Grrrr: Matthew Shepard Truthers Say Hate Crime Laws Were Built On a Lie

15 years later, it's time to slime Matthew Shepard and claim hate laws are built on a lie as well as infer that there aren't really any hate crimes. People are really trying hard to rewrite history based on this new book.

This week, almost 15 years to the day since Matthew Shepard was killed and strung up on a fence in Wyoming, a book claiming to provide the true story of Shepard's death will be released — a book that blames drugs, not homophobia, as the reason Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson killed him.

The book in question is The Book of Matt, by Stephen Jimenez, who postulates that one of Shepard's murderers had gay sex, possibly with Shepard, and that this is more proof that Shepard wasn't killed because he was gay. Jimenez mentions a letter he found while going through unsealed court documents. "It mentioned at first both Aaron and Russell, but as the letter went on it spoke more about Aaron, mentioning that he really did like having sex with gay guys, that he wasn't unfamiliar with homosexuality and the gay world," Jimenez told Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. Because McKinney was allegedly OK with having sex with men, Jimenez believes this gives credence to McKinney and Henderson's assertion that Shepard was killed because both men were coming down from crystal meth. (Never mind the idea that being homophobic, engaging in gay sex, and being a meth user aren't mutually exclusive, and it's possible that someone could be all three.)

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Conservatives love Jimenez's narrative of the Shepard story. Last week, Breitbart News contributor Ben Shapiro wrote a column (which spelled Jimenez's name wrong in every instance) for the conservative-leaning Town Hall website connecting Shepard's murder to Trayvon Martin. Shapiro does not mention Jimenez's connection to Newcomb, and accepts Jimenez's narrative as fact. One of the qualifiers that Shapiro uses as a gauge to whether or not this narrative is true is that Andrew Sullivan, a gay blogger who sometimes hates New York and roots for Obama, approves of Jimenez's book. Shapiro writes:

Were the left to openly contend that gay men and women around America are in danger every day from the vastly homophobic majority of the American populace, most Americans would rightly be insulted and skeptical. Were the left to suggest that most Americans are vicious racists a hairsbreadth away from murdering black teenagers, most Americans would scoff. Instead, the left trots out cases like Shepard and cases like Trayvon -- and manufactures those cases to fit their needs.

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http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/09/matthew-shepard-truthers-hate-crime-laws-were-all-built-lie/69770/