The October 6, 1998 beating and torture of Matthew
Shepard that eventually led to his death has become one of the more interesting
rallying points in our recent history in the United States. Almost overnight
Shepard’s brutal murder was plunged into politics based solely on the fact that
he was an HIV positive, gay man; which raised the specter that his murder was
due to hated or as popularized at the time, a hate crime.
In, The Book of
Matt: The Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, journalist Stephen
Jimenez continued his investigations of the crime and some of the facts that
were left unexplored during the eventual trial and conviction of Shepard’s
murders. Jimenez had been the producer of an ABC News 20/20 investigation into
the case and a couple of months after Shepard’s
murder, he went to Laramie, Wyoming to dig a little deeper into things
that had come up in the initial digging into the story.
The book is the result of that second, deeper look at
the story and some of the facts weren’t a part of the trial or the case
against Shepard’s killers. It didn’t take long to track down those killers and
the case against them in legal parlance was “air tight” so why would police dig
any deeper?
Jimenez uncovered some clear evidence that Shepard, a
slight, college student wasn’t perhaps the innocent victim of a hate crime, but
perhaps even more likely, he was murdered due to his involvement in dealing
methamphetamine. This naturally flew in the face of the activists who were
pushing for legislation that eventually came to pass, to somehow supersize the
crimes against protected classes as defined in the law.
Jimenez became the subject of attacks that labeled him
as somehow “anti-gay” because he pointed out facts that flew counter to
the public claims about Shepard. I guess that would make Jimenez a self-hating
gay man; since he is in fact gay himself. The orchestrated campaign against
Jimenez and the book is ridiculous on its face, since it doesn’t bother to
actually address the facts in the book.
But that seems to be the way politics is debated in
this day and age; and that is purely what is at play here. The politics of who
cares more and who can somehow do more to protect or defend or give more to
defined special classes. Think about the ridiculous nature of so-called hate
crimes. Are people injured or killed because someone hates them? Certainly the
answer is YES! Do we need a special set of laws to enforce criminal sanctions
against those deemed to be in protected groups? NO…not really.
Matthew Shepard’s murder’s were convicted of their
crimes; in a deal brokered by Shepard’s parents the killers received life
sentences without chance of parole. If they had been convicted of a hate crime,
would they spend any more time behind bars? The vile murderers of James Byrd, a
Texas man who was beaten, chained and dragged to his death; both received death
penalty sentences. When Texas eventually gets around to meting out that
sentence, would they have been executed twice due to committing a hate crime?
Turning this book into a political debate is ridiculous.
It’s clear to me that Jimenez didn’t have an “agenda” in mind when he set out
to investigate the story, but it is in fact the left who attack him that have
the agenda to somehow protect ridiculous hate crimes laws to somehow be
portrayed as more caring and compassionate.
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