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 by quoting it, let me draw instead from the much less graphic story that moved on the national wire of the Associated Press:
 Jesse Dirkhising |
"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 equally 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.
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