There was an opinion piece printed in the April 1 edition of The Reflector, the newspaper at Mississippi State University, written by Lazarus Austin, that really made my blood boil.
You guys remember Lawrence King? That 15-year-old gay boy from California who was shot to death by a classmate upset because Larry “flirted” with him? Well, Mr. Austin from Mississippi State suggested this week that Larry was the one at fault.
Mr. Austin says he has “two problems with the controversy” (the controversy being all those radicals calling on schools to do more to teach tolerance and crack down on bullying). His first problem is that “people are blowing the situation out of proportion and automatically assuming King’s murderer killed him simply because King was gay. This remind me of how people love to cry racism when someone kills a person of a different race.”
Mr. Austin’s second problem is, apparently, that poor little Brandon McInerney, the 14-year-old charged with a hate crime and murder for shooting Larry King, has had a rough life, and even though he was a good student, he was really just “a fuse ready to explode.” So it was really Larry King’s fault because his “fraternization” and his “imposing his homosexuality on McInerney” just set Brandon off!
He writes: “Although King by no means deserved his fate” (good of Mr. Austin to think so!) “he may have unfortunately invited it.”
There’s more. Read it for yourself here.
There is a link on the page where you can e-mail Mr. Austin, and a place for leaving comments. So check it out. And let Lazarus Austin know what you think. This kind of dangerous idiocy can’t go unchallenged.
3 Comments
This child was murderd out of a hate crime.
That is by no means excusable.
A child have mental problems or being a “a fuse ready to explode” doesn’t make this any less of a hate crime.
If he had shot up a school because he’s had a bad life, that makes it less plausable that this was a hate crime.
But he didn’t he shot one little boy who wanted him to be his valentine.
And shame on you for defending that.
My 17 year old son was once given a hair cut by a gay hairdresser.My son is a good looking well built teenager. The gay hairdresser kept hugging my son like they are very good friends and in a flirty way. He kept dropping his shears near my son’s crotch. It is very uncomfortable as my son felt being taken advantage of so he had no choice but to say “Do it again and I will k… you.” Of course he didn’t mean to because he was just belting out his frustration. Eventually the hairdresser backed off. I saw what happened as I took him there but I let my son deal with the situation as I watched him keep his cool. He is a good kid and has shared rooms with a gay person in a missionary base two years later. He has no problem with them as long as they act decently and they know their boundaries and not assume that their sometimes obnoxious behavior is acceptable to everybody…My son has rights too to be respected as a decent person.
Larry sure knew how to pick em
Anyway, you can’t REALLY force people to change the way they might react to a thing like come ons, especially young hormonal people even though they act so “grown up” these days. Not without threats or forced medication or lobotimies, but that’s suppousedly what we’re against. Fascism on the left and right, etc etc
So its my belief that maybe an observing teacher or whomever should have taken Larry aside and said told him that what he was doing was dangerous. Had that happened he would have learned to be smarter and more mature about it and lived a long life.
Oh well