On March 27, 2023, Audrey Hale, a woman who falsely claimed to be a man, attacked the Covenant Presbyterian Church and School in Nashville killing six innocent people, three of whom were children. Over two years later, the Metro Nashville Police Department released its report into the deadly assault.
Given that the report acknowledges that “the amount of information Hale left behind was far more than is usually available in a criminal investigation,” one might expect that the nearly 50-page document would leave no stone unturned. But instead of providing a comprehensive overview of this tragedy, the report protects secular-liberal biases ignoring Hale’s violent commentaries on sex, race, and religion.
Indeed, the report gives little mind to any of these. For instance, it only mentions twice that Hale was a lesbian. Similarly, the report almost entirely ignores that Hale misidentified as a male. There are only two instances that this is brought up, and one of these times was to explain why the report would use pronouns that reflect biological reality and proper grammar. The other was to note that although Hale “made statements about wanting to transition genders” and used “the name ‘Aiden Williams’” and “male pronouns,” she was “not undergoing any transition at the time of her death.”
In addition to the subject of sex, the report downplays Hale’s views on race. The report reveals that in December of 2018, Hale began planning to attack a school. Initially, she wanted to target Creswell Middle School, a magnate school for arts which she attended. However, by March of 2020, Hale decided against the attack because Creswell had a large minority student body, and she did not want to be seen as racist. At this point, she turned her focus on Covenant because more white children attended the school.
In fact, Hale’s race consciousness played a significant role in her life. The report briefly discusses that Hale’s writings were full of what she dubbed “rage storms,” essentially unhinged and violent rants. At first, these “rage storms” focused on how she felt rejected by society. In time, the report notes that these would expand to other issues such as “being ostracized by black culture despite her longing for acceptance” and “white privilege.”
Another bias that the report glosses over was Hale’s attitudes about Christians. The report notes that when Hale first decided to attack a school she also began writing about how she resented living at home and the control her mother had over her. Of particular interest, the report notes that Hale “feared to open up to her mother about her being a lesbian, believing her mother’s ‘traditional Christian’ values would make her incapable of understanding, if not derisive towards her daughter’s orientation.” Indeed, “Hale considered this a wedge between them.”
Further, the report goes on to say that Hale “believed the Christian faith of those within [Covenant] would make them meek and afraid.”
Yet despite this evidence that the report clearly cites, its authors disregard these factors to make the final assessment. Chiefly among these concerns is an attempt to demonstrate that Hale did not specifically choose to target white Christian children.
While the primary evidence that the report relies on to make this claim is statements by Hale “that the race, religion, gender, or other demographic categories of her victims would not matter,” the evidence above clearly show that these factors featured significantly in her writings and planning of the assault. It would seem as though the report twists logic to avoid drawing a certain conclusion that runs contrary to the predominant secular-liberal narrative.
Even in the section of the report dedicated to debunking the claim that “Hale selected this location [Covenant] for racial, religious or economic reasons,” the report undermines this claim, and as a result, the report trips over its own arguments and undercuts its own conclusions.
But then again, the authors of this report love playing these games. There is an entire page dedicated to what is and is not a manifesto. Rather than obscuring the facts of this tragedy with mental gymnastics, it would be nice if the authors of the report would get their secular-liberal biases out of the way so they could provide an unvarnished version of the story.
