Because He Was Hitting On His Attacker

Posted on | January 9, 2006

I just read a post by ColoradoPatriot over at The Gay Patriot that really got me fuming. He talks about Kyle Lawson, a former soldier in the US Army who was recently discharged, honorably, after coming out of the closet. What made Lawson more of a news item than most cases of this sort of thing is that he was beaten by a fellow soldier at an off-base party for it. The municipal police arrested his attacker and charges were pending, but the military took over the process and ended up disciplining the attacker with just a slap on the wrist involving the revocation of his pass.

I am not one to criticize someone for simply voicing a dissenting viewpoint, but I do have a problem when it is done, intentionally or not, by using cheap tricks like blaming the victim which is what CP did. As he is painting a different picture of the situation with Lawson he makes one fatal comment that, in my opinion, discards his credibility. This comment was:

"You’d also not know that Lawson was coming on to Pierre."

Whether he wants to admit it or not, and judging from the comments he made he does not want to do so, he justified the so-called "gay panic defense". The GPD is the assertion that the assault/murder of a homosexual is mitigated by the victim "flirting" or "coming onto" them. In other words it is like saying a rapist is not as responsible for their actions because the victim was "dressed provocatively". One highly publicized attempt to use the GPD was the trial of Aaron Kenny, one of the two individuals who murdered Matthew Shepard.

What pissed me off the most about this entry of his is that the remark was totally unnecessary to the point he was trying to make. As I read it, sans the remark, CP was trying to point out the Lawson knew that gays were not welcome in the military and so his departure on those grounds should not be a surprise to anyone. This is true because with that abominable "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" policy in effect Lawson was restricted from being openly homosexual and he knew that before he signed the enlistment papers. The post could have stood on its own without the "Lawson was coming on to Pierre" comment.