There appears to have been a horrific, organized hate crime in the Bronx, but the New York Times risks trivializing it by treating it and the Rutgers tragedy as two instances of the same sort of thing.
I won’t fully describe what happened in the Bronx. Read it if you have a strong stomach. Unless there is a cunning conspiracy to luridly embellish the facts, 9 thugs targeted some gay men, one or two at a time, and sytemmatically did terrible things to them in an abandoned house where the thugs were squatting.
What offended me in the New York Times coverage was this agenda-driven juxtaposition:
There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old … Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said — until the boys … admitted to having had sex with the man.
… One of the teenage victims was still there, and the [thugs] ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette … as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.
The beatings and robberies went on for hours …
“These suspects deployed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference.
The assaults are the latest in a string of recent episodes of bullying and attacks against gays. A Rutgers University student jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge last month, prosecutors said, after his roommate had secretly set up a webcam in their room and streamed over the Internet his sexual encounter with another man …
(Italics added) This seems to me another example of what Joe Sobran (Memory Eternal!) satirized: “New York Destroyed by Earthquake; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.”
I already have argued that what happened at Rutgers was a vulgar, vile invasion of privacy, but not at all a clear case of hatred, homophobia, or bullying. It trivializes enormities like the Bronx torture to compare it to a merely barbarian, adolescent unwillingness to let private things remain private.
And what real meaning of “The assaults are the latest in a string of recent episodes of bullying and attacks against gays”? Will there ever be a time when there is no bullying and attacking? Won’t a gay or lesbian be on the receiving end of such, by sheer dumb luck, 2% or so of the time? Has the Times never heard of “coincidence”?
The Boy Who Cried Wolf is hardly a new tale. I wouldn’t bet against the New York Times, which does buy its ink by the barrel, but it risks undermining its own pro-gay agenda by gratuitous, implausible comparisons of apples and oranges.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 