-Caveat Lector-
WHY THIS DEATH DIDN'T COUNT
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
December 9, 1999
A 13-year-old named Jesse Dirkhising was killed on Sept. 26 in Rogers,
Ark. Why didn't you know that?
The police affidavit describing the circumstances of Jesse's death is
stomach-turning. Rather than sicken you, let me quote instead from the
>much less graphic story that moved on the national wire of the Associated
>Press.
"According to police, Davis Carpenter Jr., 38, and Joshua Brown, 22,
drugged and blindfolded Jesse Dirkhising, gagged him with underwear, and
strapped him to a mattress face-down with duct tape and belts. Then the
>boy was repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects before he
suffocated because of the position he was in, investigators said.
"At the apartment, police found handwritten instructions and a diagram
of how to position the boy. Other notes described apparently unfulfilled
fantasies of molesting other children....
"On the night of Jesse's death, Brown repeatedly raped the boy while
Carpenter watched, police said. Brown took a break to eat a sandwich, and
soon noticed the boy had stopped breathing."
The AP dispatch leaves out a lot of horrifying details, but that isn't
the most noteworthy thing about it. The date is. The story didn't move
until Oct. 29 -- 33 days after Jesse was killed. AP's deputy managing editor
later admitted that the story was assigned only after the Washington Times
reported the grim facts in an Oct. 22 story headlined, "Media tune out
torture
>death of Arkansas boy: Homosexuals charged with rape, murder."
Jesse was killed a few days before the first anniversary of Matthew
Shepard's brutal murder. The contrast in the coverage of the two cases is
overpowering. The first AP report on the atrocity in Laramie -- "Openly
gay student critically injured in Wyoming attack" -- moved just hours after
Shepard was discovered, badly beaten but alive. The story was front-page
news around the country, and was followed for weeks by every television
network and news magazine in America.
The death of Jesse Dirkhising, on the other hand, received almost no
notice in the national press. The belated Washington Times and AP reports
didn't trigger a rush of catch-up stories. Only one television network,
Fox, took note of the crime -- in a single story on Nov. 23. And that was
it.
For all intents and purposes, what happened to the seventh-grader went down
>the memory hole. Why?
Some critics suggest there is a media double standard: Violent crimes
committed against gays get big headlines; violent crimes committed by
>gays even against children -- get a shrug. "Had Jesse Dirkhising been shot
inside his Arkansas school," writes Brent Bozell of the Media Research
Center,
>"he would have been an immediate national news story. Had he been openly
gay
and his attackers heterosexual, the crime would have led all the networks.
>But no liberal media outlet would dare be the first to tell a grisly murder
>story which has as its villains two gay men."
Possibly. But there is an even more insidious explanation -- one
articulated not by media critics but by media insiders themselves.
Provoked by Bozell's challenge and by messages from readers wanting to
know why the Dirkhising murder was being ignored, writers at The
>Washington
Post and the Time magazine web site offered a defense.
"While Shepard's murderers were driven to kill by hate, the boy's rape
and death was a sex crime," argued Jonathan Gregg, the senior editor at
Time.com. Shepard's killers "were not satisfying some animalistic sexual
impulse, they were bullies who gratuitously killed someone out of hate
>for being different than they were."
The Post's ombudsman, E.R. Shipp, made the same claim. She
acknowledged that her paper had run some 80 items referring to Shepard, but
only a
single news brief mentioning Dirkhising. "Here at the Post, however, the two
are
seen as quite different," Shipp wrote. A hate crime homicide such as
Shepard's ... is 'a special kind of killing,' the Post has
editorialized....
Arkansas authorities have not characterized the Dirkhising death as a
>hate crime."
Could anything make clearer the perniciousness of treating some kinds
>of violence as "hate crimes?" Here lies Matthew Shepard, beaten to death by
>a pair of savages. Here lies Jesse Dirkhising, tortured to death by a
different pair of savages. Each was an innocent. Each died in agony. Each
left
>behind grieving family and friends. Each was the victim of a crime so
vicious as
to shock the conscience. But because Shepard's savages detested homosexuals,
his death matters. Because Dirkhising's savages were driven by lust, his
>death is a nullity.
Hate crime laws are immoral and unjust, for they are premised on the
notion that the lives and well-being of some people are worth more than
>the lives and well-being of others. Journalism that adopts the hate crime
premise is no less offensive.
It is no answer to say that "hate crimes" are uniquely toxic because
they threaten entire groups. If Shepard's slaying was particularly alarming
to
gays, was Dirkhising's any less alarming to the parents of young boys?
*Every* violent crime spreads fear and distrust.
Buy into the "hate crimes" mentality and you buy into the belief that
some victims don't count because they didn't belong to the right group.
That is why you didn't know who Jesse Dirkhising was. He deserved better.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His e-mail address
>is [EMAIL PROTECTED])
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