[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Nx9HAEGFQ?rel=0&w=525&h=330]

If you have the time, watch that ten-minute clip from SkyNews. In it, the gay journalist Owen Jones storms off the set of a program because he believes that the host and the other guest are downplaying the hatred of homosexuals angle to the Orlando shooting.

I have to say I’m somewhat sympathetic to him here. I don’t like it when, in the wake of Islamic terror attacks, commenters reflexively fall back on departicularizing language, e.g., “It was an attack on our freedom,” or “It was an attack on us all.” This sometimes seems to be a way of evading difficult truths. There is no way to divorce what happened in Orlando from the killer’s pathological hatred of gays. Jones is right to call them on it.

But I’m also somewhat sympathetic to the others on the program. It seems to me that Jones was trying to force them to say that the attack was about nothing other than homosexuality. That was his entire contribution to the discussion — and that is too reductive. Whatever the flaws in their discussion — and again, Jones made a good point, even if he got stuck on it — I took the host and the other guest to be trying to express simple human solidarity with the gays killed in the nightclub. I sympathize with the female guest on the show who tells Jones that she resents his attempt to “claim ownership of the horror of this crime.” She’s right that there is a tendency among some gay commenters (the always-excitable Mark Joseph Stern is a prime example) and their allies to bully people into reacting to the atrocity in approved ways.

The battle for control of the narrative is ugly.