UPDATED BELOW
Today’s Guest Column is by Bill S.
On October 28, the President signed The Matthew Shepard act, which expands on the existing federal Hate Crimes law passed in 1969. It was historic — to the best of my knowledge, it’s the first federal law to acknowledge that LGBT people are citizens of the U.S., deserving of equal protection under the law. This has not gone over well with some people, particularly those who refuse to believe that anti-gay hate crimes even happen. In 2004, there was even a segment on 20/20 that attempted to raise doubts about the Shepard murder. That piece was widely discredited by most people directly involved in the case, including the primary investigating officer, Rob DeBeers.
“I have never worked on a homicide case with this much evidence,” Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding in his voice. “It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from beginning to end-it was like, here it is boys, work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all that. It was just a gift.”Bruce Garrett adds, “I drove that same path when I was in Laramie, to the extent I was able to before coming upon all the ‘private property signs’, and that same impression swept over me like a cold clammy sickness. You simply cannot drive the path that Shepard’s killers took and come away from it believing it was simply a robbery gone bad. Unless of course that is what you need to believe.”
Which is what leads to vile garbage like this column by Pam Meister.
Quick: When I say “Matthew Shepard”, what do you think? A man killed because he was gay? Or a poor sap in the wrong place at the wrong time?
When I say “Pam Meister,” what do you think? Brainless nimrod? Or heartless asshole?
A crime is a crime. It shouldn’t matter if the victim was a target because he was black, because he was gay…
…said the white heterosexual. But she’s right. Since when does motive matter, except for, oh, every single time? Yeah. Murder is murder. And vandalism is vandalism, when you deface a billboard by painting mustache on the model’s face, or deface a synagogue by painting a swastika on the door. And arson is arson, whether you torch a warehouse to collect insurance, or burn a cross on your neighbor’s lawn. They’re exactly the same, and affect communities in the same exact way. And when investigating those cases, we should look for the same suspects.
And what of Shepard? He was a troubled young man who was HIV positive and into the drug scene too. This is not to say I blame the victim-far from it.
By “far from it,” she means, “So close she’s practically rimming it with her tonsils.
But his issues are relevent to what happened after his death. Cliff Kincaid explores this theme further:
“…The gay rights movement wanted to depict Shepard as a victim of a homophobic society. This played into their demands to curb so-called “Hate Crimes”.
But ABC and Vargas ALSO show Shepard to be a very depressed young man, on the verge of suicide, because of his homosexual lifestyle. The “gay rights” lobby doesn’t want to face up to that. Matthew Shepard wasn’t “gay” and “proud”. He was profoundly troubled.
doesn’t look like a young man who was troubled by his sexual orientation.
If Matt was battling depression, it’s more likely because three years prior to the murder, while he was a student abroad in Morocco, he was beaten and raped. Strange how people trying paint him as a druggy slut tend to omit this traumatic event from his bio.
I believe I speak for everyone when I say , “Go French Kiss a chainsaw, you ignorant sack of jackal vomit.”
Speaking of which, Gary Cass of The Christian Anti-defamation Commission has launched a protest against the Hate Crimes act, set to be held in D.C. today, at 1:30 PM.
“The Rally For Religious Freedom” in front of the Department of Justice is intended to force Attorney General Eric Holder either to address the issues or be put in a position of ignoring those who say they are violating the provisions of the federal law”, Cass told WND. “We’re going to declare the whole council of God, including those parts that some may consider ‘inciting a hate crime’ to see if the attorney general is going to come down and arrest a group of peaceful clergy exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Since the Hate Crimes Act is perfectly clear on the matter of speech, my guess is that as long as they’re peaceful, he won’t do anything.But that won’t stop Cass & co. from their little publicity stunt, which has drawn support from some charming people:
…Rick Scarborough went on Janet Porter’s radio program yesterday to discuss it and Porter pledged to join them in standing outside the Department of Justice as they seek to get arrested for preaching the Bible. According to the program, Porter, Scarborough, and the others will be joined by Matt Barber and Gordon Klingenschmitt (as well as Brian Camenker of Mass Resistance).
What, no Pete LeBarbera? I guess it’s the absence of a crowd of Leather Daddies keeping him away from it. Scarborough adds this:
“To test this belief and protest a clear violation of First Amendment freedom of speech and religion, various clergy will preach short sermons and read passages from the Bible regarding homosexual behavior. Like Dr. Martin Luther King and the Sixties Civil Rights movement, they will engage in civil disobedience to protest injustice.”
Did anybody else’s Bullshit Meter just explode?
Well, we know they won’t get arrested for this little display, any more than a person quoting Shakespeare’s line, “The first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers”* will be arrested for issuing a death threat. But something tells me they will get arrested for something. So I leave it to you, dear readers, to put on your psychic skullcaps or what have you, and predict what will happen during or after this stunt occurs. It’ll be interesting to see who comes the closest to getting it right.
*Henry VI (Part 2), Act IV, Scene II.
-Bill S
Apparently the rally didn’t really go all that well. (And frankly, I never imagined that dainty, girly-girl house-muffin Janet Folger Porter sounds like an adenoidal 14-year old boy yelling at his little brother for taking his collectible action figures out of their original packaging.)