Free Republic

But what really happened to Matthew Shepard? He was beaten, tortured, and killed by one or both of the men now serving life sentences. But it turns out, according to Jiminez, that Shepard was a meth dealer himself and he was friends and sex partners with the man who led in his killing. Indeed, his killer may have killed him because Shepard allegedly came into possession of a large amount of methamphetamine and refused to give it up.

The blockbuster story that the facts in the Matthew Shepard murder case have been distorted in order to promote a political agenda is another example of the power of the left's narrative mythmaking. Gay journalist Stephen Jimenez presents a new argument as to the details of Shepard's murder in The Book of Matt, but he's up against 15 years of storytelling and inverted reality. A piece in the gay culture magazine The Advocate by Aaron Hicklin lays out the facts about the Shepherd mythology, but it also contains a line that is the Rosetta Stone to understanding how leftist narrative mythology...

Just when you think you've seen the most vile, disgusting levels of human behavior, you come across something that makes you fear for the survival of the human race. It's not that I wasn't aware of the vicious demonstrations held by the Westboro Baptist Church; I wrote about their malevolence in 1998 when they picketed the funeral of Mathew Shepard, a young man who had been brutally murdered by a couple of Neanderthals in Wyoming. Shepard was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fence, and left to die. This happened not because he had committed a crime or hurt anyone, but...