I present this reprint of my tribute to the memory of Matthew Sheppard.
It was originally posted on October 27, but I decided to delete that post due to it being linked by some twisted, insane hate-crime support site encouraging hits to my blog to, perhaps, incite trolling comments. No comments were written. If they had been, I would not fear them, but I will not have a flame war on my blog. The mere connection to that abomination of a website sickened me so I eliminated the link.
We Americans have come a long way over the years but where civil and equal rights of our fellow citizens are concerned, it always seems that it comes down to a "win some, lose some" situation.
Such as electing an African American man to lead us as President, but allowing the state legislatures of California and Florida to "defend marriage" and effectively make sexual orientation a diviner of first or second class citizenship.
And when we think that, as a people of this bastion of freedom we call America, we're overcoming the prejudices and ignorance that have plagued our nation for time immemorial, we need look no further than the persistence of hate in the form of sites of the sort I have mentioned to discover that we still have a long way to go.
Here's the original post, lovingly dedicated to the memory of a teenager in Wyoming who was brutally beaten to death a decade ago, simply for daring to be openly gay:
"And where he was in that spot up there. If you sit exactly in that spot up there, Laramie sparkles from there. With the low lying clouds, it's uh, it's the blue light bouncing off the clouds from the airport and ah, and it goes 'tsss, tsss, tsss' over the whole city. I mean, I mean it blows you away. And Matt was right there in that spot. And I can just picture, in his eyes, I can picture what he was seein'. The last thing that he saw, on this Earth, was the sparkling lights of Laramie, Wyoming."
- Dialog by actor Steve Buscemi in "The Laramie Project"
In Memory of Matthew Sheppard
1976 - 1998
It was originally posted on October 27, but I decided to delete that post due to it being linked by some twisted, insane hate-crime support site encouraging hits to my blog to, perhaps, incite trolling comments. No comments were written. If they had been, I would not fear them, but I will not have a flame war on my blog. The mere connection to that abomination of a website sickened me so I eliminated the link.
We Americans have come a long way over the years but where civil and equal rights of our fellow citizens are concerned, it always seems that it comes down to a "win some, lose some" situation.
Such as electing an African American man to lead us as President, but allowing the state legislatures of California and Florida to "defend marriage" and effectively make sexual orientation a diviner of first or second class citizenship.
And when we think that, as a people of this bastion of freedom we call America, we're overcoming the prejudices and ignorance that have plagued our nation for time immemorial, we need look no further than the persistence of hate in the form of sites of the sort I have mentioned to discover that we still have a long way to go.
Here's the original post, lovingly dedicated to the memory of a teenager in Wyoming who was brutally beaten to death a decade ago, simply for daring to be openly gay:
"And where he was in that spot up there. If you sit exactly in that spot up there, Laramie sparkles from there. With the low lying clouds, it's uh, it's the blue light bouncing off the clouds from the airport and ah, and it goes 'tsss, tsss, tsss' over the whole city. I mean, I mean it blows you away. And Matt was right there in that spot. And I can just picture, in his eyes, I can picture what he was seein'. The last thing that he saw, on this Earth, was the sparkling lights of Laramie, Wyoming."
- Dialog by actor Steve Buscemi in "The Laramie Project"
In Memory of Matthew Sheppard1976 - 1998