GOP In Denial On Gay Issues

As President Obama addresses the Human Rights Campaign, it’s against the backdrop of a Republican Party that can’t even bring itself to acknowledge that a well-documented murder was, indeed, about the victim’s sexual orientation.  Iowa Congressman Steve King says the murder of Matthew Shepard had nothing to do with him being gay.

KING: And the Matthew Shepard case, there’s been a fair amount of information that came out that that really wasn’t the motivation of the people who killed him, but they did receive the maximum penalty under the law.

North Carolina Republican Virginia Foxx said it was a “hoax” that a hate crimes bill was named for Shepard, and had to retract her comments.  Right wing radio host Janet Parshall questioned whether Shepard was responsible for being murdered on Larry King’s show.

Speaking about Shepard’s death — the result of severe injuries sustained during a violent beating at the hands of two men who, purportedly claiming to be gay, lured him from a campus bar at the University of Wyoming — Parshall first asserted that she was not offering “a justification of what happened, because it was wrong, wrong, and wrong;” nonetheless, she suggested that “there’s a lot of questions about his [Shepard’s] background,” and asked, “[W]as he looking for trouble in all the wrong places?”

At the trial, the girlfriend of one of the killers testified that it was, indeed, Shepard’s sexual preference that figured into the murder.

Two men, Aaron McKinney, 22, and Russell Henderson, 21, are charged with the murder. McKinney’s girlfriend Kristen Price says he had been embarrassed because he believed Matthew Shepard “made a pass at him” at the Fireside Bar in Laramie. Price says that McKinney and Henderson decided to “teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people.”

They’re in denial about climate change, about the need for health care reform, and even about the motive behind the murder of Matthew Shepard, because, in the last case,  an anti-gay hate crime doesn’t fit with their agenda.  The party of “no” is also the party of denial.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.