Word: sheparded
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...most people on this campus, and probably around the country, know the gruesome story: Matthew Shepard, a first-year at the University of Wyoming at Laramie, was lured by two men out of town. They tied him like a scarecrow to the fence of a ranch and beat him to death because he was gay. I know Wyoming somewhat: it can be a violent place, and most people I've met there don't like homosexuals. But the deliberate savagery of this murder, a hate crime, shocked people, because, for the most part, they have what the writer William...
...lone innocent ever died the way Jesus did, it was Matthew Shepard. He could have been my student, my son, your brother or friend. But after this crucifixion there is no resurrection, no redemption--only the books Matt will never read, the paintings that will hang an eternity without the light of his eyes to touch them. His teachers will never hear his voice in a seminar room...
This I remembered, as a teacher mourning Matthew Shepard; but then I recalled also that Nabokov lost his own brother, whom the Nazis arrested and killed because he was gay. Literature, unlike philosophy, is not a consolation. When in Armenia they mourn a child, parents cry, "May I be the one to bear your pain!" They can't and Heaven can't hear the howl. Oh, Matthew Shepard, tsaved tanem...
...sometimes we need to find motive to calm us down. Then hate-crime laws, for all their inconsistencies, seem to be the only resort. As night fell at the vigil for Matthew Shepard outside the Capitol last Wednesday, the stony resistance of many Republicans to federal hate-crime legislation melted amid rosy predictions it would be revived, and passed, when Congress resumes in January...
Words are one thing. Sticks and stones are another. There were nearly 8,759 hate crimes reported in 1996; 1,016 of those were sex-bias crimes. Although no one thinks that Wyoming, which has quashed hate-crime bills three times, won't fully prosecute Shepard's killers, gay lobbyists have no doubt that there are cases in which the 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...