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Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Two incidents in the news lately have gotten me thinking (again) about how our society views people of differing colors, creeds and sexual orientations — and how intolerance can sometimes serve as a cover for real cruelty and hatred.
It’s a conversation that often runs through my head as I navigate the daily sea of bewildering, depersonalizing news of shooting sprees and Craiglist’s killers and suicidal CEOs and struggle to find patterns in the seemingly random acts grabbing the headlines.
The first case that struck me this week is that of 31-year-old Allen Ray Andrade, a Colorado man on trial for the murder of Angie Zapata, an 18-year old transgender woman who was found beaten to death last year in her Greeley apartment.
The question wasn’t whether Andrade did it — he freely confessed to beating Zapata with his fists and bashing her skull with a fire extinguisher until she was dead.
But it was Andrade’s defense that turned his trial into a rallying point for gay and transgender activists around the world. Andrade believed he had the right to kill Zapata because he discovered Zapata was biologically a man. Andrade said Zapata had tricked Andrade, who hated gay people, into having sex.
In Andrade’s mind, Zapata was gay or worse, an “it,” as he coldly referred to Zapata in taped jailhouse calls to friends after her murder.
The hatred revealed during the brief trial was chilling. In another taped call from jail, Andrade told a girlfriend that “all gay things must die” and explained to her: “It’s not like I went up to a school teacher and shot her in the head… or like I killed a law-abiding straight citizen.”
Would the jury buy Andrade’s defense and decide it was okay to “snap” and kill someone just because they were gay or transgendered? Would jurors acquit him or convict him of second-degree murder only?
Wednesday the jury took less than two hours to find Andrade guilty of murder in the first degree and a hate crime. That meant they saw right through his “trans panic” defense and found him responsible for the cold-blooded, unprovoked killing of an innocent human being. An hour later, a judge sentenced Andrade to life without parole.
For Zapata’s family, who had always loved and accepted Angie as a woman, the swift, decisive verdict restored their sister’s dignity as a human being undeserving of her brutal death.
For the global community of gay and transgendered people who were closely watching the case, it represented a glimmer of hope that they can be considered equal under the law.
The second incident that stopped me this week was the case of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a 11-year old boy from Springfield, Massachusetts, who took his own life on April 6 after repeatedly being called “gay” by his classmates because of his clothes and the way he dressed.
“He was being teased at the school — he was being made fun of — he was being bullied. A lot of it surrounded by ‘you act gay,’ ‘are you gay,’” his mother, Sirdeander Walker, told Boston news outlets as she recounted the weeks of abuse her son endured before his death.
Was little Carl actually gay? Who knows? He was only 11. And does it even matter?
No. What matters is that his classmates kept telling this boy he was gay and he was so ashamed he hung himself.
Coming across these two tales of human destruction in one week prompts me to ask — how can our society still let the concept of being gay invoke such shame? Exactly what is the source of hatred and fear that surrounds it?
And please don’t tell me it comes from the Bible. I know that’s the number one argument cited by those who hate (or pity) gay people: The Bible tells tells them that being gay violates God’s law. But the Bible doesn’t say you should execute gay people or drive them to take their lives.
Of course, most people aren’t going around doing that. Certainly, the two examples I’ve written about represent the absolute worst outcomes that anti-gay attitudes can bring.
I know it’s complicated. But every day, when I hear examples of anti-gay sentiment, I can’t stop thinking about where it all can go.
I could go on and on about why gay people are just like the rest of us and why it isn’t Christian to hate people for things like color or religion or sexual orientation.
But I think the most visceral reminder that intolerance is just plain wrong comes from cases like Angie Zapata and Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, whose sad ends prove that hate is ALWAYS dehumanizing.
