The lectures on "risky" behavior are nice, but they're an attempt to sideline the real issue (saying that people who go home with strangers, whether straight, gay, or bisexual, whether they've met the strangers online, at a bar, at a Republican teabagging party, etc., etc., etc., are taking a "risk" is one of those "no, sh*t, Sherlock" equations. I'm not sure where in my post I said that the countless folks who are picking up strangers across the country weren't engaging in "risky" behavior. But, thanks, it would make a good public safety pamphlet.

However-- and this is a big however (and one that gets back to Paglia's actual "hate crime" argument I (and I thought you) was/were addressing, as well as Pahglia's frequent use of Matthew Shepard)-- simply engaging in "risky" behavior does not come into play in whether or not a case like Shepard's is a "hate crime."

For example, many people also engage in the risky behavior of jaywalking on busy streets. If a man is jaywalking on a busy street, and a car hits him, this is, indeed, a tragedy, and certainly we have both the risk the man took and the ability of the driver to adequately stop into consideration when considering the event. In a case like this, let's all share a good reminder that jaywalking on a busy street is risky and to be avoided by all decent people.

However, let's say a particularly impatient rabbi frequently jaywalks. Now, this is by no means perfectly desirable behavior. We might pull the rabbi aside and say "please, sir, cross at the lights," and we'd be good and noble and it would be a very real issue. But one day, this rabbi is jaywalking across the street and a big car hits him, then backs up, runs him over again, backs up, runs him over again, and again, and again. The cops finally chase down the driver who is taken into custody shouting anti-semitic slurs.

Who, exactly, not just in a court of law, but even in simply civil culture, would keep insisting that jaywalking was now a particularly crucial point we should pay a lot of attention to in this case, particularly calling the point up over a decade after the rabbi's death? Who, by any stretch of the imagination, would go on and on lecturing the Jewish community and/or everyone else to beware of jaywalking, when anyone with a pair of eyes could clearly see there was something much different at stake in this particular case? Would there be posts on Salon ten years after the White Supremacist who ran over the rabbi thirty-six times had begun serving his life sentence in jail that, hey, the rabbi was being "risky," what with the jaywalking and everything?

My point, as was very clear in my original post, was that picking up strangers, even roughnecks, is exceedingly common by straights, gays, bisexuals and pretty much any and every adult who might fall into some other category. Zillions of people are probably doing it right now. Is it risky? Well, dang me, if it ain't. But what doesn't often happen-- and here's where you might want to take notes-- is that the persons in question either torture someone nearly to death and leave them to die on a fence in the wilderness and later rant about the "f*g" and "qu**r" to police, nor, conversely, do they very often end up being tortured, left to die, etc. If this happens, well, much like how backing up over the jaywalking rabbi thirty-seven times while screaming anti-Semitism is somewhat different than a driver who may or may not be able to stop in time and hits a jaywalker once, there's a substantial difference in the nature of the crime.

My belief is that these attempts to dwell on whether or not Shepard was being "risky" is an attempt to pretend his murder didn't have the specific details that it actually has. Lots and lots and lots of folks go home with strangers. (Again, not to sound like a remedial reading class, but the fact presented in the previous sentence does not suggest I'm saying "hey, everyone, it's great to go home with strangers! Everybody, please go pick up a redneck immediately"). But unless we're playing pseudo-psychologists and are wanting to write a dissertation on Freud's "death drive," none of us, not me, you, or Paglia, have any clue that Shepard knew the redneck guys he was leaving with with were GOING TO FREAKIN' KILL HIM. And to keep on implying this, about a real person, on armchair psychology and supposition, is, IMO, pretty sick itself.

Again, one more time: Shepard's behavior while risky, wasn't out-of-the-ordinary. Lots of people do it all the time and will likely do so until the end of human existence. Paglia et al yammering on about Shepard doing this and "ohmigod, it's risky!" is phony-baloney shock (Paglia indeed has previously tried to force this into her overall trite precious "Sexual Personae" portrait of "gays," rather than something all sorts have done and do) and an attempt to divert the actual subject.

What wasn't ordinary was the severity and nature of the violence that happened next. It's not ordinary in the sense of what usually happens with the countless folks who go out nightly for a bang with a roughneck (or plural, roughnecks). It's not even ordinary in the sense of most murders. The fact that the court system tends to look at distinctions in cases like these isn't some obscure, professorial sideline-- it's the heart of the whole issue. But Paglia and her pals would rather we focused on how Shepard was ohmigod-oh-so-unusual in picking up folks for a quickie. So, yeah, go figure.

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That has nothing to do with cost of delivery and everything to do with increasing numbers of recipients as the baby boomer generation retires. And, of course, now it includes a prescription drug benefit.

As I wrote earlier, it may be eye opening to Sarah Palin after she leaves the state's employ to discover with private insurance will balk at paying for; she has a disabled child and he presumably has special medical needs. She will quickly come to appreciate what it's like to be nickle and dimed on reimburseables.