What’s Your Motivation?
December 4, 2004
Chris Bull, writing for PlanetOut, explores a troubling trend in the media—to ignore, or spin, gay bashings by blaming the incidents on unrelated factors. Factors that, conveniently, are not damning to our society at large.
Bull writes: ”[Scotty Joe] Weaver’s slaying received scant national media attention. In fact, in the six years since Matthew Shepard’s murder, dozens of similar killings have been overlooked. With a few notable exceptions, journalists apparently decided, having established Shepard as a martyr, that they could go back to pretending gay-bashing was no longer a national disgrace they had an obligation to expose.”
Coinciding with the national media’s “ignorance is bliss” work ethic with regard to the killings of Scotty Joe Weaver, Roderick George, and Billy Jack Gaither, the inimitable Elizabeth Vargas—the “investigatory journalist” that is Barbara Walters’ replacement on 20/20—decides that the Sweeps Week is the right time to offer her new theory on the motivation for Matthew Shepard’s murder: drugs. Because, you see, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney didn’t beat, pistol-whip, and leave Matthew Shepard bound to a fence to die because he was gay. They did it because they were just so gosh darn high!
Bull says it best when he states: “That it took a complicated mix of lethal motives to trigger murder in no way made these killings any less a product of savage bigotry. To minimize any part of this equation is to do a disservice both to the truth and to efforts to prevent this deadly cycle of violence and societal prejudice that took the lives of Scotty Joe Weaver, Matthew Shepard and hundreds of more anonymous victims.”
Read the full article at PlanetOut News.