Julia Hartley-Brewer, it's not OK to say Owen Jones is like Isis with a 'hate mob' when 50 just died in a real hate crime

Grief is a highly personal thing – that’s not news. The extent to which we feel personally affected by tragedy and loss can’t, and shouldn’t, be homogenised. It does seem, however, that all too often there is a general “hierarchy of sympathy” that places the untimely deaths of one group of people above those of another. Some tragedies, it appears, are just more tragic than others.

What we need is for straight people to be outraged enough by what happened to articulate that anger, both online and off. The occasional headache of “allyship” or the odd vigil aside, LGBT people need to see – and, more importantly, feel – that their lives are cherished and valued by society at large. Frankly, a simple “like” on social media is just lazy. Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan’s presence at the Soho vigil last night did nothing to erase the fact that she openly opposed gay marriage a mere three years ago, and announced this year that sex education would not be made compulsory for religious parents who would rather their children weren’t taught about sex and sexuality.

Elsewhere, we have the kind of “straightsplaining” most vividly exemplified by host Mark Longhurst and guest Julia Hartley-Brewer’s exchange with Owen Jones on Sky News, during which Longhurst sought to generalise the incident as an attack on “all humans”. Well, yes, LGBT people are humans, but the simple truth of the matter is that Omar Mateen’s view of our community was so far removed from human that he was prepared to drive for two hours to specifically massacre LGBT people in what should have been a safe space. All the evidence points to this being an act of terrorism perpetrated specifically against the LGBT community; we might not know why, but we know what it was. To refute that, however politely, is a grave insult to the victims and to the wider community to which they belonged.

Julia Hartley-Brewer has taken to the pages of The Telegraph this morning in the aftermath of the Sky News fiasco - but not to offer her support for the LGBT community, as you might expect. Instead, Hartley-Brewer goes to extraordinary lengths to not only defend the “straightsplaining” that took place but to rub salt into very open wounds by mocking the notion of social privilege. At one point, she suggests that Jones wants to shut down her freedom of speech and says that “Owen Jones might have more in common with Islamic State than he thinks”.

The irony of the fact that the article reeks of privilege is lost only on Hartley-Brewer herself. She singularly fails to recognise that her privileged access to the mainstream media as an outlet for her bile could, and should, have been used to make amends. By opting to exploit that privilege by castigating Owen Jones, and labelling his supporters a “hate mob” a day after LGBT people were massacred in a real-life hate crime, she is guilty of the worst kind of dog-whistle homophobia. That a third of the article revolves around Hartley-Brewer’s own hurt feelings and determination to continue writing unabashed really does tell us all we need to know.

Far more heinous, of course, are the sickening utterances of approval, extending to expressions of regret that the death toll was not higher, made by both faceless Twitter trolls and out-and-proud right-wing homophobes. Omar Mateen’s father, who suggested that “God will punish homosexuals” (so it isn’t necessary to shoot them dead as his son did) didn’t exactly paint a picture of a tolerant and hate-free household in which Mateen was raised.

For many LGBT people, as deeply offensive and hurtful as this is, the prick from the pin that we collectively hear dropping as we wait for our straight brethren to rail against the murderous events of Sunday morning is equally as painful. We do not need the likes of Mark Longhurst and Julia Hartley-Brewer to twist the knife at a time when LGBT people across the globe are already emotionally haemorrhaging so heavily.