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Pro-gay web site “The Advocate” tells real story of the Matthew Shepard murder

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A fascinating article the radically pro-gay The Advocate.

Excerpt:

What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong? What if our most fiercely held convictions about the circumstances of that fatal night of October 6, 1998, have obscured other, more critical, aspects of the case? How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?

None of this is idle speculation; it’s the fruit of years of dogged investigation by journalist Stephen Jimenez, himself gay. In the course of his reporting, Jimenez interviewed over 100 subjects, including friends of Shepard and of his convicted killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, as well as the killers themselves (though by the book’s end you may have more questions than answers about the extent of Henderson’s complicity).  In the process, he amassed enough anecdotal evidence to build a persuasive case that Shepard’s sexuality was, if not incidental, certainly less central than popular consensus has lead us to believe.

And here are the details:

But in what circumstances does someone slam a seven-inch gun barrel into their victim’s head so violently as to crush his brain stem? That’s not just flipping out, that’s psychotic — literally psychotic, to anyone familiar with the long-term effects of methamphetamine. In court, both the prosecutor and the plaintiffs had compelling reasons to ignore this thread, but for Jimenez it is the central context for understanding not only the brutality of the crime but the milieu in which both Shepard and McKinney lived and operated.

By several accounts, McKinney had been on a meth bender for five days prior to the murder, and spent much of October 6 trying to find more drugs. By the evening he was so wound up that he attacked three other men in addition to Shepard. Even Cal Rerucha, the prosecutor who had pushed for the death sentence for McKinney and Henderson, would later concede on ABC’s 20/20 that “it was a murder that was driven by drugs.”
No one was talking much about meth abuse in 1998, though it was rapidly establishing itself in small-town America, as well as in metropolitan gay clubs, where it would leave a catastrophic legacy. In Wyoming in the late 1990s, eighth graders were using meth at a higher rate than 12th graders nationwide. It’s hardly surprising to learn from Jimenez that Shepard was also a routine drug user, and — according to some of his friends — an experienced dealer. (Although there is no real evidence for supposing that Shepard was using drugs himself on the night of his murder).

Despite the many interviews, Jimenez does not entirely resolve the true nature of McKinney’s relationship to Shepard, partly because of his unreliable chief witness. McKinney presents himself as a “straight hustler” turning tricks for money or drugs, but others characterize him as bisexual. A former lover of Shepard’s confirms that Shepard and McKinney had sex while doing drugs in the back of a limo owned by a shady Laramie figure, Doc O’Connor. Another subject, Elaine Baker, tells Jimenez that Shepard and McKinney were friends who had been in sexual threesome with O’Connor. A manager of a gay bar in Denver recalls seeing photos of McKinney and Henderson in the papers and recognizing them as patrons of his bar. He recounts his shock at realizing “these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community.”

Not everyone is interested in hearing these alternative theories. When 20/20 engaged Jimenez to work on a segment revisiting the case in 2004, GLAAD bridled at what the organization saw as an attempt to undermine the notion that anti-gay bias was a factor; Moises Kaufman, the director and co-writer of The Laramie Project, denounced it as “terrible journalism,” though the segment went on to win an award from the Writers Guild of America for best news analysis of the year.

There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. In his book, Flagrant Conduct, Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, similarly unpicks the notorious case of Lawrence v. Texas, in which the arrest of two men for having sex in their own bedroom became a vehicle for affirming the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private. Except that the two men were not having sex, and were not even a couple. Yet this non-story, carefully edited and taken all the way to the Supreme Court, changed America.

In different ways, the Shepard story we’ve come to embrace was just as necessary for shaping the history of gay rights as Lawrence v. Texas; it galvanized a generation of LGBT youth and stung lawmakers into action. President Obama, who signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named for Shepard and James Byrd Jr., into law on October 28, 2009, credited Judy Shepard for making him “passionate” about LGBT equality.

I think that it’s good that The Advocate posted this correction to the story. I admire them for being willing to tell the truth about the story. However, note that the author is not sorry that a fake version of the case was used to push the gay agenda forward. Now what if the same willingness to twist the truth was shared by the gay activists who are redefining the issues in the culture as a whole? What if the people who are pushing the gay agenda in schools, in the media, in the workplace, and elsewhere, had the same willingness to twist the truth in order to advance their cause?

It’s also helpful to understand the media bias angle of this story. Are they really interested in telling the truth? Or is there something else going on there? How much of a story was the attack on the Family Research Council building by a gun-wielding gay activist compared to the Matthew Shepard story? How much of a story is the persecution of Christians in the Middle East compared to the Matthew Shepard story? How much of a story is the loss of basic human rights like free speech and religious liberty here at home when compared to the Matthew Shepard story?

UPDATE: Mysterious Jack sends me this link from Breitbart News that has more about what really happened to Matthew Shepard.

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Russia to supply Iran with state-of-the-art surface-to-air missile systems

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From the Jerusalem Post.

Excerpt:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved the transfer of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, according to the prestigious Russian daily newspaper Kommersant.

The newspaper reported on Wednesday that the Russian government will revive the transfer three years after it canceled the original transaction.

According to Kommersant, the Kremlin agreed to Tehran’s request to complete the transaction, which will net the Russian treasury $800 million.

In addition to the missile deal, Russia has also agreed to construct another nuclear reactor in Bushehr. According to the Kommersant report, the two sides are expected to finalize the details of the deal this coming Friday, when Putin is expected to meet his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, in the central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan.

[…]The Russian-manufactured anti-aircraft batteries have been a source of concern to Israeli officials who fear that their enemies’ possession of them could have adverse strategic consequences.

The article reports the range of the surface-to-air missile system as 200 km.

The missiles can be used to shoot down incoming missiles or strike aircraft. It would probably make any Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear weapons facilities much more dangerous. If the system is supposed to come online in 2016 then that would mean that the Israelis would have to strike before then.

I blogged before about how missile systems sold to Iran made their way to Syria and then to Hezbollah, where they were used to sink an Israeli ship. Could that happen with these S-300 SAMs?

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North Korea reactivates nuclear reactor that was closed in 2007 deal

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CNS News reports on a disturbing story.

Excerpt:

While the international community has been focused on the crises in Syria and Egypt, North Korea evidently has been quietly preparing to resume operations at a nuclear reactor which it agreed under an international deal eight years ago to shut down, before warning amid heightened tensions last April that it would restart.

Commercial satellite images captured in late August show columns of steam rising from a building alongside the five-megawatt plutonium-based reactor at Yongbyon, prompting experts at the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to say it will likely be operational shortly.

“The white coloration and volume are consistent with steam being vented because the electrical generating system is about to come online, indicating that the reactor is in or nearing operation,” said analysts Nick Hansen and Jeffrey Lewis.

They said the reactor is capable of producing six kilograms of plutonium a year, which the North Korean regime can use “to slowly increase the size of its nuclear weapons stockpile.”

In a separate analysis, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) noted in addition to the reactor developments that the North Koreans has also recently expanded a building housing a centrifuge plant for uranium-enrichment.

Pyongyang has said this is to obtain low-enriched uranium to fuel a separate light-water reactor under construction at the complex, although one of many unknowns in the North Korean program is whether it has also produced weapons-grade uranium, and if so, how much.

The Yongbyon complex, some 60 miles north of Pyongyang, houses both the five-megawatt, graphite-moderated reactor and an associated reprocessing plant and nuclear fuel rod fabrication facility.

Under an agreement at China-hosted at “six-party” talks, first hammered together in Sept. 2005 and then formalized in Feb. 2007, North Korea pledged to shut the facilities in exchange for economic and diplomatic concessions. Among them, the Bush administration agreed to unfreeze $25 million in North Korean funds, frozen in its account at a Macao-based bank.

In July 2007 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that the Yongbyon shutdown was complete, and in 2008 the main cooling tower at the site was demolished in a dramatic supposed symbol of Pyongyang’s commitment to the denuclearization deal.

But after that the six-party talks – involving the U.S., the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia – ran into more difficulties. In late 2008 they stalled amid disagreements over how to verify North Korean compliance with its commitments, and the talks have not reconvened since.

Pyongyang tested a nuclear device for a second time in 2009, and again early this year.

Last April, it announced plans to restart the Yongbyon reactor. It also vowed never to abandon its nuclear capability for political or economic benefits, and reiterated demands that the international community accept it as a nuclear weapons power.

Has our performance in Syria been a trigger for their decision?

Heritage Foundation scholar Bruce Klingner in an analysis Thursday said Pyongyang was likely encouraged by the Obama administration’s policy on Syria and its chemical weapons use – “a dizzying array of contradictory U.S. statements, crossed redlines, and reticence to fulfill declarations of intent.”

“To the degree that North Korea can penetrate this confusing political morass, the regime is probably heartened by signs of a declining American willingness to intervene overseas even when confronted by evidence of the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD),” he wrote.

“Pyongyang will conclude that President Obama’s bold rhetoric, including that directed against North Korea, was unlikely to be backed with significant military action,” said Klingner, a senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at Heritage’s Asian Studies Center.

“The regime will incorporate this perceived American passivity into its decision-making in future confrontations with Washington and Seoul.”

The Heritage Foundation is against a strike, so I think what they are saying is that you don’t make threats unless you intend to carry them out. If you say there’s a red line, then don’t follow up on that threat, you look weak. And when you look weak, bullies are emboldened to be aggressive. That’s the way the world is.