That revisionist touch

We learn via Brian Leiter that Antonin Scalia has been engaging in a kind of Holocaust revisionism:

Scalia, 68, addressed the topic of government and its relationship to religion.

In the synagogue that is home to America's oldest Jewish congregation, he noted that in Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word "God."

But, the justice asked, "Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America? I don't think so."

As Thom Hartmann points out, fascism was closely associated with religious institutions, which it cynically manipulated for its own purposes. "Separation of church and state" was not what occurred under Nazism.

As a matter of fact, Jews proved to have been much safer in America, where they had, you know, separation of church and state. Somewhat compromised, perhaps, but certainly more pronounced than what was occurring in Germany.

Indeed, you'd think Antonin Scalia would know this full well. After all, as Alan Dershowitz pointed out in Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000, Scalia's father was a member of the American Italian fascist party in the 1930s. Atrios posted a quotes from Dershowitz regarding this subject a few months ago:

He's an interesting guy. His father was a teacher at Brooklyn college when I was there. His father was a proud member of the American-Italian fascist party and got his doctorate at Casa Italiano at Columbia at a time when in order to get your doctorate you had to swear an oath to Mussolini. So he comes from an interesting background and he went to a kind of military school in New York which was a place where many children of fascists were educated.

You'd think a fellow like Scalia, in fact, would be well aware of the integration of the Italian fascist state and the Church, embodied by the Lateran Treaties:

Through the concordat, the Pope agreed to submit candidates for bishop and archbishop to the Italian government, to require bishops to swear allegiance to the Italian state before taking offices, and to forbid the clergy from taking part in politics. Italy agreed to submit its rules on marriage and divorce to make them conformable to the rules of the Roman Catholic Church, and to exempt clergy from military conscription. The treaties granted the Roman Catholic Church the status of the established church in Italy. They also gave the Roman Catholic Church substantial control over the Italian educational system.

Then again, it's very likely Scalia knows full well these facts.

After all, as another Italian observer of fascism put it: "Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak."

The same essay reminds us of an all-too-relevant reminder from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, spoken in 1938:

If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

It's starting to sound like prophecy.

Just don't kill God

I was pleased to hear that someone was making Phillip Pullman's remarkable trilogy, His Dark Materials, into a film.

Now comes the word (via Pandagon) that the film version is going to omit all references to God -- which would be like doing The Lord of the Rings without any reference to Sauron.

The reason? They don't want to offend AmeriBush's delicate religious sensibilities:

Chris Weitz, director of About a Boy, said the changes were being made after film studio New Line expressed concern.

The books tell of a battle against the church and a fight to overthrow God.

"They have expressed worry about the possibility of perceived anti-religiosity," Weitz told a His Dark Materials fans' website.

The story goes on to explain that New Line feared that staying true to the text would render the film "unviable financially." Right. Just like the books, which have sold several million copies.

Pullman, it seems, is working around this:

Weitz said he had visited Pullman, who had told him that the Authority could "represent any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual, whether it be religious, political, totalitarian, fundamentalist, communist, what have you".

He added: "I have no desire to change the nature or intentions of the villains of the piece, but they may appear in more subtle guises."

There are a number of Christian websites which attack the trilogy for their depiction of the church and of God, but Pullman has denied his books are anti-religious.

His agent told the Times newspaper that Pullman was happy with the adaptation so far.

"Of course New Line want to make money, but Mr Weitz is a wonderful director and Philip is very supportive.

"You have to recognise that it is a challenge in the climate of Bush's America."

Now, humanities have never been the strong suit of these alleged "Christians" who despise Pullman's books, so it's very likely that none of these people have ever heard of Milton and Blake. But they are the literary lions on whom Pullman bases much of his work. His cosmology in particular, and his depiction of God, is drawn directly from theirs.

But then, it doesn't take much reflection to see that, in the view of fundamentalists, such Christian mysticism is indeed a kind of blasphemy.

So how long will it be before the folks with pitchforks and torches start demanding that school libraries remove Paradise Lost and Songs of Innocence and Experience?

I suppose it helps that no one is making a movie out of them ...

Back

Sorry about dropping out for the past week. I've been in the middle of a deadline-intensive edit of Strawberry Days, a process that requires a kind of writing mindset that admits and emits no light.

I have, however, been squirreling away little tidbits that caught my attention and which I just didn't have time to write about. So I'll be popping them out over the next few days.

I should warn you all, though, that I will be able to post only lightly during the week before Christmas, since I'm traveling to Idaho and my Web access will be limited.

Eliminationist watch

I have heard a lot of people say that, after the 2004 election, "gays are the new Jews." That struck me as a bit of hyperbole at first.

But maybe not:

...A pro-family activist from Virginia says voters who put Republicans in office should demand that politicians not employ key personnel who don't hold the conservative views that the party promotes. That activist says the Capitol Hill office of Virginia Senator George Allen is a good example. Senator Allen is head of the Republican Senatorial Committee and was a key figure in the GOP's big victories in November. But Joe Glover, president of the Virginia-based Family Policy Network, says something is very wrong. Glover says homosexual publications have outed at least six members of the senator's office as homosexuals. He says one homosexual activist even went so far as to say Allen had the "gayest office on Capitol Hill." Pro-family conservatives, he says, need to make sure Senator Allen hears their voices. "If someone is going to run the day-to-day operations for the Republican apparatus to elect U.S. senators across the country, then dog-gone-it, it better not be somebody who practices a lifestyle that is diametrically opposed to the evangelical Christian base that delivered George W. Bush and the Republicans in the Senate the victory they saw in November," he says. Glover says Allen's executive director recently resigned because he was outed as a homosexual.

Soon enough, it will be illegal for anyone to employ homosexuals. The people have spoken, after all. And definitely, no more man dates.

[Via Salon's Right Hook.]

A liberal war on terror

Peter Beinart's recent piece in The New Republic raises a reasonable problem: Why haven't liberals gotten behind the war on terror, given that most terrorists' political and religious beliefs are diametrically opposed to progressive values?

Good question. And the answer is contained within it, to wit: Liberals have not supported the current war on terror precisely because it does not confront the real nature of the terrorist threat.

Liberals, I believe, would enthusiastically support a "war on terror" that recognized its broad nature, its root sources in radical fundamentalism, and its asymmetrical shape, and responded appropriately. Unfortunately, the DLC-style leadership we've been getting from atop the Democratic party, cheered on by folks like Beinart, has been too timid to articulate that kind of vision.

In the meantime, it should not surprise anyone that liberals are unenthusiastic about the Bush administration's substitute: warmed-over Cold War strategies combined with a megalomaniacal vision of American global hegemony. Moreover, its "war on terror," as I've argued frequently, is manifestly a political public-relations campaign that does not take any serious steps at actually confronting terrorism. We know this isn't a real war on terror because we still haven't caught either Osama bin Laden or the anthrax killer -- and don't show any signs of doing so soon. We know this administration isn't serious about terrorism precisely because we are now spending the bulk of our national energy fighting a war in Iraq that made the likelihood of future terrorist attacks exponentially greater.

Beinart starts out reasonably enough:

On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

Note, however, the way that Beinart describes the "war on terror" -- that is, as "the struggle against Al Qaeda" and "totalitarian Islam". Nowhere is there a mention, in his discussion of terrorism, of the anthrax killer or Oklahoma City. Nowhere does he evince any awareness that right-wing domestic extremists pose a similarly potent threat to American lives and the national well-being, having committed the second-most lethal terrorist attack on American soil and by far the largest number of terrorist acts within our borders. This blind spot pervades Beinart's essay, but it is only part of what is wrong with it.

Indeed, Beinart veers off into the ditch in short order by getting to the heart of his essay: identifying liberals' antiwar faction as the source of their problem, and urging the marginalization of this bloc.

The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

This is a peculiar formula. Of course, if the Democrats have any grassroots strength now, it is associated with the MoveOn and Howard Dean factions (and mentioning Michael Moore is just silly, since he is a nonentity organizationally speaking). How exactly does he intend to transform the party at its grassroots by excising the people who are its grassroots? If we jettison these folks, as he's suggesting, who do we replace them with? This sounds like a classic formula for self-evisceration.

More to the point, why exactly should we drive out the faction that proved, in fact, to be right about the Iraq war? Perhaps so people like Beinart won't have to be constantly reminded reminded just how wrong they were?

MoveOn.org has never indicated anything but support for combating terrorism, and particularly for hunting down bin Laden. What the grassroots antiwar factions objected to was a willy-nilly invasion of another country without adequate assessment in the case of Afghanistan, and in the case of Iraq, the unwarranted invasion of another country, one only marginally associated with terrorism and unconnected to 9/11, under false pretenses and without a well-planned exit strategy. And you know what? They were right in most cases.

Very few mainstream progressives opposed the Afghanistan invasion on principle; many questioned its necessity and its planning and execution, questions that remain legitimate in light of the outcome there, with bin Laden and Al Qaeda still at large and the Taliban still a political force. But generally speaking, liberal opposition was very muted and generally limited to the factions that oppose war in any form.

Iraq, however, was a wholly different matter. Many mainstream liberals immediately questioned the rationale for invading Iraq (as well as some mainstream conservatives conservatives who made similar cases) -- and were pooh-poohed by the New Republic crew as a bunch of peaceniks. Then as now, the essence of their attacks on the antiwar factions boiled down to image over substance.

I had some specific experience in this area. I was one of the first journalists to ask whether Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and based much of my early reportage on interviews with people like James Woolsey and Laurie Mylroie, who it turned out were also the people directly influencing the White House as well. But the more time I spent on the matter, the more clear it became that the case connecting Saddam to 9/11 was utterly ephemeral, as I explained in one of my first posts at this blog. Even later, it was proven beyond a doubt that Mylroie had been selling everyone a bill of goods.

As the Bush administration had made it clear it intended to invade Iraq, it seemed simultaneously clear that it simply had failed to make any kind of valid case for doing so. And many of us said so.

There were five major substantive objections to the invasion of Iraq:

-- Its rationale was predicated on questionable assertions about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

-- It seemed similarly predicated on an assumption that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

-- There seemed to be little or no planning for the post-invasion environment, particularly an extended occupation.

-- It would destabilize Iraq, creating an environment ripe for inviting fresh terrorist activity.

-- And most of all, as I pointed out at the time, it would seriously dilute our ability to actually fight the war on terror.

Looking back, all five of these objections were not only well grounded, they proved prophetic. All five are now the essence of what has gone wrong with the invasion.

But those of us looking for liberals to lead the charge in giving voice to these objections found no one -- particularly not the TNR and DLC crowds -- to provide that leadership. So they allied themselves, naturally, with the antiwar progressives who were already geared up in opposition.

As Atrios suggests, the blame lies not with grassroots organizers like MoveOn and Howard Dean, but the Democratic Party leadership. At a time when thoughtful liberals needed someone from the top to step up and oppose the war, they were ignored instead by the John Kerrys and Hillary Clintons who opted to give Bush the green light.

Things haven't gotten any better since. None of the Democratic candidates were able to articulate a cogent approach to the war on terror, particularly not John Kerry. Part of the problem is that the mainstream, pro-defense Democrats have proven to be as hidebound in their thinking as the antiwar folks like Moore and MoveOn, only on opposite sides of the aisle. Neither side seems ready to step outside the box.

The key to winning any war, whether amorphous, cold, or real, is contingent on one's ability to objectively assess the facts on the ground. When your assessments are constantly twisted by politics, ideology, and public relations, you lose that ability. The Bush "war on terror" is doomed to fail because it has made itself ideologically incapable of recognizing the real nature of terrorism itself.

The result has been a "war on terror" that is recognizably a sham. Kevin Drum has noticed some of this as well:

-- The Republican party has made it as clear as it possibly can that the war on terror is not vital enough to require either bipartisan support or the support of the rest of the world. They've treated it more like a garden variety electoral wedge issue than a world historical struggle.

-- Things like Tom Ridge's sales pitch for duct tape, along with the transparently political color coded terror levels, have made the war on terror fodder for late night TV. It's entirely predictable that anyone who was even a bit skeptical in 2002 now views the war as trivial at best, and comical or Machiavellian at worst.

It's arguable that liberals are foolish to let all this prevent them from seeing the totalitarian danger for what it is. But it's hardly surprising. The fact is that compared to fascism and communism, Islamic totalitarianism seems like pretty thin beer to many. It's not fundamentally expansionist, and its power to kill people isn't even remotely in the same league.

Bottom line: I think the majority of liberals could probably be persuaded to take a harder line on the war on terror -- although it's worth emphasizing that the liberal response is always going to be different from the conservative one, just as containment was a different response to the Cold War than outright war. But first someone has to make a compelling case that the danger is truly overwhelming. So far, no one on the left has really done that.

I don't think, though, that the threat needs to be overwhelming for it to be compelling. There are many reasons liberals should be in the front lines fighting the war on terrorism, a few of which Beinart points out, and some of which he misses. The problem is that the war we're currently fighting has little or nothing to do with terrorism, other than making it more likely.

The liberal response can't just be different: It has to be effective. It has be based on a rational consideration of the facts on the ground and must jettison ideological blinkers of all kinds. Most of all, it has to take a realistic measure of the actual nature of terrorism.

The first recognition has to be that terrorism is an asymmetrical threat: that is, unlike conflicts between nations, it involves an attack by a small entity (perhaps only a handful of people) against a large nation. Likewise, the danger terrorist acts represent are outsized compared to the scale of the organization undertaking them.

The essence of terrorism is undermining citizens' sense of security, their belief that their government is capable of protecting them adequately. As P. Terrence Hopmann explains:

Asymmetrical conflict succeeds by playing on such fears. Terrorism strikes at innocent civilians going about their daily lives. It also flourishes on flexibility and uncertainty. The terrorist has the advantage of choosing the time, place, and means of attack. The targets are mostly symbolic, chosen for maximum psychological impact. The goal is to disrupt the lives of all. In fact, the capacity to instill in ordinary people the fear that they can be attacked anytime and anywhere, while doing just about anything, is the most important weapon terrorists have.

It's important to remember that such threats cannot be dealt with by ordinary military means. Of course, those who commit such horrendous acts of terrorism as those carried out on September 11 must be found and brought to justice, one way or another. But the classic riposte of retaliation against the homeland of the aggressor may not only be meaningless, it may be dangerous, creating additional terrorists who are even more dedicated and self-sacrificing than those who went before. And as long as the terrorists continue to find fertile soil on which to operate anywhere in the world, they will be able to survive, to react flexibly to circumvent whatever security measures the United States and other countries put in place, and to find new means to deliver terror at times and places of their own choosing.

The Bush administration has dealt with terrorism in a classic symmetrical response, sending the military out into action against other nations. But terrorism is not state-based; it floats about the fringes of whatever places it finds a foothold under the various circumstances that inspire it. This is pretty much everywhere, including the United States.

Any serious war on terrorism will take domestic terrorists just as seriously as it does those from abroad. One need search no further than the anthrax attacks for an example of how terrorist attacks, both internation and domestic in origin, can piggyback off each other in attaining their goals. Differentiating them in terms of threat assessment only leaves us vulnerable to attack from the faction that is deemed the lesser.

This in turn entails a serious assessment of domestic-terror threats. The Bush administration has deemed eco-terrorism the most significant source of domestic terror -- a clear skewing of priorities, considering that eco-terrorists have to date only committed property crimes, while fundamentalist right-wing terrorists have a long and bloody history of killing people, and have shown little inclination to stop this. (At the same time, mainstream liberals need to take eco-terrorists seriously, which they often do not; the fact remains that not only are these people committing acts of violence, their attacks on scientific research are every bit as regressive as any Bible-thumper's attempts to impose creationism on local schools).

Short of simply trying to rub out anyone who might be deemed a terrorist -- the Bush Doctrine approach -- it's clear that any effective war on terrorism has to be predicated around enhancing our intelligence-gathering capacities. The central component of this has entail our capacity to infiltrate radical groups with the potential to commit terrorist acts. As we saw in the 1995-2000 period, this approach was phenomenally successful in short-circuiting a large number of domestic terrorist attacks.

Some preventative measures are also fairly obvious from the asymmetrical nature of the threat. One of these is a real tightening of our borders and particularly our ports, which remain vulnerable to a scenario under which terrorists place bombs in an uninspected container.

Next, there has to be an understanding of what is fueling terrorism. The Center for Proliferation Studies describes the identifying features of modern terrorists, particularly when it comes to wielding chemical and biological weapons:

The six characteristics we identified are: charismatic leadership, no external constituency, apocalyptic ideology, loner or splinter group, a sense of paranoia and grandiosity, and defense aggression. Of these six characteristics, the two that were present in all of the cases of actual CBW use warrant thorough examination: no outside constituency and a sense of paranoia and grandiosity.

Over the past 15 years and more, the great generator of terrorist acts around the world has been the phenomenon that embodies the commingling of all these traits: radical religious fundamentalism. The forms this takes range from the right-wing domestic terrorists of the Patriot movement to the Al Qaeda fanatics who struck on 9/11. (A variant on this is Tim McVeigh, who was closer to a neo-Nazi than a fundamentalist; but he clearly shared their apocalyptic worldview and urge to defend "traditional" values.) All of them have one key trait in common: an abiding hatred of modernity and progressive values.

So progressives indeed have a clear and compelling interest in opposing terrorism. Central to their support, indeed, is confronting the core of what is driving the phenomenon. The left naturally will readily confront radical fundamentalism, as long as it's made clear that's what we're dealing with.

What's been missing, however, is either a recognition or at least acknowledgement of this aspect of the problem from the right and its toadies on the left. Since American fundamentalism is primarily associated with the mainstream right, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the Bush administration has assiduously refused to frame the modern terrorist threat (including, notably, Al Qaeda) as primarily a right-wing phenomenon -- even though that is clearly what it is. And the ever-timid "moderate" leadership of the Democratic Party has been too polite to point it out.

Beinart, indeed, attacks the antiwar left as "the softs" who, like their counterparts of the early 1950s, tended to see the only potential threat to America as emanating from the right, blinding itself to communism. What he ignores, though, is the fact that Al Qaeda-style terrorism is in fact a radical right-wing movement. This is part of the reason why the "Islamofascism" label, while not entirely accurate in terms of what constitutes fascism, is nonetheless substantially close to the truth.

Beinart and Drum are right in pointing out that progressives have done a poor job of articulating a vision for a progressive war on terrorism. But blaming antiwar liberals is a convenient way of scapegoating the bloc that so far has been right in this whole debacle. The problem has been an utter lack of vision from the current Democratic leadership, and progressive leadership generally, including folks like Beinart, Drum, and the TNR. They have bought too readily into the right-wing paradigm of what a war on terror should be about.

They've also bought into the right-wing paradigm of what's wrong with liberalism: namely, the antiwar left. This is self-serving not just for those on the right but for the liberal hawks who now seem too chagrined to acknowledge that they were wrong and -- gulp -- Michael Moore was right.

Kevin Drum put the hypocrisy inherent in this position on display the other day responding to Atrios:

And evading the issue by constantly implying that no one who supported the Iraq war is morally qualified to criticize those who opposed it doesn't really help matters.

This has it exactly backwards. No one is saying the Beinarts and Drums of the world don't have anything to contribute. What Beinart is explicitly saying is the reverse: That the Michael Moores and MoveOn folks have no value to the party.

So really, what doesn't help matters is evading the issue by implying the people who opposed the Iraq war -- that is, the people who were right -- not only are unqualified to contribute, but must be evicted from the ranks of liberalism. That, in fact, is the opposite of an honest conversation.

Matthew Shepard and hate crimes

I've been a little slow responding to the recent revisionism by ABC News' 20/20 regarding the murder of Matthew Shepard -- so far, Eric Muller, Atrios, and David Ehrenstein have all weighed in admirably.

Certainly there is serious reason to call into question ABC News' ethics. As John Wierick points out, its participation in this project was a violation of the agreement between Aaron McKinney (one of the two men who killed Shepard, and whose interviews form the basis for this report) and the Shepard family, who agreed not to pursue the death penalty.

And, as Muller has pointed out, there was nothing new uncovered in this report. It was already well established that McKinney and Russell Henderson were amped by drugs and looking for someone to rob.

Indeed, the entire thrust of ABC's "revelations" -- that it was all a drug binge, not a hate crime -- reveals how little the reporters who worked on this understand not just bias crimes but criminal law generally. One factor, such as drug use, does not cancel out another, such as a bias motive. They often in fact appear together and work in conjunction.

There's an even more significant problem with the 20/20 report, however: It is signficantly factually flawed.

The flaw is not so much in what it reports, but what it intentionally omits.

Consider, for instance, the ABC account of how Shepard's murder came to be considered a hate crime:

Just hours after Shepard's battered body was discovered, and before anyone knew who had beaten him, Shepard's friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout began spreading the word that Shepard was openly gay and that they were concerned the attack may have been a gay-bashing.

Boulden told "20/20" in an interview shortly after the attack in 1998, "I know in the core of my heart it happened because he revealed he was gay. And it's chilling. They targeted him because he was gay."

Prosecutor Rerucha recalls that Shepard's friends also contacted his office. Rerucha told "20/20," "They were calling the County Attorney's office, they were calling the media and indicating Matthew Shepard is gay and we don't want the fact that he is gay to go unnoticed."

Helping fuel the gay hate crime theory were statements made to police and the media by Kristen Price, McKinney's girlfriend. (Price was charged with felony accessory after-the-fact to first-degree murder. She later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of misdemeanor interference with police officers.)

Price now says that at the time of the crime she thought things would go easier for McKinney if his violence were seen as a panic reaction to an unwanted gay sexual advance.

But today, Price tells Vargas the initial statements she made were not true and tells Vargas that McKinney's motive was money and drugs. "I don't think it was a hate crime at all. I never did," she said.

Former Laramie Police Detective Ben Fritzen, one of the lead investigators in the case, also believed robbery was the primary motive. "Matthew Shepard's sexual preference or sexual orientation certainly wasn't the motive in the homicide," he said.

"If it wasn't Shepard, they would have found another easy target. What it came down to really is drugs and money and two punks that were out looking for it," Fritzen said.

As I've mentioned, this account is absurd on its face. All bias crimes in fact are acts (including, say, robbery) which are already crimes and which are committed with a bias motive.

But more importantly, it omits other central pieces of evidence which established clearly that it was no mere "theory" that McKinney had committed a gay hate crime.

I discussed the Shepard case in Chapter 9 of Death on the Fourth of July. Here are the facts I laid out there:

Shepard, a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Wyoming, was openly gay, and was somewhat flamboyant about it, at least by Laramie standards. Hanging out in a local bar the night of October 6, he managed at least to attract the attention of two local rednecks, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who were looking for someone to rob, and picked Shepard because he was gay. They told Shepard they too were gay and offered to give him a ride home in their pickup truck, and Shepard accepted.

McKinney later gave multiple, conflicting accounts of what happened that night. He told a police detective that Shepard had not made any advances toward him at the bar, but that Shepard put his hand on McKinney's leg inside the pickup, at which point McKinney told him: "Guess what? We're not gay. You're gonna get jacked." From prison, he wrote to a friend that he started beating Shepard in the car because of an even more naked advance:

"When we got out to where he was living, I got ready to draw down on his ass, and all of the sudden he said he was gay and wanted a piece of me. While he was 'comming out of the closet' he grabbed my nuts and licked my ear!! Being a verry drunk homofobic [sic] I flipped out and began to pistol whip the fag with my gun, ready at hand."

Later, at trial, McKinney attempted to claim that Shepard had in fact made an advance on him at the bar, whispering a sexual proposition into his ear and then licking his lips suggestively. The humiliation he felt at the advance, he claimed, spurred a violent rage that made him want to beat Shepard. (The judge, however, struck down this testimony.)

Whatever the sequence of events and motivations, the three men wound up southeast of town in a remote area near the Sherman Hills subdivision. McKinney and Henderson robbed Shepard and tied him up with rope. As Shepard begged for his life, McKinney proceeded to beat him severely, ultimately pulling out a gun and pistol-whipping him over the head. They left him to die, in the freezing night air, leaned up against a wooden rail fence.

It was in that pose that two mountain bikers found him, some twelve hours later, at first thinking he was a "scarecrow" someone had propped up on the fence. (Their original description created a popular image of Shepard strung up on the fence like a crucified martyr, though in fact his arms were tied behind him and he was seated on the ground.) Though he probably should have either bled to death or succumbed to hypothermia, he was barely alive. He lingered for another five days at the Laramie hospital before he finally died of his injuries.

As you can see, the 20/20 report substantially omits evidence that was produced at the time establishing McKinney's bias motivation. And indeed, McKinney not only did not deny the existence of this bias, he positively embraced it at trial by attempting a "gay panic" defense.

Incidentally, Fritzen was not the lead investigator in the case. That honor went to a fellow named Rob DeBree. And DeBree has significantly repudiated the "crystal meth" theory.

Here's what he told Beth Loffreda, author of Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of an Anti-Gay Murder, regarding the attempt by McKinney's defense team to paint him as being under the influence of crystal meth:

Rob DeBree too was unimpressed by the argument -- he told me quite forcefully that the murder didn't look like any meth crime he knew.

In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that for once he had told the truth. Obviously it's unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There's no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in the search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been up to two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." ...

There are other serious problems with the report. It omits the fact that McKinney has now changed his story at least three times, and probably more, raising serious doubts about his credibility anyway. It also omits the fact that other detectives in the case testified at trial that the victim was selected for violence, and was beaten especially severely, because he was gay. Their testimony was based on their actual conversations with McKinney and Henderson.

And the piece's later attempts to defend McKinney by tainting Shepard's reputation (claiming he also was a crystal-meth user) should be beneath even the lowliest cops-and-courts reporter, let alone a national news organization. Even if true, whatever Shepard's habits, he did not deserve to die for them.

This story has a distinct Foxcist stench -- which means that it is not interested in the truth, it's propaganda for an agenda. An agenda which is, of course, left unstated during the program, but is implicit in the pattern of omitted evidence and facts.

For the explicit version, JoAnn Wypijewski laid it all out for us in an L.A. Times op-ed:

So was Shepard's murder a hate crime or was it something else? "20/20" comes down on the side of something else, amplifying the meth connection, which I first reported in Harper's in 1999, and exploring Laramie's drug subculture, through which Shepard seems to have become acquainted with McKinney. Some gay advocates of hate crime laws have already blasted the network for raising the question. Michael Adams of Lambda Legal Defense says ABC is trying to "de-gay the murder."

Scrapping over the nature of Shepard's victimhood is the wrong debate. Whatever his killer's degree of homophobia, Shepard is dead. Powerless to restore him, society is obligated to ask what is owed to the living -- to gay people, who have suffered ages of abuse, and also criminal defendants. Tinkering with criminal law is a backward step in countering the deep cultural realities of homophobia, racism, sexism. Prosecuting murder as a hate crime only lets the rest of us think we're off the hook, while it tramples on justice.

You see, the problem isn't people who like to seek out gays for special violence and then visit it upon them. It's the laws that are intended to punish these people -- that's the problem.

Right.

Hate-crime laws, as I explain in my text, are indeed relatively new insofar as they are now on the books. But attempts to pass laws like them date back to the anti-lynching laws of the 1920s and '30s.

And the reality is that they represent the kind of law that should have been on the books long ago, because they play a substantial role in protecting individual freedoms for all Americans. This isn't tinkering: It's righting an omission.

Keep in mind that hate crimes historically represent an unofficial attempt at oppressing minorities -- in the case of lynching, it in fact was a cornerstone of the Jim Crow system of racial oppression. They are clearly special "message" crimes whose primary intent is to deprive whole groups of Americans of their right to partake of democracy, and they clearly create substantially more harm across all sectors of society than ordinary crimes. As such, they deserve harsher punishment.

Underlying Wypijewski's argument is one of the persistent myths about hate crimes, namely, that the laws on the books now should be adequate to punish them. I address this in Chapter 11:

This myth arises from one of the realities about hate-crime laws: they only exist on the books as laws dealing with a special category of crimes with which we already are well familiar (murder, assault, threatening, intimidation, vandalism, etc.) -- that is, a hate crime always has a well-established "parallel" crime underlying it, upon which is added the layer of motivation by bias (racial, ethnic, etc.). Thus, opponents argue, the laws for those parallel crimes should be adequate for punishing perpetrators. (If this argument sounds familiar, it is; the identical points were raised in the 1920s and '30s by opponents of the anti-lynching legislation that was the NAACP's raison d'etre during its early years.)

Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes? Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.

The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays—to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community. Hate-crime laws resemble anti-terrorism laws in this respect as well—adding, in effect, punishment because more than just the immediate victim is targeted and affected, and thus greater harm is inflicted.

But this is only one aspect of the greater harm inflicted by hate crimes than their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are substantial.

-- The violence quotient. Hate crimes are much likelier to be violent than other crimes, on two levels. First, bias crimes involve physical assaults at a significantly higher rate. A study based in Boston found that out of all hate crimes reported to police, fully half of them were assaults—well above the average of 7 percent of all crimes generally. Second, serious physical harm is far more likely to be inflicted on hate-crime victims; the same study found that while physical injury occurred in only about 30 percent of all assault cases nationally, they were present in almost three-quarters of bias-crime cases.

The personal trauma levels. There is also a singularly greater level of harm from bias crimes' impact on the emotional and psychological well-being of the victim. As Frederick Lawrence observes in his Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes and American Law:

The victim of a bias crime is not attacked for a random reason—as the person injured during a shooting spree in a public place—nor is he attacked for an impersonal reason, as is the victim of a mugging for money. He is attacked for a specific, personal reason: his race [or religion, or sexual preference]. Moreover, the bias crime victim cannot reasonably minimize the risk of future attacks because he is unable to change the characteristics that made him a victim.

A bias crime thus attacks the victim not only physically but at the very core of his identity. It is an attack from which there is no escape. It is one thing to avoid the park at night because it is not safe. It is quite another to avoid certain neighborhoods because of one's race. This heightened sense of vulnerability caused by bias crimes is beyond that normally found in crime victims. Bias-crime victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation.

-- Harm to the community: All crimes, of course, harm the broader community in which they occur. They create fear and uncertainty about citizens' personal security, and add to a climate of civil distrust. However, bias crimes create, in addition to these harms, a further level of injury to a community in a democratic society: They violate the underlying egalitarian principles of equality for all citizens, and they profoundly disturb whatever harmony may exist in a modern, heterogeneous society. Hate crimes may not be as profound an offense in a non-democratic society, but they represent a gross violation of basic American legal and cultural institutions.

This harm is especially evident in small rural towns -- such as Ocean Shores, or Jasper, or Laramie, or Hayden Lake -- which are often dependent to some extent on tourist dollars, and whose names can be permanently blackened by a hate crime committed in the back yards. Not only can the economic effect be widespread, the community itself must grapple for years with questions about its basic integrity; the cloud may lighten, but it never completely goes away. Small towns are especially vulnerable because they rarely have a law-enforcement department capable of adequately handling such crimes, which can create conditions in which a series of incidents can escalate into full-blown violence, as they did in Ocean Shores.

Wypijewski also makes a significant error in suggesting that, under proposed federal laws, Shepard's murder would have been prosecuted as a hate crime. Again, she betrays a gross misunderstanding of the phenomenon.

The reality is that bias-crime statutes (which are usually sentence-enhancement laws) are typically not very helpful when it comes to murder cases, especially those involving horrific killings like Shepard's or James Byrd's in Texas. The perpetrators are likely to face the death penalty in an any event -- and how can you enhance that sentence? At best, a prosecutor may be able to push his case to a death-penalty threshold because of hate-crime circumstances surrounding a given case.

But only about 2-3 percent of all hate crimes involve murder. The vast majority of them involve assaults and lesser violent crimes, property crimes, threats and intimidation. And within that spectrum, there is clearly not only room for, but a need for, sentence enhancement.

In this respect, Matthew Shepard was a poor representative of the typical hate-crime victim. Most victims of violent gay bashing survive -- but they are rarely left unscarred, both without and within. And Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were punished about as harshly as they would have been had there been a law on Wyoming's books or in the federal statutes. Of course, they can thank the Shepard family -- upon whom Aaron McKinney and ABC News have just spat -- for that.

Indeed, the prominence of Shepard's case was more a matter of timing, appearing at a time when cases like his were coming before the national consciousness. As I explain in Death on the Fourth of July:

Certainly, there had been any number of anti-gay hate crimes committed over the preceding year that warranted the public's attention. The previous January in Springfield, Illinois, three men had kidnapped, robbed and assaulted a visiting man from Washington, D.C., because they believed (incorrectly) that he was gay. In Honolulu that August, a group of teenagers beat a heterosexual man to death at a public shower because they thought he was gay. In September in Fresno, California, a transgender woman named Chanel Chandler was stabbed to death with a broken beer bottle, and her apartment set on fire in an attempt to hide the body; two young men whose fingerprints showed up were questioned by police, but the prosecutor dropped charges when the pair refused to waive their right to a speedy trial and his evidence, including DNA work, had not arrived in time. Charges were never re-filed.

For that matter, a steady drumbeat of news about vicious crimes directed against gays and lesbians had been getting increasing play in the nation's headlines for the previous decade. The sport of "gay bashing," in which groups of young men from rural or suburban areas would invade urban gay districts and commit brutal assaults, often with baseball bats, became something of a legend during the early 1990s; though the incidents were real enough, many of them went unreported because of gay men's reluctance to report the beatings to police.

By 1998, even though only twenty-one states had hate-crimes laws against gays, lesbians, or bisexuals even on the books (Wyoming was one of seven states with no hate-crimes law at all), such crimes made up 11.6 percent of all hate crimes reported to the FBI, the third-highest such category. Since twenty-nine states were out of the picture, and many of the crimes went unreported anyway, the numbers could at best only hint at the levels of gay-bashing that were happening in reality. Indeed, one study, conducted in 1991, estimated that better than 50 percent of all gays and lesbians in America had been subjected to physical attacks motivated by their homosexuality. As early as 1987, a Department of Justice report had observed that "homosexuals are probably the most frequent victims of hate crimes." The same report noted: "Many victims of bias crimes do not report incidents because they distrust the police, feel that the incident is too minor or that the police cannot do anything about it, have a language barrier, fear retaliation by the offender or—in the case of gays and lesbians—fear public exposure."

What really stood out about these crimes was their viciousness. These weren't merely assaults: they entailed torture, mutilation, castration, sexual assault, and extremely severe beatings, and they were very likely to end in death. Gay-related homicides are notable for the "overkill" that pervades the attacks; a 1995 study found that in more than 60 percent of the homicides, there was evidence of "rage/hate-fueled extraordinary violence" that included "dismemberment, bodily and genital mutilation, use of multiple weapons, repeated blows from a blunt object, or numerous stab wounds."

In this respect, Matt Shepard was an ideal symbol of the phenomenon of gay-bashing hate crimes. The viciousness of the attack against him was fueled not merely by crystal methamphetamine but by homophobic rage. ABC News' reporters seemed to believe the two factors were mutually exclusive, rather than complementary.

That omission appears to be quite intentional. The underlying agenda appears to be to undermine public support for hate-crime laws.

Why? After all, Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert killed a Senate-approved federal hate-crime law recently, and paid no political price for it whatsoever. With an even more conservative Senate running the show, there is now almost zero prospect of a federal hate-crime law passing anytime soon.

One has to wonder if a larger rollback is in the works. So much for "compassionate" conservatism.