Don’t Blame Us

It was one of the most convoluted sentences I've ever heard. NBC Today Show host Katie Couric was talking to Gov. Jim Geringer about the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death following a robbery last week. Ms. Couric said: “Governor, some gay rights activists have said that... organizations like the Christian Coalition... and Focus on [the] Family are contributing to this anti-homosexual atmosphere by having an ad campaign saying, if you're a homosexual, you can change your orientation. Do you think that campaigns like this inspire people to try to harm homosexuals?” Whoa! Pro-family groups are sponsoring ads that lovingly tell people that through the power of Christ, they can break free from homosexual habits. But Couric was trying to get Gov. Geringer to agree that these ads were literally driving people to murder gay men. It's a sorry example of how effectively the gay lobby exploits tragedy to demonize anyone who opposes their political agenda. And shockingly, how someone like Katie Couric can engage in what is nothing less than McCarthyism. What happened to Matthew Shepard was, of course, a horrible crime, and I hope Wyoming prosecutors throw the book at the two perpetrators. And should it turn out that the young men accused of the Wyoming murder were members of Focus on the Family, or the Christian Coalition—well, Katie Couric can blame Jim Dobson and the Coalition for what they did. Otherwise, she ought to apologize at once to Dobson and other Christians for her outrageous slander. Compare the hysterical reaction to this case to the reaction to the Hugh Finn case in Virginia. Just a few days ago, doctors removed a feeding tube from Finn, a husband and father who has been in a coma for several years. Despite the testimony of nurses that he showed signs of responsiveness, and despite the fact that Gov. James Gilmore and Finn's parents went to court to try to stop it, Finn was deprived of food and water. Where was Katie Couric's outrage when Finn was deliberately starved to death? In fact, you could make a case that our cultural elites' support of abortion and euthanasia is responsible for the degradation of human life—a degradation that allows the small, the weak, and the helpless among us to be killed. Ultimately, the only people responsible for the Wyoming murder are the people who committed it. But if we're going to blame cultural influences for inspiring murder, I'd suggest maybe it's the very elites who are doing that by promoting the pro-choice, pro-euthanasia views and thereby encouraging an impoverished view of the human being. And these are the views that most of our media elites hold. Now I want to be very careful how I choose my words. Nothing excuses what happened in Wyoming. The assault on Matthew Shepard was grotesque and ghastly and the perpetrators need to be punished fully. But on the moral scale of things, from my perspective at least, the murder of Shepard was no more grotesque or ghastly than what happened in that nursing home in Virginia that caused hardly a ripple of protest among our opinion makers. You and I have to help our neighbors understand it's not so-called hate crimes we really have to fear, and certainly not Christians. What we have to fear is the total disregard of the intrinsic value of human life. A disregard that threatens all of us.

10/15/98