Word: murdered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Richard Dooling's brilliant new novel, Brain Storm, Judge Whittaker Stang, a Howard Cosell in robes, scolds an attorney who wants to try the killer of a "disabled person of color" for a hate crime rather than simple murder. The ambitious lawyer thinks that will make him look cuddly and electable in a run for the Senate. Throbbing with scorn, Stang tears into him: "Are we going to impanel a jury to inquire after just what kind of hate this degenerate had running around inside his head? And after we identify all the warped, deviant varietals of hatred...
...police look the other way, prosecutors don't bring charges and juries don't convict. Take the case of Jonathan Schmitz, who killed a gay man who said during the taping of the Jenny Jones Show that he had a crush on Schmitz. Schmitz was convicted of second-degree murder. Was being the object of gay affection such understandable humiliation that the charges were ameliorated...
What people mean when they say Matthew Shepard's murder was a lynching is that he was killed to make a point. When he was 21 years old, the world's arguments reached him with deadly force and printed their worst conclusions across him. So he was stretched along a Wyoming fence not just as a dying young man but as a signpost. "When push comes to shove," it says, "this is what we have in mind for gays...
...farther, and through swamps. However much it revolted people all around the country, don't count on Shepard's murder to revolutionize the intractable politics of gay rights in Washington or elsewhere. In the aftermath of the killing, President Clinton urged Congress to pass the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a bill long bottled up by conservatives and other groups in Congress because it would broaden the definition of hate crimes to include assaults on gays as well as women and the disabled. But with Congress adjourned until after Election Day, the momentum to pass the bill is no sure thing...
...while Shepard's death has forced even the most belligerently anti-gay conservatives to situate themselves carefully--condemning the murder while insisting they contributed nothing to the atmosphere that might legitimize it--the Republican Party, beholden to its Christian-activist base, doesn't dare compromise much on gay rights. One speaker at the vigil was Wyoming's former Senator Alan Simpson, a Republican. But Wyoming's current G.O.P. Senators, Michael Enzi and Craig Thomas, didn't show...