modicum of blame is to be found. Ours are dangerous and troubling times. They'll become more so, though, without the constant, vigilant and committed upholding of the broadest range of human rights. That's as it's in rights and their articulation in the social body that we find the expression of everyone's worth: that we maintain "reason and conscience" and that we gain the fullest articulation of all of us as "equal" and "free" (United Nations 1948, article 1).
* The larger point here is that Trump appears interested to take national a particular set of practices used by the NYPD, but then phased out in recent years. See Haberman (2015).
** In large part, I'm pointing to stereotyping here: the blanket charge that particular groups might be "tainted" with particular behaviors. See Morey and Yaqin (2011).
*** This was largely in the context of economics (specifically issues surrounding the health system). Still, Clinton seemed clear to mark out that, though a supporter of international rights, there were clear instances when the "American" way of doing things absolutely came first.
**** One can see the logic in this argument: anti-rights states using rights-based justice systems to tie up great powers and coalitions insisting on international right. Still, the notion that the U.S. has a special role as a specific rights monitor, arbiter of international conflicts or that it has a special ability to step in and out of rights, even in their defense, is a tenuous idea. It sticks out like a sore thumb that along with Turkey, the U.S. is the only NATO ally that doesn't subject itself to the rules of the International Criminal Court. See Ignatieff (2005).
***** Bernadette Barton (2012), e.g., notes the idea held out some conservative Christian communities (sometimes quite violently expressed by extreme activists) that LGBT individuals haven't been "graced by God;" that they're an "abomination" somehow, leading to the legitimization of some quite violent attitude. It is a small victory to have had at least one day -- perhaps the first -- without that kind of public vitriol.
References
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Barton, Bernadette. 2012. Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays. New York: New York University Press.
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Haberman, Maggie. 2015. "Donald Trump Calls for Surveillance of ‘Certain Mosques’ and a Syrian Refugee Database." The New York Times, November 21, 2015, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/politics/donald-trump-syrian-muslims-surveillance.html?_r=0.
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Pierce, Charles P. 2015. “Why Hillary Clinton's Stint as a Civil-Rights Secret Agent Matters Today.” Esquire (December 28). Available at http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a40772/hillary-clinton-undercover-civil-rights/.
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