U.S. House Approves Matthew Shepard Act
Washington, DC – In a vote that marks the first major expansion of protection under the law in 40 years, the House of Representatives voted to approve the Matthew Shepard Act on Thursday. The Shepard Act, attached as an amendment to a Defense Appropriations Bill, extends protection to LGBT people from bias-related physical violence. A similar provision faced the threat of a veto from President Bush in a recent Congress, even though it passed the House by a comfortable majority. This time around, President Obama has signaled his eagerness to sign the Shepard Amendment into law, as soon as it receives a favorable vote in the U.S. Senate. That vote is expect soon. Protections from hate violence for LGBT Americans have been opposed by congressional Republicans and their allies, usually on the pretext that the addition of the Shepard Act to a defense bill is inappropriate “social engineering,” a “poison pill,” and that the provisions of the Act would serve as a sort of Trojan Horse, making LGBT behaviors “normative.” Some religious critics have argued that the Shepard Act would gag ministers and priests who oppose homosexuality on moral or doctrinal grounds, abrogating their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and to the free exercise of religion, making vocal opposition to LGBT behaviors criminal. Proponents of the legislation counter that the language of the Shepard Act has been carefully crafted to criminalize only acts of physical violence, leaving all First Amendment rights fully intact. The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and openly gay Congressman Jared Polis (D-Colorado) hailed the passage of the Act in the House. Pelosi said, “It’s a very exciting day for us here in the Capitol,” noting that attempts to pass such a law had gone on for her 22-year tenure in the House of Representatives. Polis argued that critics of the Shepard Act seem not to understand the impact of anti-LGBT hate violence beyond the individual victims. “What makes these crimes so bad is they are not just crimes against individuals; they are crimes against entire communities,” he said during the debate on the defense bill. The measure passed the House by a vote of 281 to 146. 237 Democrats and 44 Republicans voted in the affirmative. 131 Republicans and 15 Democrats opposed the bill. “We are closer than ever before to protecting Americans from hate violence thanks to today’s action by the House,” said Joe Solmonese, head of the Washington, D.C.-based LGBT advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign. “The day is within sight when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people will benefit from updating our nation’s hate crimes laws.”
Anti-Transgender Violence Hot Topic for LGBT Community
New York City – The Associate Press reports that a major anti-transgender violence forum slated for October 7 will address the rising incidence of attacks against transgender New Yorkers. Brooklyn Law School is hosting the forum,which will be attended by the family of Lateisha Green, transwoman of color, who was murdered in Syracuse last year. Her convicted killer, Dwight DeLee, was convicted of manslaughter in her shooting death three months ago. The conviction was the first under New York State’s hate crimes law, sending a message to perpetrators of violence against transgender people that transphobic attacks will no longer be tolerated in the Empire State. The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, organizers of the Brooklyn forum, point out that transgender people face increasing degrees of “pervasive discrimination, harassment and violence.” Statistics gathered by transgender advocacy groups note that 12% of all violent attacks against LGBT people in 2008 were perpetrated against transgender people. As Joseph Erbentraut, Great Lakes Regional Editor for EDGE reported earlier this week, Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals are complicit in these crimes of violence because of prejudices they hold against gender non-conforming people. Activists agree that lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals are hardly immune from the prejudice vented against transpeople by the society. Each group too easily absolutizes the gender presentation they are familiar and comfortable with. Jokes and slurs aimed by LGB people against transgender people, calling them “trannies” or “drag queens” differ little from the epithets cast at them by straight haters. While actual instances of anti-trans violence by LGB people are rare, the bias is symptomatic of a tragic lack of awareness that all prejudice against members of the sexual minority is interconnected. The Lateisha Green case, however, is a source of hope in New York. While the conviction of DeLee was based on anti-gay epithets he used while murdering Green rather than transphobic ones, the severity of the first-degree manslaughter sentence woke the Empire State legal community up, and began a movement to add transphobic language to the hate crimes penal code as well as homophobic speech. The precedent-setting case sends a message that attacks against transgender New Yorkers will no longer be tolerated. Erbentraut reports that all sources he contacted agreed that the most effective way to blunt anti-transgender violence would be the swift passage of comprehensive hate crimes protections and employment security legislation at the federal level, such as the Matthew Shepard Act, now in the House-Senate conference process, and the recently introduced Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
Murder Most Foul: Transgender Holocaust in the United States
Chicago, IL – The Great Lakes Regional Editor of EDGE reports that the slaughter of transgender persons in the United States has already gone 12 per cent higher than last year at this time, and the grim statistics are growing. Joseph Erbentraut, in his important essay, “Violence Against the Transgendered Only Getting Worse,” published on edgeonthenet.com, notes that the silence and invisibility common to LGBT hate crime murders is intensified for transgender Americans. As in the case of Paulina Ibarra, the lives of transgender victims are often ignored until a more culturally sensational aspect of the crime surfaces, as it did in the August stabbing death of the East Los Angeles Latina transwoman when a known parole jumper surfaced as a “person of interest” in the investigation. Until then, Ibarra’s brutal murder was largely neglected, even by the LGBT press, and her life has been reduced to a string of seamy innuendoes and a few glam photos. Other notorious instances this year have been the broad-daylight attack on Ty’lia “Nana Boo-Boo” Mack in D.C. last month, Lateisha Green, shot to death in Syracuse, NY last November, Angie Zapata, bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher in Greeley, CO last July, and Duanna Johnson and Ebony Whitaker who died on the streets of Memphis, TN last November and July, respectively. According to Erbentraut, the media are largely to blame for this stunning neglect of one of the most important human rights stories of 2009: “Underreporting from official statistics leaves the issue in the hands of media outlets, which have historically been known for problems identifying victims’ genders through using incorrect names and pronouns,” he writes. “The past year has also seen a number of examples of media programs condoning violence against the community,” Erbentraut continues, “including a radio news program on KRXQ Sacramento which referred to gender dysphoric children as ‘idiots’ and ‘freaks.’ Co-host Arnie States said he ‘[looked] forward to when [transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down…'” While 32 states have some form of hate crime legislation that increases the penalty for violence against LGB people, only 11 have statutes covering their transgender population. Only Brazil, with 80 transgender murders this year, has a larger number of transgender killings than the United States. Until gays, lesbians, and bisexual people and their allies begin to take violence against transgender people, especially transgender people of color, as seriously as they do crimes against themselves, this deplorable trend will surely continue.
Transgender Latina Stabbed to Death in Los Angeles: Story of Injustice
Los Angeles, CA – Paulina Ibarra, transgender Latina, was found stabbed to death in her apartment in East Los Angeles on August 28. The transgender community quickly moved to help the LAPD identify a “person of interest,” 24-year-old Jesus Catalan, who is wanted for jumping parole. Police as of this writing are still seeking Catalan to question him in regards to Ms. Ibarra’s murder, believing him to have been at the scene of the crime. While the LAPD has not definitively determined that her murder is a transphobic hate crime, the case is being investigated as if it were, according to Officer Sara Faden. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, all the LAPD is willing to say at this point is that a suspect, or suspects, apparently entered Ibarra’s home, “engaged in a physical confrontation, resulting in the victim being stabbed to death.” Victoria Ortega, transgender community leader and activist, told ABC 7 News that the Los Angeles trans community won’t stand idly by and let a killer get away: “We’re here to say that we’re not going to let somebody come in here and kill one of our members and let it happen and let it be forgotten.” Innuendo has been used to downplay the Ibarra murder, such as suggestions that Catalan, who allegedly frequented prostitutes may have been in Ms. Ibarra’s apartment for that purpose. Such tactics in the press often diminish the victim in the eyes of the public, and just as often are later shown to be false, after the damage to the story, the investigation, and the character of the victim is already done. Added to such reductionistic tendencies in press reports are factors in Ms. Ibarra’s identity, that she was non-white, transgender, and Latina. The cumulative effect of these downplaying tendencies in the press and in public consciousness is subtly to blame the victim for her own demise, an insidious injustice. While the story of the search for Catalan achieved moderate coverage in the mainstream media, and a bit more in the LGBT press, no follow-up news has been forthcoming on Ms. Ibarra, another indication that her death is being downplayed as less significant than if she were a white, straight male with a family. The murders of transwomen of color have reached an epidemic proportion in the United States, a newsworthy item that is largely unknown because of cultural and media insensitivity.
For Courageous Mothers of LGBT Murder Victims, There is No Closure
Pat and Lynn Mulder at USF, Stephen Coddington photo for the Times
Families of LGBT hate crimes murder victims are on the front lines of grief and loss when a homophobic attack takes the life of someone they love. This is especially true of their mothers. That powerful truth was driven home for me again by learning of Pat and Lynn Mulder’s courageous appearance at the Hate Crimes Awareness Summit held this week at the University of South Florida. Pat shared the story of how her beloved son, Ryan Keith Skipper, lived and died at the hands of brutal, anti-gay attackers in rural Polk County Florida on March 14, 2007. The popular 25-year-old Skipper was stabbed over 19 times, and left to bleed out on a lonely dirt road in Wahneta, a rural town in the Winter Haven region. One of his murderers, Joseph “Smiley” Bearden has been sentenced to life without parole earlier this year, and a second alleged killer, William D. “Bill Bill” Brown is to stand trial on October 12. Reporting on the Summit, Alexandra Zayas of the St. Petersburg Times, relates how Pat had to overcome her reluctance and nervousness about speaking in front of crowds about the worst tragedy in her family’s history. “The worst thing in the world that can happen to you has already happened. There’s nothing else to be afraid of.” Speaking with passion and the conviction that no family should ever have to endure what hers has, Pat and her husband Lynn have tirelessly reached out to others bereaved by unreasoning hatred. Barely a year after her son’s murder, Pat traveled to Fort Lauderdale to see Denise King, mother of African American youth Simmie Williams, Jr., who was shot for being transgender by attackers who have not yet been identified or apprehended. At at town hall meeting dedicated to the memory of 17-year-old Williams, Pat introduced herself to Mrs. King as Ryan’s mother, and enfolded her in an embrace that King later said was deeply meaningful to her. Speaking to the Times about that moment, Pat said, “It’s beyond being women. It’s beyond being different races, different backgrounds. It has nothing to do with that. It’s the hearts of two mothers,” Pat said. “For a moment, there’s someone who’s helping you hold up your pain.” The real unsung heroes of the effort to win passage of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act are women like Pat Mulder and Denise King who became “accidental activists” for the sake of their children who died so senselessly. Elke Kennedy, mother of Greenville, SC victim, Sean William Kennedy, Pauline Mitchell, mother of Navajo two-spirit son, F.C. Martinez, Jr. of Cortez, CO, Pat Kuteles, mother of U.S. Army Pvt. Barry Winchell, murdered at Fort Campbell, KY, Kathy Jo Gaither, sister of Sylacauga, AL victim Bill Joe Gaither, and, certainly, Judy Shepard of Casper, WY who is currently touring the nation to promote passage of the LGBT hate crimes bill named for her son Matthew, are but a few outstanding examples of women whose love overcame untold obstacles to add their voices to the chorus of Americans, gay and straight, who want anti-queer violence to come to an end forever. These courageous women and many other family members around the nation have become the most effective spokespersons for human rights because of their unsought-for mission to stamp out hate from the American vocabulary for all people, especially LGBTQ folk who are so much at risk. How do mothers do it? Pat Mulder says that for parents of gay murder victims, there is no closure, only the determination to turn up the volume on what hate crimes do to families.
~ Stephen Sprinkle for the Unfinished Lives Project
Trans Hate Violence Spikes in Nation’s Capital
Washington, DC – Hard questions are being asked by the LGBT community in the wake of the murder of 21-year-old transwoman, Tyl’ia “Nana Boo-Boo” Mack and the continuing investigation by metropolitan police. Stabbed to death in the Truxton Circle neighborhood by an assailant still at large, the popular and well-known transwoman of color had nearly made it to her destination, the offices of Transgender Health Empowerment (THE). Another transgender woman of color was seriously injured in the knife attack, but survived. Her name has not be released because of the ongoing investigation. By one reputable estimate, there have been six transwomen murdered in DC since 2006, and GenderPAC has rated the nation’s capitol as having the highest incidence of anti-transgender violence in the United States. The Metropolitan Police are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a suspect or suspects in the Mack murder case. G.G. Thomas, Mack’s client advocate at Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), told Will O’Brian, reporter for the Metro Weekly, that she “was a roar of thunder, someone who always had an opinion and expressed it. She was like a role model to the younger girls, saying, ‘We’re all going through discrimination and poverty, dealing with drug issues, family issues…. But at the same time, there’s hope.'” The DC trans community is on guard, many feeling unsafe in the city. Gay DC City Council Member David Catania told the Weekly, “This is an opportunity for every leader in the city — whether elected, whether appointed, whether in a pulpit — to stand up and say this is not acceptable, that the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are not so casual and so meaningless that they can be taken from us for no reason,” he said. “This was an unprovoked and unforgivable attack. And this must stop. To the family of Ms. Mack, our profoundest condolences. To every one of us, let us go to all of our leaders and say enough is enough. We want to hear Sunday in the pulpits in this city that this kind of attack is unacceptable.” David Mariner, executive director of the Center, DC’s LGBT community center, confessed that he was particularly hard hit by Nana Boo-Boo’s brutal murder: “I’m just here along with everybody because I’m shocked, I’m troubled, and because it’s happened again. My thoughts are with the family. My thoughts are with every person in D.C. who has felt unsafe, or who will in the future.”
Protest Calls for Passage of NC Hate Crimes Protections for LGBT Tarheels
New Hanover County, NC – In the wake of a violent attack on two gay men in Wilmington, NC in July, protestors gathered Thursday to repeat their call for the passage of hate crimes protection for LGBT North Carolinians. Chaz Housand and Chet Saunders were beaten outside a popular bar on Front Street in Wilmington after celebrating their graduations. Three suspects are charged with the attack, which witnesses say was accompanied by virulent anti-gay slurs as the two men were beaten senseless and left on the sidewalk. Both sustained considerable injuries, and investigators on the scene suggested that more serious harm might have been done had witnesses not intruded on the attackers. Tab Ballis, an independent documentary film maker and local human rights leader told WWAY News, “In downtown there is a lot of general violence, but this violence by three assailants was directed towards these two men because of the perception that they were gay.” Protestors point out that North Carolina is one of sixteen states that does not protect LGBT people against hate crimes, and they want the State Legislature to pass a statute criminalizing anti-LGBT bias crimes in the Tarheel State. Assistant District Attorney James Blanton told WWAY News that though North Carolina does have laws protecting people from attacks against them because of race, religion, or country of origin, “Sexual orientation is not one of the protected classes. If someone commits a misdemeanor assault based on the fact that the victim has a different sexual orientation that they’re not satisfied with, it would not bump it up to a felony.” The Safer Communities Act, North Carolina State House Bill 207, would provide protection based on victims’ sexual orientation, as well as for gender and disability. Human rights advocates are concerned that the three alleged attackers will not face appropriate punishment for their actions because the statute is not yet law in North Carolina. Ballis went on to say, “Hate crimes are based on fear, ignorance, and misunderstanding. And I think we all believe that folks that pay taxes deserve to be safe in their own community.”
DC Trans Murder ‘Possible’ Hate Crime
Tyli'a "NaNa Boo" Mack, Aram Vartian photo for the Blade
Washington, DC – Police found the bleeding body of Tyli’a “NaNa Boo” Mack, a 21-year-old transwoman of color on the sidewalk at 209 Q Street, N.W. on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 26. She and a second transwoman had been stabbed after an apparent hate crime attack, according to the Washington Blade. 30 minutes later, Ms. Mack was pronounced dead at Howard University Hospital. The second victim’s identity has not been released for her own protection, pending the success of the investigation of the Gay and Lesbian Unit of the D.C. police force, who are handling the case. Sources in the G&L Unit report preliminarily that some homophobic and transphobic language may have been used by the attacker(s), and so the crime has been tentatively designated as bias motivated. A $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons who carried out the fatal attack against Ms. Mack. The Mack family, led by her mother, Beverlyn Mack, are encouraging anyone with information about the crime to come forward. Both Ms. Mack and the surviving victim were clients of THE, Transgender Health Empowerment, a non-profit agency offering a range of programs and counseling to the transgender population of the District of Columbia. Brian Watson, an official of THE, related an account of what happened in the attack according to the report given him by the surviving victim on Thursday. According to the eye witness account as related by Watson, a man and a woman began an argument with Ms. Mack at the Giant Supermarket on Ninth and O Streets, N.W. They followed the two transgender women as they headed from the supermarket toward the offices of THE at North Capitol and P Streets N.W., and the argument continued off and on for the whole 10 block journey. As they reached the 200 block of Q Street N.W., the argument “escalated,” and the man stabbed both Ms. Mack and her friend. Anthony Hall, executive director of THE, issued the following statement to the press: “As members of the transgender community, we are too well aware of the mental and physical effects of threats and violence. The violent attack on Aug. 26 is one in a long string of violence against transgender people in the Metro D.C. area.”
Justice for Jimmy Lee Dean: Both Attackers Now Sentenced
Jimmy Lee Dean, Victim of Brutal Attack
Dallas, TX – The second man who nearly beat Jimmy Lee Dean to death in July 2008 has been sentenced to 75 years in prison. Bobby Jack Singleton, 30, faced his fate August 27 in Dallas County’s 194th District Court. The co-defendant in the case, Jonathan Russell Gunter, 33, received a 30-year sentence for the crime in March of this year. The Singleton sentence means that the jury understood the severity of the crime against Mr. Dean, who has been permanently disfigured and lost his entire sense of smell due to the attack. The earliest Singleton can be paroled is 37 1/2 years under Texas law. There is no penalty attached to an LGBT hate crime in Texas, though the Dallas Police who investigated the attack, which occurred just a block off the major LGBT entertainment strip in the city, treated the crime as anti-gay from the beginning. Had the Matthew Shepard Act been law at the time of the case, there would have been another recourse for law enforcement to take. Dean said that he was satisfied by the sentence. Testimony in the trial revealed that the co-defendants had drunk five pitchers of beer at a North Dallas bar before getting up the courage to travel to the Oaklawn/Cedar Springs area to rob gay people because the perpetrators were “low on cash” and believed gay men could be more easily robbed. Gunter took a gun with him and brandished it at Dean, a 17-year resident of the Oaklawn neighborhood, on a darkened section of Dickason Street. Singleton, however, did most of the severe damage to Dean as he lay unconscious on the sidewalk,
Gunter (l), Singleton (r)
kneeing him, kicking him, and stomping on his face with his boots while yelling anti-gay slurs at his helpless victim. The jury heard taped phone conversations between Singleton and his half-sister while he was in jail awaiting trial, in which he laughed about Dean’s nose hanging on by a flap of skin, and claimed that he was going to pretend he was gay so that the punishment might be lighter on him. “All I got to do is fill out one of them homosexual cards and prove that I’m a faggot, too,” he said. He went on to his half-sister that if he were sentenced to prison, he could just tell the corrections officers that he was “not really a fucking faggot” so that he could skip being housed in protective custody. Dean said to Dallas Voice reporter John Wright, “This [sentence] sets a precedent for anything like this that happens. He also said that no one should be a target of violence for any reason, including one’s sexual orientation. What now remains to be done is support for Mr. Dean in the months and years that follow this trial. LGBT presence at both the Gunter trial and the Singleton trial was sparse. Dean and his longtime roommate, Thomas Bergh, are contemplating moving to Oklahoma, away from the scene of the attack. Dean told reporters that when he walks along Dickason Street these days, he has to walk down the middle of the street, and not on the sidewalk where the two Garland, TX men nearly killed him. Like so many victims before him, Dean will live with the nightmares and the physical consequences of the attack for the rest of his life. It is not enough for the LGBT community to shrug shoulders now that that last trial has been held, and assume Dean can just go from this point vindicated. Dallas has to face its hate-crime problems, as the Dean case, and the Richard Hernandez case have both shown in recent months. One way to do that is to get support for Jimmy Lee right from here on out.
About
If you are a first-time visitor to the Unfinished Lives Project website, we invite you to read A Welcome Message introducing you to our project. We are truly grateful for your visit.
The Unfinished Lives Project website is a place of public discourse which remembers and honors LGBTQ hate crime victims, while also revealing the reality of unseen violence perpetrated against people whose only “offense” is their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender presentation. LGBTQ people in the United States are suffering a slow-rolling decimation of terror and murder all across the country. Every locale and demographic of society are affected: First Nations, Anglo, Black, Latino and Latina, South and Southeast Asian, Transgender, Bisexuals, Gay men, Lesbians, disabled, young, and mature. Homophobia has a long, crooked arm, and it is reaching out to snatch the life away from women and men whose tragic stories are under-reported to begin with, and whose memories are swiftly forgotten.
The horror of these killings transcends the shock and bereavement of loved ones and friends. These are not typical homicides; they are not killings for money or drugs, incidents of domestic strife, or crimes of passion. The vicious nature of hate crimes against LGBTQ persons is extremely brutal, grotesquely violent, and egregiously hateful.
Each murder serves the LGBTQ population as a sobering warning about the actual level of danger in our communities. The message these killings send is that freedom and open life for LGBTQ people is a cruel dream. Every time we remember one of these victims, however, the intentions of their killers are frustrated. To remember these women and men is to begin the process of changing the culture that killed them.
Our Project Director
Dr. Stephen V. Sprinkle (Keith Tew photo).
Stephen V. Sprinkle is Director of Field Education and Supervised Ministry, and Professor of Practical Theology at Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas, a post he has held since 1994. An ordained Baptist minister, he is the first open and out Gay scholar in the history of the Divinity School, and the first open and out LGBTQ person to be tenured there. Read More…
Recent Social Justice Advocacy Activity By Dr. Sprinkle
Summer 2009 – Dr. Sprinkle responded to the Fort Worth Police Department and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Raid on the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay bar, on June 28, 2009, the exact 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Dr. Sprinkle was invited to speak at three protest events sponsored by Queer LiberAction of Dallas. Here, he is keynoting the Rainbow Lounge Protest at the Tarrant County Courthouse on July 12, 2009. Read More…
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Unfinished Lives: Remembering LGBT Hate Crime VictimsBrite Divinity School/Texas Christian UniversityFort Worth TXprofessor, minister, author, blogger, LGBTQ advocate
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Unfinished Lives 
Protecting Wretches: Why Freedom of Speech Belongs to Fred Phelps, Too
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September 26, 2009 Posted by unfinishedlives | bi-phobia, Bisexual persons, gay men, harassment, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, Kansas, Law and Order, Lesbian women, Matthew Shepard Act, military, Monuments and markers, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, Politics, Popular Culture, Protests and Demonstrations, religious intolerance, Slurs and epithets, Social Justice Advocacy, Special Comments, transgender persons, transphobia | bisexuals, freedom of speech, gay men, harassment, Heterosexism and homophobia, Kansas, Law and Order, legal rulings, Lesbians, Maryland, Matthew Shepard Act, perpetrators, protests, religious hate speech, religious intolerance, Special Comment, transgender persons, transphobia | Comments Off on Protecting Wretches: Why Freedom of Speech Belongs to Fred Phelps, Too