Passage of Matthew Shepard Act remains priority

Julie Hutchinson, Special to the Rocky

Published October 3, 2008 at 7:37 p.m.
Updated October 3, 2008 at 7:37 p.m.

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Photo by Courtesty of Mathew Shepard Foundation

Matthew Shepard

Gay-rights advocates say Matthew Shepard's death gave the movement a human face and broadened its base of support.

But activists have yet to achieve a major objective: a federal hate-crimes bill named after Shepard, who was brutally murdered 10 years ago.

"It coalesced people to fight for hate-crimes legislation, but it hasn't really paid off," said Jon Barrett, editor-in-chief of The Advocate, a biweekly magazine based in Los Angeles that focuses on gay issues.

Barrett said activists remain hopeful federal legislation expanding hate-crimes laws to include sexual orientation will become law. President Bush vetoed such a bill, titled the Matthew Shepard Act, last year.

"What Matthew did do was put a face on these things," Barrett said. "Before, it was just a hate-crime bill. Now, it's the Matthew Shepard Act."

Barrett said Shepard's death helped educate mainstream media worldwide about the extent of hate crimes and other rights violations against gays.

"People began to see the kind of hatred gay people faced," Barrett added. "People didn't realize ... that to have gay relationships was illegal in many states."

Tim Sweeney is president of the Denver-based Gill Foundation, founded by software entrepreneur Tim Gill to advocate for civil rights for gays. He cautioned that despite the attention on gay rights in the last decade hate crimes based on sexual orientation reported between 1998 and 2006 held steady at about 1,200 incidents a year.

Sweeney said passage of the Matthew Shepard Act remains a priority for gay-rights advocates and for Shepard's parents.

"It would send a very strong message to the public that these actions have simply got to stop," Sweeney said.

Joe Solmonese, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, said Shepard's death and the decision by his parents to turn their grief into activism "has really unified the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community around the profoundly simple idea that we must erase hate in this country in any form."

Moises Kaufman, the 44-year-old New York playwright who authored "The Laramie Project," a stage play about the killing that has been staged at theaters across the country, returned to Laramie in mid-September to interview people for an epilogue. Kaufman also directed the film version of "The Laramie Project."

Kaufman said his recent visit left him believing attitudes about gay rights have changed markedly in the last decade among individuals.

"I talked to lots of gays in Laramie who feel the gay community has gotten stronger," Kaufman said. "And people felt there is much more awareness from the straight community about the gay community."

Nonetheless, Kaufman remains disappointed that personal change has not translated into legislative change.

"Once again, going back there, you see there is a lot of individual change but there is not yet enough political, social, legislative change," Kaufman said. "What I've always found about Laramie is how similar it is to most of the rest of the country. Not that it is different, but similar."

• October 3, 2008

  10:19 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  happymike44 writes:

  If you think you can't be murdered just for being who you are guess again.
  This poor young man was murdered for a couple of bucks and for being gay.
  He died in a horrible vicous way no person should ever die.
  Beaten and tied to a fence and beaten till you could no longer recoginize him.
  Then the so called christian right destroyed and slandered him for being a murder victim.
  That was in the same way defense attorney's blame the victim for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
  He was left tied to a fencepost and beaten till he was no longer recognisable by his mother and father.
  Do you think his family deserved to see him that as the last image to remember to the dy they die.
  I am sickened and shocked by what hatred those two boys exhibited towards this harmless young man.
  I want his parents to explain how they could raise such evil to have such total disregard for a fellow human being.
  I did not know Matthew Shepard yet he is a reminder to all of us what can happen in a minute.
  When some dirtbag decides you have no value in this world.
  Hope the two guys involved in this have a great time in prison.

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