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Friday, May 18, 2007
The recent horrific murder of Ryan Skipper had something in common with almost all of the other gay murders that I have reported on for the Express: The suspects, William Brown and Joseph Bearden, are Caucasian, native-born American citizens.
As we approach an election in which the right wing is likely to make immigration a wedge issue since they have nothing else to run on, I thought it would be interesting to run down the grim list of the red-blooded American murder suspects that the Express has reported on in the past few years: There’s Matthew Hicks, accused of killing gay accountant Richard Shoemaker. Eric Patrick was arrested for the murder of Steven Schumacher. Joseph Fleischer, 18, and Scott Whisenant, 17, were arrested in the murder of gay physician Dr. Harry T. Grossman. William McHenry was convicted of murdering Lucas McCauley. Bryan Donahue and William Dodge were convicted in the hate-crime murder of Steven Goedereis. Vincent J. Puglisi and Rex S. Ditto were arrested for the murder of “Curious George” writer Alan Shalleck. All of the above suspects were Caucasian American citizens.
In fact, I recall just three murder suspects that I’ve reported on for the Express who were apparently Latino: Luis Fernando Ortiz, who was arrested in January for the murder of Michael Schrader; Carlos Sanchez, who was arrested in the killing of Jesus Pineda; and Omar Loureiro, who was convicted of murdering James G. Lentry. In none of those cases were the suspects identified as illegal immigrants.
As any gay person who lives in South Florida knows, Latinos are very well represented in the gay community here, and I have even met some illegal ones. But Latinos are not particularly well represented when it comes to crime suspects, and they are certainly not disproportionately represented in the gay crime mug shots. Other nationalities are also well represented among the gay community here, but it is extremely rare to see them in the crime stories. Moreover, I can’t recall a single crime that I’ve reported on for the Express in which the suspect was identified as an illegal immigrant.
I realize this is all anecdotal evidence, but I think it is revealing nonetheless.
In the coming months, you will hear a lot of chatter from the right about “illegal aliens.” They will rarely, if ever, use the terms “illegal immigrant” or “undocumented worker” because they don’t want you to think of these people as human beings with children, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and domestic partners. There is even a website called We Hire Illegal Aliens.com, designed to publicly humiliate companies that hire illegal workers.
This is all in line with the three-pronged strategy of the far right in recent years: dehumanize your opponents or anyone you want to scapegoat, publicly humiliate them using the internet and intimidate them. It’s the same as referring to all sex offenders as “predators,” even those who have not actually engaged in predatory behavior or pose no threat to society.
Meanwhile, a group called the Minutemen is seeking to build a new Berlin Wall on our border with Mexico.
It should be pointed out that there is a major difference between the invaders that the Minutemen of Paul Revere’s time were warning against and the “invaders” that the Minutemen of today are ranting about: The Redcoats of the 1770s hailed from a rich country, England, that was looking to get richer by exploiting the American colonists. The people who are now coming across our southern border are for the most part desperately poor individuals looking to come here to do whatever menial work they can find to support their families.
Anyway, amid this background of pretend patriotism, a bill was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives called the Uniting American Families Act. It would give gay men and lesbians the same rights to apply for citizenship for their permanent partners that married heterosexual couples have. The bill includes strict regulations to prevent fraud and specific definitions of what a permanent partner is.
Though it’s a good step forward, the bill is unlikely to become law because the far-right people who are behind the anti-immigration hysteria movement don’t care about the heterosexual family members of immigrants let alone gay families. While conservatives harp about “family values,” it’s ironic that the oppressive immigration policies that they are pushing are actually splitting up families.
It is more likely that we will see more laws like the one that Farmers Branch, Tex., recently passed that makes it illegal for anyone to rent an apartment to an illegal immigrant. Before you know it, you could be hauled off to jail for renting that room in your condo to your Latino friend because you didn’t properly interrogate him about his background or he lied about his status.
The Minutemen and others use 9-11 and the terrorist threat to justify oppressive proposals, even though none of the Sept. 11 hijackers swam across the Rio Grande. The Bush Administration has refused to spend the money on the measures that would really make our country more secure, such as installing radiation-detection devices at the seaports and explosive-detection devices to scan checked luggage at all airports.
I don’t think people should just be allowed to ignore our current immigration laws without facing some consequences. But maybe if we didn’t live in such a dysfunctional world — a world in which a handful of countries are successful and everyone else still lives like a Dickens pauper — we wouldn’t have so many people looking to leave their homelands and come here in the first place.
Trying to create a more level playing field with more prosperous countries in the world requires strong leadership skills in the areas of international trade, international investment, promoting secular democratic movements and discouraging repressive theocracies and dictatorships that retard the economic growth of societies. In short, it requires diplomatic skills, and we currently have a diplomatic dunce in the White House.
Maybe the next administration will recognize that the real solution to our illegal immigration woes requires working to transform the socio-economic basket case that is planet Earth. Maybe we will eventually have leaders that value God-given human dignity more than man-made borders.
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