Edwards’ wife says local homicide illustrates danger of hate speech<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oh you did, did you? \u00a0 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. \u00a0 Learn something? \u00a0 Oh my goodness. \u00a0 How to bury their fucking heads in the sand deeper maybe.<\/p>\n The first time I visited Laramie since the murder, I was driving through on my way back home to Baltimore. \u00a0 I thought I’d swing through the town and see if I could find the place where Shepard was killed and pay my respects. \u00a0 But without knowing exactly where it was, other then a general description of the site, it was hopeless and I had to give up. \u00a0 So I drove through town looking for any sign, any acknowledgment, of what had happened. \u00a0 Maybe a little poster in some window somewhere. \u00a0 Maybe a little plaque. \u00a0 Some notice somewhere, anywhere, that gay folks would be coming here to morn and pay their respects. \u00a0 I found exactly nothing.<\/p>\n Okay, thinks I…next time I come, I’ll know the location beforehand. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 Shepard was driven from The Fireside bar near the edge of the downtown part of Laramie, out to Snowy View Road. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 But I figured I could still stand at the spot for a moment or two and morn.<\/p>\n It was not to be…<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0 That entire area is now off limits to the public. \u00a0 You can’t get anywhere near the place where Shepard’s dying body was found anymore.<\/p>\n I suppose at some point, they’ll do something like build a condo right on top of the spot where it happened. \u00a0 Or maybe a nice tennis court.<\/p>\n Over and over again in this struggle for our freedom and human dignity, I am put in mind of the words of Malcolm X. \u00a0 He was not anything near the peacemaker that Martin Luther King Jr. was, but he knew what progress meant…<\/p>\n 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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Progress is healing the wound…<\/em> Hate crime legislation, anti discrimination laws, same sex marriage…these are all good things, necessary things. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 And not only are they not pulling out the knife, in Laramie, they’re still trying to make people forget it’s even there.<\/p>\n And this is why gay people are still being murdered every year in America, for no other reason then that they are gay. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 And too many other people don’t give a shit. \u00a0 Hate, and it’s lover, Contempt, just keep doing their dance on our lives, their dance over our bodies.<\/p>\n That was why Matthew Shepard was killed, make no mistake. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0 Into the rolling sage. \u00a0 Into the darkness. \u00a0 I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now. \u00a0 Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could. \u00a0 Into the darkness. \u00a0 Where no one would see. \u00a0 Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time.<\/p>\n 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?<\/em> No way. \u00a0 Just. \u00a0 No. \u00a0 Way. \u00a0 \u00a0 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. \u00a0 You don’t drive that far out of town, into the middle of nowhere, just to rob a 112 pound kid. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n That was always the plan, from the moment they got him into the truck. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Lessons? \u00a0 Lessons? \u00a0 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. \u00a0 And the killing goes on. \u00a0 They’re learning how to live with the increasing stench of their own prejudices is what they’re learning. \u00a0 Because that is still preferable to treating homosexuals as their neighbors.<\/p>\n [Edited a tad…]<\/em><\/p>\n [Update…<\/em>] \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n![\"](\"\/photos\/IMG_3131.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/bench.jpg\" "\\"bench\\"")
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