Word: shepards
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...aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder last October played out - culminating Thursday with the sentencing of Aaron McKinney to two life sentences - an equally disgusting crime was committed in Arkansas, where two men raped and killed a 13-year-old boy. That incident received relatively little coverage, while Shepard leaves a story that will probably endure for years to come as a symbol of intolerance and lowest-common-denominator conformity...
...attention to the Arkansas incident, we decided to examine whether we and other media outlets had been guilty of some sort of unfairness. (Actually, the media did pay attention, if only at the lack of ink the story generated. As an editorial in the conservative Washington Times fumed, if Shepard had become a cause c?l?bre, why didn't this rate the same treatment?) Could it be because we in the the media elite were unwilling to publicize crimes committed by homosexuals because it didn't suit our agenda? The next stop in that line of reasoning was clear: That news...
...most salient difference between the Shepard case and this one, however, is that while Shepard's murderers were driven to kill by hate, the boy's rape and death was a sex crime. It was repulsive, unconscionable - and the predictable pastime of perverted criminals. It was the kind of depraved act that happens with even more regularity against young females, and, indeed, if the victim had been a 13-year-old girl, the story would probably never have gotten beyond Benton County, much less Arkansas. (There is, of course, a double standard there.) Matthew Shepard died not because...
...Essentially, Shepard was lynched - taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified "other," whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just "another" to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were not satisfying some animalistic sexual impulse, they were bullies who gratuitously killed someone out of hate for being different than they were. It wasn't about them, it was about Matthew Shepard. Because they dramatically reflected some of society's darkest influences...
...they are friends again. They have bonded over mutual horror at the high-profile violence of the past year, beginning with the Shepard murder and culminating in September, when seven Christian young people were murdered at a Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas. "Columbine, Paducah, the Gaithers, the Shepards, we don't like any of that," Falwell told TIME. It sounds a little odd to compare school shootings in Colorado and Kentucky with anti-gay slayings, but over the past few years, evangelical Christians have begun to see themselves as victims, just as many gays do. Conservative Christians have lost...