It would almost be funny, if it didn't make you angry to be part of the same species.
Less than 48 hours after the global LGBT community became the collective victim of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history less than 2 hours' drive from here, Tampa Bay pastors got together to threaten members of the Hillsborough County School Board with being run out of office if they add protections for trans kids to a list of formal student protections. God may be love, but boy, are some of His fan club assholes.
St. Pete Chief of Police Anthony Holloway and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced an intensive new teen crime prevention program, in which the worst young offenders — those with a minimum of five felony arrests and who are on probation — will be "under intense surveillance by officers and crime analysts." It's called HOME, or Habitual Offender Monitoring Enforcement, but it should've been called The Usual Suspects, because they're literally rounding up the usual suspects.
Rick Scott is afraid of even uttering the words "gay" or "LGBT" in the wake of the Pulse massacre for fear of alienating his core voting base of eighteenth-century Puritans. Leadership! Empathy. Compassion. A milliliter of humanity. Etc.
And finally, a stalwart Tampa do-it-yourself type required an ambulance after being bitten by the 5-foot gator he was trying to remove from his property himself. OK, one, it's illegal for unlicensed regular people to try to catch alligators, and two, gator-wrangling is a lot harder than it looks like—and what it looks like is a very, very, very obviously bad idea.
This article appears in Jun 9-16, 2016.
