Past
Justice Action Alerts #8
Current Action Alert
| Past Action Alerts
#1
| #2 | #3 | #4
| #5 | #6 | #7
| #8 | #9 | #10
| #11 | #12 | #13
| #14 | #15 | #16
| #17 | #18 | #19
| #20 | #21 | #22
#23 | #24 | #25
| #26 | #27 | #28 | #29 | #30
Sent:
Wednesday, September 22, 2004 |
Subject:
Evangelist Swaggart threatens to kill gays - please support
The Federal Hate Crimes Bill |
Please consider using the link below to ask your Representative
to support the Federal Hate Crimes Bill ASAP. As we approach
the anniversary of Matthew Shepherd’s murder, and
with a great attempt by many to divide the country with
hate and intolerance for political purposes, the stories
below illustrate the need for this bill is more necessary
than ever.
Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart Threatens To Kill Gays
by Jan Prout
(Toronto, Ontario) A Canadian television station has apologized
publicly to viewers for a telecast of American evangelist
Jimmy Swaggart's television program in which he threatened
to kill gays.
The program aired during a broadcast Sept. 12 regarding
marriage equality, on Omni 1, a Toronto multicultural station,
and throughout the US, has also prompted an investigation
by the Canadian Radio Television Commission, the government
agency which regulates television.
During the program, a rambling sermon by Swaggart who is
trying to rehabilitate himself after an arrest for soliciting
a prostitute, the televangelist turned to the subject of
gay marriage.
According to a transcript of the program, Swaggart said:
"I'm trying to find the correct name for it ... this
utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying
men. ... I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry.
And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me
like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died."
The remarks were met with applause from his congregation
Scotty's last moments
The murder of a gay teen—allegedly at the hands of
his best friends—has rattled a small Alabama town
By Jen Christensen
September 28, 2004
Talk to the people in rural Pine Grove, Ala., who knew Scotty
Joe Weaver and they’ll tell you one thing: The 18-year-old
seemed to survive anything life threw at him.
At age 10 he fought off cancer through two grueling years
of chemotherapy. At 15 he lost his father. Throughout his
high school years in the nearby town of Bay Minette, he
weathered the taunts and teases of classmates for being
gay. “He always knew how to get through,” remembers
his friend Justin Toth, who is also gay. “He had fun
even at the worst times in his life.”
This time, however, Weaver did not survive.
He was brutally killed outside Pine Grove, his southern
Alabama hometown of less than 1,000 people near the Florida
panhandle. Some officials are speculating that it was a
hate crime.
On July 22 a man driving an all-terrain vehicle discovered
a burned body in a remote field about eight miles from Weaver’s
trailer home. The autopsy showed Weaver had been beaten,
strangled, stabbed multiple times, doused with gasoline,
and set afire. Investigators believe the teen was tied to
a chair and killed in his home. “It took a very long
and painful time for him to die,” says Baldwin County
district attorney David Whetstone, who believes the injuries
didn’t all happen at once and that the severity of
the wounds suggests Weaver was killed because he was gay.
One of the suspects charged in the case was Weaver’s
best friend since the first grade—18-year-old Nichole
Bryars Kelsay. Also charged with capital murder are Christopher
Ryan Gaines, 20, and Robert Holly Lofton Porter, 18. As
the three sit in jail awaiting their trial, the town is
struggling to understand how the life of such a tenacious
teen could end so horribly. “Scotty Joe was such a
good and trusting boy, but after his daddy died I think
he started going with people he shouldn’t—at
least I think that now,” says his uncle Ewing Weaver.
Friends and family describe Scotty Joe Weaver as a smart
kid who had no choice but to drop out of high school because
he faced daily harassment for being gay. He got a minimum-wage
job at a Waffle House and developed a growing circle of
gay friends. He gravitated to local gay clubs and performed
in drag competitions.
“He’d borrow some of my makeup sometimes,”
says Scotty Joe’s brother Lum, 24, the oldest of the
four Weaver boys. Lum, who is also gay, remembers his brother
performing Dolly Parton numbers in the Drag-o-rama at the
Emerald City bar in Pensacola, Fla. The grand prize for
the amateur competition was a week’s worth of paid
bookings at the club. Scotty Joe took second place. “He
was really pretty good, although I did tell him a couple
of things that he could work on,” Lum says, sounding
like a big brother.
Martha Weaver knew that two of her sons were gay and always
said, “If you love your child, it doesn’t matter.”
Still, she was concerned about Scotty Joe performing his
drag act in public. “His mother told me she knew about
his sexual orientation and the competitions, and she warned
him to be careful,” says Whetstone. “She worried
someone could really hurt him.”
At the Waffle House, Weaver was a hard worker, often taking
double shifts—working at the cash register, serving
meals, running the grill—all to earn a little extra
money to be independent, coworkers say. With his new earnings
he was able to afford a place of his own. Less than a month
before his death Weaver moved into a trailer home. It was
small and white with green trim, near his mom’s house,
and had enough room for his best friend, Kelsay, and her
boyfriend, Gaines. The couple was unemployed, and Scotty
Joe paid the expenses. He didn’t mind. Weaver asked
Kelsay to move in so she would have a stable home for her
baby. She was in a custody fight with the child’s
father, so Weaver offered to take care of her child as if
it were his own.
Life seemed to be looking up.
On July 18, Weaver finished the graveyard shift and then
dropped off money that he owed his mom, according to police
officials. When Martha Weaver didn’t hear from her
son for a couple of days, she filed a missing person report.
She later told investigators that the roommates now accused
of Scotty Joe’s murder had stopped by to say they
hadn’t seen her son and that they encouraged her to
contact police.
Officials with the sheriff’s department believe Kelsay,
Gaines, and Porter robbed Weaver of the remaining $80 from
his Waffle House take-home pay before killing him. Investigators
have not officially ruled that Weaver’s sexual orientation
was a motive, but Whetstone is convinced it was. “Overkill
happens in these kinds of cases because of hate,”
he says.
A statement released by Rusty Pigott, an attorney for defendant
Gaines, points the finger at Porter, whom Kelsay allowed
to sleep on the couch when Weaver was at work. Pigott says
that Porter “spoke openly of wanting to kill the guy
because he was gay” and “had been known to brag
about assaulting homosexuals.” He adds that Porter
tried to hit Weaver just two days before he was killed.
Porter’s attorney had no comment, except to say that
Pigott’s statements were misleading.
Lawyers for the state of Alabama don’t have to prove
motive to apply the death penalty if the three are convicted,
but Whetstone says the jury needs to know there were aggravating
circumstances. Alabama does not include sexual orientation
in its hate-crimes statue—and lawmakers have repeatedly
defeated attempts to add it.
“I want to send a message to the community that it
doesn’t matter how you feel about the status of a
victim—you can’t hate anyone and hurt them,”
Whetstone says.
About 250 people filled the tiny, rural Crossroads Church
of God for Scotty Joe Weaver’s funeral. A dark blue
casket dotted with tiny doves stood in the front of the
church, draped with his favorite flowers—red roses
and baby’s breath—and a picture of a young,
happy Scotty Joe sitting in a kayak.
Lum Weaver describes the setting as beautiful, even though
antigay rhetoric seeped into the service. Hearing the Reverend
Helen Stewart’s fire-and-brimstone preaching, a few
gay people walked out. “She made a lot of people mad,
saying basically that Scotty Joe was in hell,” Lum
says. “And while most of the congregation was gay
or bisexual, she told us we were all going to hell if we
didn’t change our ways.”
Family and friends quietly buried Scotty Joe at the McGill
Cemetery near his grandmother. Lum has moved back in with
his mother to help with the bills and to help her cope with
losing a son.
These days Lum hears people talking about his brother’s
death. It makes him happy to hear that there’s renewed
talk by lawmakers of changing the state’s law to cover
hate crimes based on sexual orientation. “They think
this is going to drive us away, but it only makes us stronger,”
he says
Adds District Attorney Whetstone: “People at church
and on the street talk to me about this case. If there is
a positive that can come out of something so heinous, it’s
that these small-town people are talking to me about some
of their own bad feelings toward [gay people]. They admit
they’ve sometimes treated [gay] people badly. They’re
now saying this isn’t right. You just can’t
hate people. There is no excuse for something like this
to happen in Alabama.”
Christensen is a producer for CNN.
The Death Of Matthew Shepherd
The murder of a college student named Matthew Shepherd would
become one of the most famous examples of a hate crime in
recent history. On October 6, 1998, Aaron McKinney and Russell
A. Henderson entered a Laramie Wyoming bar which was known
as a place where homosexuals often hung out. The two men
left the bar with the company of Matthew Shepherd, who they
drove to an open field. After being tied to a fence and
beaten within an inch of his life, he was left for dead
in the near freezing temperatures. The two men had also
stolen his wallet and shoes. Eighteen hours later, he was
found by two passing motorcyclists who thought at first
that Shepherd was a scarecrow because of the way he was
positioned on the fence. Shepherd was flown via helicopter
to Poudre Valley Hospital (approximately a ninety mile drive
in Fort Collins, Colorado) where he remained in critical
condition for several days.
Twenty-two year old political science student Matthew Shepherd
devoted his life, his friends say, to the fight for human
rights. He was a relatively small guy, and it was reported
later that he had been beaten up on two previous occasions
because he was gay. The more severe of the other two attacks
had left his jaw broken the year before.
Matthew had spent many of his growing up years traveling
the world - mainly because of his father's job as an oilrig
safety inspector. After graduating high school, Matthew
settled in the area between Denver, Colorado (where he worked
as a waiter and in retail stores) and Laramie, Wyoming where
he went to school. He chose Laramie because that was where
his father had gone.
Three days later, four arrests were made in connection with
the murder of Matthew Shepherd. This included Aaron McKinney,
Russell Henderson and Chastity Pasley (who lived with Henderson)
and Kristin Price - the later two arrested as accessories
because they helped the two men dispose of the bloody clothes
and helped cover up their crime.
Police Commander Dave O'Malley stated that he believed that
robbery was part of the motive since Shepherd's wallet had
been stolen, but said that Shepherd was most likely chosen
because he was gay. He told a reporter from the associated
press that they had a few such hate crimes in Laramie, "But
nothing anywhere near this."
With Matthew Shepherd still in a coma at Poudre Valley Hospital,
the political hoopla started full force. Gay Rights groups
everywhere started calling attention to the fact that the
Matthew Shepherd case demonstrated a need to adopt hate
crime legislation - anti-gay groups started fighting this
because they believed this meant gays would have some sort
of special rights. It may be interesting to note that several
days prior to Shepherd's beating, several anti-gay groups
had begun public campaigns in the Colorado and Wyoming areas.
This was also several days before National Coming Out Day
- a day devoted to lending support for those who wish to
come out of the closet as gay or lesbian.
At 12:53 a.m., on Monday, October 12, 1998, Matthew Shepherd
died as a result of his injuries with his family by his
side.
Again, PLEASE ask your Representative to support the Federal
Hate Crimes Bill. Just a simple click away (and forward
the link to everyone you can):
http://www.hrcactioncenter.org/campaign/hate_crimes_us?rk=d11Mntn16jPIW
Thanks,
Chris |
|