The death penalty for flirting (aka gay panic)

(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Let’s go back to February 12, 2008.  Brandon McInerney (14) decided to take his father’s .22 to E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard that day.  In his first period class in the computer lab, he sat behind Larry King.  He pulled the trigger and shot Larry King in the back of the head.

This got the attention of the entire class and the teacher.  With everyone watching, he shot Larry King in the head again.

McInerney has been described as being “popular and athletic”.  King was small, shy, half-black and effeminate.

King (15) wore high heeled boots and make-up to school, was completely open about his homosexuality and believed that the way to deal with his tormentors was to flirt with them.

One student testified that McInerney had told a group of students, “Say goodbye to your friend Larry because you won’t see him after tomorrow.”

McInerney’s defense team wants us to believe that Larry King’s sexual aggression “pushed McInerney over the edge”.  

Gay panic.  The accepted way to react to unwanted flirting is murder.

Didn’t we all know that?

There has been blame thrown in a lot of directions, including the school for “allowing him to dress like that”.

But there was nothing Assistant Principal Joy Epstein could do about it because King’s high-heeled boots, earrings and eye makeup were within the Oxnard school’s dress policy, Epstein testified Monday at the murder trial of King’s classmate, Brandon McInerney.

The prosecutor is trying to establish that McInerney is a white-supremacist.  Why?  Being homophobic is a good enough excuse to justify murder but being a Nazi isn’t?

What kind of a country is this where wearing makeup and fingernail polish earns someone a privately generated death sentence?

The teacher in the classroom on the day of the shooting testified  that she and her daughter had given Larry a homecoming dress, nail polish and a leopard-print gift bag as on a previous occasion.  Dawn Boldrin said:

It seemed like the foster care he was in was not condoning it per se but at least allowing him to finally do what he wanted to do instead of fighting him on it [obliquely referring to strife between King and his adoptive family. At the time of his death, King was living at a center for abused, neglected, and severely emotionally disturbed children.]