Presswatch: Murder in Wyoming
Corry, John
century, so noble, so presidential. But it seems that, just like Riley, Bill's been lying about his age—trying to pass himself off as a mature, sober statesman when he's actually just a ditzy...
...The principal one is that homosexuals must always be seen as victims, and the world around them as hostile...
...44 The American Spectator • December 19 9 8 73...
...Sexual politics have become essential to its identity, and while the right may plead for some restraints on sexual behavior, the left now seems to want none at all...
...Being a nonagenarian, Autry's passing didn't generate the buzz Riley Weston did...
...The left will not allow that to happen...
...Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, his killers (the journalistic convention is to identify them only as suspects, but let us dispense with that) could have been the stock characters of off-Broadway plays—rootless, amoral, and not very bright predators on a barren landscape...
...It's no wonder," he said, "that things like this happen...
...The wooden poles were burnished by a golden sun, and a basket of flowers hung from one of the uprights...
...Two days later the New York Times said in an editorial that even though Wyoming was the first state to allow women JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Press-watch columnist...
...The day before Cohen had his tantrum in the Post, Frank Rich had insisted in the Times that con-44 After tying Shepard to the fence, McKinney and Henderson returned to Laramie and picked a fight with two other men...
...2 One way or another, they are con- F cerned about sex...
...My suggestionwould be Gene Autry, who died a few months ago...
...The Laramie police say a plan to rob him went wrong...
...Rich also had said that the TV ads by Gary Bauer's Family Research Council imploring gays to change their sexual orientation "ooze malice...
...You may not expect, though, those politics to disappear...
...Cohen also said he would "figuratively place" Shepard's body at "the doorstep of Trent Lott, Richard Armey and countless other conservatives...
...They also say that after tying Shepard to the fence McKinney and Henderson returned to Laramie and picked a fight with two other young men...
...C ertainly Time observed the rule after Matthew Shepard died...
...Meanwhile the headline on the cover proclaimed "The War Over Gays," and the story inside began as follows: What people mean when they say Matthew Shepard's murder was a lynching is that he was killed to make a point...
...it helped them make their case...
...The Washington Post's Richard Cohen said Shepard's murder was not a "unique event...
...As columnist Jonathan Alter wrote somberly in Newsweek, it might seem "unfair to link the anti-gay remarks of political leaders to a heinous-crirne they don't condone," but the reality had to be Did the usual suspects kill Matthew Shepard...
...Meanwhile, recall now that Truman Capote once explored the minds of two young men who butchered a family in Kansas...
...He declared that "in their rhetoric they and others have bit by bit robbed homosexuals of their humanity...
...his sexual orientation was really irrelevant...
...When push comes to shove," it says, "this is what we have in mind for gays...
...to vote, Laramie was still "a small town in a masculine culture...not big enough to have its own gay bar...
...The Clutter family of Kansas might have lost their lives to random violence, but Matthew Shepard died because hate had trickled down from high places...
...Rich oozes it himself on a regular basis, but apparently that's different...
...On Monday Katie Couric wondered on NBC's "Today" whether "conservative Christian political organizations" were contributing to an "anti-homosexual atmosphere," and on ABC's woefully misnamed "Politically Incorrect," Bill Maher likened the Republican Party to the Afghan Taliban...
...By any reasonable measure the world is not as hostile to gays as sexual-identity politics says it is...
...Meanwhile, if Al Gore isn't entirely comfortable with a presidency that's now the triumphant apotheosis of the American urge to defer adulthood, he might look for a pop star who's easier on the ear than Miss Love...
...Meanwhile William Styron says Starr has produced a report of "invincible repulsiveness," and insists that America has shown "an absence of decency" just by allowing it to be published...
...Arthur Miller says Ken Starr has a hatred of Clinton that "sometimes seems to mount to a hellish fear of him as unclean...
...He might have gone on and beaten him as savagely as he had beaten Matthew Shepard except that the other young man then hit McKinney with a stick and gave him a hair-line skull fracture...
...But what was he to do...
...It devoted its cover to a picture of the fence on which he had been left helpless...
...Capote, however, was writing in the 1960's, and fashionable thinking since then has changed...
...But it seems that, just like Riley, Bill's been lying about his age—trying to pass himself off as a mature, sober statesman when he's actually just a ditzy adolescent...
...But a federal law would not have prevented the gruesome murder of young Shepard...
...It is, shall we say, inventive, although after Matthew Shepard died many columnists relied on it...
...When he was zi years old, the world's arguments reached him with deadly force and printed their worst conclusions across him...
...The Republicans were to blame...
...3 PR ESSWATCH by John Corry Murder in Wyoming M atthew Shepard, beaten, burned, and near death, was found lashed to a wooden fence near Laramie, Wyoming, on a Wednesday night...
...Alter cited Trent Lott's awkward comparison of homosexuality and kleptomania, and "bragging" by some Republican candidates "about how they held the line on gay rights" as examples of the constant degrading...
...Twenty-one people were killed in 1996," Alter wrote, "because they were gay or lesbian...
...Clinton's apologists E may be right...
...On Sunday Bill Clinton called for a federal hate-crimes law...
...Meanwhile in its imaginings it becomes increasingly lurid...
...Perhaps it's really only about sex, after all...
...the twenty-one murders in 1996 proved it...
...Matthew Shepard, however, was not killed to make a point...
...The dirty old men on the literary left grow active...
...The thugs who killed him had no point to make, and whatever the world's arguments over homosexuality, deadly force seldom settles them...
...Granted that crime figures of any kind are debatable, and sex-bias crime figures are more debatable than most, but the majority of sex-bias crimes was still in the same shadowy area as thought crimes...
...Sexual-identity politics is a high cause, and in promoting it columnists and other journalists have their own rules...
...The Times also wanted a federal hate-crimes law...
...The Southern Poverty Law Center might have said that twenty-one people were killed in 1996 because they were homosexual or lesbian, but of the 1,281 sex-orientation bias crimes the FBI recorded that year only two were murders...
...That raised some interesting questions, of course...
...The Southern Poverty Law Center, however, is not a good source for figures...
...Did Cohen know any gays who had been robbed of their humanity...
...Indeed did he even know any gays, and did anyone at the Post ever read his copy...
...After all, the Constitution says you can't be president unless you're over 35—which must surely be a typing error by the Founders: Face it, every other job in America worth having you can't get unless you're under 35...
...servative Christian groups were "stirring up the fear that produces hate...
...Like Riley he knew that if he told the truth about his age, he'd never get the gig...
...So maybe the simplest solution for our two most famous liars' predicaments would be to swap jobs...
...His In Cold Blood, while sympathetic, said their psyches were twisted...
...It was the guileless Shepard's terrible misfortune to turn up in the Fireside Lounge the same night they did...
...Then he cited figures provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center to show the toll in blood...
...E. L. Doctorow writes that if Clinton is "impeached or forced to resign, American Puritanism, with its punitive lusts and its theocratic visions, will be reborn for the 21st century...
...So he was stretched across a Wyoming fence not just as a dying young man but as a signpost...
...The columnists, or at least the more self-consciously liberal columnists, seemed to be competing over who could express the most outrage...
...It turns out Riley's so old she's almost old enough to be president, while Bill's so immature he's certainly young enough to work on "Felicity," a show about an i8-year-old college freshman...
...There is no reason to think the youngmen were gay, but McKinney apparently hit one of them with the same pistol he had used to bludgeon Shepard, and opened a wound on his scalp that later required twenty-two staples to close...
...72 December 1998 • The American Spectator faced: "The constant degrading of homosexuals is extracting a toll in blood...
...But in these troubled times the sagebrush troubadour's Cowboy Code seems more timely than ever, especially Rules Number Three ("The Cowboy must always tell the truth"), Number Eight ("He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action and personal habits"), and Number Nine ("He must respect women, parents and his nation's laws...
...By Saturday the big news organizations were all on the story, and a consensus began to form...
Vol. 31 • December 1998 • No. 12
