Gay martyrs

Silence of Conservative Christian Bloggers on Gay Violence 03/07/2014 (UPDATE: Considering a criticism of this post (link), having had time to think about the claims made, I have decided not to change a single word of this post in its current form. While I considered his critiques, and challenged myself as to the validity of his claims, I believe the blogger has erred on several points, concluding that I am right in my complaints here, and that he is wrong. I'm sure he disagrees.)

http://www.thefurther.net/1/post/2014/03/silence-of-conservative-christian-bloggers-on-gay-violence.html

Birch is referring to my post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/03/lets-yell-and-stamp-our-feet.html

Since he is digging in his heels, I will simply take the occasion to elaborate on one of his allegations: 

So, conservative Christians have no excuse whatsoever for refusing to stand up and against the bullying, mocking, violence, hatred and killing of gays, no matter their personal opinion of gay sex. 

i) Homosexual activists, with the complicity of the liberal media, have been very successful in popularizing a narrative of persecuted homosexuals. The Matthew Shepard case is the grandaddy of this narrative. However, it turns out that was bogus. Even homosexual outlets now admit that was bogus. And it's revealing how they respond to the corrective:

By the time he died, five days later, the question had been firmly settled, as news reporters and gay organizations like GLAAD rushed in. As JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in a brilliant 1999 piece for Harper’s Magazine, “Press crews who had never before and have not since lingered over gruesome murders of homosexuals came out in force, reporting their brush with a bigotry so poisonous it could scarcely be imagined.” 

Add to that a president who needed to expiate his sins against the LGBT community, still recoiling from the double whammy of DOMA and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Shepard’s posthumous status as gay martyr was sealed. The defendants didn’t aid themselves by claiming they’d lured Shepard into their car and then flipped out when he came on to them.   

Not everyone is interested in hearing these alternative theories. When 20/20 engaged Jimenez to work on a segment revisiting the case in 2004, GLAAD bridled at what the organization saw as an attempt to undermine the notion that anti-gay bias was a factor; Moises Kaufman, the director and co-writer of The Laramie Project, denounced it as “terrible journalism,” though the segment went on to win an award from the Writers Guild of America for best news analysis of the year. 

There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. In his book, Flagrant Conduct, Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, similarly unpicks the notorious case of Lawrence v. Texas, in which the arrest of two men for having sex in their own bedroom became a vehicle for affirming the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private. Except that the two men were not having sex, and were not even a couple. Yet this non-story, carefully edited and taken all the way to the Supreme Court, changed America. 

In different ways, the Shepard story we’ve come to embrace was just as necessary for shaping the history of gay rights as Lawrence v. Texas; it galvanized a generation of LGBT youth and stung lawmakers into action. President Obama, who signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named for Shepard and James Byrd Jr., into law on October 28, 2009, credited Judy Shepard for making him “passionate” about LGBT equality. 

There are obvious reasons why advocates of hate crime legislation must want to preserve one particular version of the Matthew Shepard story, but it was always just that — a version. Jimenez’s version is another, more studiously reported account, but he is not the first to challenge the popular mythology. Way back in 1999, Wypijewski rejected what she called the “quasi-religious characterizations of Matthew’s passion, death, and resurrection as patron saint of hate-crime legislation” in favor of what she called “wussitude” — a culture of “compulsory heterosexuality” that teaches young men how to pass as men, unfeeling, benumbed, primed to cloak any vulnerability in violence. 

http://www.advocate.com/print/print-issue/current-issue/2013/09/13/have-we-got-matthew-shepard-all-wrong

So the Shepard case was a lie, but a useful lie. And unfortunately, that's not an isolated incident. There's an epidemic of fake hate-crimes to bolster the politically expedient narrative:

http://fakehatecrimes.org/

ii) As a result, members of the LGBT community have shot their credibility. When a homosexual or transgender claims to be the victim of bullying, violence, or harassment, there's no presumption that the allegation is true. Absent independent corroboration, Christians are entitled to be skeptical. Gullibility is not a theological virtue. Allowing yourself to be manipulated by a cynical political strategy is not an intellectual virtue. 

iii) Some students have always been bullied. Straight students are bullied. Smaller students are bullied by bigger students. If a school is predominantly one race, then students of another race tend to be bullied. 

So we need to distinguish between a bullied student who happens to be homosexual and a student who's bullied because he's homosexual. Given all the special protections accorded homosexual and trans students, I suspect they are less likely to be bullied than other students who don't belong to the protected class.