[snip]
“Robin” used to be Robert. A name change document, signed by his mother when he was a minor is all over the internet.
That document is mentioned eight paragraphs into another piece, “The Minneapolis suspect knew her target, but the motive is a mystery.” Here, the NYT picks the pronoun “she.” Purportedly because Robin would have wanted it that way. This piece offers a bit of detail — “She worked at a local cannabis dispensary for several months earlier this year” — but concludes “it is hard to fathom what drove Ms. Westman to attack before killing herself, despite the dark and violent writings and videos she left behind.”
[snip]
“On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill,” the reporters wrote.
CNN also buried the gunman’s trans-identification. CNN reporter Chelsea Bailey mentioned that “Suspect Robin Westman, 23, graduated from Annunciation Catholic’s grade school in 2017, according to a yearbook obtained by CNN,” but her lengthy online report never mentioned that Westman claimed to be transgender. The story also avoided pronouns, although the CNN reporter quoted Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara referring to “the gunman.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper ostensibly tried to clear up the gender confusion: “She identifies as a female,” Tapper said, so “her” name is now “Robin.”
USA Today’s faith, identity, and social justice reporter Marc Ramirez covered the shooting by exploring “safety in houses of worship” in a piece that never mentions transgender anything. Instead, Ramirez quoted a Voice of America report to turn the focus onto “perpetrators with a history of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity and Islamophobia, with ties to white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.”
Ramirez then managed to squeeze a completely unrelated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reference in his piece by quoting Mathew Schmalz, a religious studies professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts:
[snip]
Individuals who claim to be transgender want to be called by whatever pronouns they prefer, and the propaganda press plays along with the delusion. But it does not ask important questions, like why have so many mass shootings and acts of violence involved transgender shooters?
Could it be hormone replacement therapy? Hormones that are strong enough to put hair on a chest, miraculous enough to grow an entire human in a womb, and wild enough to make a pregnant woman weepy, could certainly cause rage in someone jacked up on the wrong hormones.
[snip]
People who believe they are transgender are worthy of love and acceptance, but the most loving thing we can do is not lie to them. We should not pretend that sex is changeable.
And we should demand studies on the potentially violent effects of hormone drugs used for off-label treatments related to gender. Or better, stop using them all together.
[snip]
“As houses of worship become the sites for such crimes and other sociocultural unrest, their traditional roles as places of refuge risk erosion,” Ramirez wrote.
Refuge from what? Evil? There is no sanctuary on earth that can keep us from the evil of man’s sinful design. The church is not a building with a “traditional role.” The church is a people with an ageless hope so well described in Romans 8:38-39:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.