FBI officials told participants on a conference call late Monday that they would investigate the reports that the alleged shooter behind the Orlando massacre was conflicted about his sexuality, the Guardian reported. The move comes as multiple people have come forward with accounts about the alleged shooter, Omar Mateen, that suggest his sexuality may have played a role in the shooting, which left nearly 50 people at a gay night club dead.
One former policy academy colleague of Mateen’s told the Palm Beach Post that Mateen had asked him out and they had frequented gay clubs together. The Orlando Sentinel published a report that regulars at Pulse, the Orlando night club targeted early Sunday, had seen Mateen at the club a number of times before the shooting. He also is believed to have had a profile on a gay dating app, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Guardian report of the conference call cites an unnamed a senior U.S. official. The call was held with 358 civil-rights-minded leaders, including those in the LGBT and Muslim communities, as well as officials from the FBI, the Departments of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, the Guardian said.
Confused sexuality meets religious zealotry. Bad results ensue. It scarcely matters which religion…
The bigger question is: will this impact the resources devoted to investigating Hillary’s emails? I hope not because they need to indict her quickly, seeing as they’re not in the business of stopping terrorists. Fucking jerks.
Shame and guilt can drive someone to do really bad things. It wouldn’t surprise me if this guy was all mixed up about what he felt, and took it out on those like him, and then blamed it all on ISIS as some kind of religious affirmation.
If he was attracted to men but didn’t want to be attracted to men, it makes sense that he would kill the object of his attraction rather than kill himself for having these feelings.
Entire libraries could be filled with the role of sexuality in America’s gun-nut fetish.
And in a lot of its religious obsessions, too.