I have decided to wait until the dust has settled after the slaughter of 49 men and women at an Orlando nightclub that catered to the local LGBT community(arguably making it a "hate crime" as much as the burning of crosses adjacent to African American churches or last year's mass murder of worshippers at an African American church in Charleston South Carolina by white supremacist Dylann Roof) before commenting on it( my stance on gun control is well known to readers of this blog and I will NOT reiterate it; in a nutshell I approve of it) and more to the point to criticize the self styled " Christian" (and presumably "pro-life") pastors( Baptist and others- thankfully my own Church- Roman Catholic has expressly distanced itself from such ludicrous and manifestly un-Christian sentiment as has Bishop Robert Lynch of the St Petersburg Diocese) who have gone so far as to condone or approve of the murders of "faggots".

Several questions for these "Christian " gentlemen:

If you believe that the "faggots/paedophiles" in the Pulse nightclub got what"they deserved", do you also "believe":

(a) that the Stanford rape victim got"what she deserved"(hey she was drunk at the time)?

(b) Trayvon Martin also"got what he deserved"( at the hands of vigilante George Zimmerman)?

(c) That as long as the victim/victims of a hate crime are neither Caucasian, Christian or demonstratably heterosexual, then their killings are NOT an abomination in the eyes of God? Were a crazed leftist to enter a conservative "think tank" such as The American Enterprise Institute and slaughter en masse men and women because he despised their political views would you not be the frist to cry that the spilling of their blood is an "abomination in the eyes of God"?

I KNOW I would!

(d) Whatever happened to the view that EVERY human being's life( irrespective of their ethnic origin, religious affilation, sexual orientation or political viewpoint) is precious in the eyes of their Maker)? To quote the late Cardinal Cathal Daly during the NI"Troubles", are we not "absolutizing the relative and relativizing the absolute"- that is to say making party political attitudes more important than the teachings of the Church(denomination irrelevant) and conversely making Church teaching less important?

I await answers- to be fair several commentators have expressly condemned such deeply un Christian statements but we cannot afford to have what I call "The Ned Flanders syndrome"(after the obsessively sanctimonious/preachily judgemental character in the cartoon series known as "The Simpsons") to define what Christianity is in reality!