Does “accepting” gays mean we have to pay them to mock our religion? - the Aspen beat Glenn K. Beaton

Twenty-six years ago, the media reported that a young man named Matthew Shepard was beaten and strung up on a Wyoming barbed wire fence to die.

• The beating and murder were because Shepard was gay.
• The perps were quickly found, tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to prison...
• It was a good news story about bad news and was widely reported.
• But it wasn’t true.
• It has since been shown that Shepard and one of the perps were in the drug business together. 
• Shepard was due to receive a $10,000 shipment of meth. 
• The perp himself was gay and had been in a gay relationship with Shepard.

So, it wasn’t a hate crime by a straight Wyoming redneck against an innocent 21-year-old gay guy. 

It was a drug deal gone bad between two gay lovers.
But never mind that. 

Gay advocates seized on Shepard’s death as evidence of hatred in the heartland toward gays. 

His death spurred new federal hate crime laws, where criminally attacking someone becomes even more criminal if the someone is gay...
The flip side of that, of course, is that criminally attacking someone is now a little less criminal if the person is not gay...