Thirteen years ago tonight we lost Matt. While his body lived for five more day, his life effectively came to an end one crisp night, October 6, 1998. It was ended by hate in a crime that shocked the nation.
Matthew Shepard was a 21 year old University of Wyoming student studying political science. On the night of October 6, he met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson at a bar in Laramie. They recognized that Matt was gay and pretended to befriend him offering him a ride home. Instead they drove him to a remote field, tied him to a buck rail fence, robbed him of his wallet and shoes, and proceeded to torture and pistol-whip him. When finished, they left him there to die where he was discovered 18 hours later by a cyclist who initially mistook the short and slightly built young man for a scarecrow. He was barely alive in a coma. He was taken to a hospital in Laramie and immediately transferred to a larger hospital in Fort Collins, on the other side of the Wyoming-Colorado border. His parents, living in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia where his father was working for Saudi Aramco, rushed to his side. But his wounds were too severe, his skull fractured in multiple places, his brain damaged from the blows and much of his upper body lacerated and bruised. He was into too weak a condition to even operate. On the evening of October 11, his blood pressure began to drop. Fifty three minutes past midnight, his heart stop beating and he was pronounced dead.
Vigils for him around America that were already taking place took an even more somber turn. As a nation, it seemed, we for the most part took a pause and for a moment thought about the level of hate directed at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community. For years LGBTs had been pushing for sexual orientation and gender identity to be included in hate crimes laws both at the state level and the national level. A Federal hate crime law had been passed covering race and ethnicity in 1969 on the heels of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination and in the early 1990's a small number of states had, at the urging of the LGBT community, passed their own that included at the very least sexual orientation, but efforts to pass a national hate crime law including gays had gone no where. We didn't want a martyr. We didn't want there to have to be a martyr. We wanted there to be laws in place to strongly discourage these crimes from ever occurring...but it was not to be. We reluctantly acquired a symbol of our struggle and a new impetus for pushing forward to achieve legislation that would hopefully mean no more Matts had to die, especially like this.
Personally I was so devastated by this that in trying to have a catharsis over my grief, I, a nearly broke college student with a car in not so good shape, very nearly decided to drive the 20 hours from Austin, Texas to Casper, Wyoming to be there for his funeral. At the time, I was personally in a war with my parents over their theretofore lack of acceptance of me being gay. I can't help but think that Matt's death and them seeing how the death of a person I never knew or knew existed until his life was effectively over could affect me so much helped steer my parents on a course towards acceptance.
On the legal horizon in Texas, a push was made in 1999 to pass a hate crime bill in the Texas legislature. Texas had also suffered a heinous hate crime in 1998 when James Byrd, Jr. was chained to the back of a pickup truck by two white supremacists and dragged for miles behind it. But in anticipation of his run for the Presidency the following year, George Bush was able to get his buddies in the Lege to kill the bill and prevent a Senate vote on the measure before adjournment. Two years later, not wanting to see it happen again, I along with many others made a point of lobbying legislators in person to push for the bill. To pass the House, compromise language had to be used with ally St. Rep. Senfronia Thompson brokering a deal with the bill's chief opponent St. Rep. Warren Chisum to allow a House vote if the term "sexual orientation" was changed to "sexual preference." Rick Perry proved less effective than Bush in secretly killing the bill, and when it was publicly discovered he was involved in trying to prevent a Senate vote, it pretty much guaranteed a vote would be taken. St. Sen. Rodney Ellis shepherded the bill past Texas' equivalent of a cloture vote and the legislation passed the Senate 20-10. The House quickly passed the Senate version that differed slightly from the version it passed earlier by a 90-55 margin and Perry reluctantly signed it.
Nationally and in Wyoming, however, even Matt's brutal murder could not convince those in Congress or the Wyoming legislature to pass a hate crimes law covering sexual orientation and gender identity. For more than a decade in the U.S. Congress, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crime Act languished. In 2007 when Democrats retook both the House and Senate, it looked as though it might finally become reality. The act was passed as an amendment to the Department of Defense authorization act and cleared both houses of Congress. All that remained in order to be sent to the President's desk was for the House and Senate to reconcile differences between the versions of the defense bills they had both passed. In the meantime, George W. Bush, already the least popular President in the history of polling on the approval of American Presidents, threatened to veto the entire defense bill if the hate crimes amendment was included. The Democrats refused to call his bluff and in voice votes in each chamber, unceremoniously striped the hate crimes amendment from the bill before it was sent to the President's desk.
Two years later, with Bush out of the White House, the defense bill was again used a the vehicle towards passage of the hate crimes act being one of the only ways Democrats could secure cloture in the Senate on any bill that might include the hate crimes provision. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act was attached to the defense bill and again it cleared the hurdle and was sent to President Obama, who signed it on October 28, 2009.
I wish that were the end of the story, but unfortunately it is not. Some 709 days after becoming law, the law has yet to be used in any hate bias motivated crime where the bias motivation was the victim's actual or perceived gender identity or sexual orientation. The law's expanded jurisdiction has already been used in four other cases stemming from three separate incidents where the bias motivations were the victims' race, ethnicity and mental disability status. The first two convictions under the expanded hate crimes law occurred earlier this summer and just last week the two defendants in those two cases were sentenced in accordance with the new law. But as someone that has advocated for hate crimes laws since before Matthew Shepard was killed, this fight for LGBT protection can't be over until the law is actually being used, successfully, in cases of such crimes. And in just three weeks shy of two years, we have yet to see the Department of Justice utilize this new tool to protect the community largely responsible for pushing the new law to passage. And it is not for lack of hate crimes against LGBT people. In absolute numbers, the FBI's annual uniform crime report on hate crime statistics for 2009 recorded over 1,400 offenses in over 1,200 incidents committed because of anti-LGB hate. And that doesn't include the numbers for the transgendered because they will not be included in the FBI's number until this year's report due out in November. By the numbers, a LGB person is about three times more likely to be the victim of an anti-LGB aggravated assault than a black person is to be a victim of an anti-black aggravated assault and nearly four times more likely than a Native American or a Muslim is to suffer an anti-native American or anti-Islamic aggravated assault. The chances of a simple assault are two and a half more likely than the next highest class and LGB's trail the Jewish community only slightly in rate of acts of intimidation.
Hate crimes against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered are going unpunished to the extent the law now provides for harsher penalties for these crimes. Until people actually see the law being used, it is not likely to have much if any affect in combatting these crimes. All too often the people that bash gays get off with lighter sentences, if convicted at all, because the victim is/was LGBT. Just this week, the Deputy District Attorney for Ventura County announced charges being refiled against Brandon McInerney, who shot and killed Lawrence King in February 2008 in their Oxnard, CA middle school computer lab in front of the entire class, after his first trial ended in a hung jury. When the charges were refiled, the hate crime enhancements were dropped.
Hate crimes has proven to be yet another case of where the LGBT community's perceived victory has not panned out into actual change and real action. It shouldn't take 709 days to use the law for the community that pushed for the law. It didn't take Acting AG Nicholas Katzenbach 709 days to use the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after it was passed and signed into law. From DADT repeal support to DADT repeal certification to DOMA repeal support to ENDA to the minor breadcrumb changes in federal policies affecting LGBT people, this White House has slow walked everything LGBT related, but this...this is very personal for me. As the victim of a hate crime and someone that was deeply affected by Matthew Shepard's murder and has worked to get hate crimes laws passed, I'm sick and tired of the see-saw of emotions between profound sadness of the lives lost in some of these crimes and the palpable anger at the apathy law enforcement in general and the Administration has show towards them. If it is out of a fear the law will be declared unconstitutional (and thus take away a political victory), I'd rather see it declared unconstitutional so the task of fixing it can begin rather than be deferred another 13 years. If it is because all the hate crimes that they've looked at are already so serious adding hate crime enhancements is pointless, passing the law was pointless. If it is because the crimes are "too minor" and would be a waste of time and money to add hate crime enhancements, passing the law was pointless. Again we see the politicians using this law as a political victory to pad their political resume to build political capital to get re-elected. President Obama was touting the hate crimes act at the HRC's annual gala just last weekend in D.C. That's what they were in this battle for...political capital, but in the LGBT community, we were in it for the protections and so far that has not materialized and without it, we should not be letting politicians claim victory for this.
| In Remembrance |
Matthew Shepard: 1976-1998 |
Allen Schindler, murdered October 1992 |
Brandon Teena, murdered December 1993 |
Barry Winchell, murdered July 1999 |
Steen Fenrich, murdered September 1999 |
Gwen Araujo, murdered October 2002 |
Sakia Gunn, murdered May 2003 |
Jason Gage, murdered March 2005 |
Michael Sandy, murdered October 2006 |
Ryan "Skip" Skipper, murdered March 2007 |
Sean W. Kennedy, murdered May 2007 |
Satender Singh, murdered July 2007 |
Lawrence "Larry" King, murdered February 2008 |
Simmie Williams, murdered February 2008 |
Steven Parrish, murdered March 2008 |
Angie Zapata, murdered July 2008 |
Tony Randolph Hunter, murdered September 2008 |
Jose Sucuzhañay, murdered December 2008 |
Lateisha Green, murdered November 2008 |
Duanna Johnson, murdered November 2008 |
Michael Goucher, murdered February 2009 |
Anthony Collao, murdered June 2011 |
