Intent

Steve Harmon is gay. He is gay and he is fifteen years old. He is gay, fifteen and was beaten until his skull was fractured. He was beaten.

It is probably unfair to characterize opinion regarding any issue by the comments following news articles on the Internet. The local television affiliate’s site read like the residents of a psych ward having simultaneous arguments with invisible friends. It consisted of a cathectic man who insisted upon posting long diatribes that, summed up basically, were his intrinsic proof that Jesus was gay, arguing against the people who, not only paid attention to him, but chose to try to engage him in debate. The more they would protest, the more he would write. Page after page after page.

The local paper’s website, however, had more coherent but equally toxic comments, perhaps even somewhat more so as they were much more subtle in their commentary. Many appeared to have compassion for this boy for being beaten and there wasn’t a lot of the ‘homosexuality is a sin‘ rhetoric.

One line of discussion was that this boy shouldn’t have been revealed by his mother as gay, as if she were sensationalizing this or it was something of which he should be ashamed. If the boy were Christian or any other distinguishing characteristic, do you think they would have complained if his mom released his name or that characteristic? The fact, the main fact of this story, is that the boy was harassed and beaten because he was gay. I think the readers were going to put two and two together and come to that conclusion anyway. The boy was openly gay. It wasn’t that he was being called names. He was attacked because of who he is. I dare say that is an integral part of the story. I also think it was very brave of the family to come forward and put a name and face on this sort of bigoted violence. If we do not release the shame that society tries to heap upon being gay and say proudly who we are and that we do not deserve to be used as human punching bags, we will never move forward.

The second greatest theme was that the intent of the of the attackers in this story should not matter in their prosecution for attacking Steve. Many people also objected that this be considered in the sentencing of these young men, but their fears had no chance of being realized, as being attacked for being gay does not fall under Michigan’s hate crime statute. That did not seem to appease them, as aversion to the very thought of punishing someone for the intent behind their crime was the theme of letter after letter. They believed that a person’s ethnicity, race or sexual orientation should not come into play when prosecuting someone. Again, I wonder if the boy had been beat up for being a Christian if the same objections would have been launched?

If you follow their line of thinking, it should make no difference if you accidently hit someone wearing a dark color walking across a darkened street than if you planned for weeks and slowly poisoned someone. You killed someone either way, right? You should just be punished for killing someone if your intent doesn’t matter. I wonder why we have all those degrees of murder? I mean if it’s just that someone dies and nothing else matters, we could save a whole lot of time, right? The truth is, we consider the motive of an accused criminal all the time. Even if you killed someone in the heat of the moment versus planning out an elaborate scheme to avoid being caught, both murders outright, what will ultimately play out in your sentencing is your intention. If you grew pot to have some around the house versus growing some to head over to the local elementary school, your sentence would be quite different. It is based on your intent. If we follow this logic out to its most insane degree, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden and every other blood thirsty genocidal maniac, were just trying to further their political ideals. Right?

The final argument put forth in these reactions was that we didn’t get to hear the other side in this case. As if there were some reason, that somehow, Steve Harmon was asking for trouble. It goes back to that same sick homophobic thinking that somehow, in some way, straight guys need to prove their straightness by physically displaying their disdain for homosexuality. They need to cover up their own feelings by acting out and showing the extent of their repulsion by cracking open the skull of another child. I told the story of my sister’s sister-in-law in another post. She believed her son was completely justified in beating up gay boys for showing pubic affection. She even bemoaned the fact that it was her son who would be punished. She thought that was acceptable because her son’s intention didn’t matter and that those boys, who were the object of her son’s hate, didn’t deserve some kind of protection from being maligned or injured because of the way they were born. They were as vulnerable as Steve Harmon, who is fifteen. Steve Harmon who is fifteen, gay and has a fractured skull. Steve Harmon who was singled out. Steve Harmon, who was singled out and beaten because he was gay.