Arlen Specter left for strategic political reasons. Some folks have left to jump on the Obama bandwagon. Some are leaving because of the Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin debacles. But others are leaving out of pure shame.
Today, North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx said, in a speech on the floor of the House, that the 1998 beating death of Matthew Shepard “was merely the result of a robbery gone bad.”
As Media Matters reports, “While his killers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson did rob him, they also admitted that they were well aware of his sexual orientation and pretended they were gay to lure him away from the bar he was in at the time. The most striking feature of the case, of course, is that during the course of a normal, simple robbery, the victim is not generally beaten, tied to a post, and left for dead.”
Rep. Foxx said, ” we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay. The bill was named for him, the hate crimes bill was named for him, but it’s, it’s really a hoax.”
A hoax.
It’s one thing to be a conservative. It’s one thing to be opposed to same-sex marriage. But it’s quite another to say that the murder of a 21-year-old college student was a “hoax.”
No wonder Republican registration is on the decline. Decent people refuse to be associated with this abominable and revisionist Phelpsian nonsense.
It is obvious that the Republican party has become one of the extreme right. Virginia Foxx should immediately apologize to both Matthew’s family as well as the LGBT community for her statements. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening. What I do see happening is her going on Beck, Hannity, and Billo and getting a sympathetic ear.
Also… Where are the Log Cabin Republicans and GOProud? After all of these years trying to “work from the inside” it just shows how much progress they’ve really made.