Ritual Killings: Antigay Violence and Reasonable Justice

Abstract

The 1998 killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay, white, male college student in Wyoming, produced a surprisingly vocal and widespread demand for more powerful hate crime laws and for a tempering of the antigay rhetoric of conservative Christian churches. Nightline, the well-known national news/analysis program, produced a 1998 special television broadcast on the murder, Beyond Hate; and Naftali Bendavid, writing for the Chicago Tribune, reported that “some think the nation’s mood is more conducive than ever for penalizing hate crimes in the strongest possible way.”² The then-pending federal “hate crimes bill” that would have strengthened a 1968 federal provision criminalizing certain civil rights violations did not pass, however, and many argued that Shepard’s murder contributed to its failure. Bendavid wrote: “Some of the Kennedy bill’s supporters say privately that the killing of Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming gay student, actually hurt the bill’s chances. By focusing attention on the gay community’s fierce push for the bill, these activists say, the Wyoming incident prompted the religious right to oppose it with equal fervor.” Nonetheless, this kind of national public attention to an antigay homicide is notably different from the relative obscurity of numerous very similar crimes, one of which is the subject of this chapter.

The author wishes to thank Claire Goodman, Tommi Avicolli, Lisa De Paulo, and Alan Rubenstein for their assistance with research for this chapter. For their helpful