The two young straight men who killed Matthew Shepard robbed him, pistol whipped him, tortured him, and left him to die, tied to a fence in remote, rural Wyoming. The man who found him the next day at first thought he was a busted up scarecrow.
Last night was the 11th anniversary of that hate crime.
Did Representative Louie Gohmert (R, TX) know thatwhen he attacked the pendingMatthew Shepard Hate Crimes Bill last night on the house floor? It would be interesting to find out, especially since Gohmert was there to speak on an entirely different matter. He was there to deliver a response to the floor speeches made during a special session convened to discuss the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), convened by Rep. Patrick Murphy ( D, PA).
“Screed” is a word best not used lightly, but it’s an accurate description of Gohmert’s rambling, blatantly hateful assault on the LGBT community. He started out by labeling the potential repeal of DADT as a “perverse… social experimentation” that would hold American soldiers hostage to an aberrant sociological agenda, gave props to Alan Keyes and Chuck Colson in the same breath, and went on to bring up the hate crimes bill, envisioning that the legislation would turn America into an immoral Nazi wasteland of pedophilia, necrophilia, and bestiality.
If you’re oriented toward animals, bestiality, then,
you know, that’s not something that can be used, held against you or
any bias be held against you for that. Which means you’d have
to strike any laws against bestiality, if you’re oriented toward
corpses, toward children, you know, there are all kinds of perversions,
[…] pedophiles or necrophiliacs or what most would say is perverse sexual orientations but the trouble is, we made amendments to eliminate pedophiles from
being included in the definition. […] But people have always been
willing to give up their liberties, their freedoms in order to gain
economic stability. It happened in 1920 and 1930’s. Germany
gave up their liberties to gain economic stability and they got a
little guy with a mustache, who was the ultimate hate monger. And this is scary stuff we’re doing here when we take away what has traditionally been an important aspect of moral teaching in America
.
Gohmert’s standing on the same rhetorical ground here as Virginia Foxx was when she described the notion that Shepard’s murder was a hate crime as “a hoax” during a House session when Shepard’s mother was present. She later excused her statement as “a poor choice of words.”
But Foxx and Gohmert aren’t really sorry. They’re never sorry for these kind of statements, or the resulting (understandable) outrage and media coverage. It’s how they do business, and the stakes here are high: their right to hate as they see fit.