QUASHING A GAY KILLING?

Some reporters and talk show hosts say that some major media outlets suppressed a murder story because the suspects are a homosexual couple, while other outlets received death threats over the story.

Eric Hogue, a broadcaster covering northeastern Ohio and Pennsylvania for WHK- AM/FM, tells Conservative News Service he himself received death threats from people accusing him of hatemongering, over his coverage of the murder case, which involves the Sept. 26 death of a 13-year-old boy, Jesse Dirkhising, in Arkansas.

Various reports indicate one of the suspects, 22-year-old Joshua M. Brown, told police he snuck up on the boy, tied him up, and sodomized him repeatedly while Brown's lover, 38-year-old Davis Don Carpenter, watched, according to CNS. Jesse died of asphyxiation. The men have pleaded not guilty and are held without bond.

"About 10 percent of my emails are from people who haven't heard of the case and who want material to verify what they heard," Hogue tells CNS. "People asked me to send them some stuff because people they told about it didn't believe them.

"My beef is with the national news media who ignore this story, and go to the other extreme in covering Matthew Shepard," he continues, citing the gay college student who was murdered last year. "The issue with me is not who's heterosexual and who's homosexual, but what the news media is covering and not covering. Evidently that makes me a hatemonger in the eyes of some."

Several published commentaries since the Dirkhising killing have charged homosexual activists with holding the position that the sexual preferences of the suspects is irrelevant, even as such activists so often make loud noises about playing up the sexual preferences of homosexuals who are murder or other crime victims.

Another radio host, Philip Johnson of KORM in Arkansas, who claims he tried to get the story to several national media outlets but was rejected, charges that the story has been held back for political reasons. "Nothing was done in print, nothing was done on TV nor on radio," he told the news wire.

Public policy groups told CNSNews.com that gay rights activists, who joined in the condemnation of the Dirkhising slaying, should go a step further and use the slaying to warn their communities of the dangers of sado-masochistic behavior.

"We have called on them to denounce violence against homosexuals by homosexuals," says the Family Research Council's cultural studies director Robert H. Knight, "because there's more of that than any other kind of violence, far more than so-called hate crimes."

Mission America director Linda Harvey tells CNS the Dirkhising and Shepard murders should be treated equally, "in condemnation and punishment."