News Slant	News Slant Archive

For months after his murder, America's largest gay groups proclaimed, lobbied, and fund-raised with the corpse of Matthew Shepard as their mascot, without ever acknowledging where their pressure was likely to lead-- to two more deaths.

Sure enough, on December 28th, Wyoming prosecutor Cal Rerucha announced he was seeking the death penalty against Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, the young men charged in Shepard's killing. More than a month later, major gay groups-- from Lamdba Legal Defense to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force-- which normally like to cloak themselves in progressive garb, remained silent about capital punishment, the US's fondness for which is condemned by human rights groups around the world.

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Finally on February 10th, a consortium of gay organizations, including-- Lambda, NGLTF, Gay Men of African Descent, and Michigan's Triangle Foundation-- issued a call against the death penalty. The Human Rights Campaign was conspicuously absent, claiming no stance, while the Log Cabin Republicans bayed for blood. Seeking any less than the strongest available punishment, the gay Republicans said, would be homophobic.

The joint anti-death penalty statement sought to countered that argument. "The answer to homophobic violence is not more violence, it is education," said Richard Burns, director of New York's gay community center.

Lighting a fire under the national gay organizations was Queer Watch, which lobbied behind the scenes for the statement. "As the Shepard murder united our communities in outrage and mourning," said Queer Watch's Bill Dobbs, "we can only be divided by a bloody revenge." **