The Family Research charade
By Frank Rich
From The New York Times, Dec. 5

"It's Gay Awareness Week!" taunted one of the two men charged with murdering Matthew Shepard just before they slammed a pistol butt into the University of Wyoming student's head 18 times.

Police testimony at a preliminary hearing two weeks ago also indicates that Matthew had not made a pass at his assailants, which didn't stop them from referring to him repeatedly as "queer" and "faggot." By the time the beating was over, Matthew's head was entirely covered with blood except, as a sheriff's deputy explained, "where he'd been crying and the tears went down his face."

Was this a slaughter driven by pathological hatred or just by robbery?(The wallet he was carrying contained $20.) The trial will tell, we can hope.

What remains as certain now as on Oct. 12, the day Matthew died, is that this murder happened against the backdrop of a campaign in which the far right,abetted by political leaders like Trent Lott, was demonizing gay people as sick and sinful.

Since F.B.I. figures show that hate crimes due to "sexual-orientation bias" are rising even as the national crime rate goes down, the most pressing question now is: Has that ugly backdrop changed?

Not enough.

In the aftermath of the Wyoming killing, the same groups that worked overtime to stigmatize gay people have mounted a furious propaganda defense to assert that their words and ads demeaning gay people have nothing to do with any anti-gay crimes.

Given that these are the same groups that claim the "pro-gay" rhetoric of an Ellen DeGeneres or Joycelyn Elders foments homosexuality, it isn't easy for them to argue now that their own words have no consequences. So they instead attack those who call them on their game, hoping we might be intimidated and shut up. As one of their apologists, Hadley Arkes, wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, my columns on this subject are "vibrant with a hatred of the Family Research Council and evangelical Christians."

It's a nice try at changing the subject, but taking a stand against the anti-gay crusade of the political organizations of the religious right is not a stand against Christians, evangelical or otherwise. Most people who abhor homophobia are themselves Christian -- and so, for that matter, are most gay Americans.
As for the Family Research Council, it is not even a quasi-religious organization but a moneyed secular outfit whose leader, Gary Bauer,wants to be President. And the Shepard killing has hardly deterred its demonization of gay people as sub-human.

One new tack -- according to a council draft document I've seen -- is to show that "homosexuals are at much greater risk from one another than from bias-related attacks."

And so the plan is to inform us that more gay men die of AIDS than of bias-related murders -- a nonsensical pairing intended to brand gay men as diseased. Since gay women can't be stigmatized en masse with AIDS, the council had to use real ingenuity to prove that they, too, are vermin at "much greater risk from one another" than from gay-bashers.

The solution turned up in a"Culture Facts" newsletter it published only nine days after Matthew Shepard's death and is still posted on its Web site. Titled " 'Gay' Violence Escalates," it asserts that "The University of Houston-Downtown in a recent study found that 47.5 percent of lesbian relationships involve some form of domestic abuse," compared with 0.22 percent for married women.

I reached the unnamed source of this "fact" in Houston -- Lisa Waldner,an assistant professor of sociology. Previously unaware of what she called the council's "misleading" use of her work, she told me that this so-called"recent study" was a paper she co-wrote as a student in 1992 about the lifetime experiences of a non-random sample of gay people she knew and their circle.

She said it was wrong to "say this is the average for all lesbians"and that the council's comparison of her study with another on married women was meaningless since they used completely different methodologies.

But if not even Matthew Shepard's death could derail the Family Research Council's "loving" crusade against homosexuality, the unmasking of its fallaciously "scientific" slurs won't stop it now. What, you have to wonder, will?