FEEDBACK from WillNich@aol.com:
Yesterday, Michael Carneal, the Paducah-area teenager who shot and killed
three of his fellow students at a prayer meeting last December and wounded
five others, plead guilty but mentally insane to charges stemming from that
incident. His expected sentence -- life without parole for 25 years -- will
be handed down in two months.
This past June, Carneal told his psychological evaluators that he fired
into the crowd in an effort to stop his fellow classmates from directing anti-
gay teasings and taunts against him (Carneal says he's not gay). At times
this harassment grew intense, ranging from daily verbal taunting to physical
assaults.
So you'd think that the mainstream press would mention that problem in
its coverage yesterday. But the newspapers as well as the television stations
in Louisville -- the state's largest city and its most important media market
-- made no mention whatsoever of the nature of this abuse. And neither did
his attorneys in a statement released after the hearing yesterday.
The most the Courier-Journal would say is that Carneal's family hired
experts who determined that he "suffered from low self-esteem and that
ridicule from other teen-agers led to feelings of inadequacy...." If he'd
been of a religion different from the majority of students there, my guess is
that the newspapers would be falling over themselves to mention it. But since
it was anti-gay harassment, there wasn't one word. This is very frightening
to me.
The same newspaper did reprint a statement from Carneal's attorneys, but
the attorneys compounded the problem. "He had lost any sense of self-esteem,
self-worth or self-love," they wrote. "Like many teen-agers, he was
hypersensitive to his classmates' statements about him. He felt inadequate,
unworthy, unloved, unrespected and unaccepted by his peer group...Michael felt
as if he were a massive failure, doomed to be different and recognized as a
'nobody.'"
The closest the attorneys came to describing the anti-gay harassment was:
"Things that were said about Michael challenged his manhood and ultimately
resulted in his being stamped as 'odd and different' and to some extent an
outcast from the student body.'" Evidently they consider being called gay a
challenged to one's "manhood."
I don't know yet how the local paper, the Paducah Sun, handled this; in
all respects they've been much better than the state's leading newspaper, the
Louisville Courier-Journal, which used to be at the forefront of social
progress in Kentucky but of late has been refocusing its news toward
conservative Christian readers.
I myself am furious -- and a bit scared -- by this total lack of coverage
of such an important issue. And in talking with the school district where
Carneal was a student, I've found there are no plans to address anti-gay
harassment per se in the schools. They have a blanket policy against
harassment of any kind, but I seriously question how well that's being managed
for gay and lesbian students, or those perceived to be gay (as in Carneal's
case). I doubt that counselors are being educated on how to handle gay
issues, and there is probably no set policy on how teachers and principles
should handle anti-gay harassment in the classrooms and hallways.
And so the problem continues, thanks to Carneal's attorneys (who seemed
to want to cover over the gay aspect of this case) and the Louisville Courier-
Journal and electronic media, which decided to go along with the coverup and
therefore help the problem to continue.
If you'd like to complain to the Courier-Journal, its address is 525 W.
Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202. Its ombudsman's phone number is
502/582-4600. (E-MAIL: cjletter@louisv02.gannett.com )
--David Williams, Editor, The Letter - Kentucky's gay, lesbian, bisexual &
transgender newspaper
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Subject: More on Paducah shootings...
To: frice@raids.org
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 11:40:23 +0800 (WST)
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