In the late 1990s, Eric Rudolph — raised Catholic and affiliated for a time with a Christian Identity sect — bombed abortion clinics and a gay bar, insisting they were venues of immorality and evil. Last July, an Orthodox Jewish Israeli attacked the marchers in the Jerusalem LGBT pride parade, stabbing six of them, and one of them, a teenager, died of her wounds; justifying his attacks by appealing to Talmudic punishments for homosexuality, he had just been released from a 10-year prison term for doing the same in 2005. Yesterday, a Christian pastor from Arizona, Steven Anderson, praised the slaughter of 49 people in an Orlando LGBT club on the ground that “homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts” and are “pedophiles.”
Violent attacks on gay bars in the U.S. have long been common, as sociology professor Greggor Mattson documented today: “The crime blotters of the gay press have always been punctuated by attacks on patrons at gay bars and continue to be today,” including killings. In 2014, a brutal hate crime against a gay couple was carried out by staff and students at a Catholic high school. In overwhelmingly Catholic and evangelical Brazil, killing of trans women is now an epidemic. The Terrence McNally play Corpus Christi was repeatedly targeted in the U.S. with bomb threats and had to be canceled because it depicted Jesus as gay.
A 2015 Pew poll found that U.S. Muslims were more accepting of homosexuality than evangelical Christians, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses:
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