Someone ran a Nexus search of the two stories just before Jesse's killers went to trial. I wish I could remember the numbers, but it was stunning. They found thousands of articles on the Shepherd murder, only a dozen or so on the Jesse Dirkhising torture/murder.
If Jesse Dirkhising had been gay, and the exact thing had happened at the hands of straight guys, he would be on Mt. Olympus with Matthew Shepherd. But because he was murdered by gays, he is forgotten.
Repulsive.
You're quite right. Matthew Sheppard did not deserve what happened to him, but you state scenario most eloquently.
Fox News is the only station that ran the Brown and Carpenter trial for the sodomization/murder of Jesse Dirkhising and people were interested, discounting arrogant liberal pronoucements that the story was not newsworthy: Click here for Fox's real icon to Dirkhising case
The contention in the Sheppard case was that he was killed because he was homosexual. That is why the media made a fuss: It was supposedly an example of the virulence of homophobia in our society, etc., etc. Therefore, it makes some sense to compare the Sheppard case to the murder of James Byrd, where the motivation for the killing was apparently the victim's minority status (in Byrd's case, as a black man).
As far as I know, no one has ever claimed that Dirkhising was killed because he was straight. (I don't know that it's ever even been established that he was straight.) Therefore, the Dirkhising case does not serve as a counter-example of the virulence of gays' hatred of heterosexuals, and so is not a useful comparison to the Sheppard case.
In fact, I can't think of any useful comparison to the Sheppard case, i.e., an instance when a couple of gay men beat a straight man to death because he was straight.
Nevertheless, it might make sense to compare the Dirkhising case to the many recent cases in the news where presumably straight men violated, then killed, little girls. In all those situations, the victim was killed in connection with a (twisted) sexual act.
But, of course, if we were to compare the Dirkhising case to the recent rapes/murders of little girls, it wouldn't be as satisfying would it? After all, the ratio of gay rapist/murderers to straight rapist/murderers wouldn't be one-to-one. So that wouldn't serve the "agenda" of the Reismanites.
The disparity became so obvious that the ombudsperson for the Washington Post was called upon to write a column explaining why they never reported the Dirkhising case.
Her explanation, in sum: it was a local (Arkansas) issue and they saw no reason for their audience (nationwide, Washington metro and international) to be concerned with the story.
I sent her an e-mail -- a very courteous and restrained e-mail -- challenging her logic.
Astoundingly, I got a response. She accused me of being a "right-wing extremist", a "homophobe" and an "admirer of David Duke"...
That's what you want from an ombudsperson, I guess. Even-handedness...