Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham complained that "The 25th anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder in Wyoming became another opportunity to promote the LGBTQ agenda and denigrate conservative opposition" in an Oct. 22 post:
All this 25th anniversary hoopla overlooks major problems for the "gay hate crime" angle. Billy Binion at Reason posted a piece headlined "Matthew Shepard's Murder Was Almost Certainly Not an Anti-Gay Hate Crime." Something didn't add up.
It wasn't until the prominent gay journalist Stephen Jimenez published his 2013 book, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, that those gaps started to narrow significantly. [Aaron] McKinney and Shepard reportedly were connected by the drug trade, with Shepard set to receive a $10,000 shipment of methamphetamine around the time he was killed. Also relevant is that McKinney was allegedly not traumatized by advances from Shepard, as the two had been sexually involved.
Anyone care to challenge those allegations? The Jimenez book has been ignored for 10 years now.
Binion added that the AP reported in 2018 that Shepard assailant Russell Henderson claimed "neither he nor McKinney was motivated by anti-gay hatred when they offered Shepard a ride home from a bar. Instead, he said, they were out to rob him of money and possibly drugs when they drove him to the edge of town on the night of Oct. 6, 1998."
Graham omitted the fact that the AP article also reported that McKinney tried to mount a "gay panic" defense at his murder trial, but the judge blocked it.If he wasn't "traumatized," why did he push such a defense? Graham probably doesn't want to answer that question.
He also probably doesn't want to talk about how problematic Jimenez's book is. As one reviewer noted, he plays fast and loose with quoted material, admitting that he invented dialogue "I did not personally hear; nor could the characters themselves recall every word exactly from memory," and he did not identify in the book what dialogus is real and what is invented. Jimenez also failed to offer credible evidence to back up his claim that Shepard was a major drug dealer. The lead sheriff's investigator on Shepard's death stated that Jimenez's book contains "factual errors and lies." Then there's also the question of motive behind the book, given that Jimenez is a longtime friend of one of Henderson's defense attorneys -- it comes off a bid for leniency for the killers, given how they have changed their stories.
Neveretheless, Graham went on to whine that "when the Left has made a legend, they 'print the legend' and ignore inconvenient facts." But what he's portraying as "facts" is nothing but a right-wing legend, designed to ignore facts inconvenient to right-wingers in order to perpetuate the legend that LGBT people don't face violence because of who they are.Desprte working for decades in his job, he still doesn't (or deliberately won't) understand that just because a right-wing narrative may advance the story of the day, that doesn't mean it's true.
