Gunman disliked church's liberal views, Tenn. police say

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

An unemployed man accused of opening fire with a shotgun and killing two people at a Unitarian church apparently targeted the congregation out of hatred for its liberal social policies, police said today.

Knoxville Police Chief Sterling Owen IV said a letter had been been recovered from the SUV of Jim D. Adkisson, 58, by investigators seeking clues about the motive behind the attack. Authorities said he was an apparent stranger to the Tennessee church where gunfire punctuated a children's performance based on the musical "Annie." Two people were killed and seven wounded Sunday.

"It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that and his stated hatred of the liberal movement," Owen said at a news conference.

No children were hurt, but five people remained in serious or critical condition today. A burly usher who died is being hailed as a hero for shielding others from gunfire Sunday at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.

And

Unitarians have roots in a movement that rejected Puritan orthodoxy in New England. Although the outlook and beliefs of individual Unitarian churches can vary dramatically, most congregations retain a deep commitment to social justice, which has led them to embrace liberal positions over the years. Unitarians were among the first to ordain women, support the civil rights movement and back gay rights.

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Despite my agnosticism, I've intended for years to check out the Unitarians--only my Sunday morning laziness has kept me from going.

Obviously, the shooter is a nut job, taking out on these people whatever torment his personal demons have inflicted on him over the years. But his madness has a focus: he thinks liberals need to die violently, by his own hand. And this particular tragedy didn't take place in a vacuum. It happened in a greater cultural context.

Now, I'm not about to sit here and say that some other person's words or actions caused Adkisson to freak out and start shooting liberals. Clearly, there is ultimately only one man responsible for this murderous rampage. But I do feel pretty safe asserting that other people shaped the focus of Adkisson's hatred, shaped it and encouraged it.

For over a decade now, the demagogues of the right wing, on both talk radio and from the pulpit, have spewed violent, venomous, vitriolic hate toward American liberals. Often, when coming from the likes of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, these rhetorical daggers have been haphazardly disguised as "jokes." Ha ha, no, it's funny, get it? Dead liberals are funny!!! Others, such as the despicable Michael Savage simply use straight-up Nazi imagery, like the word "vermin," to describe liberals--say what you want about him; at least he's honest about what he is. Right-wing preachers, such as Pat Robertson, or the recently passed Jerry Falwell, on the other hand, tend to couch their murderous rhetoric in spiritual language, strongly asserting again and again, that it is "God's will" that liberals die, such as their statements that Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, and the deaths associated with it, was a manifestation of their angry Lord's wrath for the city's support of homosexuality.

The gatekeepers of public discourse, politicians and the mainstream news media, have, by and large, behaved as though this was no big deal, often handing over their megaphone to these people, amplifying their messages of murder and death. Years and years of this psychotic rhetorical dynamic have created a cultural atmosphere wherein numerous Americans are unfazed by this kind of talk.

Again, I assert no direct causation of Adkisson's rampage in Tennessee. But I think it is undeniably obvious that this right-wing atmosphere of deep and violent hatred toward liberals both directed his aim and gave him the moral certainty he needed to walk into a church and start shooting. Indeed, for some years now, reacting to the right wing's hate, the left has been predicting such an event--this isn't so far fetched, either: over the years, the left has helplessly watched while self-righteous and violent anti-abortion rhetoric inspired clinic bombings and shootings of doctors. And if Obama is elected, and Congress becomes more solidly Democratic, I have no doubt that there will be still more hate crimes like this one as rank-and-file conservatives become more desperate and disillusioned.

One of my deeper fears is that this horrid ideological tribalism will one day descend into an actual shooting war between the left and right, a virtual civil war of the variety we recently unleashed in Iraq. We're nowhere near that now, thank god, especially because the left appears to have long ago shed its violent extremist elements, but if the right decides to take its own rhetoric more seriously, and we all know how they love their guns, it might not be just the nuts out there shooting up liberal churches. And if it gets bad enough, the left will eventually start shooting back.

Then we're all fucked.

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