Stunned By The Orlando Shooting, I Ask My Hating Preacher Father: ‘Are You Happy Now?’

We woke up this June Sunday morning to the news that a terrorist entered a gay bar in Orlando and committed the worse mass shooting in USA history: 49 dead and 53 wounded.

And I ask, “Are you happy, now, Mr. Rev. Richard Parelli?”

It was another Sunday June morning – a morning I will never forget – when the Reverend — my father — said, in an off-the-cuff remark, with disgust, some subdued rage, and straight from his heart, “They should all be taken out and shot!”

So, I ask you, “Are you happy, now, Mr. Rev. Richard Parelli?”

The Rev. was reading the Syracuse Herald Journal. In blaring headlines, and with accompanying photos, the article he was reading was on the Gay Pride Parade in Syracuse.

And he said, “They should all be taken out and shot!”

And I ask him, “Are you happy, now, Mr. Rev. Richard Parelli?”

I sat there, very uneasy, myself a gay man. My father knew that. I had told him years ago. And he had said then:

“I will kill the boy who had sex with you!”

And I ask, “Are you happy, now, Mr. Rev. Richard Parelli?”

He put down the newspaper. First him, then me – we arose from the comfortable sofa and chair of the living room of the church parsonage. Already dressed in our Sunday best, my father and I crossed the street to his Baptist church in upstate New York where he pastored.

And I thought to myself, “How can he step into the pulpit and preach having just said ‘they’ should all be taken out and shot.”

And so I ask you, Mr. Rev. Richard Parelli, “Are you happy, now?

Is the Orlando gay massacre the answer to your prayers?”