Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning reacted to the mass shooting in Orlando by making the terror attack all about himself.
In a tweet posted early Monday morning, Fanning stated, “Hrs & distance cannot dull the pain of #Orlando. It could have been me that night. And now that I’m #Army Secretary, it’s doubly personal.”
Fanning is the first openly gay man to hold a secretary level service position, and apparently, Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old terrorist, also had homosexual proclivities, as evidenced by his apparent use of the gay dating app Jack’d and the fact that he was reportedly a regular at the Pulse nightclub.
Fanning often emphasizes the fact that he’s gay when talking about his position as head of a military branch, saying he initially wanted to focus solely on his qualifications for the job, but now is interested in talking about his sexual identity.
One of the club-goers, Kevin West, told The Los Angeles Times that Mateen messaged him for about a year over the app. Four other regulars at the club said they had previously seen Mateen sloppily drunk at Pulse.
“He was trying to pick up people. Men,” Jim Van Horn told The Associated Press. “He would walk up to them and then he would maybe put his arm around them or something and maybe try to get them to dance a little bit or something. And then go over and buy a drink or something. That’s what people do at gay bars, you know? That’s what we do.”
West, on the other hand, had never actually seen Mateen until Sunday morning, when the shooting took place. Mateen killed 49 and wounded 53 others. The narrative surrounding Mateen’s motives is now shifting to accommodate not just radical Islam and devotion to terror groups, but also the fact that he seemed to be a self-loathing, closeted homosexual. Just two months before the shooting, Mateen’s father noted he had been angered by the sight of two men kissing, which may have been the impetus for the terror attack Sunday.
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