This lynching and the controversy surrounding it take place amid a growing "culture war" by rightist and incipient fascist forces. As the instability of the world capitalist system increases, bringing growing insecurity to the daily lives of millions, social tensions and political polarization continue to mount. Ultrarightist demagogues such as Patrick Buchanan have stepped up their scapegoating of homosexuals, immigrants, and women, while railing against the "degeneracy" of the "elite," to gain a hearing for their reactionary aims. They play especially on the fears and resentments among the panicky middle classes. For example, groups opposing gay rights organized a protest of 1,500 people at the opening night of the new play Corpus Christi in New York October 13, demanding it be shut down as "blasphemous" for supposedly portraying Jesus Christ as gay.
Actions to curtail democratic rights by capitalist politicians, liberal and conservative alike, add fuel to these rightists. The same week Shepard was killed, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Cincinnati city law aimed at denying homosexuals protection under antidiscrimination laws. This government attack gives a green light to employers and others to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
Democratic Party politicians from Attorney General Janet Reno to House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt have stepped up calls for new "hate crimes" laws in the wake of Shepard's killing. This has been a demand of many of the protests against the lynching as well. Forty states currently have laws that increase penalties against those convicted of crimes related to a person's race, sex, or, in many cases, sexual orientation. Reno is urging Congress to adopt broader legislation making such "hate crimes" a federal offense.
Working people should oppose these laws, which hand the wealthy rulers another instrument to curtail democratic rights. Every move to give greater powers to the cops and courts can and will be used against the working class and its organizations.
No additional legislation is needed to make assault, battery, and murder illegal. Reactionary groups like the Ku Klux Klan were able to carry out lynchings with impunity for decades not because there were no "hate" laws, but because police and government officials throughout the South, often with the complicity of FBI cops and other federal officials, supported and often participated in such racist violence. It was the mass Black civil rights movement, which overthrew the Jim Crow system, that forced both federal and local authorities to begin to provide some semblance of equal protection under the law.
Reno and other Clinton administration officials today shed crocodile tears over Matthew Shepard, while they demand more restrictions on democratic rights in his memory. These are the same people who designed and defend the White House's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which has reinforced discrimination against gays in the military and actually increased the number of people kicked out because of their sexual orientation.
Instead of backing the calls for "hate crime" laws, working people and other supporters of democratic rights should demand that existing laws be enforced to protect the civil rights of gays and lesbians, as well as oppose efforts like the Cincinnati law that encourage discrimination and scapegoating.
Growing numbers of youth and working people will be repelled by the system that breeds acts like the murder of Matthew Shepard and, increasingly, spawns fascist-minded thugs. They will be open to joining the fight, led by a revolutionary working-class movement, for a socialist world based on human dignity and solidarity.