AS FAR AS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS CONCERNED, IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHOSE OX IS BEING GORED

Jesse William Dirkhising
Jesse Dirkhising
Born	May 24, 1986(1986-05-24) Oxford, Ohio
Died	September 26, 1999 (aged 13)[1] Rogers, Arkansas

This September,

on college campuses across the nation,

conservative students will be sponsoring

the first annual Jesse Dirkhising Day.

For those who aren’t aware, Jesse was the 13-year old boy

who was tortured to death by two homosexual predators in September of 1999.

As of this writing, nearly ten years after his death, college and universities around the nation have been ignoring his tragic case. Long after being used as a sex toy by two homosexual pedophiles his memory is still being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness by those who feign commitment to cultural diversity. Meanwhile, the case of Matthew Shepard is endlessly exploited for political gain.

In the summer of 1999, Jesse’s mother and stepfather – Tina and Miles Yates – foolishly allowed him to spend time with a homosexual couple, Davis Carpenter, then 38, and Joshua Brown, then 22. Carpenter used to drive 60 miles to pick Jesse up at his trailer park home in order to take him to Rogers, Arkansas, where he and Brown lived.

Then, one evening - after gagging him with dirty underwear and propping pillows beneath his abdomen – an all-night sexual assault began. Brown sodomized young Jesse with several fingers before using his penis, a banana, and an enema laced with a sedative. Carpenter enjoyed the rape show while masturbating in the hallway.

During the middle of the sexual assault, Carpenter went to a convenience store to buy sausage and cucumbers to use during the second half of the assault. He also bought two sandwiches – one for himself and one for Brown. But he didn’t buy a sandwich for Jesse. Jesse had already eaten his last meal.

When Carpenter returned from the store, young Jesse Dirkhising was no longer breathing. After a failed attempt to administer CPR, Carpenter panicked and called 911. The police found Jesse with a mouth full of blood. His body was smeared with fecal matter. Are you listening Al Sharpton? His body was really covered with fecal matter. And he didn’t put it on himself.

After his arrest, Carpenter claimed that Jesse Dirkhising was attracted to males and, as a consequence, hated himself. Was Davis Carpenter suggesting that Jesse allowed himself to be lured into the rape and torture situation because of this self-hatred? Would Carpenter also be open to the suggestion that he and Brown were driven to abuse Jesse by some sick sense of violent self-hatred?

And, here’s the $64,000 question: If so, did their actions qualify as a “hate crime”?

During Brown’s murder and rape trial, prosecutors presented nylon rope, douche bottles, feces and vomit-covered shirts and underwear – as well as scores of photographs of items used to sodomize Jesse. During the trial, Jesse’s stepfather stated that he was aware that the two grown men were homosexuals. But he didn’t care about what they did “So long as it was not around the family.”

One of the prosecutors in Brown’s trial dismissed those who would call Jesse’s murder a hate crime, saying the following: “Jesse was not attacked because he was heterosexual; he was attacked because he was a child.” But is the prosecutor’s statement accurate?

Jesse Dirkhising was attacked, in part, because he was poor. Pedophiles often target kids from lower-class families thinking that people, including their own family members, are less likely to care about them. There was certainly evidence of familial apathy in this case. But there was also evidence that Jesse engaged in consensual oral sex with Brown before the night of the murder.

Once again, if Jesse was a homosexual who hated that part of his being, then what about Brown? Was he led to rape and torture another homosexual out of his own sense of self-loathing? And can such self-hatred be used as the basis of a hate crime prosecution?

For years, college campuses have used the Matthew Shepard case to show what horrible things can happen to homosexuals at the hands of heterosexuals. Sadly, they have been unwilling to use the Jesse Dirkhising case to show what horrible things can happen to homosexuals at the hands of other homosexuals.

It’s a little bit like the situation with black-on-black crime. When academics refuse to discuss it they show their own true colors. And they show how truly thoughtless the thought police can be.

JESSE DIRKHISING DAY

By Dr. Mike Adams

July 13, 2009

www.drmadams.org

Dr. Adams in a professor of criminology

At The University of North Carolina

Wilmington, N.C.

WIKIPEDIA

Jesse William Dirkhising (May 24, 1986 – September 26, 1999), also known as Jesse Yates, was an American teenager from Prairie Grove, Arkansas who was bound, drugged, tortured, raped, and died as a result of the position in which he was tied down.^[5][6]

Dirkhising's death, later ruled a murder, received only regional media coverage until a Washington Times article ran a story nearly a month after his death noting the lack of national coverage in contrast to that given to the death of Matthew Shepard.^[7][8] The high-profile Shepard murder was approaching its first anniversary and as such was getting another round of national attention coupled with updates on pending hate crime legislation.^[9] Prompted by coverage in the Washington Times, the Dirkhising case gained notoriety as conservative commentators compared media coverage of the two cases and explored the issues of what was considered a hate crime.^[8]

The resulting controversy resulted in mainstream media also reporting the Dirkhising case in relation to the coverage of the Shepard case, with many attempting to explain why the two were handled differently by the media, and perhaps received differently by readers.^[9][10][7]

The media coverage of the Dirkhising case was repeatedly and consistently compared to that of the Shepard case, although Dirkhising was a minor and the victim of a sex crime and Shepard the adult victim of a hate crime.^[11][7] Shepherd was an openly gay man attacked by two heterosexual men, while Dirkhising's attackers were both gay.^[12][13]

Background

At the time of his death, Dirkhising was a thirteen-year-old seventh grader from the small town of Prairie Grove.^[8] David Carpenter lived about thirty miles away in a "small but booming northwest Arkansas town" called Rogers.^[8][14][15] Carpenter's younger gay lover, Joshua Macave Brown, shared his apartment.^[8][4] Carpenter managed a beauty salon and was a friend of Dirkhising's parents, Tina and Miles Yates Jr., and Dirkhising had stayed with the two men at their apartment on weekends for two months prior to his death.^[4] The child's family had been told he was helping out at the salon.^[4] Brown, who had been sexually molesting Dirkhising for two months prior his death, claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant.^[16][17]

Dirkhising died two weeks before the first anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder.^[18] Shepard, a University of Wyoming student and a young gay man, was picked up at a gay bar by two men posing as gay who offered Shepard a ride in their car.^[12] They drove Shepard to a remote part of rural Laramie, Wyoming; robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied him to a fence and left him to die.^[19][20] Shepard was still alive, but in a coma when discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow.^[21][22][23] As he lay in intensive care, candlelight vigils were held by the people of Laramie.^[24][18] It was revealed that the two men had also attempted to get their girlfriends to provide alibis. "When Matthew Shepard died on 12 October 1998, at the age of 21, five days after getting into a pickup truck with two goons who beat him mercilessly, he had already become a huge national news story that continues today. It made the cover of Time magazine with the headline 'The War Over Gays'."^[10] Much of the media coverage of Shepard's killing also included calls for hate crime legislation.^[10] Gay conservative writer Andrew Sullivan noted that both murders were rare and the difference in how they were treated was likely due to the political atmosphere and agendas.^[25] Shepard's murder and the events surrounding his death and memorials have been portrayed in numerous television specials, films and plays.

Death and investigation

Dirkhising's murder was brought to Rogers, Arkansas police attention on September 26, 1999 when they responded to a 911 call and went to the home of David Carpenter;^[4] Joshua Brown was also present.^[8][2] Police found that Dirkhising had been tied to a mattress; his ankles, knees and wrists had been bound with duct tape and belts.^{[2][16][17][5]} He had been gagged with his own underwear, a bandana and duct tape.^[26][2] Police determined that Dirkhising had been repeatedly raped over a period of several hours.^[26] According to police, he had also been drugged.^[5] Dirkhising later died in hospital, his death hastened apparently as the result of positional asphyxia.^[16][17][2] Some believed the death was accidental.^[27] The Arkansas State Police recorded in their affidavit a statement by Brown that he had been involved in molesting Dirkhising for at least two months prior to Dirkhising's death.^[2] Brown called it 'horseplay' and claimed that Dirkhising was a willing participant.^[16][17]

Police found instructions and a diagram to position the boy as well as other notes of fantasies of molesting children, including instructions how to sedate, tie up and position a child — indicating a strong interest in pedophilia.^[7][9][2] It was speculated that one of the men diagrammed it and the other carried it out.^[28] It was revealed that over a two day period Dirkising was repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects.^[28] After the men took a break to eat, Brown noticed Dirkhising wasn't breathing and alerted Carpenter who attempted to resuscitate the boy then called 911.^[28][4][2] Brown also later claimed he was "under the influence of methamphetamine" when talking with his arresting officers.^[1]

Media coverage

Dirkhising's case initially was reported regionally by "news organizations in Arkansas and also covered by newspapers in Oklahoma and Tennessee", yet almost no national press.^[26][11] The Associated Press ran the story on its local wires but not nationally until a month later when the story was focused on the lack of coverage rather than the crime itself.^[7] A LexisNexis search revealed only a few dozen articles which appeared only after the Washington Times story on the lack of coverage on October 22, 1999, a month after Dirkhising's death.^[7]

Accusations of liberal media bias

On October 22, 1999, approximately one month after his death, the Washington Times, ran a story with the headline: "Media tune out torture death of Arkansas boy." The story contrasted the lack of coverage of the Dirkhising case with the treatment the murder of Matthew Shepard received.^[7] The story quoted Tim Graham, director of media studies at Media Research Center, a media watchdog group that frequently criticizes "liberal bias", as saying, "Nobody wants to say anything negative about homosexuals. Nobody wants to be seen on the wrong side of that issue."^[4] Brent Bozell, media critic and director of the Media Research Center, accused the media of deliberately spiking the story.^[29] Bozell wrote, "Had he been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, the crime would have led all the networks. But no liberal media outlet has as its villains two gay men."^[10]

After the Washington Times article the lack of coverage of Dirkhising's case was noted by conservative commentators and was attributed to the homosexuality of the perpetrators as well as the nature of the crimes.^[11] Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan noted that showing gay men as sadistic barbarians does not fit the "villain-victim script of our cultural elite".^[11]

The Dirkhising case was repeatedly compared to the media coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard although Dirkhising was a minor in a sex crime and Shepard's murder is a hate crime involving adults.^[7] Also the sexualities of the victims and attackers differed somewhat with Shepherd being openly gay man attacked by two heterosexual men while Dirkhising's attackers were both gay.^[12][13]

Jonathan Gregg wrote in Time, "Matthew Shepard died not because of an all-too-common sex crime, but because of prejudice. Essentially, Shepard was lynched; taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified "other" whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just "another" to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is."^[9]

In the month after Shepard's murder, LexisNexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death compared to only 46 in the month after the Dirkhising murder.^[30] However, once the media seized on the story, this count rapidly rose into the thousands.^[31] Many of the articles justified the lack of coverage, citing that the death did not justify national attention; initial reports failed to mention that the two perpetrators were gay whereas the Shepherd reports identified Shepherd as gay and the crimes as hate-crimes from the beginning.^[7] In a November 4, 1999 Time magazine Jonathan Gregg opined that accusations of liberal media bias were not justified because the two cases varied with the Dirkhising murder offering "no lessons" whereas the Shepard murder "touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons."^[9][7]

Accusations of homophobia

Gay conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in The New Republic accusing the liberal media of political correctness and using the opportunity to attack the Human Rights Campaign for its support of hate crime legislation.^[32][25] The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) also complained that the Washington Times "omitted a key piece of information" for its front-page story on Dirkhising.^[33] The HRC had provided a statement strongly condemning the crime and called for the perpetrators to be punished "to the fullest extent of the law".^[33] Sullivan also criticised some aspects of the conservative coverage of the Dirkhising case equating gay sex with child molestation as "ugly nonsense".^[31] Sullivan squarely summed up the differences in media coverage as being due to political interests.^[25] Sullivan stated that whereas the Shepherd case was used to support including LGBT people in federal hate crime law the Dirkhising case was ignored for concerns of inciting anti-gay prejudice.^[25] In November 1999, E. R. Shipp, ombudsman at The Washington Post, noted that: "readers, prodded by commentators who are hostile to LGBT people and to what they view as a ‘liberal’ press" had raised questions about the Dirkhising case. Shipp, said however, that she "made a clear distinction" between the Dirkhising and Shepard cases: "Matthew Shepard’s death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news… That Jesse Dirkhising’s death has not done so is hardly the fault of the Washington Post."^[7] Shipp also noted that the Shepherd story was newsworthy because of the debate it fostered on hate crimes and the level of intolerance towards LGBT people in the United States.^[7]

The story of the September 26 death was transmitted by Associated Press national news wires on October 29 and the Post ran a news brief the following day.^[7]

Jonathan Gregg, in a November 9 Time magazine editorial, asserted that, "[the killing of Dirkhising] was the kind of depraved act that happens with even more regularity against young females and, indeed if the victim had been a 13-year-old girl, the story would probably never have gotten beyond Benton County, much less Arkansas.^[9] The same editorial also said: "A red herring worth addressing at the outset is the failure to distinguish between homosexuality and pedophilia, which creates a false parallel at the core of the Washington Times argument.^[9] But sex with children is a crime regardless of the sexes involved, and is not synonymous with homosexuality…."The reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is because it offered no lessons.^[7][9] Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. "Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men."^[34][7][9]

Trials and convictions:

Davis Don Carpenter and Joshua Brown were each charged with capital murder and six counts of rape and they faced the death penalty in Arkansas for the crimes.^[13][26] Neither man had any known prior convictions.^[2] The two men were tried separately as it was believed "each of them will blame the other for the murder."^[28] The Arkansas state prosecutor "maintained that the older man had mapped out the assault and watched a portion of it" so chose to send Brown (the younger lover) to trial first.^[16][17] Carpenter's court-appointed attorney, criminal defense lawyer Tim Buckley, sought a change of venue from Benton County citing excessive pretrial publicity.^[6] "It's been on everyone's lips down here for a month and a half", Buckley stated.^[6] The Washington Post was "almost alone among national newspapers" reporting on Brown's trial and Fox News was the only network to cover the murder trial and conviction.^[11] The prosecutors "argued that Jesse suffocated to death during the sexual assault because of a combination of the drugs and the way he was trussed up".^[16][17] In March 2001 Brown was found guilty of first-degree murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison, and this sentence was upheld on appeal by the Arkansas Supreme Court in September 2003. In April 2001, Carpenter pleaded guilty to similar charges and was also sentenced to life. Subsequently, Carpenter said on the Fox News Channel that Brown was solely responsible for the rape and murder of Dirkhising while Brown said that Carpenter was the director.^[35]