SGN June 17, 2016 - Pre-Pride - Section 1

Celebrating 42 Years!

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Seattle Gay News SEATTLE’S LGBT NEWS & ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Radical Islamists are not the only Mass shooting at Gay religious extremists who want us dead nightclub in Orlando leaves Orlando murders set off 49 dead, 53 wounded ecumenical hate-fest

Flowers in Orlando – sacbee.com

Baptist pastor Steven Anderson – youtube.com

by Shaun Knittel SGN Associate Editor

by Mike Andrew side Pulse nightclub, a popular Gay bar that SGN Staff Writer was celebrating with a Latin Dance night.

Most of the 49 people killed by Omar Mateen Seattle Gay News will feature a special were Latino as well as LGBTQ; more than While Republicans blame “radical supplemental section dedicated to the vic- half were of Puerto Rican descent. For this Islam” for the mass murder in Orlando tims of the mass shooting and hate crime edition of SGN were are not offering com- and call for more restrictions on Amerithat took place June 12 in Orlando, Fla., insee ORLANDO page 12 ca’s Muslim communities, other religious

extremists have stepped forward to spew hate at the victims, survivors, and the entire LGBT community.

Baptist pastor Steven Anderson, of Tempe, Ariz., for example, labeled the Orlando victims “disgusting perverts and see RADICALS page 11

Another tragedy narrowly averted Fire Backholm! demands Washington Won’t Discriminate L.A. Pride suspect had

explosives and loaded semi- I-1515 boss orders signature gatherers to automatic rifles in his car

harass women

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Keith Schwartz – zimbio.com

action.wawont.org

by Mike Andrew massacre was avoided in Santa Monica, Ca- SGN Staff Writer lif., where police found loaded assault rifles, rounds of ammunition, and 25 pounds of As if LGBTQ folks needed yet another explosive chemicals in a white Acura sedan “We are calling on the I-1515 campaign reminder on Sunday, June 12, the day Amer- belonging to James Wesley Howell. to fire their manager, Joseph Backholm, for ica learned of the horror that occurred at Howell, a self-described sociopath, said inciting others to commit crimes and putPulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., a similar see L.A. PRIDE SUSPECT page 11 ting voters in danger,” Washington Won’t

by Shaun Knittel SGN Associate Editor

Discriminate demanded on June 15.

The call to get rid of Backholm, who is also boss of the Family Policy Institute of Washington, came in the wake of a KIRO-7 story reporting that Backholm had ordered I-1515 signature gatherers to follow women into restrooms and coerce them into signing see BACKHOLM page 7

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Celebrating 41 Years!

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‘We will stand strong’ Mayor urges community resolve in wake of Orlando massacre Seattle Mayor Ed Murray delivered the following remarks on Sunday, June 12, during a vigil at Capitol Hill’s Cal Anderson Park in the aftermath of the Orlando mass shooting.

“We are gathered on this summer evening during the month we celebrate Pride to share our grief and support each other as we absorb the news of the largest mass shooting in our nation’s history and the largest act of violence against the LGBTQ community in our nation’s history. We gather tonight in solidarity with those who lost their lives, and we offer our support to their families and to the people of the City of Orlando.

“We are also here this evening because the slaughter of our brothers and sisters was meant to spread fear throughout LGBTQ communities across this country. We will, as we have in the past, face this fear. We will not be intimidated. We will stand strong. We will stand together as a community. The mostly young people in that club were doing something very important: they were out, they were living their joyous lives, they were not afraid.

“We cannot be surprised, but still we are shocked and shaken in our pain and anger and disbelief. And as we learn the stories of those who lost their lives and those who tried to help them, this pain will only grow deeper and the anger greater and the disbelief more profound in the days ahead. As difficult as all this is, we cannot give in to despair.

“The greatest way we can honor those whose lives were lost is to recommit ourselves to hope, to that promise that someday being LGBTQ and out at a club is not an act of bravery — because gone is the threat that it might end in slaughter because of who you are.

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“To young people in particular, I urge you, despite this tragedy, not to give in to the sense that nothing can be done. Instead, I ask you to engage like never before. Our community looks to you, more than ever, to build on the gains that we’ve made and to offer a future of hope.

“Along with the Council, with Chief [Kathleen] O’Toole, and the men and women of the Seattle Police Department, I promise that this City will do all we can in a free society to prevent a tragedy like this from occurring in our community.

“As we leave here, the sun will set and night will fall. Some of us will pray, some will hold their loved ones closest, some will redouble their commitment to the movement, some will do all of these things. All of us will find ways to make sure those who were murdered

in the early hours of this morning did not die in vain. We will live in hope and not fear; we will find ways to bridge what divides us.

“Finally, when night falls and we think of those who lost their lives, think of the words I will now paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: And when they shall die, Take them and cut them out in little stars, And they will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.

“Thank you.”

Courtesy of the Seattle Office of the Mayor

Attendees unfurl a giant rainbow flag after a vigil at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle on Sunday – Photo by Lindsey Wasson

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Celebrating 41 Years!

“Nonbinary” now a legal gender in Oregon

Jamie Shupe – unfilteredpatriot.com

by Mike Andrew SGN Staff Writer An Oregon circuit court ruled on June 10 that a Portland resident could list their gender as “nonbinary” on official documents.

The ruling came in the case of Jamie Shupe, who was assigned male gender at birth but began to transition in 2013. Shupe at first petitioned the court to change legal gender to female, but then requested to be designated nonbinary.

“As far as we know, this may be the first ruling of its kind in the U.S.,” said Transgender Law Center’s legal director Ilona Turner in an email to the Daily Dot website.

“This is an important step toward ensuring that nonbinary members of our community have access to identity documents that reflect who they are, just like everyone else.”

Shupe’s petition for “sex change,” as the court documents calls the change in legal gender designation, was filed on April 27. Shupe, who prefers not to use gender pronouns at all, was represented by Portland attorney Lake James Perriguey.

“Male and female are the traditional categories, but they fail to properly categorize people like me. So I challenged that,” said Shupe.

Shupe described being “literally tearful” when the circuit court issued the judgment.

“This is incredibly humbling to be the first person to accomplish this,” Shupe told the Daily Dot. “I hope the impact will be that it opened the legal doorway for all that choose to

BACKHOLM

continued from cover the petition to put the anti-Trans initiative on the November ballot.

“When the head of the I-1515 campaign is prepared to menace women in an effort to overturn transgender non-discrimination protections, clearly this is about one thing: Transgender discrimination,” Equal Rights Washington Executive Director Monisha Harrell said in an email to supporters.

“Using fear and intimidation to achieve discriminatory political ends is despicable.

What’s more, sending men into women’s bathrooms is against the law.”

Audio recordings of Backholm speaking to signature gatherers were delivered anonymously to the Gender Justice League of Seattle.

“For the gentlemen, what I would encourage you to do, if you are so bold and to

do so to follow me through. We don’t deserve to be classified improperly against our will.”

Shupe told the Daily Dot that it remains unclear how the court’s decision will apply to the range of identity documents people rely on. Shupe said the “first goal is to tackle the Oregon DMV.” But even if the state agrees to issue a “nonbinary” driver’s license, federal identity documents currently use only male or female gender markers.

“To my knowledge, many cities and a few states have options where an ID card does not need to declare a gender (such as the NYC ID card or the NYS Benefits card),” Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) attorney Mik Kinkead wrote in an email, “but I have never heard of a system where someone’s nonbinary gender is actually affirmed on the card itself.”

“Many trans, gender-nonconforming, and intersex (TGNCI) people identify as nonbinary or along a genderfluid spectrum, but due to the nature of ID documents and discrimination, many of us have no way to see our gender identity reflected, so this is amazing news,” SRLP Membership Director Sasha Alexander added.

In 2014, over 64,000 people signed a petition asking the White House to recognize nonbinary genders, but without success as yet.

However, according to the website Nonbinary.org, other countries already recognize genders other than male and female – including Australia, Denmark, Nepal, and New Zealand.

Nonbinary Document – Multnomah County Circuit Court

make the point, take your petition and stand outside the women’s restroom at the mall,” Backhom says in the recording.

“If any of the women don’t want to sign it, just go ahead and follow them in [laughter from crowd]. Maybe this will be a better time to sign our little petition, and we can make the point that way.”

In another meeting, Backholm was recorded saying something similar about targeting a women’s spa.

“We’re going to go gather signatures there, actually,” he says.

“We’re gonna walk in...We’re going naked to the Lakewood spa, and we’re going to tell the ladies, ‘If you don’t think we should be here, you need to sign our petition.’ And we think that would be wildly successful.”

Danni Askini, director of the Gender Justice League, told KIRO-7 that Backhom’s remarks were frightening to the Trans

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community.

“This is one recording, but we’ve heard that it’s been said at other trainings,” Askini said. “That is setting a tone that that’s actually what they’re encouraging.”

“I take security and safety very seriously,” Askini continued, noting that more than 50% of Trans people report being attacked or harassed in restrooms. “I think most transgender people do – and I think most women – take security and safety, especially in bathrooms, seriously, and I think joking about it is incredibly irresponsible.”

Washington Won’t Discriminate, the organization created to fight I-1515, agreed.

“This is scary,” the group said on its website. “All of us enter bathrooms with the expectation of privacy and security. And now public safety – which proponents of I-1515 say is their reason for discriminating against transgender Washingtonians – is be-

ing directly compromised, all to advance a ballot initiative.

“And the fact that Backholm is seeking to ignite and capitalize on fear to advance anti-transgender discrimination just days after the brutal shooting in Orlando is indefensible.”

King County Sheriff John Urquhart said Backholm’s suggestions would be a violation of criminal trespass laws.

“I’m not going to be the moral arbiter of what’s funny and what isn’t funny,” Urquhart said. “I don’t know whether Backholm is serious or not. I think the bottom line is, if a signature gatherer follows a woman into a bathroom, he’s going to get arrested, at least by my deputies.”

According to KIRO-7, Backholm refused to answer questions about his comments.

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Boo-hoo-hoo! Anderson Cooper was mean to me, Florida AG says

by Mike Andrew SGN Staff Writer Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi charged that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper ambushed her on air with questions about her past opposition to marriage equality in a June 14 interview.

Speaking to a New York radio station on June 15, Bondi said she was told that Cooper’s interview would focus on scams pretending to seek donations for victims of the Orlando massacre. Instead, Bondi claimed, Cooper shifted his line of questioning to her past anti-Gay record.

That served to “encourage anger and hate,” the Attorney General said.

Bondi said she found it inappropriate for Cooper to press her on her political record, especially in front of a hospital where shooting victims were being treated for serious wounds.

“There’s a time and place for everything,” she said. “But yesterday wasn’t the time nor the place in front of a hospital when we could have been helping victims.”

In her interaction with Cooper, Bondi initially said she hoped to protect her state’s LGBT community from con artists. Cooper then challenged her commitment to her LGBT constituents.

“I saw you the other day,” he said, “saying that anyone who attacks the LGBT community – our LGBT community, you said

– will be gone after to the full extent of the law.

“I talked to a lot of gay and lesbian people here yesterday who are not fans of yours and said that they thought you were being a hypocrite, that you for years have fought – you’ve basically gone after gay people, said that in court that gay people, simply by fighting for marriage equality, were trying to do harm to the people of Florida.

“Do you really think you’re a champion of the gay community?”

“I’ve never said I don’t like gay people,” Bondi replied. “Those words never came out of my mouth.”

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“That’s what you argued in court,” Cooper replied.

“The hotline that you’ve been talking about on television, which allows family members and spouses of the dead to get information, which is incredibly important, and I appreciate you talking about on the air… had there been no gay marriage, no same-sex marriage, you do realize that spouses – there would be no spouses, that boyfriends and girlfriends of the dead would not be able to get information and would not be able to visit in the hospital here. Isn’t there a sick irony in that?”

Bondi responded that she had, in fact,

helped unmarried partners to get medical information on their loved ones.

Cooper shot back that until quite recently she’d argued against the “very idea” that same-sex couples should have that right.

“Is it hypocritical to portray yourself as a champion of the gay community when – I’m just reflecting what gay people told me – they don’t see you as this?” Cooper said.

“It’s just that, I will say I have never really seen you talk about gays and lesbians and transgender people in a positive way until now.”

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and Pam Bondi – blogspot.com

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L.A. PRIDE SUSPECT continued from cover

he was on his way to L.A. Pride. Authorities say he also had a Taser, handcuffs, a buck knife, a canister of gasoline, a security badge, and a black hood.

“I cannot in good conscience think of any reasonable reason that somebody would be traveling across the country with all of these things,” said Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Keith Schwartz, who set bail at $2 million at a hearing on Tuesday.

Howell, 20, amazingly pleaded not guilty to three felony weapons counts. However, court documents show that he also faces a string of charges from earlier incidents in his home state of Indiana when, on Wednesday, Howell was charged with sexually abusing a young girl in Clark County last month and threatening to kill himself and members of his victim’s family.

While there are not many similarities between Omar Mateen, the man who committed the horrific attack in Orlando, and Howell, the fact that they both targeted the LGBTQ community during Pride month, and that they are two deeply disturbed people suffering from obvious mental health problems, is enough for the LGBTQ community to feel on edge as many Pride celebrations (San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle included) have yet to happen.

According to authorities, Howell told someone close to the sexual abuse victim

RADICALS

continued from cover pedophiles.”

In a speech to his Faithful Word Baptist Church, Anderson proclaimed, “The good news is that there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world.”

And the bad news? The murders might be used to push restrictions on hate speech, Anderson warned.

“I’m sure it’s also gonna be used to push an agenda against so-called ‘hate speech,’” he said.

“So Bible-believing Christian preachers who preach what the Bible actually says about homosexuality – that it’s vile, that it’s disgusting, that they’re reprobates – you know, we’re gonna be blamed.”

Anderson told his parishioners he doesn’t want random shooters walking into Gay bars and killing people. The government should execute Gay people instead, he believes.

“Obviously, it’s not right for somebody to just, you know, shoot up the place, because that’s not going through the proper

James Wesley Howell – Photo by Mark Boster

The Indiana Star reports Howell was discovered on Sunday with the following: Twenty-five pounds of Shoc-Shot, an explosive used for blowing up targets (the two components needed to make it explosive had been mixed); an Anderson Manufacturing AM-115 .223-caliber rifle (the rifle had a round in its chamber and additional rounds in a 30-round magazine attached to it, and a second 30-round magazine was taped to the rifle); a .30-06 bolt-action rifle with a round in its chamber; and a .22-caliber Ruger semi-automatic.

As of press time, it’s not clear where Howell obtained the weapons or whether he did so legally. Deputy District Attorney Sean Carney said he believed the weapons were purchased by Howell’s father.

Friends say Howell never made any threats toward the LGBT community. However, an ex-boyfriend maintains that Howell wasn’t open about his sexuality.

“He didn’t like anybody to know about it,” said Zach Hambrick, 17, who met Howell on a dating app.

Their relationship allegedly ended quickly and the two haven’t spoken in months.

Hambrick said Howell acted violent toward him when the relationship wasn’t going well and admitted that he wasn’t surprised about Howell’s arrest in Santa Monica.

he was “a sociopath with an automatic” and threatened to kill police if they tried to arrest him.

Investigators say he fled Indiana and headed toward California when he believed his capture for the molestation was imminent.

Questions about Howell’s sexual orientation, such as with Mateen, and how the two men dealt with it in their lives, are begging for answers. Just like the Orlando killer, Howell had same-sex relations in his past. In fact, police say that last October, an ex-boyfriend accused Howell of pointing a

rifle at him and threatening to pull the trigger - though no arrest was made. The following day he was accused of pointing a loaded handgun at a neighbor, although that time Howell was arrested. Police say he agreed to forfeit his weapons and plead guilty to a misdemeanor intimidation charge, and he was then free to go home.

In February of this year, he was pulled over for going more than 100 mph in a 55mph zone. And when the patrolman approached the car Howell sped off - injuring the officer. Howell is said to have shared video of the incident with his friends.

channels,” Anderson said.

“But these people all should have been killed anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed.”

Anderson previously called for God to rip out Caitlyn Jenner’s heart and advocated mass execution of Gay people to create an AIDS-free world.

Similar sentiments were expressed by a Baptist preacher in Sacramento, Calif.

“Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?” Pastor Roger Jimenez asked in a sermon posted on YouTube.

“Um no, I think that’s great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida, is a little safer tonight.”

The remarks were delivered at the Verity Baptist Church on the morning of June 12, just hours after the attack happened.

“We don’t need to do anything to help.

As far as I’m concerned, Orlando is a little bit safer tonight,” he said.

Jimenez’s sermon went on to echo Anderson’s call for execution of Gays by the government.

“If we lived in a righteous government, they should round them all up and put them up against a firing wall, and blow their brains out,” Jimenez said.

The pastors were joined by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has tried to turn himself into a national political figure by attacking his state’s Transgender community.

In response to the shooting he posted a Bible verse on his Twitter account: “Galatians 6:7 ‘Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.’”

Not to be outdone by Christians, a Brooklyn Hassidic rabbi, Yosef Edery, celebrated the Orlando murders in a video.

“People were killed in an act of terror,” Edery said. “Fine. If an Arab did it, good for him! God hates sin. They deserved to die. I have no mercy for people that God has no mercy for.”

Orlando human rights activists say re-

ligious bigotry contributed to a climate of hatred in which violent attacks like the Pulse murders could take place.

“Not only has the church contributed,” Marytza Sanz told reporters, “but these politicians that have been bringing up the constant bashing of Muslims, homosexuality, women – I think this has been growing and growing until this time bomb exploded.”

Sanz is president of Latino Leadership, a non-profit that helps connect Orlando’s Latino families with services and resources.

“This [shooting] is about violence that has been happening for many, many years,” Jorge Gutierrez, the National Coordinator for Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, added. “We want to blame everything on one person, but this is not an isolated case.

“A couple of years ago, I was at that club. For us, the scary part is that that could have been anywhere. They look like us. That could have been any of us.”

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Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the UK says open the synagogues to LGBT Jews Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, said in a statement that LGBT Jews must be welcomed into Orthodox synagogues that had previously banned them. Mirvis’s statement ran in Britain’s Jewish News next to a rainbow masthead.

“In the face of such unspeakable violence, we must be introspective,” Mirvis said.

ORLANDO

continued from cover mentary, as there are still so many questions left unanswered. Our story here contains what we know, according to the FBI and Orlando authorities.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 12, minutes past 2 a.m., FBI officials say Omar Mateen, 29, an American citizen born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Afghanistan, committed the worst mass shooting in American history, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded, when he began to shoot people on the dancefloor of Pulse, a popular Gay nightclub in Orlando, with bullets from an assault rifle and a handgun. Within the first few minutes of entering the club and firing at his targets, nearly all of the confirmed dead had been shot, although the horror was far from over. After engaging in a shootout with an Orlando police officer employed as security by the club, and surviving another shooting match with police who responded immediately after the carnage began, Mateen held 30 hostages inside one of the nightclub’s bathrooms for the next three hours until, minutes after 5 a.m., fearing that he would kill the hostages, SWAT officers blasted and bored a hole into the exterior of the bathroom wall, freed the hostages, and shot Mateen dead.

Survivors and police report that Matten was “cool and calm” while he talked by phone to law enforcement officials about further carnage during the hostage standoff.

He reportedly also claimed allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIL) and praised the Boston Marathon bombers.

Chief John Mina of the Orlando Police Department said Mateen told police negotiators that he had explosives and accomplices at Pulse. Later, police would report that Mateen did not have anyone who helped him during the attack. He was a lone shooter, they said.

Mateen eventually made comments persuading police that “there would be an imminent loss of life,” Chief Mina said, prompting the chief to end the three-hour standoff and order the assault that killed Mateen and subsequently freed the dozens of people trapped in the club. Many of them had suffered one or more gunshot wounds. Witnesses describe the hostages as being covered in blood as they ran for their lives through a hole in the wall a SWAT team used an armored vehicle and explosives to make.

In a statement Monday, President Barack Obama said the attack was “an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been concerned about,” with a gunman who was inspired by radical material he found online.

“One of the biggest challenges we are going to have is this kind of propaganda and perversions of Islam that you see generated on the Internet,” said Obama.

The shooter, Mateen, is said to have made frightening statements three years ago to

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“The Torah takes a clear, well-known position on acts of homosexual intimacy but it also leaves us in no doubt about our responsibility to provide a welcoming environment in our synagogues and beyond for all Jews, regardless of their level of religious observance, ethnicity, or sexuality.

“After Orlando, we must take a step beyond condemnation and open our hearts and our synagogues so that no Jew feels per-

secuted or excluded from the warm embrace of our communities.

“Together with adherents of all faiths and none, may we all find the courage to overcome the forces of division and darkness so that we might create a more peaceful and tolerant world…

“As Jews, we join with all of those across the world who stand defiant and united in declaring that there is absolutely no place

for hatred or intolerance in our societies.

“We must also be honest enough to recognize that there are places where the scourge of homophobia persists, even in our own communities, and that is totally unacceptable.

“Where that hate is religiously motivated, faith leaders and faith communities carry a particular responsibility to act.”

co-workers at a local courthouse about being tied to terrorism, which resulted in an extensive FBI investigation that lasted 10 months.

According to James Comey, FBI director, Mateen claimed family connections to Al Qaeda, which, like the Islamic State, is a Sunni Muslim terrorist group, but he also said he was a member of Hezbollah, a Shiite group in conflict with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. None of that made any sense as far as being tactically true, and the FBI says it did not find any tangible evidence linking him to terror organizations.

“He said he hoped that law enforcement would raid his apartment and assault his wife and child so that he could martyr himself,” Comey said.

“Our investigation involved introducing confidential sources to him, recording conversations with him, following him, reviewing transactional records from his communications,” and searching government records for mentions of him, the director said. “We then interviewed him twice. He admitted making the statements his co-workers reported, but explained that he did it in anger because he thought his co-workers were discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.”

The FBI closed the investigation and Mateen continued working as a security guard for a private firm G4S. Additionally, the Florida Department of Corrections revealed on Monday that before working for G4S, Mateen briefly worked as a state prison guard. Alberto C. Moscoso, a department spokesman, said that Mateen worked at Martin Correctional Institution from October 2006 to April 2007, but did not say why he left.

Also, the government of Saudi Arabia reported on Monday that Mateen had traveled to that country twice to make a religious pilgrimage known as the umrah. The Interior Ministry said he had visited in March 2011 for 10 days, and in March 2012 for eight days.

SGN feels it is important to note that neither traveling to Saudi Arabia nor making umrah are considered terrorist activity.

Comey says that there is no known indication that this tragic event was part of a plot directed from outside the United States.

Mateen had a history that included talking about killing people, and he beat his former wife, authorities say. There are also reports that he voiced hatred of minorities, Gays, and Jews.

His father, Seddique Mir Mateen, recalled that his son was particularly enraged by seeing a same-sex couple kiss, though he said in a video posted online that he believed that it was up to God to punish Gays, not his son.

His father appeared teary-eyed on Monday and told reporters that he had no inkling of what was to come.

“If I knew one percent about what he was doing, I would have called the FBI,” the elder Mateen said. “He went against my principles

as a father and as a U.S. citizen.”

The assault began, according to Chief Mina, at about 2 a.m. Sunday. Officers rushed to the scene, he said, and entered the nightclub, where they engaged in a gun battle with Mateen, forcing him to retreat to a bathroom where officers believed he had four to five hostages. About 15 to 20 people were in another bathroom.

At that time Orlando police were able to save and rescue dozens and dozens of people and get them out of the club while a SWAT team was called in and took up positions in a bathroom across from where Mateen had taken cover.

Mateen turned a night of dancing to salsa and merengue music at the crowded Pulse nightclub into a panicked scene that left the floors smeared with blood, the dead and the wounded piled atop one another. Terrified people poured onto the darkened streets of the surrounding neighborhood, some carried wounded victims to safety, and police vehicles were pressed into service as makeshift ambulances to rush people to hospitals.

From that point, “it kind of stabilized and the suspect had barricaded himself in the bathroom,” and there was no shooting during the subsequent standoff, the chief said.

Mateen called 911, beginning a series of calls and conversations with the police. Officials say he declared allegiance to the Islamic State, the terrorist group that has taken over parts of Syria, Iraq, and Libya. The attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December – had also stated their allegiance to the group.

Chief Mina says crisis negotiators did talk to the suspect and tried to get as much information as possible, and focused on what they could do to resolve the situation. However, he added, Mateen wasn’t asking for a lot, and police were doing most of the asking.

Chief Mina says that reports that Mateen was laughing or celebrating during the phone conversations with authorities are false.

“There was talk about bomb vests, about explosives, throughout,” and eventually “there were statements made about imminent loss of life.”

That is when law enforcement officials began to mount an assault on the club. The explosive placed on the wall did not penetrate completely, so officers used an armored vehicle to punch a hole about two feet off the ground, allowing hostages to flee, the chief said.

Mateen also came through the breach in the wall, Chief Mina said, and was killed in a shootout with the police.

A. Lee Bentley, the U.S. attorney for Central Florida, said the investigators had collected a large amount of electronic and criminal evidence and were trying to determine whether Mateen acted alone.

“If anyone else was involved in this crime,” Mr. Bentley said, “they will be prosecuted.”

It has been discovered that his ex-wife

knew of his plans for the attack and could soon be charged as an accomplice, a law enforcement source said.

The source told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday that a federal grand jury had been convened and could recommend charges against Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, as early as Wednesday.

“It appears she had some knowledge of what was going on,” said U.S. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which received a briefing on the attack on Tuesday.

“She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information,” King told CNN. Citing an FBI source, media reports said prosecutors were seeking to charge Mateen’s wife as an accessory to 49 counts of murder and 53 counts of attempted murder, plus failure to notify law enforcement about the pending attack and lying to federal agents.

Salman told federal agents that she tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack. But she also told the FBI that she once drove him to the Pulse nightclub because he wanted to scope it out.

Officials say the Orlando attack was the worst act of terrorism on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001, and the deadliest attack on a Gay target in the nation’s history, surpassing the never-solved arson attack that killed 32 at the Upstairs Lounge, in New Orleans, on June 24, 1973. The toll is larger than the number of murders in Orlando over the previous three years. Of an estimated 320 people in the club, nearly one-third were shot.

The casualties far exceeded those in the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were killed, and the 2012 shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where 26 people died.

To make matters even more complicated, reports have surfaced that Mateen had frequented the club dozens of times over a period of up to three years before the attack.

He is also said to have hooked up with men using apps like Jack’d. Several Orlando-area men came forward to turn in their mobile phones and hookup-app accounts over to the FBI, adding to a growing pile of evidence that points to severe problems, on both a social and mental health level, that Mateen was suffering from.

All over the world, including in Seattle, which saw one of the largest crowds of all (thousands of people filled Cal Anderson Park on Sunday night as Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and leaders from the local LGBTQ community spoke out to condemn the attack), candlelight vigils were held to mourn the dead and call for gun reform, specifically a ban on semi-automatic rifles like the Sig Sauer MCX used by Mateen.

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June 17, 2016

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14 Seattle Gay News

June 17, 2016

Celebrating 41 Years!

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June 17, 2016

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