Two awful things happened in Laramie, Wyo., six years ago. First, a young man -- a small, gay man -- was beaten beyond recognition and left tied to a fence. It was a foul murder. In its wake came a polite murder, sober in its execution: the slaying of justice.
The bloody horror of the first assault blinded almost everyone to the sterile wrongfulness of the second. Tonight, ABC's "20/20" will revisit the murder of Matthew Shepard, providing an occasion to consider what was neglected and to rethink the notion that anyone is safer, freer, wiser or more generous in spirit because some murders might be defined as worse than murder, some victims considered special, and some perpetrators punished more harshly -- all on the basis of something as measureless as hate.
Shepard was killed in a town, like many towns, inhospitable to gay people, with no protections against sexual discrimination and only disincentives for being openly gay. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the men now serving life sentences for murdering Shepard, grew up on the milk of violence that America feeds its sons and on the language of easy slurs -- "faggot," "sissy," "girlie man." They were homophobes in the way that passes for normal.
They were also broke and drunk or drugged up on the night of the murder. McKinney, bingeing on crystal meth, had not slept in a week. Henderson, impaired by drink, suggested McKinney might let up on Shepard and got slugged in the mouth. Afterward, they were headed to burgle Shepard's house when McKinney picked a fight with two men and cracked another skull, wielding his .357 magnum like a baseball bat, just as he had against Matthew Shepard.
So was Shepard's murder a hate crime or was it something else? "20/20" comes down on the side of something else, amplifying the meth connection, which I first reported in Harper's in 1999, and exploring Laramie's drug subculture, through which Shepard seems to have become acquainted with McKinney. Some gay advocates of hate crime laws have already blasted the network for raising the question. Michael Adams of Lambda Legal Defense says ABC is trying to "de-gay the murder."
Scrapping over the nature of Shepard's victimhood is the wrong debate. Whatever his killer's degree of homophobia, Shepard is dead. Powerless to restore him, society is obligated to ask what is owed to the living -- to gay people, who have suffered ages of abuse, and also criminal defendants. Tinkering with criminal law is a backward step in countering the deep cultural realities of homophobia, racism, sexism. Prosecuting murder as a hate crime only lets the rest of us think we're off the hook, while it tramples on justice.
