While on the road from Laramie, I tuned into Sirius OutQ and heard that John Edwards wife had made a speech about the need for hate crime legislation…

Edwards’ wife says local homicide illustrates danger of hate speech

Elizabeth Edwards said Saturday she is troubled by the suspected anti-gay beating death of a Sacramento man, and said the killing of Satender Singh demands renewed condemnations of hate speech in America.

Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, died four days after he was attacked July 1 at Lake Natoma by an angry group hurling explicit gay slurs and racial remarks.

Edwards, campaigning in Sacramento for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina, said she was so affected by news of Singh’s death that she rewrote a speech on human rights she was due to deliver later Saturday in San Francisco.

“I thought we learned some lessons from Laramie and Matthew Shepard,” Edwards said in an interview, referring to the fatal 1998 beating of a gay college student in Wyoming that triggered an uproar over anti-gay violence.

Oh you did, did you?   Well I was just in Laramie lady, and I can tell you for a fact that they are busy trying to forget it ever happened.   Learn something?   Oh my goodness.   How to bury their fucking heads in the sand deeper maybe.

The first time I visited Laramie since the murder, I was driving through on my way back home to Baltimore.   I thought I’d swing through the town and see if I could find the place where Shepard was killed and pay my respects.   But without knowing exactly where it was, other then a general description of the site, it was hopeless and I had to give up.   So I drove through town looking for any sign, any acknowledgment, of what had happened.   Maybe a little poster in some window somewhere.   Maybe a little plaque.   Some notice somewhere, anywhere, that gay folks would be coming here to morn and pay their respects.   I found exactly nothing.

Okay, thinks I…next time I come, I’ll know the location beforehand.   So I did a small amount of poking around and found the spot where Shepard’s dying body was found and looked it up on a map.   Shepard was driven from The Fireside bar near the edge of the downtown part of Laramie, out to Snowy View Road.   I’d already read that the property owner had torn down the deer fence that Shepard had been tied too, out of pique that so many people were leaving flowers and tributes there.   But I figured I could still stand at the spot for a moment or two and morn.

It was not to be…

The road leading to the site is now marked with signs warning you that it is a private drive, not a public road, and that everyone should keep out.   That entire area is now off limits to the public.   You can’t get anywhere near the place where Shepard’s dying body was found anymore.

I suppose at some point, they’ll do something like build a condo right on top of the spot where it happened.   Or maybe a nice tennis court.

Over and over again in this struggle for our freedom and human dignity, I am put in mind of the words of Malcolm X.   He was not anything near the peacemaker that Martin Luther King Jr. was, but he knew what progress meant…

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.

Progress is healing the wound… Hate crime legislation, anti discrimination laws, same sex marriage…these are all good things, necessary things.   But real progress toward gay equality, toward that day when gay people can live side-by side with our heterosexual neighbors in peace and good will, won’t happen, won’t even begin to happen, until straight America is willing to begin healing the wound.   And not only are they not pulling out the knife, in Laramie, they’re still trying to make people forget it’s even there.

And this is why gay people are still being murdered every year in America, for no other reason then that they are gay.   Too many people hate us enough to kill us, to think of killing us as some kind of sport, or a rite of passage into manhood.   And too many other people don’t give a shit.   Hate, and it’s lover, Contempt, just keep doing their dance on our lives, their dance over our bodies.

That was why Matthew Shepard was killed, make no mistake.   ABC News can get away with helping the religious right whitewash that basic fact of the killing, because few people outside of the gay community will bother making the trip to Laramie to see the place where it all happened for themselves.   But last night I drove from about where Shepard was kidnapped to the place where his killers tied him to a fence, put their cigarettes out on his skin, and beat his skull open with the butt of a pistol.

You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond.   Into the rolling sage.   Into the darkness.   I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now.   Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate.   They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive back toward town or drive for miles to Happy Jack Road.   So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could.   Into the darkness.   Where no one would see.   Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time.

You take that drive…out of town…far away from the town lights…into the night…and you start thinking to yourself…This was a robbery? No way.   Just.   No.   Way.     There were two of them against one small, 112 pound boy and they passed plenty of nice, quiet, dark places where they could have taken Shepard, robbed him, dumped him, and driven off. Hell…they passed plenty of places where they could have just shot him dead and driven off without being seen.   You don’t drive that far out of town, into the middle of nowhere, just to rob a 112 pound kid.   You drive him there because you intend to spend a while enjoying yourself beating a faggot to death while he begs for his life and nobody can hear him scream for help, and you don’t want the body discovered before you’ve had a chance to clean up and get rid of the evidence.

That was always the plan, from the moment they got him into the truck.   If you doubt that, take the drive yourself some night, from downtown Laramie to Snowy View Road, and try to convince yourself that they only intended to rob him.

Lessons?   Lessons?   There is no memorial to Matthew Shepard anywhere in Laramie that I could find, the site of this beating is off limits to the public now, and thanks to ABC News, people are calling Matthew Shepard a Meth addict who knew his killers, and maybe even had sex with them once or twice.   And the killing goes on.   They’re learning how to live with the increasing stench of their own prejudices is what they’re learning.   Because that is still preferable to treating homosexuals as their neighbors.

[Edited a tad…]

[Update…]   The Good People of Laramie eventually did decide to erect a memorial after all. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby present you with the Matthew Shepard Memorial…bench.