"The widespread parable version."

Virginia Heffernan, in today's NYT, reviews tonight's incendiary "20/20":

"20/20" takes the position that the description of [the Matthew Shepard] murder as an anti-gay hate crime is entirely wrong. After six years of sentimental theater, documentaries and television movies that have bolstered the hate-crime view, tonight's program is no less than iconoclastic. ...



None of this ... changes the horror of the murder, or the inspiration and awareness that people gained from the widespread parable version of the event. But getting the truth - in ABC's revisionist investigation, which seeks to overturn the powerful and canonical version of the facts and meaning of this crime - is worthwhile, as it thickens the description and adds to the mystery of what happened that night in Laramie.

"The widespread parable version" remains intact as a source of "inspiration and awareness"? "Getting at the truth" is "worthwhile" because it "thickens the description and adds to the mystery"? We like the mythological story, and the reason we also like the truth is because it makes the myth more mysterious???



Isn't the truth a bit more important than that?



Consider this commentary from JoAnn Wypijewski in the L.A. Times:

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.

If a legend is used as leverage to change the law, we need to be willing to think about whether the legend is true, and if it is not, we need to be willing to rethink our analysis.



Remember Cindy Dixon? She was the mother of Russell Henderson, one of the two men convicted of murdering Matthew Shepard. Henderson, the L.A. Times article tells us, "was the driver that night. He never hit Shepard, but, on McKinney's order, he tied him to the fence."

In January 1999, Henderson's mother, Cindy Dixon, was found dead. She had been raped and struck and left in the snow to die. No powerful advocates spoke for her. She was likely to come to a bad end, people said, what with the drinking and the men, and then her son….



Nobody took the measure of hate. By the time the Dixon case was wrapped up, they weren't even talking murder. A man pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and the same judge who sent Dixon's son to prison forever sentenced her killer to four to nine years. He got out last year.

Justice demands that we think clearly about criminal responsibility and not let our minds be clouded by evocative stories that mesh with our assumptions about the world and our social policy aspirations. I believe the cause of gay rights is a very good one, and I also think that if the cause is good, truth should serve it. If you think your cause is so important that you must put it ahead of the truth, you are deeply confused.



UPDATE: I've watched the "20/20," and it didn't impress me much. There were a lot of interviews with people who had plenty of reason to lie. Now that the public's strong reaction to the original "gay panic" story is known, the two murderers have every motivation to say it wasn't like that at all. And the people of Laramie can't appreciate having their town associated with bigotry, so they too have a motivation to retell the story. I have no idea what is true here. Since the men weren't convicted of a "hate crime" and, in any event, they pleaded guilty, their convictions are sound whether their motivation was robbery or bigotry. As to the question of whether there should be hate crime legislation, I do not mean to offer an opinion on the subject. I have not done the complex policy analysis that I think is needed to decide whether there should be additional, separately defined crimes in addition to murder and assault. The main point of this post is to highlight the importance of truth and to be critical of people who would subordinate truth to their political and policy goals.