Feeling like a frog in a pot of slowly heating water, let me add that this sort of overtly violent political discourse is not something people were accustomed to even a couple decades ago.

As a gay man, I'm accustomed to the idea that political leaders don't care what happens to LGBTQ people. I lived through Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party ignoring AIDS, though many of my friends didn't make it.

So I'm not looking back at the past through through glasses.

I'm just saying that deliberate, frequent, violence-stoking rhetoric like what we see today is new, at least in my lifetime.

That LGBTQ people are the goat is nothing new, but the intensity of the violent political rhetoric is. As is its acceptance in general by the American people.

You see it on the left too. I watch people everyday on social media stop just short of urging violence against Republicans. Well, sometimes they don't stop short.

And this is where we are right now.