from The Daily Tar Heel

The daily student newspaper of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Crimes Deserve Equal Punishment
written by Craig Warner

Jesse Dirkhising was a very innocent 13-year-old boy.
    One year ago, Jesse was abducted by two homosexual lovers, strapped to a bed, gagged with his own underwear and brutally sodomized for two days.
    He gagged and bled to death as his torturers were in the next room, laughing and making themselves lunch.
    Until several weeks ago, I had never heard of Jesse Dirkhising. And a full year after he died, chances are good that you have never heard of Jesse Dirkhising either. Despite the incredible brutality of Jesse's murder, the national media did not report his death.
    We'll come back to Jesse Dirkhising. Now let's talk about another brutal murder that did receive news coverage.
    When gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was murdered, the national media response was overwhelming. This was partially because of the inhuman brutality of the crime. Shepard had been savagely beaten, tied to a stake and left alone to die in the harsh Wyoming night.
    At first, the media coverage focused appropriately on these horrifying details. But soon, Matthew's death was transformed into a political cause.
    Pundits began to insist that his murder was not just the work of two morally twisted neanderthals.
    Instead, Matthew Shepard had fallen victim to a "trend of hate and intolerance." America had become so "violently anti-gay" that the two murderers of Matthew Shepard had felt morally justified in killing him.
    Most of the furor over Matthew Shepard's death was directed into the political push for so-called "hate crimes" legislation. "Hate crimes" laws are designed to give special legal protection to homosexuals and other minorities by increasing the penalties for those who commit violence against them.
    In the shadow of Matthew Shepard, the push for hate-crime laws was emotionally appealing.
    But behind this smoke screen, the hate-crimes movement remains a legal, moral and rational deterrent to real justice and compassion in America.
    Hate-crime laws work like this: Suppose that three men each commit a premeditated murder. Alfred kills to gain entrance to a gang; Buford kills to steal a wallet; Cletus kills because his victim was homosexual.
    Under federal law, each man will be charged with first-degree murder and each might receive 30 years in prison.
    But under a hate-crime statute, Cletus will serve an additional 10 years not for his crime (which was identical to the other two crimes) but for his attitude.
    He is first sentenced to 30 years for the murder of an innocent human being. Then he serves 10 more years for the harboring of ideas deemed unacceptable by the U.S. government.
    There are a number of reasons that laws like these are inept and dangerous.
    To begin, hate-crime laws are simply not necessary.
    Matthew Shepard's murderers have both been sentenced by a Wyoming jury to spend their lives in prison without the use of any special hate-crime laws. (The death penalty is illegal in Wyoming.)
    The American justice system is not designed to punish Americans for the possession of skewed ideologies or hateful emotions. It is not illegal in America to be a racist, neo-Nazi, communist or cultist because we recognize that the governmental punishing of ideas (even evil ideas) would destroy our beloved freedoms of thought, conscience and speech.
    Hate-crime laws are specifically designed to punish bad attitudes and are dangerous because they make the government the arbiter of ideology and conscience.
    If the government can mandate 10 separate years in prison for "hateful" feelings and ideas when they're connected to physical crime, there is no logical reason that it can't also punish the simple advocacy of any ideology it randomly deems "hateful."
    But the worst part of hate-crime legislation is that by politicizing victims of crime, it stunts our sympathy for our fellow human beings and causes us to devalue innocent life. The death of Matthew Shepard was a grievous tragedy not because he happened to be gay, but because he was an innocent man whose life was unjustly stripped from him in a torturous fashion.
    When our focus shifts from the violation of life to the embrace of bad ideology, we begin to see the victims of crime as propaganda pieces and to emphasize (or ignore) certain victims of crime because of the political implications of their stories.
    Which brings us back to little Jesse Dirkhising. I heard about Jesse for the first time one year after his death in writings by conservatives about media bias. They used Jesse's story to charge (probably correctly) that the media was biased against "un-politically correct" crime victims.
    In other words: If two white men had killed a black boy, or two Christians tortured a Jewish child, the media response would've been overwhelming.
    Their point was true to the spirit of hate-crime laws it was politically motivated, divisive and more concerned with demographics than with the suffering of Jesse Dirkhising.
    The liberals had enjoyed their media moment with Matt Shepard; these conservatives wanted theirs with Jesse Dirkhising.
    Jesse Dirkhising died in pained tears, to the sound of perverted laughter. The only way I ever heard his name was as an example of media bias used by frustrated conservatives to make a political point.

NOTE: Craig Warner was a senior political science major from Latrobe Pa. at the
             time this was written.

November 9, 1999 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Peter LaBarbera (202) 637-4679 www.americansfortruth.org

Why Aren’t Media Covering Jesse Dirkhising Murder

Like that of Matthew Shepard?

WASHINGTON — The national media should devote equal resources to covering the pedophilic murder of Jesse Dirkhising –– a 13-year-old Arkansas boy sadistically tortured to death by two homosexual men –– as they did to the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard, Americans for Truth President Peter LaBarbera said today. Americans for Truth about Homosexuality has blacked out its website in memory of Jesse and is publishing Internet copies of two affidavits detailing the facts of his torturous killing. The affidavits, based on the testimony of one of the alleged assailants, 22-year-old Josh Brown,reveal that young Jesse was the victim of a “sadomasochistic” torture episode gone bad. Brown’s 38-year-old homosexual lover, Davis Don Carpenter,reportedly purchased items from a grocery store that were used to sodomize Jesse –– and stood nearby performing sexual acts on himself while Brown (whom he called “Baby”) repeatedly raped the Prairie Grove boy.

So far the only national “mainstream” media to take a deep interest in the Dirkhising case is the Washington Times, LaBarbera said. “The national media, following the lead of homosexual activists, made Matthew Shepard a household name for most Americans,” LaBarbera said. “But what about young Jesse? Is his death at the hands of two sadistic homosexuals less newsworthy than Shepard’s at the hands of two cruel heterosexuals?” LaBarbera said he suspects there is a more plausible link between “gay” advocacy institutions and Jesse’s murder than between Shepard’s murder and religious foes of homosexuality. (Many reporters and pundits repeated the absurd claim by homosexual activists that the public discourse of pro-family groups opposed to “gay” activism –– such as a series of ex-gay newspaper ads –– contributed to Shepard’s murder by creating an environment that encourages anti-homosexual violence.“All across America, gay newspapers and bars and organizations not only tolerate sadistic sex but promote it,” LaBarbera said. “In fact,on the very day of Dirkhising’s death, two leading homosexual groups, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, were manning booths at a sadistic sex fair in San Francisco that celebrated bondage, human floggings and the same ‘S&M’ techniques that led to the death of young Jesse. We call on all homosexual organizations, bookstores and newspapers to stop promoting sexual violence –– ‘consensual’ or otherwise.”