It is so gratifying to see the U.S. House finally passing the Matthew Shepard Act. Matthew was a friend of mine before his murder. It has been a strange decade, watching his story spread around the world while remembering him as a student, interested in language and diplomacy and politics. I am confident he would have been an eager participant in the blogging world in support of progressive causes and social justice if he were still with us today.
I wasn't suprised that Rep. Virginia Foxx parroted the warped revisionist account of Matt's death first popularized in 2003 by an Elizabeth Vargas hit-job on ABC's 20/20. I and others familiar with the crime were interviewed fo that one-sided piece of garbage. During nearly two hours of taping time, I tried very hard to poke holes in the obvious slant the piece's producer, Steve Jimenez, had developed. They ended up using about 10 seconds of my out-of-context remarks to try to bolster their own case. I felt naive.
The "Shepard death not a hate crime" line is a tiring thing to continually run into. It seems to give a certain kind of homophobe a reason to completely disregard the murder, what it has meant to people and all the actions any government might ever take to try to address any hate crime, anywhere. Encountering this line of argument with people over the years, I have observed an almost sadistic glee in "taking away" (so they think) Matt's relevance to the world. To see it actually used on the floor of the House of Representatives, though, is just mind-numbing.
I'm glad to see how upset so many of us on the site are over her tasteless (and irrelevant) theories of the case. I am sending an extra donation today to the Matthew Shepard Foundation in "honor" of Virginia Foxx, and hope you all do as well. Perhaps all the thank-you notes rolling in from her enormous "donation" will remind her she is playing a dangerous game with her fellow human beings' dignity, to say nothing of the feelings of Matthew's tireless mother, who has traveled on an exhausting itinerary of educational outreach efforts for more than 10 years now, trying to erase this kind of hate forever.
Help out the family and its work, and have the credit sent to this ignorant, embarrassing congresswoman. Do it today.
http://www.matthewshepard.org