We weep with the families of Atlanta's dead
Eight people were killed and one person was injured Tuesday at three Atlanta-area spas/massage parlors. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, adding to fears of increased anti-Asian attacks, which in the last year have numbered upwards of 3,800.
A 21-year old Georgia man has been arrested for the shootings. He told authorities that he has “sex-addiction issues,” and was seeking to “remove” the “temptation” by killing the people who worked in the industry that drew him to sin.
Robert Aaron Long, who was arrested late Tuesday on his way to a “pornography-related venue” in Florida, grew up in the evangelical Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia. The church has made its website private.
In the last decade or so, researchers have started studying sex addiction among evangelicals. Some of those studies include examinations of evangelicals and their use of pornography. Boiled down (really boiled down), shame is attached to any sex or sexual act outside of marriage, and even then, sex is only pastor-approved if it’s for the purpose of procreation. When shame doesn’t work, evangelical solutions are generally neither scientific nor terribly helpful.
Solutions to identified sexual problems are often provided through restrictive viewpoints despite the existence of largely opposing positions within this movement. Reaction formation and authoritarian personality theory are theorized as the primary explanations for individuals failing to conform to stringent religious sexual expectations.
This is in no way an excuse for this heinous act. Whatever Long’s burden, eight people are dead. When a sheriff’s deputy (who was also the author of an earlier anti-Asian Facebook post) suggested Long had had a “bad day,” he (rightfully) got his head handed to him. As of this writing, authorities had not called these murders a hate crime and the media was reporting it as a mass shooting, to which George Takei responded on Twitter:
Among the dead:
Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33
Xiaojie Tan, 49
Daoyou Feng, 44
Paul Andre Michels, 54
Also of this writing, the names of the rest of the victims have not been released because their families still don’t know. Another victim, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, was in stable condition at an area hospital.
For just a moment I want to set aside the issues of ethnicity and religion. I think this tragedy is representative of a confluence of two virulent streams of male thought in America. I wanted to say white male thought which is the predominant strain but I don’t want to let other men off the hook. The first stream is about misogyny. The second is phony victimhood. The combination can become twisted justification for objectification, dehumanization and subjugation. I’m not just talking about murderers. Think Robert Kraft, Bill Clinton, Donald T**** and more to the darker side of the spectrum, Jeffrey Epstein. All contributors to the normalization of men’s worst instincts. When people say we’re saying the bad part out loud these days, we’re not just talking racism (cue the moron sheriff’s deputy). Sexism isn’t a good enough word. These women were exploited and likely enslaved (Did you ever think of that Mr. Kraft? You pig). I swear, I’m still waiting for a convicted rapist to sue his victim for parental rights for the child she bore as a result of the rape. I’m sure Asa Hutchinson would be down with that.
Stripped to its core it is immorality and it runs deep. For men like these, religion, racism and dehumanization can serve as both motivators and justification. To a degree, I think they can be distractions. How boys get this way is a question we all have to answer. How these individual men got this way is important in context but it’s a question asked in isolation and I think we need to be careful about that. We can take it as a pass on our own responsibility.
I’ve never thought of America as post-racial or post-sexist but I thought we were making progress. That may have been an illusion. Attempting to be “glass half full”, maybe the past four years have been progress of a sort by exposing the rot that still exists and making it harder to deny. Just maybe.
This is so sad. Is targeting a gender (women) a hate crime? He certainly did that. Even if he is saying he didn't target Asian women, Asian women were the target. I'm no expert, but I would call this a hate crime. And WTF Reuters? This guys kills 8 people and that he went to church in Georgia is what makes the headline? I'm out of words on all of this. It's all so sad.