The 27-year-old man who police say shot and killed a California business owner over a Pride flag draped in her store appears to have had a yearslong history of posting disturbing — and often violent — anti-LGBTQ messages on social media.
The suspect, Travis Ikeguchi, gunned down Laura Ann Carleton, 66, on Friday, after confronting her and “yelling many homophobic slurs” over her clothing store’s Pride flag, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said at a news conference Monday. Shortly after fleeing the store, Mag.Pi, Ikeguchi was killed in a shootout with law enforcement.
Further, even their efforts to portray it as “silly SJWs constantly inventing new terms for things” falls flat on its face because “homophobia” has been a widely used and accepted term for literally decades. It’s a pointless (and incorrect!) diversion in pedantry. Plus, it ignores the fact that there is value in actually having specific terms for common things, actually. The reason we have a specific term for anti-gay bigotry is because it’s a concept we as a society talk a lot about, so it’s simply useful to have a specific term we can use to specifically address that phenomenon. No single person gets to play pedantic petulant child and dictate how the rest of us use language. Language is perhaps the single most democratic thing humanity has, as the meaning of words (and what words there are!) is solely determined by everyday participatory democracy.