Stefanie Pettit: Massacre revives a mother’s anxiety

I am the mother of a son who is gay. I first wrote those words in a column in this newspaper in June 2009 and noted that while things were getting better for gays and lesbians in America, attention still needed to be paid.

And now, Orlando. Like so many others, I was stunned that 49 patrons of a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, had been murdered by yet another lone gunman.

You don’t have to be the mother of a gay son to be affected by this, just as you didn’t have be a mother at all to have been devastated when a lone shooter killed 20 first-graders and six adults in Newtown, Massachusetts, in 2012. Or six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, also that year. Or 21 people at a fast-food restaurant in San Ysidro, California, in 1984.

People have been at this killing business for a long time and for a lot of reasons that seemed to make sense to them at the time, I guess. Perverted ideology, a warped sense of justice, mental illness, road rage gone amok, a need for recognition – I don’t know what. But I do know it’s not getting better.

Somewhere, somehow, some of us have gotten the idea that it’s cool, heroic, a sign of faith or whatever to take a gun or two someplace public and fire away, especially at people viewed as lesser, sinners, “the other.” The fault of society, religion, bad parenting, brainwashing or something else – frankly, I don’t care. I just care that it stops.

I have a focused concern over the Orlando shootings because of my son. When you have a gay son, you always worry that someone will hurt him just because of his sexual orientation. But as Sam has reached his upper 30s, and I can see that he is happy, making his way and likes who he is (I do, too), I’ve begun to relax a little. And then here comes Orlando.

Two steps forward and I don’t know how many steps backward this puts the gay community’s progress.

I have that knot in my stomach again – just as every parent does who sends a child off to school in this world of mass shootings. Just as everyone does who attends Bible study at church, goes to the movies or gathers anywhere with others, putting themselves in places where they are vulnerable to a person with a gun and an agenda. No matter how much time goes by, there’s always something of a knot deep within.

I know from experience that there are those who, while they might not wish this level of violence on anyone, are less sympathetic when bad things happen to gay people. To that, I think of Arthur Miller’s play “All My Sons,” in which the lead character knowingly ships defective airplane parts to the military during World War II, resulting in the death of 21 pilots.

At the end of the play he comes to understand that while none of the pilots were his own son, “they were all my sons.”

And they are.

Stefanie Pettit, of Spokane, is a columnist for the Voices.