-Caveat Lector- <<US Anti-Gay Groups See Rally Point in Ark. Murder Wednesday, November 24, 1999 By Marcus Kabel DALLAS (Reuters) - Anti-gay groups want to make the Arkansas case of two homosexual men charged with raping and murdering a 13-year-old boy a rallying point, the head of one of the groups says. Angered at what they consider excessive media coverage of the trials of the two Wyoming men convicted of killing gay student Matthew Shepard, conservative campaigners are demanding the same level of national media attention for the gruesome death in September of Jesse Dirkhising. Police said Dirkhising was bound to a mattress and repeatedly sodomized with objects before suffocating on a gag in an apartment in the northern Arkansas town of Rogers. The two homosexual men living in the apartment, Joshua Brown, 22, and Davis Carpenter, 38, were arrested and have been jailed without bond on charges of murder and rape. Prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty when the trial starts on April 10. Conservative activist Peter LaBarbera wants the Dirkhising case to be as much a rallying point for anti-gay campaigners as he says the Shepard trial was for gay rights. "The national media, following the lead of homosexual activists, made Matthew Shepard a household name for most Americans," said LaBarbera, head of a Washington, D.C., group called Americans for Truth about Homosexuality and a writer for the Family Research Council, also based in Washington. "When a homosexual is a victim, they've made that a major crime that everybody has to be educated on," LaBarbera told Reuters Tuesday. "What about when homosexuals are perpetrators?" "Either it's because there are a lot of gay reporters, or they are sympathetic to gay causes, but they paid tribute to all that the homosexual activists did," LaBarbera said of coverage of the trials of Shepard's killers, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. The two men are serving life prison sentences for the October 1998 murder of Shepard outside Laramie, Wyoming. LaBarbera and the Family Research Council have been among a number of voices, which also include the Washington Times newspaper and right-wing Louisiana politician David Duke, asking why Dirkhising's murder received little national news coverage while the Shepard murder trials were front-page. In response to the criticism, much of it by e-mail, Time Magazine's online edition Time.com and the Washington Post's ombudsman E.R. Shipp have published defenses of the different treatment of the Shepard and Dirkhising cases. "Matthew Shepard's death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news. That Jesse Dirkhising's death has not done so to date is hardly the fault of The Washington Post," Shipp wrote Nov. 14. The Washington Post and Time.com also drew a distinction between a hate crime, such as the fatal beating of the gay Shepard, and sex crimes by heterosexual and homosexual predators. That view is shared by the prosecutor who is seeking the death penalty in the Dirkhising case. "Shepard was killed because he was a homosexual. This is a sex crime, but it is not a hate crime, and I think to compare it to the Shepard case is comparing apples and oranges," Benton County prosecuting attorney Brad Butler told Reuters. He said he was aware there were groups who wanted to use the Dirkhising murder to air their views. "But I think it's wrong to use the death of a 13-year-old boy to voice them. These crimes are just the acts of two degenerates, sick people," Butler said. Arkansas media, including the 36,000-circulation Morning News of Northwest Arkansas, have also drawn a distinction. The region's largest daily gave the story front-page coverage when it broke. "The Shepard case, according to our information, was more of a hate crime. This is more of a sex crime. We have not characterized them as comparable, no," executive editor Jim Harris said. LaBarbera disputes any difference between the crimes, saying Dirkhising's murder was just as hateful as the beating of Shepard. Gay rights groups have flatly rejected any connection between their activities and the murder. "I'm not even going to dignify that accusation with a comment," a spokeswoman for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund said.>> ======================== To quote the red queen, a word means what I define it to mean. And a 'hate crime' has a higher order of meaning.that is a hate crime is what I can use to shut people up but with an ordinary murder I cant DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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