Many people are surely asking, “What if the gunman from the Orlando, Florida shooting were a Christian?”

Why? Because little would be said by the mainstream media and leading Democratic politicians — from the president on down — if the murderer were an anti-gay Christian.

The most obvious difference is that the media and the Democrats would have blamed Christians for the mass slaughter, whereas they do everything in their power to exonerate Muslims. Indeed, as many have noted, President Obama and the entire Democratic Party leadership have long refused to even use the terms “radical Islam” or “radical Islamists.”

So let’s imagine that a gay-hating Christian murdered 49 people and badly injured 53 others in the gay nightclub in Florida. America would be inundated with attacks on religion, Christians, Christianity and the Bible.

This is not theoretical speculation. For example, the mainstream media and other voices on the left regularly cite one family — literally one family, the Phelps family — in order to demonstrate how “homophobic” conservative Christians are. Fred Phelps started the Westboro Baptist Church, which has fewer than 40 members, most of which are nine of Phelps’ 13 children and some of their children and grandchildren. This gay-hating, Jew-hating, Catholic-hating family represents no group, no ideology and no religion, and is regularly denounced by every Christian denomination, including conservative evangelicals.

Nevertheless, Westboro is frequently cited by the media and LGBT groups as if it represents conservative Christians.

Now, imagine if the nightclub murderer were a Christian who was unaffiliated with the Phelps family. We would be inundated with commentary on the dangers posed by the religious right, fundamentalist Christians, etc.

There are two reasons this is so significant.

First, the left has been waging a war against Christianity. Writers on the left deny and mock this notion, which only illustrates a lack of intellectual honesty.

Why, for example, have companies throughout America felt it necessary to rename Christmas parties “holiday parties”? What holiday other than Christmas is celebrated at these parties? Surely not New Year’s Eve. Such parties are always called New Year’s Eve parties. And not Hanukkah, because Jewish groups have Hanukkah parties.

Furthermore, since Karl Marx, the left — not traditional liberals but the left — everywhere has opposed Christianity. Leftism is a secular religion. And wherever traditional Christianity (or traditional Judaism) is strong, the left understands that it cannot vanquish society. In Europe, leftism has been almost wholly successful in supplanting Christianity. The one exception is Latin America, where the left has worked to remake Christianity in its image through “liberation theology,” which is essentially Marxism with Christ.

Thus, if the Orlando nightclub shooter were a Christian, that is almost all we would hear about. After all, the left has labeled mass murderers who have no affiliation with Christianity as Christian — Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is one example.

The second reason the left would be preoccupied with attacking Christianity would be to help it maintain the fiction that Islam is “a religion of peace.”

Islam has never been a religion of peace. It began as a warlike religion, and throughout its history, whenever possible, Muslims made war on non-Muslims, from the polytheists of North Africa to the Hindus of India. A reported 60 to 80 million Indians were killed by Muslim invaders during the hundreds of years of Muslim rule there.

So, while the left would emphasize a murderer’s Christian faith, it denies that Islam plays any role in the vast amount murder, torture, enslavement, female genital mutilation, unparalleled subjugation of women and rape committed by people of the Islamic faith. Virtually every American and European student learns of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Christian West’s role in slavery, but nothing of Muslims’ centuries of mass slaughter and vast enslavement of Europeans and Africans.

Why? Because the truth about Muslims’ historical record of violence would shine a light on the Christian West’s far-superior moral record. So the left employs a dual-sided tactic: portraying Islam as benign and Christianity as malicious.

I am writing this column in Rome, where I’m staying at a hotel located one block from the American embassy. The embassy is draped in an enormous gay liberation flag.

Three questions come to mind:

Why does the embassy have such a flag? Does it have any other giant flag besides the American flag on hand?

Are all embassies currently draped in this flag? For example, are the American embassies in Muslim countries draped in it?

My third and most relevant question is: Had a Muslim targeted and murdered scores of Christians, would any American embassy anywhere in the world be draped in a flag depicting the Christian cross? In fact, in light of the one and only ongoing genocide in the world, that of Christians in the Middle East by certain Muslim groups, why aren’t American embassies draped with a flag bearing a cross?

We all know the answer.

Christians must be portrayed as villains, not victims.