Politicizing Tragedy

on October 4, 2013

“What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong? How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime?” -Aaron Hicklin writing in The Advocate, September 13, 2013

Emerging consensus among gay journalists suggesting that Matthew Shepard was in fact not killed for his sexual orientation has prompted an ongoing discussion about his brutal murder 15 years ago. Given the sensitivity of the topic, one would think that American churches would be particularly inclined to tread lightly so as to avoid appearing to politicize a tragedy. One need not have an active imagination to foresee the torrent of outrage that would have poured forth (with good cause) if the Roman Catholic, Continuing Anglican or Orthodox Churches had even appeared to appropriate the new information surrounding the circumstances of Shepard’s death as an opportunity to reiterate their traditional doctrinal positions on human sexuality.

Given the particular sensitivity of the subject in their own denomination, one would perhaps think that, of all the liberal mainline churches, The Episcopal Church (TEC) would be especially careful to avoid even the appearance of partisanship or one-sided coverage of the issue. Yet beginning tonight and lasting through this weekend to next Thursday, October 10, TEC’s Washington National Cathedral will be hosting a series of week-long events focusing on the plight of LGBT young people entitled “Honoring LGBT Youth“. These will include panel discussions, film screenings, and even a special Eucharist service with prayers focusing on LGBT issues. According to the Cathedral website, where the page appears under the heading of the Cathedral’s “Witness”,

To mark the fifteenth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death after a brutal hate crime, Washington National Cathedral hosts a weekend of events to honor and remember lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LBGT) youth who have suffered hate-inspired bullying, discrimination, and violence. We are pleased to sponsor these events with the Matthew Shepard Foundation, the Tyler Clementi Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, the Trevor Project, and PFLAG. Also made posible [sic] with generous support from Michael E. Hill and Dr. Michael T. McMahon.

While it is always fitting to remember the departed, and all who suffer in this life from “hate-inspired bullying, discrimination, and violence”, what is so disturbing about these events is the degree to which they openly mix the political with the spiritual. Rather than the Cathedral clergy offering sermons which appropriately connect the violence directed against gays and lesbians to all other condemnable hate-based violence, the week-long lineup of Cathedral events catering exclusively to discussions on gay rights and inclusion will serve to highlight LGBT people as a special class within TEC.

If you were at all skeptical as to what the Cathedral’s official stance was, a statement from the Dean on the same page (to the right of the events schedule) serves to underline his and the other clergy’s full support for the initiative. Rev. Hall even includes a straw-man attack on churches which affirm the Scriptural teachings on homosexual activity:

“For too long, LGBT people have been ostracized by or unwelcome in faith communities where the Bible has been used as a weapon,” says the Very Rev. Gary Hall, dean of the Cathedral. “Washington National Cathedral is a house of prayer where all are welcome, and where all people can experience God’s boundless love and grace.”

Speakers from the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s most powerful gay lobbying organization, as well as GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) will be present at the week’s events. While it is hardly surprising that the Episcopal National Cathedral should serve as the host for these events, it only serves to indicate the degree to which TEC shows no consideration for even the slightest attempt at remaining neutral on any of the polarizing social issues.

Ignoring the tragic circumstances of Shepard’s death would be a crime of omission, a politicization of a different sort. But there is something fundamentally distasteful to me in seeing the Cathedral which Congress has recognized as “the national house of prayer” play politics of this kind. By offering an unrestrained platform to such progressive political organizations as the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, the Cathedral clergy have essentially endorsed the viewpoints of these political groups.

Given that these groups have made numerous statements generalizing and demeaning traditional Christians as religious bigots or “fundamentalists”, I wonder if Rev. Hall has considered how his invitation to these political organizations might make traditional Christians feel decidedly unwelcome at his Cathedral, a place that is supposed to serve, as he said, as “a house of prayer where all are welcome”?

No one disputes that 21-year old student Matthew Shepard suffered an agonizing death 15 years ago when he was brutally beaten and left to die tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. No one contests the reality of his murder, the appropriate sense of horror that gripped the nation in the wake of such a gruesome death, or the fact that Shepard happened to be gay.

What many commentators, including prominent gay journalists such as Aaron Hicklin at The Advocate (arguably the nation’s leading LGBT news magazine) have been questioning with increasing focus in recent weeks is the accuracy of the narrative that emerged following Shepard’s murder that portrayed him as a kind of gay martyr, a victim of homophobic hatred who was tortured and killed for his sexuality. Without allowing much time or space to elapse between the murder and the creation of the authoritative narrative about it which sought to explain why Shepard was killed, those behind this narrative instead formed it at the height of the public reaction to Shepard’s death.

Given how the accepted story of Shepard’s death solidified prior to the necessary clarifying period of reflection, dispassion and distance during which more sober assessment of the facts of the case could have emerged, the narrative grafted onto the national consciousness in such a way that many, even now, cannot begin to imagine any alternative as the truth. Instead, many are inclined to look upon such challenges to their established understanding of why Shepard was killed as absurd, misleading, or even intrinsically bigoted.

The established narrative depicting Shepard as the victim of homophobic rage has served to support an extensive network of activist artistic endeavors, as well as the agendas of political figures, academics, pop celebrities and personal interest groups who all have a vested interest in perpetuating it. For complex reasons, the reality is that numerous people, from Shepard’s parents Dennis and Judy, who would understandably be reluctant to consider any new evidence that might cause them additional anguish or distract from their work at the Matthew Shepard Foundation (which they established in their eldest son’s memory to promote LGBT activism), to Broadway producers and high school drama teachers who perform the play The Laramie Project (a highly popular chronicle of life in Laramie in the year following Shepard’s death) prefer to keep the established narrative as it is, allowing nothing to be added to it, nor anything taken away from it.

The question of whether or not an untruth can accomplish any real good is one almost as old as recorded history itself. In this particular case, some good seems to have come out of the established narrative, insofar as collaborative efforts to address widespread bullying and alienation of those struggling with their sexual orientation have led to the creation of safe spaces for LGBT youth fleeing family violence.

Many schools and universities have instituted programs to provide LGBT-identifying teens and young people who have experienced abuse with emotional and psychological support. Outrage at Shepard’s death also spawned local, state and federal hate crimes legislation, most notably the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Obama signed into law in the presence of Matthew’s parents in October 2009.

Yet insofar as this narrative points to a version of events which did not actually take place, it is both inaccurate, as it rewrites history, and it is dishonest to Matthew’s memory to claim that he died as a victim of a hate crime. One example of the powerful grip that this prevailing narrative holds for those who would prefer not to reexamine it may be found in the description which The Laramie Project’s producers at DC’s Ford’s Theatre offer:

The Laramie Project presents a deeply complex portrait of a community’s response to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man living in Laramie, Wyoming. In a series of poignant reflections, the residents of Laramie react to the hate crime and surrounding media storm with anger, bewilderment and sorrow. The play portrays the seismic and deeply personal impact Matthew’s death had on this small town while also demonstrating the power of the human spirit to triumph over bigotry and violence. [emphasis mine]

While I recall reading and acting out The Laramie Project in my ninth grade English public speaking class as a generally educational and insightful experience, it is a strange thing to contemplate that the essential message of that play is based on a false, inaccurate account of why Shepard was murdered.

In the wake of gay journalist Stephen Jimenez’ release of The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, previously large holes in the credibility of the established narrative explaining Shepard’s death have widened to reveal glaring inconsistencies and flaws. Based on investigative interviews with over 100 people, including Shepard’s convicted killers and friends of both Shepard and his killers, Jimenez concluded that the popular narrative, which he had previously willingly accepted, was simply not the truth of what had happened.

As my colleague John Lomperis has noted in his thoughtful article here, it is The Advocate, a left-leaning LGBT magazine, not a conservative blog or news channel, that publicized Jimenez’ book to a wide audience and provocatively asked readers to consider the uncomfortable question: “What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong?” The piece is well worth reading in its entirety, since, coming from the nation’s premier gay advocacy magazine, its credibility in reporting the full details of developments around the narrative surrounding Shepard’s death can be taken as a matter of course. As Hicklin observes in his article,

. . . [N]one of what Jimenez discovered changes the fact that Shepard was horribly murdered, but it may change how we interpret his murder. . . . . . 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.

As JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in a brilliant 1999 piece for Harper’s Magazine, “Press crews who had never before and have not since lingered over gruesome murders of homosexuals came out in force, reporting their brush with a bigotry so poisonous it could scarcely be imagined.”

Add to that a president who needed to expiate his sins against the LGBT community, still recoiling from the double whammy of DOMA and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Shepard’s posthumous status as gay martyr was sealed.

Hicklin observes that Jimenez’ central focus is on the hitherto hidden role that methamphetamine drugs played in Shepard’s brutal murder. Rather than a case of hate-fueled rage, which the defendants claimed amounted to “temporary insanity”, Jimenez offers a compelling case that Shepard’s murderer Aaron McKinney was completely out of his mind for an entirely different reason when he bludgeoned the young man:

But in what circumstances does someone slam a seven-inch gun barrel into their victim’s head so violently as to crush his brain stem? That’s not just flipping out, that’s psychotic — literally psychotic, to anyone familiar with the long-term effects of methamphetamine. In court, both the prosecutor and the plaintiffs had compelling reasons to ignore this thread, but for Jimenez it is the central context for understanding not only the brutality of the crime but the milieu in which both Shepard and McKinney lived and operated.

The unquestionably tragic circumstances of Shepard’s murder stand for themselves. For anyone to die in such a way is a horrific tragedy worthy of universal outrage and disgust. Yet by having his memory and his name so attached to a cause he likely would have supported, but one for which he was not killed, Matthew Shepard becomes a victim in another way. He becomes the star cast in the role of victim in a speculative history sold to the world as the only history; he becomes the lead in a play into which he never asked to be cast, with the script rooted in the political expediency of those whose interests dictate that the world hear and read an incorrect narrative of why he was killed.

The reality of his killer’s drug-induced rage is perhaps less sensational in some respects, since it portrays Shepard as a senseless victim of senseless violence rather than as a cause célèbre and martyr, but it is no less tragic. Why does the issue of methamphetamine-induced homicidal rage deserve less horror and outrage than homophobia-induced homicidal rage?

All of this causes me to question: What are narratives, especially those surrounding tragedies, if not the agreed-upon versions of a history which we agree are the best ones to offer to posterity, and to ourselves? Our understanding of how tragedies take place far too often becomes muddled by our desire to arrange and construct how we wish they had taken place. We want to shape the narratives which best fit into our own sense of how situations ought to turn out. I will not venture an answer as to whether this is something intrinsic to human nature, or particular to Western society in the 24/7 news cycle cultural context.

In the case of Matthew Shepard, an unquestionably kindhearted boy whose too-short life was filled with much tragedy, it will be far easier for many to accept whatever preconceived notions they already have explaining why he was killed. For Shepard’s parents, who have devoted their lives since their eldest son’s murder to LGBT advocacy, I can only imagine how painful – and therefore, impossible – the thought of reconsidering everything they have believed about their son’s death in the past 15 years must be.

I critique the Episcopal National Cathedral’s decision to invite political activists to their LGBT events this week not out of a sense that it is, in any way, wrong or improper for the Cathedral staff and community to honor a murder victim whose tragic death inspired many across the country to much-needed reflection and introspection, but out of a sense of bewilderment that they should seek to mix the personal, the painful, and the prayerful with such overtly political speakers. To me, it is the very essence of bad taste to even remotely inject any kind of political statement into the remembrance of a young man’s brutal death.

I understand that the nature of what took place in Laramie 15 years ago evokes profound responses from those who feel particularly strongly about homosexuality on a moral or political level, especially those active in the progressive gay rights’ movement who saw – and many of whom will continue to see – in Shepard a martyr. It is only natural that people connect with tragedies on a personal, spiritual and psychological level. This is part of our sentient intelligence and noetic awareness as human beings. But I hope that, for the sake of our ability to be honest with ourselves as a country, we are not so attached to the stories we accept and believe so as to think them entirely beyond the possibility of later reexamination, reflection, and even, correction. For if that is the case, then it is not the truth as it is, or history as it actually was, that we seek to honor, remember and preserve, but our own ideals of what we think it ought to be.

  1. Comment by Tom on October 4, 2013 at 10:37 pm

    Such depth, insight, and balance in this article! I just wish it didnt use the political term ‘progressive’ as though it is a valid noun.

  2. Comment by Lola LB on October 5, 2013 at 6:09 am

    “Progressive” used as a noun? I counted two instances, and both are being used to describe a noun.

    1. progressive political organizations

    2. progressive gay rights’ movement

  3. Comment by Ryan Hunter on October 6, 2013 at 10:31 pm

    Yes, thanks Lola!

  4. Comment by Ryan Hunter on October 5, 2013 at 10:37 pm

    Thanks for your thoughtful comment Tom! I use the word ‘progressive’ to describe those present-day adherants of what is most commonly called progressive political liberalism or secular liberalism.

  5. Comment by Donnie on October 7, 2013 at 10:30 am

    I assume Tom meant that self-proclaimed “progressives” usually are not.

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