Hate Crimes Symbol Gets 20/20 Makeover
by AFA Journal
January 19, 2005
(AgapePress) - The murder of homosexual college student Matthew Shepard in 1998 became a symbol for those demanding the passage of a federal hate crimes law that includes sexual orientation. But a reexamination of the incident in a recent television news program suggests that a hate crime may not have been committed at all.
On the November 26 installment of ABC's 20/20, news anchor Elizabeth Vargas interviewed numerous people connected to the events in Laramie, Wyoming, six years ago. Vargas offers an explanation that has never been embraced by homosexual activists or much of the mainstream press. Namely, that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson -- now serving life sentences for their crime -- killed Shepard in a robbery, in which McKinney acted under the influence of drugs.
In fact, 20/20 revealed that it was not Laramie law enforcement that saw Shepard's sexual orientation as an issue in the murder. "Just hours after Matthew was discovered at the fence, and before anyone knew who had beaten him, Walt Boulden and Alex Trout, friends of Shepard, began spreading the word that Matthew may have been attacked because he was gay," Vargas said.
Vargas asked Cal Rerucha, Laramie prosecutor in the Shepard case, whether or not Boulden and Trout had any evidence to substantiate their claim that Shepard's death was a hate crime. "Well, I don't think the proof was there .... That was something that they had decided," he said.
The hate crime link to Shepard's murder became the accepted explanation virtually overnight, and has been dogma ever since.
Reaction Pro and Con
Not unexpectedly, the initial reaction from activists to the 20/20 piece indicated that no revision to the politically correct view of the Shepard murder would be acceptable. For example, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the largest homosexual media watchdog group, issued a press release blasting 20/20 for its "oversimplifications and distortions."
GLAAD did raise some serious questions that suggested the ABC program may have been one-sided. But for Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, that misses the point.
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Tim Wildmon |
"GLAAD didn't complain in 1998 when the media almost universally jumped to the conclusion that this was a hate crime," Wildmon said. "And GLAAD said nothing when some in the media jumped to the conclusion that Matthew Shepard's death was somehow caused by Christian opposition to homosexual activism in our culture. But now they want to complain about one-sided journalism?"In fact, Wildmon insisted, this is the very problem with the drive for hate crimes laws. "Matthew Shepard's death was a tragedy, but in the same way that the other roughly 17,000 murders committed in the U.S. every year are tragedies," he said. "A murder is a murder, whether someone is homosexual or heterosexual."
Wildmon said the temptation to use a crime like Shepard's murder for political purposes is simply too strong for activists.
"McKinney and Henderson are in prison today because of the act of murder," he said. "Trying to criminalize what they were thinking at the time will only lead to endless and futile debate, like that stirred up by ABC's 20/20 expose."
No Epidemic of Anti-Homosexual Hate Crimes
Activists continue to push for a federal hate crimes statute, but the facts indicate that crimes based on bias against homosexuals are a tiny fraction of total crimes.
According to the most recent FBI report of hate crimes nationwide, out of 7,489 hate crime incidents committed in 2003, 1,239 were based on sexual orientation. About two-thirds of those 1,239 were intimidation, vandalism and property destruction.
However, in the category of more violent crimes, hate crimes represented a very small sliver of the total number of violent crimes committed in 2003.
According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, there were 16,503 criminal homicides in the United States during 2003; only six (.03 percent) of them were based on homosexual bias. There were 857,921 aggravated assaults, and only 162 (.02 percent) of them were based on sexual orientation.
"It's not that every crime isn't a terrible thing -- obviously it is," said Wildmon. "But there simply is no evidence of an epidemic of hate crimes being committed against homosexuals. There's only an epidemic of feverish political rhetoric demanding hate crimes laws."
This article appeared in the January 2005 issue of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association.
