Discrimination

[Author Janet Folger] observes that while there were 13,500 stories on the murder of Matthew Shepard, who was a homosexual, there were only 632 stories on the brutal murder of 13 year old Jesse Dirkhising by homosexual assailants. The people who killed Matthew Shepard later confirmed that they didn’t do it out of any animosity for his sexual behaviour – they killed him for money for drugs. Both killers attacked Shepard for robbery; it had nothing to do with his homosexuality. Yet there was massive newspaper and TV coverage of the Shepard case, two major Hollywood specials, three TV movies and a play, all depicting Shepard as a victim of an anti-homosexual hate crime. However, people like Jesse Dirkhising, who was bound, gagged and brutally sodomised, then smothered to death, by homosexual assailants failed to receive any such media coverage.
 
Similarly, the murder of Mary Stachowicz, a 51 year old wife, and mother of 4, who was murdered by a 19 year old homosexual, Nicholas Gutierrez, for witnessing to him and suggesting that he could change his lifestyle, was ignored by most newspapers. This mother, who was described as a deeply compassionate church member and soft-spoken, was "punched, kicked, stabbed and strangled to death." But that wasn't considered a hate crime (Folger, The Criminalisation of Christianity, Multnomah Press, 2005).