Today is the 12th anniversary of the vicious hate crime committed against Matthew Shepard. On the night of October 7th, 1998, openly gay Matthew, resident of Laramie, Wyoming, was coerced into an open, rural area, tortured and left tied to a fence to die by two men from his town. Matthew was found in the morning, still alive, by a passing biker who mistook Matthew’s mangled body for a scarecrow. He died on October 12th at a hospital in Colorado.
A few weeks ago, my roommates and I rented “The Laramie Project”, an HBO mocumentary based on over 400 hours of interviews conducted by the Tectonic Theater Project of residences of Laramie who knew Matthew and the boys that killed him. Aside from being well done and eye-opening, it lead me to question what the status of LGBT individuals in America is like today. After all, twelve years have passed since Matthew Shepard’s murder. Surely vast amounts of progress have been made?
Let’s not be too hasty.
After the Matthew Shepard hate crime, citizens of Wyoming pushed for hate crime legislation at a state level. It was voted down. In 2000, legislation was being pushed at the national level, but was voted down again. In March of 2007, the Matthew Shepard Act was introduced as federal bipartisan legislation in Congress. The act wouldn’t pass until April of 2009.
So…it took eleven years for a piece of legislation providing basic rights of safety to the LGBT community to pass at a federal level. Even now, nineteen states have no laws that address hate crimes based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Shepard’s murder managed to focus national attention on hate, but little was done to protect other members of the LGBT community from facing a similar fate.
With the recent suicides of five gay teens, our nation is once again forced to focus on violence against the gay community. Although these cases have been discussed repeatedly on this blog, their implications are too important to be ignored. Currently, 22 states have no legislation to protect LGBT kids from bullying and harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity. And if the history of the Matthew Shepard Act is any indication, it will probably take a while for any legislation to get passed on a national level.
In the wake of the Matthew Shepard murder, the stunned town of Laramie vocalized the belief that they “don’t grow children like that” there. Well, it’s pretty clear they do grow children like that there. Even clearer is the fact that we’re still growing children like that in cities across the nation. Kids are not born homophobic; they learn discrimination through the examples that are set for them by their parents, their religious leaders, and their government. When we live in a society that encourages hate towards people who are different from us, and teaches LGBT children that they are fundamentally flawed and not worthy of our love and respect, we can’t be surprised when tragedies like these happen.
ShoutOut! James Madison University 