In the film Dog Day Afternoon, a man faced with paying for his male lover’s sex change operation (Al Pacino) leads an amateurish robbery at a Manhattan bank, only to see the whole robbery fail when the two robbers (Pacino and John Cazale) lose their nerve after they discover the bank only has $1,100 in the vault.
The story, based on a real-life event at a Chase Manhattan branch in 1972, was fueled because Pacino wanted the money to pay for his lover’s sex change operation. The robbery ends in a hostage situation, and as Pacino and Cazale are on their way to the airport to be flown out of the country, the FBI moves in, and the pair of amateur, likable bank robbers are killed.
The money for the sex change operation, and the apparent love the Pacino character had for his male lover, is the motive behind the amateurish robbery. The event shows the power of love between the two men, or at least one who is in the process of transitioning to a woman.
The murder of Charlie Kirk by Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man raised in a Mormon family. Robinson has a similar backstory. Robinson is enraged by the hateful messages he thinks the MAGA and Christian evangelists Kirk is spreading about gay people, Jews, and others. Enraged at the Kirk messages and his apparent hypocrisy against Christian tenets, Robinson decided to shoot Kirk. Robinson’s boyfriend, Lance Twiggs, who is trans, cooperated with the FBI and was living with Robinson at the time of the shooting.
According to the New York Times, “Robinson’s mother told investigators that her son had grown more political, and that his political views had moved to the left over the last year or so. She also told the police that he had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” Mr. Robinson’s partner, who was living with him, had been transitioning to being a woman from a man, prosecutors said.” In the MAGA world, “left” apparently means “liberal.”
Tyler Robinson also left behind notes that said he had “had enough of his hatred” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Robinson also sent Twiggs a text that said:
Love Is a Powerful Force
Like the real-life story depicted in Dog Day Afternoon, the power of love between two people, whether they be two men or individuals transitioning to become women, is a challenging concept for most Americans to grasp.
Only 1.3% of the US population is trans, and only 3.4% of Americans are gay (lesbian (1.4%) or homosexual (2%).
But these small percentages have driven the national political discussion for decades as it ebbed and flowed in volume along with the prominent conservative political undercurrents.
What is propelling it is a dramatic shift in sexual identities and practices that has alarmed conservatives and fractured the traditional roles of men and women, fathers and others, which has dramatically changed since 2012.
But this dramatic change in sexual identities wasn’t always the case. Despite its unconventional theme and plot, when it was released in 1975, Dog Day Afternoon was a box office and critical success. The movie was nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards, six BAFTAs (winning Best Actor for Pacino and Best Editing), and six Academy Awards (winning Best Original Screenplay). In 2009, Dog Day Afternoon was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, according to Wikipedia.
It’s hard to imagine that MAGA politicians would allow the Library of Congress to call Dog Day Afternoon “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” today, since many MAGA followers and Christian nationalists would consider the topic an abomination.
But strange things happen in life. The Robinson shooting of a Christian activist in 2025 was done by a Mormon whose father is a MAGA supporter. Robinson’s mother said her son had become more of a “leftist”, by which she probably means “liberal”, and that was a red flag to his family.
Being liberal politically is much less extreme and controversial than being liberal sexually, especially in terms of gender roles. Sexual identity is a bedrock belief among many people. People across cultures develop father and mother figure stereotypes.
This explains why many groups, primarily political and religious conservatives, are alarmed by the recent increase in people’s sexual self-identity. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 9.3% of U.S. adults identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or something other than straight or heterosexual. The percentage has more than doubled since Gallup first measured LGBTQ+ identification in 2012.”
The same poll found that “bisexual adults make up the largest share of the LGBTQ+ population at 56.3%, equivalent to 5.2% of all U.S. adults. About one in five LGBTQ+ adults say they are gay, with slightly fewer, close to 15%, identifying as lesbian. Just under 14% of LGBTQ+ adults say they are transgender, which equates to a little over 1% of all U.S. adults.”
While the numbers are increasing, they still represent a small percentage of Americans. But the impact of these sexual identity changes does not mesh with MAGA values. These numbers have created a social and political flashpoint that questions the roles of parental identities, especially among those who want to turn the clock back to the idealized image of Ward and June Cleaver, or The Brady Bunch.
This may help explain why it is very odd and pathological when MAGA followers call Trump “Daddy,” as if he were a father figure. But that all depends on your version of “daddy,” and what roles you think a father is supposed to fulfill. Based on accounts from other family members, Fred Trump Sr. was an authoritarian father who “dismantled [Fred Jr., Donald’s older brother] by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality” and mocked him for his decision to become an airline pilot. In 1981, Fred Jr. died at age 42 from complications of alcoholism.”
Avenging Kirk’s Attacks on Same-Sex Relationships and Gays
Christians, Jews, and Muslims have prohibitions against same-sex relationships that can be traced back a few thousand years. Those same sex ideas and practices are culturally and legally taboo and were violations of the law in many Western nations, many of which were in force until the 20th Century. The English mathematician and logician credited with
building one of the world’s first complex computers used to break the Enigma code used by the Nazis, Alan Turing, was chemically castrated for being gay. He later committed suicide in 1954.
The MAGA movement has never been friendly to gays and people who push the bounds of sexual identity. From same-sex bathrooms and locker rooms to transgender men playing on girls’ sports teams, this issue is red meat for political and religious conservatives who have drawn the line in the sanctity of sex role boundaries.
So, when Robinson, a scholarship-winning student who grew up in a Mormon family with conservative values, became involved in a relationship with a trans man in Utah, it presented one of the oddest, tragic family dynamics in criminal history.
The fact that Kirk happened to be in Utah for a presentation at the time when Robinson, a talented marksman, decided to seek revenge on what he considered Kirk’s hate speech against same sex relationships, could just have been a tragic coincidence.
But history hinges on coincidence. Despite what the MAGA followers say, Kirk’s messages were not all about love and peaceful coexistence. Kirk’s past positions against certain groups clashed with Robinson’s readiness to avenge “the hatred.” After Kirk’s death, MAGA needed to elevate Kirk into martyrdom to distract the public from Trump’s scandals, failure to release the Epstein papers, a shaky economy, and Gestapo tactics on city streets.
This was the perfect storm that all worked together to create an incendiary political situation that will go on for years.
