In my Daily Caller column last week, I wrote about the “testimony from multiple witnesses, including his ex-wife, suggesting that the man who massacred 49 people at a homosexual bar in Orlando, FLA may have been a homosexual himself.” Now someone has come forward claiming to have engaged in homosexual activity with Mateen, in a relationship that ended last December. Even in light of this claim, the evidence available is indicative, not conclusive. But it obviously demands further investigation. Yet the man described in one report as “the current fiance” of Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy “claims the FBI told Sitora to keep mum about Mateen’s homosexuality in interviews with ‘American media.’”
Why would the Obama Administration want to distract attention from Mateen’s possible homosexuality? Because it poses problems for their efforts to drum up sympathy for their attacks on the natural basis of marriage and family life. It makes it harder to see the attack as a simple “hate crime” against homosexuals if it was in fact motivated by passions (jealousy, anger, self-loathing) and circumstances (rejection, hurt pride and, consequently, a desire for revenge) that may be as much about frustrated homosexual love as they are about anti-homosexual hatred.
Of course, it also makes it harder to explain Mateen’s crime as an ISIS related terrorist attack because it allows us to see Mateen’s statements during the attack in a different light. It makes sense when terrorists trained and directed by ISIS make sure the world knows that their actions are the result of that organization’s activities. But Mateen’s statements weren’t couched in terms of convincing the world of ISIS’s reach. They sounded more like efforts to show leaders of ISIS that he is one of their adherents.
What sense does this make if his attack was planned and provisioned by ISIS, and/or carried out at its behest? Moreover, according to FBI Director Comey, the other terrorist bombers (the Boston marathon attackers, and a man from Florida who blew himself up in a terrorist attack in Syria) for whom Mateen expresses his admiration “were not inspired by ISIS, which adds a little bit to confusion about his motives.” In fact, Comey said, “the Florida man… died as a suicide bomber in Syria for Al-Nusra Front—a group in conflict with the so-called Islamic State.”
If Mateen’s outrage is not simply another engagement in the Islamic Jihadist war against the American people, this poses problems for the Trump GOP’s party line, predicated on the notion that Mateen’s attack is stark evidence of the utter failure of the Obama Administration’s failure to identify Islamic Jihadism as the enemy.
But if, for a moment, we stand aside from these “party lines” and look at the situation with nothing in mind but the common good of the American people, one fact stands out. Both the Obama Democrats and the Trump GOP’s anti-jihadists agree on the need to restrict civilian gun purchases, without regard for the provisions of the Constitution’s Second and Fifth Amendments. Their supposedly different “party lines” meet in agreement at a point consistent with the elitist faction’s aim of subverting the unalienable rights that are most critical to preserving the endowment of rights, including liberty, conferred on us by our Creator.
I have written at some length about this aspect of the elitist faction’s anti-constitutional agenda when it comes to the Second Amendment. Earlier this week I wrote about Donald Trump’s apparent willingness to join with Obama and Hillary Clinton in nullifying the 5th Amendments general safeguards against lawless governmental actions taken on the excuse of national security. Americans fail to appreciate the full implications of this nullification. Too many fail to appreciate the fact our unalienable rights are, in political terms, our primordial belongings, which we possess in consequence of our nature according to God’s will, not by sufferance of human law and fiat.
What ought to make the Mateen outrage especially interesting to Americans determined to preserve the endowment of right that comes to us from God is that also involves the prong of the elitist faction’s attack on our liberty that aims to discredit and discard the very idea of God-endowed natural right. This attack on the exercise of right involves the only species of property human beings may rightly have in one another — the one in light of which children belong to their parents, by way of the obligation to care for them; and parents belong to their children, by way of being the first root of their identity as human beings.
In the context of the elitist faction assault on constitutional republican self-government in the United States, the old saying comes to mind: “They’ve got us coming and going.” Living as they did in the era of absolute despotism, America’s Founders were not unmindful of the fact the this would be the dilemma of the people. Periodic elections are supposed to offer an opportunity for the people themselves, at the grassroots, to reclaim the initiative from usurping elitists, wresting from the usurpers, by peaceful means, the powers being abused to erect a permanently despotic government. Thanks to the complex nature of Mateen’s motives, the possibility of his homosexual inclinations may help people, otherwise blind to it, see the tendentiously deceptive character of the construction both of the elitist faction’s sham partisans are trying to impose on his outrage.
What they have in common is their willingness to obscure and distort the complex truth. But as we ponder this common ground a common result or purpose comes into view. Both parties urge us forward with the same imperative — “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.” They purport to abhor the acts of violence that instills fear in us. They pretend to an end to the instruments of terror, animate and inanimate, that they portray as its cause. Yet, using this very fear, they goad and herd us toward disregarding God’s endowment of right, thereby undoing of our identity as a free people.
Terrorism is not just a tactic. As our Founders learned from reading Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, fear is in fact the practical principle of despotism, the form of government diametrically opposed to republican constitutional liberty. As the elitist faction’s demagogues make fear the key motivating principle of America’s political life they move us from the political culture of liberty to the oppressive regimen of despotism. But as a matter of political culture, the opposite of fear is not, as one might think, simply courage. It is the firmness of character that produces and sustains the courage of ordinary men and women when they fight in defense of all they have done to exercise right, as God gives them to know it; and all they are obliged to do to produce and preserve the blessings that flow from that exercise, which we call liberty.
Montesquieu called this firmness of character “virtue.” It is a word that, at its root, brings to mind the intention of God for the nature of mankind. This is the very premise upon which our nation was founded. But a people discouraged from reading America’s Founders are thereby even more likely to neglect the education offered by the thinkers the Founders read. In the next article in this series (upcoming in my column for wnd.com this week), I will ponder some dangers this neglect prevents them from bearing in mind.