Hate speech has consequences
After months of Republicans vilifying gay and transgender people, and after they pass laws in multiple states targeting them, teachers, and drag queens, guess what?
Shop owner shot, killed over rainbow flag outside clothing store near Lake Arrowhead
The owner of a clothing shop in Cedar Glen was shot and killed Friday night, Aug. 18, after a person made several disparaging comments about a rainbow flag displayed outside the store, authorities said.
The suspect was found nearby by arriving deputies, who shot and killed him, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials said.
Deputies responded to the Magpi clothing store on Hook Creek Road around 5 p.m. and found the victim, identified as Laura Ann Carleton, 66, outside the store suffering from a gunshot wound.
Carleton was pronounced dead at the scene.
Footwear News describes Carleton as “a fashion and footwear industry veteran“:
According to the Magpi website, Lauri Carleton’s career in fashion began early in her teens, working in the family business at Fred Segal Feet in Los Angeles while attending Art Center School of Design. From there, she oversaw the shoe floor at Joseph Magnin Century City. Carleton later joined Kenneth Cole. During her 15 years as an executive at the company, she worked with factories and design teams in Italy and Spain, and was often on the road for 200 days a year, according to the Magpi site.
Carleton was a beloved member of her California communities, and friends and partners mourned her death on Saturday.
Members from the Mountain Provisions Cooperative wrote on Instagram:
“Laura was a pillar in our community, an immovable force in her values for equality, love and justice. If you knew Lauri, you know she loved hard, laughed often, and nurtured and protected those who she cared about,” the post read. It went on to praise Lauri and her husband Bort for being pivotal in organizing the group’s “Free Store,” which provided free food and supplies for four months after a blizzard.
Donald Trump and his merry coupsters spend months baselessly alleging that massive fraud cost him the 2020 election and them their rightful king. He invites his overwrought subjects to a “wild” rally on Jan. 6. Some arrive with weapons, tactical and communications gear, and a plan. After Trump tells them they must “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore,” they storm and ransack the U.S. Capitol.
Donald Trump baselessly accuses the FBI of planting the documents he proudly declared his. A man who was present at the Capitol riot attempts to breach a Cincinnati FBI field office the next day and is shot and killed after a standoff with police.
Sometimes the effect is more delayed. Sometimes individual assaults and killings receive no press.
The Department of Homeland Security in May warned that threats of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community were on the rise and intensifying. saying, “These issues include actions linked to drag-themed events, gender-affirming care, and LGBTQIA+ curricula in schools.”
A report in June from the Anti-Defamation League cited “at least 356 anti-LGBTQ+ extremist and non-extremist incidents” in 46 states between June 2022 and April 2023.
“From demonstrations aiming to intimidate organizers and attendees at drag shows, to bomb threats against hospitals that offer health care for LGBTQ+ people to a mass shooting that took the lives of five people in Colorado, incidents of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism are an important part of a larger story about the heightened threats facing the LGBTQ+ community in the United States today.”
The Human Rights Campaign reported last November at least “32 transgender and gender-nonconforming people” killed in the U.S. in 2022. Based on what little press there is about Carleton, she was neither, but an advocate.
Nobody is fooled by thinly disguised Trump threats and intimidation aimed at his perceived enemies. Nor by his social media tirades rendered in all-caps that he believes as immaturely as Bart Simpson provide him plausible deniability when followers act on them. His words have consequences. He bears responsibility, if not in this life perhaps in the next.
Nobody is fooled — I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis, and at GOP state legislators — that hate speech and discriminatory legislation directed at LGBTQ+ Americans does not carry deadly consequences for them or, in Carleton’s case, for their allies.
Nobody is fooled by the smirking, social media celebrities who make their dirty livings peddling this shit.
You, all of you, know who you are.