Transgender Mass Shooter Audrey Hale Shot Up Cathedral in Addition to Christian School

On the morning of March 27, a transgender "man" named Audrey Hale shot her way into the Christian elementary school that employs my wife and educates my children. The rampage that followed left seven dead, including the shooter, and has been duly chronicled, interpreted, and mourned, both here in Nashville and across the nation. Despite the fact that no one in my family was physically harmed, or perhaps because of it, I decided at first not to write about the massacre. What changed my mind was an unreported detail, confirmed privately by both the police and a church deacon in charge of the physical plant. At some point during her spree, Hale went from the school to the (attached) neo-Gothic cathedral and fired seven bullets into a stained-glass figure of Adam, the first man, according to the Genesis narrative. A writer may try for a while to resist such a symbol, but, as the existence of this article proves, he is unlikely to prevail in the end.

[...] Writing this essay, I have tried to put myself in Hale's shoes, standing before the Creation window, rifle in hand. In the figure of Adam, she must have seen not only a masculinity she could never truly achieve but a vast and unshakable edifice, terrible in its power. Had she lived, she might have come to know its grace. Instead, she chose rebellion, envy, wrath. In clinging to one god, she explicitly scorned another.