I keep thinking about how horrible my own family felt when Delta was going to file for bankruptcy and my father's pension was going to take a hit. No task force or the federal government came to his aid then...

(continued)...

I therefore decided that if I was ever in the position to make other families suffer as mine did, I would do it. I have therefore devoted my whole life to accumulating wealth and forcing corporations into bankruptcy so that other families may experience the hurt and bitterness that affected my whole family when we were thrust from affluence to poverty overnight by a corporate bankruptcy.

I feel good. I knew that I would.

... disqualify themselves if they find at the end of a round that they had an extra club in the bag that no one else but themselves knew about?

C'mon, using steroids for muscle building is illegal in all states, and is against the rules of baseball. Using steroids in baseball and other sports is CHEATING.

The United States and 196 other nations are signatories to the 2007 UN International Convention against Doping in Sport.

Once again we have a Salon author urging disregard for widely accepted international law.

If you have to use the 'gay panick ' defence ... you've admitted your motivation for the crime was hate ( people have been known to get lesser sentences because bigoted judges could relate to hating gays.)

The point of the "gay panic" defense is actually to claim a form of temporary insanity based on traumatic past experience.

For example Shepard had apparently been gang-raped in Morocco some years earlier, and as a result he suffered from recurrent depression and anxiety. If he had panicked and killed someone whom he believed was about to sexually attack him, then he might have had some kind of an argument. Or indeed, if he had pulled a gun and killed the two guys who killed him.

So the so-called "gay panic" defense is not the same as saying the motive for the killing was hate.

Anyhow, as I mentioned before, the "gay panic" defense was not allowed by the court.

What if someone were to say...

..."We were gay raped out there"?

Forty years ago expressions like I'm buggered (= I feel very tired) were commonplace and only regarded as a mild expletive.

The word rape should not be used in any kind of slang context, because this trivializes the suffering of men and women who have been sexually battered, right?

The word gay should not be used in any sense other than referring to homosexuality, and especially not in front of the word Hussar

The word crap should not be used in any context other than flushing toilets, because it is demeaning to the descendants of Thomas Crapper, noted inventor of the ballcock and other patented devices for flushing human waste. Even though the term crap was in use before Crapper came along.

All English dictionaries should be censored by the Newspeak Committee for the Enforcement of Politically Correct Language in America, which has worldwide enforcement and extradition powers, including torture where necessary.

Big Sister, I love you.

So - if they didn't kill him for being gay - why use the gay panic defense?

truly disgusting and Virginia Foxx should be called out on this.

so - you should check out the facts before making your statementst. just like virginia foxx.

Because they probably hoped to use the "gay panic" defense in mitigation to avoid the death penalty or get a lesser sentence.

Anyhow, the gay panic defense was not allowed, so this "blame the victim" ploy failed.

If the penalty for an offense is death or life imprisonment, what good is enhanced sentencing if the victim is gay or of a different race to the perpetrator? Are you going to have torture and THEN death, or life imprisonment WITH torture?

It seems obvious to me that such cases are incredibly hard to prove unless the perpetrator has demonstrable links to organized hate groups and that perpetrators are more likely to be acquitted by juries on these types of charges.

Incidentally, if you are not the original author of the Wikipedia article, you probably ought to give a citation before you paste it into your letter.

... it isn't really clear cut that the murder of Matthew Shepard was politically motivated. The murderers seem to have been common criminals.

On the night in question the assailants were high on drugs and alcohol and after killing Shepard, they also got into a fight with two Mexican-American teenagers who were not gay. This is what led to their arrest.

The reason McKinney did NOT get the death penalty was because there was no evidence that the murder was premeditated, which is surely necessary to prove that a "hate crime" took place.

Even without "hate crime" legislation he still received two consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole. No doubt he will receive therapy for any issues he has with homosexuality while he is incarcerated.

Well, I have said earlier in the letter sequence that I think this is intended as satire, though it is done rather strangely and subtly.

That line about the trains at the end is just too much of a giveaway, plus, of course the title Let war crimes be bygones, which may have been written by either the author or by a copy editor.

I do think that Keillor's intention is to provoke a furore in response to the kind of absurd arguments that we are hearing in favor of letting war crimes quietly drop so as to not rock the boat.