Another rampage the Religious Right will ignore.

This blog has argued that the political Right today is dishonest and selective in the evidence they present. I noted that they have invented false charges against the gay community in their hate campaign - such as Pat Boone's loony claim that gay protests over Prop 8 were similar to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I said that the Religious Right in particular will ignore real crimes, motivated by hate, against gay people while exaggerating any incident when some religious nut feels offended.

Here is another recent crime that the Religious Right will ignore. The two criminals you see pictured here are Christopher Stewart and Domenic Cray. They were recently arrested for the violent beating of a 13-year-old boy. The boy was beaten because he is gay.

To me the Christian Right lacks all moral credibility and the more they talk about morality the more clear it is that they are just mean-spirited, nasty people. They ignore cases where a gay person is attacked intentionally. I dare say that many of them would applaud such attacks. And many of those who publicly condemn such attacks will privately support them.

For instance, one of the men most influential in the founding of the Moral Majority was the principle of the Christian high school I attended. At one Moral Majority meeting he said: "I know what you and I feel about these queers, these fairies. We wish we could get in our cars and run them down while they march.” I discussed how a major figure in the Mormon sect has publicly praised a Mormon missionary punching another young man because he was gay. The "Apostle" told the assailant "Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn't be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way." When fundamentalist leaders preach that homosexuals "are worthy of death" they must know that eventually someone will take them at their word and attempt to kill.

Most assaults on gay people are simply not considered newsworthy and barely get picked up the media. A few do attract some attention because they are so violent and ugly. When they do it is predictable that the Religious Right then engages in a massive campaign of blaming the victim.

When Matthew Shepherd was assaulting in Wyoming, his bloodied body was left tied to a fence on a hill. The brutality of that murder was so horrible that the nation paid attention. But the Religious Right immediately started a campaign to villify the victim implying that he got what he deserved. The Right web sites repeated false stories about how Shepherd was only attacked because he was sexually assaulting his killers. Apparently this slight, young man was a sexual predator able to assault two, much bigger, young men at the same time.

Consider this comment that I found randomly. This individual was protesting the play The Laramie Project, about Shepherd's murder, because Matthew was "a homosexual tramp with no regard for the safety of others."

When Lawrence King, a junior high school student, was executed by a fellow student for being gay the Religious Right immediately went into an attack on King. The boy, who I suspect was transgendered and not homosexual, was attacked and portrayed in as bad a light as possible. They lamented how King's death was ruining the life of the boy who shot him to death.

Invariably the Religious Right begins a campaign to villify the victim. They often make a brief statement about how the killing is "not justified" and then insert a big "but" into their conversation and spend the rest of their time implying that the victim, in fact, was to blame for his own assault.