On a cold night 11 years ago, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student was lured into a pickup truck and driven to the outskirts of Laramie, where, as he begged for mercy, he was tied to a fence, kicked and pistol-whipped so brutally that he lapsed into a coma. He later died.
He was a victim of hatred. He was also his mother's treasure.
And Matthew Shepard's horrible death forced much of our nation to look at how anti-gay prejudice can explode into violence.
The meaning of Matthew Shepard's life and death is the subject of a moving book by his mother, Judy Shepard.
When James Wenneker von Brunn murdered
Stephen T. Johns at the Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier this month,
history was less made than revealed. Officer Johns, a 39-year-old
African-American family man, was an easygoing guard, affectionately
known to colleagues as "Big John.'' That his last act was to open the
door for a member of the public defines his goodness. That von Brunn,
an 88-year-old white supremacist and anti-Semite, simply opened fire on
the man holding the door defines his malevolence. But more is at work
here than an act of lunacy.
In just over a month last winter, two Latino men were beaten to death
in New York state while their attackers shouted racial slurs and
epithets (
Philadelphia Inquirer,
1/25/09). Such hate crimes, motivated by anti-immigrant prejudice and
other bigotries, have spurred a media justice campaign to reveal the
potential human costs of hate speech.
