Was Matthew Shepard’s Murder Really a “Hate Crime”?

on September 17, 2013

“What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong?”

So asks the Advocate, arguably the premier national GLBTQ news magazine.

What no one doubts is that the college student was brutally murdered 15 years ago in Laramie, Wyoming.

By the time most of us learned of this faraway crime, the narrative was already pretty well established: In a sort of modern-day lynching, the young college student and beloved son was deliberately targeted, brutally beaten, and murdered, all “just because he was gay.” Shepard was killed not just by the horrific actions of his killers, but by American society’s refusal to approve of homosexual practice, a disapproval from which this hate-driven crime sprang.

But is this really what actually happened?

According to the Advocate, as early as 1999, progressive journalist JoAnn Wypijewski “rejected what she called the quasi-religious characterizations of Matthew’s passion, death, and resurrection as patron saint of hate-crime legislation’ in favor of what she called ‘wussitude’ — a culture of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ that teaches young men how to pass as men, unfeeling, benumbed, primed to cloak any vulnerability in violence.”

In 2004, an award-winning investigation from ABC’s 20/20 found that the murder may have actually had more to do with drugs and robbery.

Yet this appears to have not done much to diminish GBLTQI activists’ treatment of Shepard as a martyr against American homophobia. “The Laramie Project,” a play about the allegedly “homophobic” murder, continues to be widely performed around the country. Matthew Shepard’s name was included in the title of the 2009 federal “hate crimes” law. And the slain young man’s name is still evoked as a reliable emotion-inducing rallying cry for gay-rights activism.

Now a gay journalist, Stephen Jimenez, has written The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, based on investigative interviews with over 100 people, including the convicted killers and friends of both the killers and the victim. Although Jimenez previously accepted the popular narrative about the murder, his research led him in a very different direction. According to the book’s Amazon.com page,

“Stephen Jimenez went to Laramie to research the story of Matthew Shepard’s murder in 2000, after the two men convicted of killing him had gone to prison, and after the national media had moved on. His aim was to write a screenplay on what he, and the rest of the nation, believed to be an open-and-shut case of bigoted violence. As a gay man, he felt an added moral imperative to tell Matthew’s story. But what Jimenez eventually found in Wyoming was a tangled web of secrets. His exhaustive investigation also plunged him deep into the deadly underworld of drug trafficking. Over the course of a thirteen-year investigation, Jimenez traveled to twenty states and Washington DC, and interviewed more than a hundred sources.” 

Although “a politically expedient myth took the place of important facts” in the murder’s immediate aftermath, making Shepard’s name “synonymous with anti-gay hate,” the book promises to “prov[e] irrefutably that Matthew Shepard was not killed for being gay but for reasons far more complicated — and daunting.”

Several segments of the Advocate article are worth quoting at some length:

Of course, none of what Jimenez discovered changes the fact that Shepard was horribly murdered, but it may change how we interpret his murder. For many of us, the crime was not simply one family’s tragedy — it symbolized our vulnerable, uncertain place in the world. For many heterosexuals it challenged the myth of America as a guarantor of equality and liberty.

All that soul-searching may have felt necessary, especially in light of the legislation the case inspired, but was it helpful in getting at the truth? Or did our need to make a symbol of Shepard blind us to a messy, complex story that is darker and more troubling than the established narrative? 

In The Book of Matt, Jimenez examines the laudable, if premature, effort on the part of two of Shepard’s friends to alert the media to what they believed to be a crime of hate. At the time, Shepard was still fighting for his life. By the time he died, five days later, the question had been firmly settled, as news reporters and gay organizations like GLAAD rushed in.

There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. In his book, Flagrant Conduct, Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, similarly unpicks the notorious case of Lawrence v. Texas, in which the arrest of two men for having sex in their own bedroom became a vehicle for affirming the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private. Except that the two men were not having sex, and were not even a couple. Yet this non-story, carefully edited and taken all the way to the Supreme Court, changed America.

In different ways, the Shepard story we’ve come to embrace was just as necessary for shaping the history of gay rights as Lawrence v. Texas; it galvanized a generation of LGBT youth and stung lawmakers into action. President Obama, who signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named for Shepard and James Byrd Jr., into law on October 28, 2009, credited Judy Shepard for making him “passionate” about LGBT equality.

There are obvious reasons why advocates of hate crime legislation must want to preserve one particular version of the Matthew Shepard story, but it was always just that — a version. Jimenez’s version is another, more studiously reported account, but he is not the first to challenge the popular mythology.

One the one hand, I applaud the Advocate for having the journalistic integrity to report on this book, even though this undermines the credibility of one of its own side’s key rallying cries of recent years.

But on the other hand, any conscientious reader should be deeply troubled by important moral debates in society, and within the church, being powerfully shaped by “non-stories” and some activists letting their “need to make a symbol” result in becoming “blind” to the actual facts.

And serious questions are inevitably invited about the justice of any cause when its leading advocates are willing to play fast and loose with the truth (at least as long as such factual liberalism keeps up its “usefulness”), whether in this case or in the many cases documented on this site of sexually liberal clergy shamelessly willing to lie their way into their respective ordinations.

Given how the same purely secular gay-rights group mentioned above, GLAAD, is apparently now in the business of helping run PR efforts for activists seeking to make the United Methodist Church abandon biblical sexual teaching for the secular American zeitgeist, this also raises even further questions for the pro-homosexuality cause’s credibility within my denomination.

What is a Christian to do?

First of all, we MUST stand clearly, unequivocally, and publicly against the violence that sometimes targets our neighbors who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. We would be wrong to simply dismiss the very real feelings of physical vulnerability felt by such neighbors of ours, especially after they hear news of an apparent (literal) gay bashing. Yes, even when we suspect (or know) that such expressions of gay vulnerability are being cynically exaggerated for political advantage.

Secondly, we must never allow our passion for any cause, however righteous, allow us to cut the slightest corners of honesty or ethics in our work to promote the cause, no matter how “useful” or “necessary” such shortcuts may seem to be. Never commit the stupidity of thinking that God is okay with your doing evil just because someone else’s evil may be worse or your evil is being done in the name of good.

Thirdly, we should be saddened, but not surprised when activists against Christian values fail to consistently exhibit basic Christian ethics (like honesty) in their efforts to oppose Christian values.

Finally, we must never tire of speaking the truth in love.  Even when we are insulted, shouted down, and/or caricatured. Even when people lay conversation-stopping rhetorical traps along the lines of “You’re either with the lewd Pride parade drag queens or with Matthew Shepard’s killers.” And even if it means challenging the most ridiculous claims of pro-homosexuality activists, such as that the sort of thug who would just beat another human being to death was somehow shaped by conservative Christian values.

  1. Comment by Tom Griffith on September 24, 2013 at 12:53 am

    John, first I want to say that regardless of the underlying causes, the murder of Matthew Shepard by strapping his arms to fenceposts five feet apart and leaving him in weather below freezing at night, after having beaten him, is the closest thing we will ever see in our lifetimes to a crucifixion. Thank you for acknowledging that this, in itself, is worth of condemnation.

    Very rarely is any crime about one single issue. The press will go for one single issue simply because it makes an easier story to write, and an easier story for a less-than-fully-informed reader to understand. There are lots of people who get arrested for drug offenses. There are even a lot (though fewer) people who get arrested for being gay. However, there are very few people who get arrested in a case where a crucifixion is involved. It was a crucifixion in which the victim unquestionably was gay. All three (Matthew Shepard and the two men who murdered him) could have been drunk, and it would still be a drug offense.

    Whatever the cause (and it’s always easier to second guess a decade later), we should agree that a horrible event occurred, admit that homosexuality MAY have been a factor, but killing a person in way that is very close to the way Christ was crucified is obnoxious in the extreme.

    Is that too hard a thing to do?

    Tom Griffith

  2. Comment by John Lomperis on September 24, 2013 at 11:11 am

    Tom, thanks for your comment. As I thought my article indicated, I absolutely agree that whatever role homosexuality may or may not have played in the murder, something extremely horrible indeed took place that day. Matthew Shepard was created no less in the image of God than I.

  3. Comment by Eric Lytle on September 24, 2013 at 8:59 am

    I give the gay movement credit for its skillful (but libelous) use of language. Keep call the opponents “haters” and eventually the lie is accepted as truth. They present society with an either/or – support us in every way (including “marriage”) or you’re the type of monster who approved of the killing of Matthew Shepard. The truth is, most Americans occupy the middle ground – we can tolerate gays without necessarily approving of what they do, and we can disapprove without hating. The gay side doesn’t like to give us that choice, they’ll insist that disapproval equals hate.

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