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.
Now you're saying you didn't say this?
How is the sophomore class this year? Study hard and perhaps you'll complete it.
I don't know where high school students get all the time to sit around most of the day posting nonsense.
No, I did say that and haven't claimed that I didn't. I think you've gotten confused somewhere. Go back and read the threads if you need to catch up.
These men should be punished as any other criminal. To extrapolte about all gays based on the facts of this case is contrary to logic. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.
The anti-intellectualism of media policy is evident by their disdain for the volumes of studies proving that homosexual behavior is a disorder; studies showing that it is not genetically determined, and that it is grotesquely unhealthy. This documentation is readily accessible. But homosexual agenda sycophants know that they cannot refute the science. They cannot refute the medical records. They cannot refute the damage done to so many lives.
If challenged, they refuse the news to you by myriad breast-beating excuses.
Homosexual behavior is protected and promoted daily by the media and those opposing are labeled "homophobic" and "hateful". The media, lead by the likes of the NY Times and eager camp-follower-wannabes pound away at the Christian civilization they so profoundly hate.
While taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions to collect, transport and treat human waste, the media encourages those who swim their demented way upstream to wallow in it at the source. The media creates a dangerous and perverse society, all done in the name of " tolerance".
You who accommodate, and argue pro-homosexual propaganda and attempt to explain this alternate "lifestyle" are as guilty as the media.
I said I'm not ranting about being struck by lightning, and I haven't. Seems simple enough to me.
They were obviously a detriment to Jesse's health and safety.
In other words, it's fine and dandy if the law is subject to mob-rule or the wind-direction, standing up for principle is regarded as foolish, and of course moral relativity is the only position that makes sense.
But at least you're an honest pragmatic, classic liberal/libertarian.
Put some ice on it, Nancy. This ain't the DU, is it?
That’s because you always fire the first shot. You want to start over and have a civil discussion let’s do it, I’ll be the first to apologize if I offend you, just let me know. Your decline will be an impeachment of your statement.
Let’s start with a discussion on how this psychiatric problem began shall we?
I fired the first shot? That's a hoot. You have a long history of barging into a thread and spewing off bellicose dogma. I don't think you have any room to point fingers, let alone make false accusations.
You want to start over and have a civil discussion let’s do it
Sorry, Clint, I'll decline any offers from you. You long ago showed there is no validity to anything you say. Why should I think this offer is any less disingenuous? No, I think I'd just prefer to ignore you, which is what I should have done to begin with.
And yet, in the face of the mountains of evidence of the evils visited upon society, we have the political left shilling for this repulsive lifestyle that is pervading our culture.
And, we have major corporations and media jumping on the agenda bandwagon putting homosexuals out front and sweating hard to put a happy face on perversion.
What? you still here pecking away? Isn't there a chatroom you can lurk in?
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