A month ago, in a California town just north of L.A., a fifteen-year old boy was sitting in a school computer lab when a classmate shot him in the head. The boy, Lawrence King, died a few days later. The classmate who shot him did it because King was gay.

I hope you are disgusted. I hope you are wondering what you can do so it won’t happen again.

Ten years ago, I stood at a vigil for Matthew Shepard asking myself the same questions. The young men who murdered Matthew Shepard said that he had come on to them and that they had panicked. So they tortured him and left him tied to a Wyoming fencepost on a cold fall night three days after my eighteenth birthday.

Lawrence’s murderer, Brandon McInerney, or lawyers on the boy’s behalf, may argue a similar gay panic defense. Shepard’s murder brought national attention to hate crimes, and now Lawrence’s fourteen-year old murderer may be punished under the new law. I wonder if Brandon wasn’t wondering about being gay himself, and rather than coming out like Matthew and Brandon had, his coping mechanism was this violence.

How can a hate crimes conviction—or even hate crimes legislation—prevent murders like these? Sending men and boys who have brutally murdered classmates, acquaintances, and maybe even lovers or sex partners, through our prison system does not address the (self-)hate that drives these crimes in the first place.

Let's not forget: queers are murdered in Philadelphia, too.

Bumped back up with special pride, today. -Dan

UPDATE:
Demonstration Outside of Tom Knox's Office Tomorrow
1717 Arch Street, Suite 3240
12:00 Noon, Thursday, April 12, 2007
Meet at LOVE Park at 11:45 to walk Over to KNOX for Philly Headquarters.

Unfortunately, given Mr. Knox’s non appearance at LGBT
related mayoral events and/or LGBT related community events, we, the
“Answers Now Ad-Hoc Coalition!” a coalition of concerned LGBT Voters
have little real understanding on his views of the LGBT community.

I just read the group interview in the PGN with the mayoral candidates, and I think that Tom “TV” Knox’s answers are too priceless not to make fun of. They used the questions from Liberty City’s endorsement questionnaire, a group I’m a member of, by the way.