Where Can These Monsters Hide?

We all gasped, “this can’t happen here”
We’re all much too civilized
Where can these monsters hide?
But they are knocking on our front door
They’re rocking in our cradles
They’re preaching in our churches
And eating at our tables

Melissa Etheridge, “Scarecrow”

They are also serving in our Congress.

The House of Representatives, as a whole, as an organization, did a good thing today — they passed the Matthew Shepard Act, aka the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. It’s an important act, expanding the 1969 hate crime legislation to cover gender, sexual orientation, and changes some of the funding and jurisdiction issues that have made it difficult to investigate and prosecute hate crimes.

The bill passed 249 to 175, which means that 175 representatives voted against it. Some of them may have valid reasons, I don’t know. However, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina took some time on the floor of the House to be mind-numbingly, stupidly, callous:

Yes, she just claimed that Matthew Shepard’s murder was not a hate crime. I know that nobody wants to think about this crime again, but it’s important: Matthew Shepard was targeted because he was gay. Two attackers approached him at a bar, claiming they were gay and befriending him, lured him into their vehicle and drove him to a remote area. They robbed him, beat him severely, smashing his skull, and tied him to a fence. Then they left him there to die. Eighteen hours later, he was discovered by someone else, who mistook him for a scarecrow at first. He was still alive when he was found, but was in a coma, and died soon thereafter. The severity of the beating was such that the only part of his face that was not covered in blood when he was found were the tracks of his tears, which had washed the blood away.

The notion that this was not a hate crime is ridiculous on its face. Even when the attackers claimed they only intended to rob him, they still admitted to premeditatively targeting a gay man. Once they robbed him, they did not kill him to cover their crime, or in a panic — they tortured him, beat him savagely, and left him, bleeding on a fencepost, to die.

It’s unfair to other Republicans to judge them by the words of Rep. Foxx. But I can’t help but see a parallel here: Rep. Foxx can look at the Matthew Shepard case without seeing a hate crime. One assumes she also toes the party line, and that she can look at 83 waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah, or wrapping towels around detainees’ necks and slamming them repeatedly against the walls of their cells, or confining them in small boxes with insects, without seeing torture.

This is a sick blindness. This is an inhuman blindness. Something is wrong with Rep. Foxx, and something is wrong with the Republican Party, and something is wrong with a culture that elects them, when they systematically look at the pain and suffering and death of people — whether they’re our citizens or suspected enemies of the state — and attempt to trivialize them; and refuse to label them as what they are.

---

Permalink | April 29th, 2009

Posted by Dan Hallock | Filed under Politics