uth = By Barry Sheppard
Two bicyclists were riding in the evening in Laramie, Wyoming, when they saw what appeared to be a scarecrow tied to a fence along a ranch, its arms outstretched. On getting closer, they saw it was a human being, unconscious.
He was Matthew Shepard, a student at nearby University of Wyoming. His skull was bashed in, and his body was covered with bruises. Burn marks were on his arms. He had been lynched because he was gay.
"There is incredible symbolism about being tied to a fence", said Rebecca Isaacs, political director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "People have likened it to a scarecrow. But it sounded more like a crucifixion."
Five days after he was found, Shepard died in hospital without regaining consciousness.
His death fanned the outrage that followed word of the attack, spawning vigils and demonstrations across the country, from Texas to Vermont, from Wayne, Nebraska, to San Francisco and New York City.
The giant rainbow flag that symbolizes the gay movement was lowered to half-mast in San Francisco's Castro district.
At the University of Wyoming's homecoming parade, hundreds of students carried signs to protest against the lynching. New actions are being called across the country.
Shepard was left hanging on the fence for 18 hours after he was lured out of a bar, abducted, robbed and beaten, tied to the fence and beaten some more with a heavy pistol. Temperatures that night fell to near freezing.
Two young men have been arrested and charged with the murder. Their two girlfriends have been charged as accessories for having helped bury their boyfriends' bloody clothes.
The lynching also brought out anti-gay sickos. While Shepard lay in a coma in a hospital in nearby Fort Collins, Colorado, another homecoming parade passed by a few blocks away. This one was for Colorado State University. A fraternity float in the parade featured a scarecrow labelled in spray paint, "I'm Gay". Someone sent e-mail to two gay organisations in Fort Collins, applauding the killing and closing with the words "I hope it happens again".
In many states, there are "hate crime" laws against attacks on people because of their race or nationality. In 22 of the 50 states, the laws also include sexual orientation. In February, the Wyoming legislature voted against adding sexual orientation to its law.
One of the demands of the marchers is that the states and the federal government pass such laws. There is a bill to that effect pending in Congress, but conservatives are loath to vote for such legislation.
After the lynching, Christian conservative leader Steven Schwalm, of the Family Research Council, said that to outlaw hate crimes against gays and lesbians "would criminalise pro-family beliefs. This basically sends a message that you can't disagree with the political message of homosexual activists."
In July, full-page advertisements in newspapers across the country urged that homosexuals be "cured" of their "disease" by accepting Christ. The ads portrayed homosexuality as a choice made by individuals, and the notion that homosexuality was involuntary was dismissed.
One of those featured in these advertisements was John Paulk, who together with his wife, said they "overcame" homosexuality through religious conversion. After Matthew Shepard died, Paulk decried passage of hate crime laws to protect gays and lesbians. "We have every right to speak out against an agenda that is contrary to Biblical norms", he said.
It is tempting just to say that Schwalm and Paulk should take a course in elementary logic, since their rights of free speech have nothing to do with stopping hate crimes against gays, which they both claim to be opposed to.
But there is a deeper logic to their illogic, revealed by their claim that outlawing hate crimes would restrict their free speech. Their goal is the same as that of the whole Christian right wing — to criminalise homosexuality — and they are appealing to the deepest prejudices for support. It's these prejudices that they are trying to bring to the surface, and it is inevitable that some will take action, including murder, in furtherance of this agenda.
These ads were the most visible part of the religious right's campaign. In June 1997, a conference in Washington was addressed by the leading intellectuals of the conservative right, and dedicated to exposing homosexuality as "the disease that it is".
One speaker, a priest, described homosexuality as "a way of life that is marked by compulsion, loneliness, depression and disease", comprising a "history-limiting horizon of a sterile world view divorced from the promise and peril of successor generations".
Another speaker attacked legal abortion and contraception as the "homosexualisation of heterosexual sex", and bemoaned that non-procreative trends among white Europeans were leading to "race death".
Soon after the ads appeared, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, Trent Lott, said that while homosexuals were not guilty of a public crime, they were guilty of a private "sin".
The Christian right wants to go further, to make homosexual acts criminal, as indeed they are under many states' rarely enforced "sodomy" laws. The Weekly Standard, a magazine founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1995, calls for the "reaffirmation by states of a sodomy law".
Lott has also used his position to block the appointment of an openly gay man as ambassador to Luxembourg.
All this open gay-bashing, which reinforces anti-gay prejudice in the population, sets the stage for violence, like the lynching of Matthew Shepard.