Shepard Ain't Shit

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Drudge flunky Andrew Dimbart takes another belated whack at the Gay Right's favorite whipping boy, Matthew Shepard. Says Andy, "A street in West Hollywood still stands in [Shepard's] name despite ABC News reporting the story false: He was killed by crazed meth addicts for drugs and money -- not because he was gay."

This proclamation is Sully Joe's cue to chime in. Dimbart's "right," says Sully, though he later qualifies that claim by sniffing a whiff of "homophobia" in the killing, "even if it was grotesquely distorted as a pure hate crime by the usual suspects."

Let's see what ABC News actually reported: After the killing, Aaron McKinney's girlfriend claimed that McKinney beat Matthew Shepard to death when he became enraged after Shepard made a sexual advance. At trial, McKinney's defense attorneys sought to introduce evidence (assuredly with McKinney's cooperation and consent) that McKinney killed Shepard after a pass because McKinney had been sexually assaulted as a child. (And ABC omitted mention of a great deal of additional evidence and testimony that both killers targeted Shepard because he was a gay man.) McKinney's defense failed spectacularly. Six years after the assault, while rotting in prison, McKinney swore that all he wanted to do was beat up and rob Shepard, not commit a "hate crime." McKinney's girlfriend also changed her story, and a bunch of people claimed or speculated that McKinney was doing meth the week of the crime.

The usual suspects indeed. If a cold-blooded killer, his girlfriend and his appointed defense attorneys aren't the patresfamilias of the P.C. Gay Mafia, I don't know who is.

All ABC reported was that McKinney claimed he killed Matthew Shepard because Shepard was a predatory homosexual and, some four or five years after that story failed to earn him a sympathy verdict, started pedalling another sob story titled "The Crank Made Me Do It." Of course, Dimbart and Sullivan adopt McKinney's self-serving revisionist history because it fits their liberal-gays-want-special-rights fantasy, and not because version 2.0 is more credible than McKinney's original admission against interest.

The only grotesque distortion here is Sullivan's continuing attempt to smear political opponents based on a convienent recantation made long after the crime was committed. Were those who called attention to a hate crime in 1998 supposed to anticipate a lie told six years later? Meanwhile, Dimbart, who hasn't been beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead, must continue to suffer the daily indignity of knowing that a street in his beloved town bears the name of a man who wasn't even man enough to fend off two armed attackers.