christian grantham
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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December 07, 2004

The far-right activist group Focus on the Family has issued a press release calling on NBC to apologize for Katie Couric's "bigoted" comments in the days following Matthew Shepard's brutal murder. In their eyes, her "bigotry," like the rage that motivated the murder, has nothing to do with homosexuality:

In fact, those who killed Mr. Shepard told "20/20" their attack was motivated solely by money -- which they needed to feed their drug habit. They singled out their victim, they said, not because he was gay, but because he was well-dressed and seemed like someone who would have the kind of cash they needed to buy more methamphetamine.

That is why we are asking NBC News to publicly apologize to Christians maligned by Ms. Couric's inflammatory remarks.
[Focus on the Family Seeks Apology - U.S.
Newswire- 12-03-04]

It's worth looking at Katie Couric's comments, which are included in Focus on the Family's letter to NBC president Neil Shapiro:

To refresh your memory, while interviewing then-Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer about the slaying on Oct. 12, 1998, Ms. Couric asked the following question:

"And, finally, governor, some--some gay rights activists have said that some conservative political organizations like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family are contributing to this anti-homosexual atmosphere by having an ad campaign saying, 'If you're a homosexual, you can change your orientation.' That prompts people to say, 'If I meet someone who is homosexual, I'm going to take action and try to convince them or try to harm them.' Do you believe that such groups are contributing to this climate?"

To be sure, there is something unseemly in the way the national media descends on a place that's experienced tragedy and tries to draw Larger Themes of what are often very local events. Even so, "America's sweetheart" (as NBC News has on occasion billed Couric) has something of a point: it is difficult to see how one can balance the "moral truth" that efforts to normalize homosexuality "undermine the fabric of our civilization" with "love for the individual." It is true that these groups don't advocate for violence against gays. But once you establish that gays are undermining the fabric of civilization, and that we cannot exist in "moral truth," you open the door to measures far less subtle than love the sinner and hate the sin.

The problem with Couric's question, as its sanctimony points up, is that Shepard's murder was nothing but subtle. He was left tied to the fence overnight, as near-freezing winds blew down from the mountains. His face was pistolwhipped so severely that his mother did not recognize him in the hospital. I stress these details because, regardless of the motivations, his murder was a most brutal crime, indeed a multiplicity of felonies that ensured severe penalties for his murderers.

And what about those motivating factors? Focus on the Family is invested in the idea that "the attack was motivated solely by money." In the "20/20" piece, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney insisted that this was their only motive. There's one big problem with taking their interviews at face value: they are convicted murderers. Moreover, they are serving life sentences with no possibility of parole. Henderson and McKinney have every reason to lie, whether to lessen their own brutal treatment in the prison system, or to try and lay a claim for a new trial.

Thus Vargas avoided mentioning many of the details of the crime covered in police reports and at the trial, but makes a big deal of Henderson's abusive childhood and, in the most bizarre twist, claims by Shepard's limo driver and McKinney's girlfriend that McKinney is or may have been bisexual.

McKinney denied this, but his girlfriend, Kristen Price, admitted that he was always trying to get her to have a threeway with one of his guy friends.

Again, there is a serious question of credibility, as "20/20" presented without irony footage of the same Kristen Price, face obscured, from the days after Shepard's murder, as she made the first public claim of a gay panic defense. In 1998, they thought gay panic would play against the public's homophobia; now, the claim of bisexuality makes McKinney -- the one who pistolwhipped Shepard to a bloody pulp -- a victim of lying, scheming, self-serving gay activists.

When watching the "20/20" segment, I was reminded of a similar interview that was printed in Look magazine (a counterpart to Life), in 1956. That article recounted the murder of Emmett Till, an African American teenager who had allegedly whistled at a white woman while visiting Money, Mississippi. Later that night, he was kidnapped, pistolwhipped, and shot, his weighted-down body dumped in the Tallahatchie River. Two white men related to the woman were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury. A few months later, in the Look article, the killers confessed and recounted the details of the crime.

The Emmett Till murder was a galvanizing moment in the movement for African American civil rights, and that magazine article was a key moment in focusing national attention on the brutal treatment African Americans routinely faced.

By comparison, Elizabeth Vargas' report attempts to do the opposite with the Shepard murder, robbing it of its iconic status as an anti-gay hate crime but going one step further, as if to prove that anti-gay hate crimes are merely the invention of gay activists and the liberal media.

Thus Vargas had to focus attention on two of Shepard's college friends, who called police right away to tell them that Shepard was gay, and this may have been a factor in his death. They also reportedly spread the word far and wide, which we are to infer from the footage looking over a man's shoulder as he logged on to America Online during Vargas' voiceover, as if a flurry of Instant Messages could turn a run-of-the-mill drug fueled robbery into a hate crime of epic proportions.

And then there is the strange way the "God Hates Fags" protestors at Shepard's funeral were presented, as drawn by the media attention created by Shepard's friends, who then dressed as angels with giant wings, trying to block out the signs and angry speech of the protesters. When the piece cuts to a shot of Shepard's father, reading a statement at the funeral, the harsh voices of the anti-gay group can be heard in the background.

The calculus of gays and hate, according to "20/20" and Focus on the Family, runs something like this: gays wrongly alleged that Shepard's death was a hate crime; in response, anti-gay protesters came to Laramie; gays tried to block them out and failed.

This brings us back around to the first paragraph of Focus on the Family's letter to NBC:

Perhaps you saw the recent report on ABC's "20/20" revisiting the Matthew Shepard murder of 1998, in which the longstanding characterization of the slaying as an anti-gay "hate crime" was debunked in detail. That report certainly was of interest to us because, shortly after Mr. Shepard was killed, Katie Couric insinuated on "Today" that groups like ours, which promote biblical values in the public square, were responsible for that heinous crime.

Remember, Couric didn't say they were "responsible" for the crime, but for "contributing" to an "anti-homosexual atmosphere." Thus, if the crime was not in any way "anti-homosexual," Focus on the Family's anti-homosexual campaigns could not have been a factor.

The facts of the case suggest otherwise, as Judy Shepard bravely reminded Vargas in the "20/20" piece. I think her words, in the balance of things, are important to remember:

"A lot of things were going on that night, and hate was one of them. Anything else we find out doesn't change that."
[Some Clarity from Matthew's Mom - Center Square - 11-26-04]

Given its iconic force, it's not surprising that Focus on the Family would try to appropriate the myth of Matthew Shepard for their own purposes. By "myth" I don't mean "falsehood" but, in the original Greek sense, "story." For the Greek myths contained varying balances of truth and legend, but always very powerfully spoke to people's understanding of the world and their place in it. While the legend of the Shepard murder is powerful, we must not forgot its kernel of truth -- truth that was decided not by press releases or on TV magazines, but in a court of law.