Nine years ago today, Matthew Shepard died after suffering for five days from injuries he sustained after being beaten by two men, whose names I refuse to include here. I also won’t review the gruesome details of his death, but I will never forget the overwhelming nausea that I felt when I heard this story. I will never forget that I was unable to function normally that day, despite being half a continent away and having no personal relationship with the Shepard family.
There are those times in our lives when an event, like 9/11 or Matthew’s murder, affected us so profoundly that we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing at the time. I was teaching a freshman composition course a our local, largely commuter, state university. My personal teaching philosophy had always been, and still is, that I should keep my (liberal) politics out of the classroom. I believe that college students should come of age and discover their own values on their own–that teachers should offer information, but that we shouldn’t attempt to politically re-educate our students.
To this day, the day of Matthew’s death marks the only time in my 14 year teaching career that I have ever brought my politics into the classroom, but my lesson that day wasn’t politically motivated. I was simply unable to carry on as usual. I can still see the faces of my students when I walked in the room and asked them to arrange their desks in a circle, and when I joined them in the circle. I remember that the students could tell that this wasn’t going to be a normal class. There was a profound silence, and even though many of my students hadn’t heard about Matthew, they honored him and respected me with their attention as I, through tears, summarized the details of Matthew’s murder.
The last thing I told them was, “Just think about it when you’re joking with your friends, when you call someone a fag, that you are dehumanizing him, even if you don’t intend to. And when we dehumanize groups of people, we make it easier for others to beat them, to murder them. So just try… out of respect for me, to rethink the language that you choose to describe people. Just try…” Then I dismissed them from class. When I received my evaluations back later, a handful of these students commented that they were deeply affected by the way I spoke to them that day. They respected me more for putting humanity ahead of curriculum.
The Mathew Shepard Act passed the Senate last month , but President Bush stands poised to veto the legislation as “unnecessary.” The president is right to use the word “unnecessary” because is should be “unnecessary” to have to remind a nation that hate is wrong and that hate-motivated crimes are an unacceptable evil. It should be unnecessary, but it isn’t. It is, in fact, very necessary for our nation’s leadership to set the tone that hate for hate’s sake will not be tolerated in a civilized, progressive society.
Even Democratic Presidential Candidate John Edwards, when discussing gay issues, had to articulate that he didn’t “get it” but that he supported gay marriage–thus, effectively still casting the gay person as “other,” as in “not one of us.” Is this the best that gay people, and the people who love them, can expect from our leadership, even the liberal leaders? It is this public rhetoric, this kind of political fence-riding, coupled with the results of the 2004 presidential election when gay-marriage was used a political wedge, which remind us that The Matthew Shepard Act is, tragically, quite necessary. I wish it wasn’t.
