The following dialogue is a handy guide for discussing with progressive friends the recent jihad attack on a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, and its moral, political and legal implications. If it seems pointed in places, note that attorneys for the progressive ACLU have actually come out with comments blaming Christians for the pro-ISIS radical gunning down scores of people at the Orlando club. Such a morally disordered response demands a firm rebuke.

Progressive Friend (PF): Well, I hope you’re satisfied. You white Christian patriots and your hatred of gays and love affair with guns have claimed another 50 innocent lives. The NRA has still more blood on its hands.

YOU: Followers of Christ are called to love all people. We don’t hate sinners; we are sinners, equally in need as anyone of God’s mercy.  We grieve for the slain and wounded. Any Christian cheering the death of these bar patrons needs to go spend some time in the Gospels. As for gun rights, the jihadi Muslim who slaughtered American citizens in Orlando had complied with strict gun laws of the kind you favor. He had passed background checks and gotten a permit. In fact, he was precisely the kind of person whom you want the law to allow to carry weapons — a worker for a DHS contractor, highly trained in the use of such weapons. Not an ordinary citizen: They were all disarmed and helpless, in fact — because they were in one of your “gun-free zones.” Or, as jihadis and other mass murderers doubtless think of them, “barrels full of fish.”

PF: Clearly no laws will be perfect, but imagine how much worse it would have been without any laws.

YOU: For instance, if one — even one — of the hundreds of bar patrons had a pistol on him? The attack might have been cut short, and dozens of lives saved. Remember the mass slaughter in Garland, Texas at the “Draw Muhammad” contest?

PF: No.

YOU: That’s because the planned slaughter didn’t happen. Someone at the event had a gun and shot the terrorists dead, saving the lives of dozens of U.S. citizens. That sent jihadis a message: “Don’t try this stuff in Texas.”

PF: I simply cannot believe that you think more guns is the answer to gun violence. That’s utterly absurd.

YOU: Funny. The Christians and Yezidis in Syria think that carrying guns is really helpful in dealing with ISIS over there. Same with Israelis. You know how to tell the heavily armed religious minorities in the Middle East from those that were disarmed?

PF: [Sighs] How?

YOU: The armed minorities are the ones whose men haven’t been beheaded, whose women and girls weren’t sold as sex slaves for ISIS. Isn’t it weird how that works?

PF: I can’t believe you’re comparing a lawless region of the Middle East with the streets of America. We have a functioning government and police forces over here. You want to turn our malls and nightclubs into shooting galleries?

YOU: You mean the same government that is admitting hundreds of unvetted, unvettable Syrian “refugees” into the U.S. each month? That welcomes thousands of low-skill, economically draining followers of a totalitarian religion into America every year — in the hope that most of them will not be radicalized by reading their own sacred texts, or listening to their Saudi-funded radical imams (like the one who called on Muslims to shoot gays while speaking at an Orlando mosque before the attack), or logging on to Islamic websites that coordinate jihad attacks around the world?

The same government that hired the Orlando attacker — no, I refuse to use his name, which I hope is forgotten — as a security contractor for places like nuclear power plants, the government whose FBI questioned the terrorist three times and judged that he wasn’t a threat? The same government that took more than three hours to send a SWAT team into the site of the Orlando attack?

3 Hours til SWAT Engaged the #Orlando Shooter. Don’t Be a Victim, Be a First Responder. #tcot #gunrights #2a #NRA pic.twitter.com/84PTmpJSnB

— Libertarian Republic (@TheLibRepublic) June 13, 2016

You want me to trust that government to protect us — to trust it so implicitly that I’d disarm our free citizenry, and leave our people like goats for the ritual slaughter each Ramadan? No, sorry. I love my fellow Americans too much — including, yes, the patrons of gay night clubs gunned down by a radical Islamic terrorist.

PF: There you go, taking a homophobic attack and trying to use it as a pretext to whip up Islamophobia.

YOU: Sorry — just to be clear, when I point out that Saudi Arabia has the death penalty for homosexual activity, am I reporting on homophobia or committing Islamophobia? It gets so confusing sometimes, this Multiculturalism game. It’s like playing croquet with Alice in Wonderland — the flamingos keep moving and the hedgehogs just run away. Maybe we should ask Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman Huma Abedin, who worked at her family’s Saudi-based Islamist journal right up until Hillary hired her at the White House. No security issue there, folks, move along, there’s nothing to see….

PF: I’m sorry, but I have too much going on to live in terror of Muslims.

YOU: And yet you are terrified.

PF: I’m terrified?

YOU: Not of the terrorists. You know that the odds that you personally (or one of those relatives whom you’re still speaking to) will be killed in such an attack are minuscule. Since all you really think life is about is compiling happy moments before your soul winks out like a match dropped in Charles Darwin’s toilet, you have little to fear from ISIS. There’s a long list of other, more plausible threats to your fragile, post-modern well-being. And those have you frightened to the bone.

PF: Since you have so much insight, why don’t you tell me what I’m scared of. This should be good.

YOU: That Americans will start to impose some kind of sane standards again, that we’ll consult our guts and the “deep conscience” that’s the wellspring of natural law, then blow down your progressive house of cards. You realize, deep down, that your deepest beliefs are incoherent and self-contradictory. We can’t be instinct-driven primates who popped out as the random products of meaningless evolution, and also precious snowflakes with elaborate “rights” to things like “safe spaces” and “reproductive choice” and taxpayer-funded transgender surgery. Both things can’t be true at the same time.

But that doesn’t matter, since truth isn’t what counts, but experiencing happy moments. So you’ve internalized the pious slogans that make people in your social set and economic class feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous, and help them find suitable sex partners — let logic and facts be damned! This strategy works for you, gets you through the day as a pro-choice animal rights vegan, or perhaps as an anti-GMO activist on the Pill. And now you’re afraid that those tacky people in orange hunting vests driving pickup trucks with Jesus Fish are going to expose your happy strategy as bankrupt. That would happen if you registered a few stark facts:

• Neither the First Amendment, nor the Second, nor any article of our Constitution applies to foreign residents or grants them a right to emigrate here. Our government was free to ban Communists from entering the U.S. during the Cold War, and it’s free to restrict Muslims from coming in now. No court could honestly strike that down. Our Communist ban didn’t stop the CPUSA from existing, and a pause on Muslim immigration wouldn’t affect the rights of Muslims who are already here legally. Though it might cut into their supply of brides from the Old Country, and encourage the Muslims already here to assimilate.
• The Orlando shooter was a registered Democrat. He belonged to the party of gun control.
• Islam is a religion with a political ideology (sharia) baked into it. Ask the clerics in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan about sharia. Its prominent provisions include polygamy, child marriage, wife-beating and executing homosexuals. Sharia law is every bit as integral to Islam as the sacraments are to Catholicism.
• People have an inalienable right to self-defense, and where the government fails to protect them they are justified in taking measures proportional to the threat.
• Christianity doesn’t advocate imprisoning gays, much less executing them. Instead, orthodox Christians merely wish not to bake wedding cakes celebrating same-sex ‘marriages,’ or to perform such ceremonies, or hire sexually active gays as pastors. We do want the freedom to preach the Gospel to them, so sue us! Oh wait, you already are.