Mohammed Atta, for example, wasn't a lesbian. Still, the dust hadn't even settled in lower Manhattan when the Rev. Jerry Falwell got on TV and blamed America's lesbians, among others, for the collapse of the World Trade Center.

It wasn't the heterosexual nuts at the controls of United Airlines Flight 175 or American Airlines Flight 11 who drew Falwell's foremost condemnation -- or even the heterosexual Osama bin Laden with his three or four wives and 10 kids.

Instead, declaring that "God will not be mocked," Falwell had an instant list of domestic God-mockers who made God mad enough to "lift the curtain" of protection from America, mad enough to pull the plug on the cooks and waitresses who were starting their day at Windows on the World on the 107th floor of the North Tower.

"I really believe," proclaimed Falwell on the Sept. 13, 2001, edition of The 700 Club, "that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

It's the same with Virginia Tech. Lesbians, along with some other sexual nontraditionalists, might well have played a role in driving poor Seung-Hui Cho over the edge, according to James Lewis.

Classes hadn't even resumed on campus when Lewis, writing at The American Thinker Web site, reported that the English Department at Virginia Tech was "a wonder world of PC weirdness."

Citing the publications of English Department professors at Virginia Tech, Lewis shows what Cho, a senior English major, might have been exposed to: "Maybe he read Professor Bernice Hausman's 'Changing Sex: Transsexualism, technology, and the idea of gender' -- just the thing for a disoriented young male suffering from massive culture shock on the hypersexual American campus.

"And even more gender-bending from Professor Paul Heilker, who wrote 'Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)'. Or the lesbian love stories of Professor Matthew Vollmer. Yup, that's just what this student needs."

That'll do it! Girly-Man gets turned down by two cute co-eds in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude while campus lesbians are gaily writing love notes to each other. Who wouldn't decide to roll out of bed in the morning and kill 27 students and five teachers and then kill himself?

Others blamed guns. Compared to other industrialized countries, American violence tends to be "lethal violence," writes David Hemenway, professor of health policy at Harvard. "The reason, plain and simple, is guns," he asserts. "We own more guns per capita than any other high-income country -- maybe even more than one gun for every man, woman and child in the country."

In contrast, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay saw more guns as the answer to Cho's unchecked killing spree: "We need to remove the ban of guns on the Virginia Tech campus and allow people to defend themselves, and allow people to get concealed carry licenses."

Rush Limbaugh blamed liberals: "If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act."

On the other side, Barry Lando, a former producer with "60 Minutes," used the Virginia Tech murders to argue that George W. Bush, commanding "the most fearful military apparatus the globe has ever known," is an "infinitely greater threat to his countrymen" than Seung-Hui Cho, "acting by himself and armed with only a couple of pistols."

Asks Lando: "Why are we so repelled by the video-taped rantings of the young South Korean psychopath, yet not equally shocked by the day-to-day outpourings of the American president?"

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