Posted on 08/21/2003 4:47:51 AM PDT by JesseHousman
A 13-year-old boy in Arkansas dies after a horrific sexual crime but much of the national media ignore the story. Conservative columnists and other critics think they know why — because the boy's accused killers are gay.
"[The media] doesn't want the public to think about homosexuality and pedophilia and torture and the murder of children," says Don Feder, a conservative columnist at the Boston Herald. The boy, Jesse Dirkhising, was bound, drugged, tortured and raped for five hours before he died in 1999.
Last month, a jury convicted Joshua Brown, 23, of rape and murder. Brown was sentenced to life in prison without parole, the maximum sentence. Brown's lover, Davis Carpenter, 39, goes on trial next month.
But the case received little attention in the national media. Critics say that is evidence of pro-gay bias, noting that news organizations gave extensive coverage to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was hung on a fence post by two straight men and left to die.
Protesters outside Brown's trial in Bentonville, Ark. held signs that read, "Pro-Gay Media Shame." Conservative and anti-gay groups have made the same argument for months on their Web sites and in their publications.
Their argument was given more weight when it was embraced by one of the country's most provocative gay writers, Andrew Sullivan, in The New Republic.
Sullivan compared media coverage of the two cases, and found what he described as a "staggering" discrepancy. He concluded that the media "hyped" the Shepard case to build support for the inclusion of gays under federal hate crime protection, and ignored the Dirkhising case for fear of feeding anti-gay prejudice.
"I think there is clearly evidence that many in the media decided we're not going to go there because we know it will feed anti-gay prejudice," Sullivan told ABCNEWS.
Editors at the television networks and major newspapers have responded that they covered the Shepard crime because it was part of a national issue — hate crime legislation.
"For a crime story or a murder story, even a horrific and sad one like [that of] Jesse Dirkhising, to be covered by the national press, I think there has to be an issue of larger social significance attached to it," says Martha Moore, a media reporter for USA Today.
Editors say that while it may seem cold, countless rapes and murders — gay and straight — regularly go unreported in the national media because they are not part of a larger issue.
Editors also say that the horrific details of the Dirkhising case made it hard to report.
According to an account Brown gave police after his arrest, he and Carpenter had tied Dirkhising to a bed with duct tape as part of a "game." Then they gave Dirkhising an enema of urine that they had dosed with amitriptyline, an antidepressant and a sedative.
Jesse was gagged with a pair of dirty underwear while Brown raped the boy and Carpenter directed the scene, according to Brown's account. The boy died of suffocation, which Brown said was an accident.
Brown told police he was acting on instructions that Carpenter wrote and drew for him on a pad of paper. Prosecutors plan to use the notes and diagrams as evidence at Carpenter's trial.
Another charge prosecutors intend to make at Carpenter's trial is that the men were planning on other rapes. Prosecutors intend to to submit handwritten short stories that police found in Carpenter's apartment, which were explicit writings envisioning future rapes and tortures, mentioning one local girl by name.
You don't win because you've nothing to say.
This is about the first thing Adams responded with on this thread:
... gay-bashing...
You're pouting simply because I won't conform, I won't have you dictate to me what I "should" believe. Grow up already. You sound like a playground bully.
You don't win because you've nothing to say.
Is that so? I've said plenty, you simply don't like to have your beliefs challenged, nor to be called to substantiate the things you say. So you're bowing out like a coward. Good riddance.
Another patently false and easily disproven lie. Geesh, I guess you guys have absolutely no regard for the truth when it comes to a subject that raised your invective!
Not including this one, I've made 20 postings on this thread. The first time I used the words "gay bashing" was in my 19th posting, in #100. Hardly the "first thing" I said.
Now, my only question for you is, do you want to admit you're simply being reactionary or go ahead and admit to lying?
The problem with 'homosexual' is that it lends a small amount of credibility to the idea that they were born that way.
I prefer Same-sex Attraction Disorder Sufferer (SADs) as it is more accurate and still describes what their problem is. Or the old fall back, sodomites.
We've minded our own business for far too long. Now we have sodomites attacking our institutions (churches, boy scouts, schools, etc) and corrupting, recruiting, raping, torturing and murdering our children.
It's time to put and end to this plague once and for all. Ignoring a cancer only lets it progress.
(Now to put that in a libertarian context, Their right to perversion stops where it affects my right to live a healthy, safe life. They've over stepped the bounds repeatedly and blatantly)
That's sounds a bit foreboding. What exactly do you have in mind?
I'd love to hear a non-socialistic explanation of how any gay person has been a detriment to your health or safety.
Yes, this is the Rind Study.
BWAHAHAHAHAAAA…
I’m guessing you don’t have the capacity to tell one way or the other. If I remember correctly, you hang on to one biased study you arbitrarily googled up for debate, as proof homosexuality is not a disorder, against myriads of evidence that proves otherwise. You simply are not competent enough to understand that there is no difference between homosexuality and ANY other sexual disorders, instead you and the APA hang onto the silly political social experiment of Liberaltarianism as proof the non-pathology and its poor substitute for science.
I'd guess homosexuals who are so-called "bisexuals" cause problems. Hmmm?
So, unless you're having sex with bisexual men, you've got nothing to worry about.
I hope your unhealty fixation on homosexuals comes to an end, it is clearly causing you great distress.
Umm…you said “I'd love to hear a non-socialistic explanation”, I gave you one... sorry to make you look so stupid.
td, if you had the capacity to understand the first thing about science I’d take that whine seriously. Homosexuality is a paraphilic disorder, it’s was true in 1973 and it’s true today, just because you can’t challenge that don’t be such a drama queen.
Oh please…don’t be such a hypocrite. Do you call those who speak out against abortion, euthanasia, drug use, incest…as being fixated? NO? Then you’re a hypoactive ain’t cha?
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