Now, I am a gentle, peaceful soul, but—

When I heard of the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard by a trio of homophobes a few years back (tortured and pistol-whipped a young college student for nothing more than his being gay, and left him tied to a fence on a country road. Days later, he was found still hanging from the fence, and taken to a hospital where he died from severe brain injuries received during the beating), I was roused to a kind of anger that I never want to feel. I want to kill—brutally—the kind of people who do such things.

I don't like that feeling. But I had the same feeling when I just read of what was done to Dane Hall.

The kind of people who perpetrate this kind of animal brutality on another human being—no matter what they consider the reasons—deserve to be banished from all human contact. They have proven that they, themselves, are not fully human. In fact, calling this sort of thing "animal brutality" is not correct. Animals may kill for food or to protect themselves, but not out of this kind of brutality.

I wonder if Dane Hall—or the authorities in Utah—are aware of The Matthew Shepard Act.

Don Firth