An Afternoon of Hope: Music in Memoriam of the Orlando Shooting takes place this coming Sunday at the St. Thomas Presbyterian Church.

In a two-act scenario a small ensemble will perform select classical pieces, followed by a rendition of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. The performers include soprano Pheobie Willis, alto Monica Isomura, tenor Brian Yeakley, and bass Austin Hoeltzel. The performance is conducted by Andrew Schneider and Michael Vaughan.

The event is free to the public with all donations going to the non-profit organizations Pulse Tragedy Fund in Orlando, Florida and Homeless Gay Kids – Houston

A silent auction will be conducted throughout the duration of the event. Bidding for respective items will conclude at the end of the second act. This is a worthy cause and the people spearheading the event are at once altruistic and concerned for the well being of all parties involved.

Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor was a commissioned work that Mozart had been hired to complete in the months before he himself died at age thirty-five. The work was unfinished at his untimely passing. Mozart’s amanuensis Franz Xaver Süssmayr delivered a completed version to Count Franz von Walsegg who had hired Mozart in the first place to write a composition to commemorate the death of his wife, who herself had passed on February 14.

Even at the end of the Eighteenth Century Valentine’s Day was an established day of romance and sacrifice. Many early Christian martyrs were named Valentine. What a ambivalent bummer to have your wife die on such a date and yet have enough scratch to hire the preeminent artist du jour to write a song about said tragedy.

“An Afternoon of Hope: Music in Memoriam of the Orlando Shooting” takes place at the St. Thomas Presbyterian Church (14100 Memorial Drive) on Sunday, July 17 from 2 to 4 pm.

At 2 a.m. on Sunday, June 12, a man named Omar Mateen entered the Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and over the course of the next three hours killed more than 50 people and wounded another 50 before police were able to enter and kill the terrorist. Mateen is the deadliest mass shooter in United States history, beating out the previous champion, Seung-Hui Cho, who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2024. Our posthumous congratulations to the new champion of the American Murdering Bastards Association.

As far as still-living bastards and all the pain and misery they are capable of spreading, that award must still be pinned to the lapel of our own Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, a man so reliably awful at being a decent human being that I’m beginning to wonder if he’s purposely trying to get Texas graded on a curve before judgment is called. He arose bright and early Sunday morning to weigh in on the Unspeakable Shooting of the Week with a tweet reading, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows,” over a picture of a quiet cornfield, clearly not in America as the picture contains no gun-toting hatemongers working through their fee fees by shooting something different. That quote is from the Bible, Galatians specifically, and he followed up with one from Psalm: “The Salvation of the righteous come from the Lord; He is their stronghold in time of trouble.” Thus, even as another state fields a disgrace to the species, the second-largest cheese of ours finds time to further embarrass us.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s now-deleted post on Twitter.

As of press time, Patrick has not responded to request for comment from news organizations, presumably as he is busy spending the Lord’s day contemplating how we could get trans kids to kill themselves faster, plotting where he will drill glory holes in the Great Wall of Trump or whatever lofty thoughts occupy a mind at the highest levels of state government. All we have to go on is speculation about the nuance of the tweet.

One could, if one was kind/high/Christ, interpret this tweet as a sign that the continued demonization of marginalized people, as well as casual, easy access to weaponry that would have made a man a god less than two hundred years ago, has brought our country a regular harvest of people slaughtered by empowered berserkers. Maybe this one last massacre was enough, and Patrick realizes the price we have paid as a nation for our actions.

But let’s keep this real. That’s not what Patrick meant. He meant that those poor people celebrating in the night committed the ultimate act of idolatry and brought upon them the wrath of God’s will as delivered through the barrel of an assault rifle (quoting the police here, lead-heads. Don’t lecture me on your stupid, deadly Barbie dreamhouse gun safe accessories). For Dan Patrick, the lieutenant period fucking period governor period of the state that until last year was home to the largest city in America with an openly-gay mayor, the very act of these people’s existence, and that we legally allow them to have rights, made them an all-too predictable target for a properly righteous and driven individual.

I make no judgments on people’s faith, and the question of whether God is “real” is utterly irrelevant whichever side of the debate you might happen to be on. I know this, though; Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed by an angry deity over an unacceptable amount of Bronze Age queering off. Something bad went down, and afterwards for centuries a bunch of bigots used the story to persecute gays in three major world religions and, by proxy, throughout the world’s governments.

Last summer we danced in the streets when the Supreme Court instituted marriage equality for all. This summer we’re spending Pride Month burying the dead. I’d say mourning, but clearly the only thing Patrick is mourning is the good old days when no one cared if you dragged a gay kid to death behind a pick-up truck. If we can’t have those days back, then our leaders will merely have to content themselves assigning a vague divinity to a discotheque-turned-abattoir.

Certainly neither Patrick nor any of the other be-suited weevils that will shortly crawl onto social media like cybernetic pubic lice will hit their knees and wonder what role they play in the culling of so many lives. None of them will sip from the cup of cold blood their mindless and predictable hatred helps draw from victims. They will just continue to assume this is God’s plan, not their failing.

Well, as for Galatians… allow me to quote a bit from Chapter 5 back at Patrick: “As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!” To which Brother Jef has scribbled in his own Bible, “And proceed to fuck themselves most vigorously.”

Amen.