What is a hate crime?

If its true, as Security Risk says, that America's support for us is strongest on the issue of anti-queer violence, what does that say about Americans? That they hold that we do not deserve health care or retirement benefits from our domestic partners, but will admit that we ought not be beaten to death? This, I suppose, is the view that people want me to "reach out to" and reason with.

I've never liked pinning our political hopes on the social construction of a new form of deviant: the anti-gay murderer. Clearly there are murders motivated by homophobia and lesbophobia, along with whatever cocktail of poisons are circulating in the social bloodstream at any moment in time. James Gilligan does an interesting bit about epidemics of shame causing violence, and proposes treating crime as a public health (and public income) matter rather than a moral panic. I'm wary of 'medicalizing' arguments, but his seem a step in the right direction: that is, away from pathologizing individuals and away from feeding the 'get tough on crime' beast.

To build political consensus around the stigmatization of anti-gay murder as the central crime against us and our rights seems to me to be an error in judgement. "Queers bash back" was one thing, but when the 'moderates' got hold of this issue and manufactured their public awareness campaigns, their hate crime laws, and their Judy Shepards, I began to have doubts. Besides unfolding new vistas for social control, which ought to at least give us pause, it exposes our left flank to inevitable arrows from the likes of 20/20.

I didn't care to watch the show, apparently correctly surmising I would be disgusted by its homophobia. But its important to realize that it was our unspoken decision to deify Shepard, to isolate this as a pure act of hate upon an angelic little boy, as a way of calling an uneasy peace with our pious and bloodthirsty Christian fundamentalist fellow Americans. I went to those vigils, and was simultaneously flummoxed and comforted. Flummoxed that people felt that sentimentally about someone they did not know, that the response to this particular act of cruelty in an immensely cruel world was so out of scale. Comforted, falsely it turns out, by the thought that some good political opportunities might come out of this passion that I could not understand, some thought that this could be a teachable moment.

But now I know better. The problem with "reaching out" to the sentimentally religious is that we do not really understand those emotions and that bloodthirstiness that seems always to hover around their most delicate imagery. Reaching out to them is playing with fire.