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Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

Matthew Shepard and Hate Crime

There’s been a lot of controversory in the blogosphere this week about ABC 20/20’s scheduled story interviewing Matthew Shepard’s killers. I haven’t seen the report, but rumor has it that Aaron McKinney and Russell A. Henderson told 20/20 that they didn’t beat young Shepard to death because he was gay, but just because they were muggers on drugs. In other words, it was just an average, every day crime.

Flame on!

Right-wing blogs leapt on this as proof that there is no such thing as “hate crime” and gays aren’t really persecuted–it’s just all a fabrication by gay activists and the liberal media. Left-wing bloggers are appalled that anyone could consider the brutal torture Shepard endured “just a mugging” and see a pattern of right-wing revisionist history.

So which is it? Were McKinney and Henderson gay bashing lunatics? Or were they just muggers hopped up on meth? Seven years after the fact, the odds are pretty good that we’ll never know for sure.

And it doesn’t matter what their motives were. Not one bit.

What matters, what makes Matthew Shepard’s death so poignant and important, is what happened at his killers’ trial:

Lawyers for accused murderer Aaron McKinney charged past warnings on Monday and hauled out a “gay panic” defense, asserting that Matthew Shepard’s murder was precipitated by an unwelcome sexual advance.

“The fact that Matthew Shepard made a sexual advance has relevance in this case,” Custis said. “It’s something Aaron McKinney responded to.”

(More here and here.)

By pulling the “gay panic” defense, McKinney’s attorneys tapped into the same cultural vein that led Judge Jack Hampton to give Richard Bednerski a light sentence in a 1988 double homicide because “I don’t much care for queers cruising the streets picking up teenage boys.” or Broward County Circuit Judge Daniel Futch to jokingly ask the prosecuting attorney, “That’s a crime now, to beat up a homosexual?” (same source) in 1989.

The attorneys tried to play the “it was OK to kill Shepard because he was gay” card. They counted on at least one out of twelve people agreeing with them. And who knows what might have happened if the judge had allowed the defense? Would “he made a pass at me” or “he looked at me funny” become a valid defense for violence and murder, on the same level as “he tried to kill me”?

This is why Shepard’s case became a rallying cry for the GBLT community and, quite honestly, for most decent people in this country. Did Shepard’s killer beat him to death because he was gay? Who cares? They beat him to death, and their lawyers tried to say it wasn’t all that bad, because he was gay.

That’s more than enough.

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