Past Justice Action Alerts #8
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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