A Homosexual Investigates Matthew Shepard's Murder

From the NY POST:

Matthew Shepard, college student. Killed, at 21, for being gay.

Or was he?

Jimenez’s “The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard,” out last month, challenges every cultural myth surrounding Shepard’s short life and unspeakable death. After some 13 years of digging, including interviews with more than 100 sources, including Shepard’s killers, Jimenez makes a radioactive suggestion:

The grisly murder, 15 years ago this month, was no hate crime.

Shepard’s tragic and untimely demise may not have been fueled by his sexual orientation, but by drugs. For Shepard had likely agreed to trade methamphetamines for sex. And it killed him.

Heresy.

Why dredge this up now? Jimenez’s answer surprised me.

“As a gay man,” he said, “I felt it was a moral thing to do.”

Modal TriggerAaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, now doing life for murder, were not homophobes, writes Jimenez. Shepard was lured from a bar, then driven to the outskirts of Laramie, Wyo., where he was robbed. McKinney savagely pistol-whipped Shepard with the barrel of a .357 Magnum. The men then hung him, barefoot, freezing and barely alive, on a fence, in a pose resembling a crucifixion. He died six days later.

But McKinney was no stranger. Strung out on meth for a week before the slaying, writes Jimenez, McKinney likely had been Shepard’s gay or bisexual lover.

“To understand who Matthew really was,” Jimenez said, “to alter our perception of him as a martyr and an icon, is not going to be damaging to gay rights.

“I don’t buy it. I don’t think we have anything to lose from telling the truth.”

Activists, journalists, politicians and filmmakers who, with the best of intentions, based careers on Shepard’s murder are furious. But Jimenez insists he’s willing to trade Shepard’s irreproachable image for a serious talk about drugs. Meth, he said, is haunting the gay scene, bringing with it a plague of ultra-violence, new HIV infection — and gay-bashing.

If this book saves one life, it’s worth it.

Andrea Peyser, NY Post; Stephen Jimanez, The Book of Matt.

Like so many things Leftist, Shepard was force-fit into the Necessary Narrative Of NEW MORALITY. It is not facts which matter; it is whether or not the Necessary Narrative is being served. Whether it is Shepard or Zimmerman, no possible rational case will deter the weaponization of the warping of the facts in the service of the Leftist cause.