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| Christian Grantham was a student activist in the late 90s and later was a consultant to domestic policy forums for the Clinton Administration as well as events for HRC and GLAAD. | |||
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November 28, 2004
After watching the ABC 20/20 segment on Matthew Shepard, I was reminded that even murderers have their version of events. How fascinating to think that all this time I believed the murderer's attorney that they killed Shepard in a maniacal "gay panic." Thanks ABC for broadening my horizons.
If you saw the segment, what did you think? Check out GLAAD's call to action.
The expensively-coiffed airhead Elizabeth Vargas is no Mike Wallace. Her doe-eyed questioning never really confronted the killers with the many contradictions between their latest version of events and the one offered up by their lawyers at their trial--the "homosexual panic" defense that said they were justified in the violence of their assault on Shepard because he'd made advances to one of them. Oh, this defense was mentioned (although never really explained), and Vargas allowed one of the killers to say it was only an invention of convenience cooked up with his lawyer. But none of the extensive accounts presented at trial as part of this defense were mentioned, nor were any legal or psychiatric authorities on "gay panic" asked to comment or dissect the murderers' equivocations.
["20/20" and MATTHEW SHEPARD - Doug Ireland - 11-27-04]Vargas' objective is not truth, but a different, more pernicious brand of distortion. In her version of Matt's death, it's not enough to suggest that the killers weren't anti-gay; she goes much further, excusing them from any responsibility for their actions. Throw in the lewdly suggestive and irrelevant details from Matt's life -- including the repeated charge that he was suicidal -- and the result is not journalism, but pornography.
[Hatchet Job - Center Square - 11-26-04]
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