Jesse Dirkhising, the murder that didn't count
The following has been circulating for a while now. I didn't write it, but it's important to remind people of what happened to this young boy and why the media has so blatantly ignored it for ten long years.
Why This Death Didn’t Count
Most Americans, and many in other countries, have heard of Matthew Shepard, the 21- year-old Wyoming college student who in October 1998 was robbed, beaten and left to die on a fence in an alleged antihomosexual “hate crime.” Details of his death and the trials of his murderers were recounted endlessly in newspapers and television news programs.
He became a cause célèbre for hate-crime legislation and the subject of several books and at least two made-for-TV movies.
Few, however, have ever heard of Jesse Dirkhising. That’snot surprising, since the Arkansas seventh-grader’stragic death less than a year later,in September 1999, and the circumstances surrounding it were not considered newsworthy by those who shape the news we hear.
The difference, as some media watchers have pointed out, is that the two men who tied up and blindfolded 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising, gagged him with his own underwear and repeatedly sodomized him before he suffocated were homosexuals. When Mr. Shepard was murdered, a great outcry arose for more hate-crime legislation. When Jesse Dirkhising was murdered, not only was there no outcry for hate-crime legislation, there were extremely few news sources that even carried the story.
A writer for The New Republic, himself a homosexual, reported on the media double standard in the April 2, 2001, edition. “. . . You’ve probably never heard of this case,” he wrote. “The New York Times has yet to run a single story about it. The Washington Post has run only a tiny Associated Press report—and an ombudsman’s explanation of why no further coverage is merited . . .
“In the month after Shepard’smurder, [the media reported] 3,007 stories about his death.
In the month after Dirkhising’s murder, [the media reported] 46 stories about his. In all of last year, only one article about Dirkhising appeared in a major mainstream newspaper, The Boston Globe. The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times ignored the incident completely. In the same period, The New York Times published 45 stories about Shepard and The
Washington Post published 28. This discrepancy isn’t just real. It’s staggering . . .
“So why the obsession with Shepard and the indifference with regard to Dirkhising? The answer is politics. The Shepard case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate-crimes law.The Dirkhising case was ignored for political reasons: squeamishness about reporting a story that could discredit that, and the lack of any pending interest-group legislation to hang a story on.
“The same politics lies behind the media’s tendency to extensively cover white ‘hate crimes’ against blacks while ignoring black ‘non-hate crimes’ against whites. What we are seeing, I fear, is a logical consequence of the culture that hate-crimes rhetoric promotes. Some deaths—if they affect a politically protected class—are worth more than others. Other deaths, those that do not fit a politically correct profile, are left to oblivion. The leading gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign—which has raised oodles of cash exploiting the horror of Shepard’s murder—has said nothing whatsoever about the Dirkhising case.”
Examples like this—and many more that can be found through searches of alternative media sources on the Internet—demonstrate that most major media outlets often aren’t reporting the full spectrum of the news, but only the news they want you to hear.
5 comments:
You're a cunt.
^ I agree with Ryan
Wait, who said the two guys who raped him were gay?
Most men who rape other men do it for power, not because they're gay. Haven't you read "The Kite Runner"? Go back to high school.
In this case, they actually were gay -- they were a gay couple who had lived together in a long-term relationship for several years. However, and this is the part the right-wingers trying to make hay out of this case refuse to recognize, that in no way makes their crime analogous to the murder of Matthew Shepard. It wasn't a hate crime, it was a sex crime, no more or less heinous than other sex crimes against children and adolescents that happen on a daily basis in this country. It was somewhat unusual in that the victim was male -- the majority of such crimes are committed against girls -- and considerably more so in that the two perpetrators were a gay couple; most sex crimes are committed by individual men, or by pairs or groups of men who are friends (like Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, or Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris) and/or relatives (like first cousins Angelo Buono and Ken Bianchi, better known as the Hillside Stranglers), but not sexually involved with one another. When such crimes are committed by couples, they are nearly always male-female couples -- the Dirkhising murder is the only exception I have ever heard about, though I'd be surprised it it's unique -- with over 6 billion people on earth, there almost have to be at least a few other predatory gay couples.
Generally, to be considered nationally newsworthy, a sex-murder has to be deliberate murder, rather than the kind of unintentional felony-murder this was (all evidence points to the conclusion that the intent was to rape the victim, but not to kill him), and must usually also be one of a series perpetrated by the same killer or killers. The best analogy for Jesse's death is not that of Matthew Shepard, but that of Tammy Lynn Homolka. Like Jesse, Tammy was drugged by a couple she thought were trustworthy -- her own sister, Karla, and Karla's fiancé, Paul -- raped repeatedly, and asphyxiated due to the drugs she was given and the position in which she was abused (though in her case it was due to being laid on her back -- the combination of alcohol and sedatives caused her to vomit while unconscious, and she aspirated the vomit and effectively drowned). Her death would never have come to light as a murder at all, much less become national news, had her killers not gone on to commit the deliberate murders of at least two other teenaged girls, Leslie Erin Mahaffey and Kristen Dawn French.
(to be continued...)
Even so, the Bernardo Homolka murders were not as large a story (at least here in the States -- they dominated the news in Canada, which has a smaller population, lower per capita murder rate, and far fewer serial killers than its neighbor to the south) as the Matthew Shepard case, for precisely the reason the Washington Post's ombudsman gave for the lack of coverage of Dirkhising: there was no lesson to be learned. While Shepard's death represents the tip of an iceberg of prejudice against gay people that validates violence against them in the eyes of many, murders like Homolka's and Dirkhising represent flotsam -- the depraved acts of individuals entirely detached from social norms and acting in opposition to, not in accord with, those norms.
The lesson the religious right wants us to take from Dirkhising's murder is that homosexuals are evil and a danger to children, but that, not to put too fine a point on it, is bullshit: Joshua McCabe Brown and Davis Carpenter are no more representative of gay couples in general than Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka are of straight couples in general. Or, for that matter, than Gerald and Charlene Gallego, or David and Catherine Bernie, or Alton Coleman and Debra Brown, or Mary Frances Creighton and Everett Applegate, or , or Ricky Dean Davis and Dena Riley, or Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, or Judith and Alvin Neelley, or Carol (no relation to Ted) Bundy and Doug Clark, or Fred and Rose West, or Jim Deveggio and Michelle Michaud are of straight couples in general.
A homophobe with a sufficiently weak grasp of statistics might argue that there are fewer gay than straight couples, so Bernardo and Homolka represent more of an aberration than Carpenter and Brown, but there are plenty of other straight serial killer couples to choose from, and the number of their victims runs into the dozens or hundreds, whereas Jesse Dirkhising may well be the only known victim of a rape-murder perpetrated by a gay male couple. If there's something newsworthy about his murder, it's that very rarity, but that's precisely the opposite of the "lesson" the right-wing press has been attempting to draw from it. The first gay serial killer couple has yet to be uncovered, as does the first deliberate rape-murder by a gay couple. And when they are, they still won't have any more relevance to the rights of the vast majority of decent, law-abiding gay people than the numerous murders committed by the aforementioned heterosexual serial killer couples have to the rights of the vast majority of decent, law-abiding straight people.
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