The "hate state" myth.

• Author: Blanchard, Robert
• Position: Hate crime in Wyoming

In Wyoming, there are a few bigots who don't like gays. In the media, there are a lot more bigots who don't like Wyoming.

In the wake of the brutal October 1998 murder-robbery of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, the news media, liberal gay rights groups, politicians, and others engaged in a national outcry for swift enactment of hate crime legislation. A hate crime law would, as loan M. Garry, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, put it, "protect Wyoming gays from the kind of horrors which Matthew Shepard and his family have had to endure." The Wyoming legislature responded in February by voting on several hate crime bills - including one that even included protection of particular occupations, such as ranching, mining, and logging, from "ecoterrorists." A House version of the bill was defeated in committee with a 30-30 tie. Two Senate versions were defeated in committee by wider margins.

National proponents of hate crime laws were quick to pass judgment: Wyoming, rather than being "The Equality State" - Wyoming's official motto, adopted after it became the first state in the nation to grant women the right to vote - was really the "Hate State." Even as Shepard's grieving parents reaffirmed on NBC's Dateline and in Vanity Fair that they did not want their son's death used in a campaign for hate crime legislation or any other political cause, groups such as the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force (NLGTF) inferred that the legislature had not merely declined to fight intolerance but itself embodied intolerance for failing to pass the bill. "If not now, when?" demanded NLGTF Executive Director Kerry Lobel. "We are extremely disappointed that Wyoming refused to take real leadership on this issue."

Such reactions fit into the "hate crime news formula" that has become increasingly popular since the early 1980s with the media, advocacy groups, academics, and liberal politicians - all of whom have vested interests in fomenting a sense of continuous social crisis. A product of the identity politics mindset that has come to dominate American society over the past two decades, the hate crime news formula uses widely recognizable and understood images - burning crosses and churches, neo-Nazi goose-steppers, and, most recently, the burned corpse of Billy Jack Gaither in Coosa County, Alabama; James Byrd, chained and dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas; and Shepard's silhouetted body lashed to a Laramie, Wyoming, buck fence - to suggest that the United States is a seething cauldron of hate directed at members of unpopular groups. Although demonstrably false (even the statistics gathered by the advocates of hate crime legislation demonstrate there is thankfully no "epidemic" of such heinous acts), the formula remains popular, partly because it provides the media with a ready-made angle by elevating "ordinary" crimes to matters of urgent, national concern involving sexism, racism, and homophobia. Indeed, the formula provides big ratings and material benefits both to advocates and to their academic allies. And it provides politicians with the opportunity to engage in cost-free, camera-friendly symbolic activity.

With the Shepard case, the Wild West setting of the murder augmented the standard media narrative: Of course, the coverage implied, Wyoming's macho, frontier culture is closed-minded, bigoted, and homophobic - what else could it be? As an NBC reporter put it while standing outside a Laramie drinking joint, "At Wild Willies Cowboy Bar today, patrons said hate is easy to find here." Never mind that Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right not only to vote but to own property and to hold office; that it elected the nation's first female governor in 1924; that it ratified the Equal Rights Amendment in 1973; that it was at the forefront of a trend in the 1970s to repeal sodomy laws; and that in the 1990s, more than 70 percent of its voters rejected anti-abortion initiatives. For the media, Wyoming was a natural setting for such a bestial crime. As The New York Times editorial page intoned the day following Shepard's death: "Laramie, the home seat of [Wyoming's] university, is a small town with a masculine culture ... [Shepard] died in a coma yesterday, in a state without a hate-crimes law."

Local Outrage

As a Wyoming native (now living in Texas) and a gay man, I find such geographical stereotyping to be more than simply inaccurate and irresponsible. The coverage of the Shepard case delivers a damning lesson about the gross inability of the hate crime news formula to explain complex social situations - and it demonstrates that when the media and advocacy groups are faced with the choice of responding to reality or simply sticking with their scripts, they almost invariably choose the latter. Indeed, had they bothered to get beyond superficial pronouncements, they might have crafted a very different - and much more accurate - tale, one that reflected the outrage and sadness of area residents and put their rejection of hate crime legislation in its proper context. Far from symbolizing the last frontier of intolerance, Wyoming instead has said no to identity politics and the divisive, separatist group consciousness that hate crime legislation both reflects and perpetuates. While it is surely misguided to hope that anything decent will come from a tragic and horrible death, drawing such a lesson might at least salvage some small scrap of good from Shepard's murder.

In December, I traveled to Laramie to cover the arraignment of Matthew Shepard's accused killers for The Triangle, a Texas-based gay newspaper. I was particularly curious to learn how the horrible crime and subsequent media frenzy affected Wyoming residents, including former classmates and lifelong friends. The lonely epicenter of the nation's Empty Quarter, Wyoming is seldom, if ever, on the national media's radar screen. There are exceptions - for example, when the president or another celebrity visits Jackson Hole or when Yellowstone National Park threatens to burn - but no one I talked to in Laramie could recall any event that generated anything close to the coverage of Shepard's homicide. As a local physician wrote in a...