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October 12th, 2023---A Quarter Of A Century Since 1998
On October 12, 2023, those of us who care will sadly mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard, a young man brutally tortured, disfigured, and beaten to death by a couple of homophobic clodhoppers outside of Laramie, Wyoming. His life is gone from this Earth, although, I am sure, very much present in Heaven.
But, in the wisdom of its jurisprudence, the State of Wyoming did not bother to impose the death penalty. It maintains the life of his two assailants at state expense, three meals a day provided, a place to sleep with a roof over their heads. Of course, even Wyoming's death penalty would not have been sufficient: those two who murdered Matthew deserved something more medieval---slowly excruciating, carefully orchestrated to bring the body through the red and orange chambers of pain right to the brink of death, but then backing away from it, only to start again; to be repeated again and again and again.
Recently, I was rebuked for writing of a fictional character whom, following the precedent established by Dante in the first canticle of his Poem, The Divine Comedy, I described as suffering in Hell. I was told that I had absolutely no right to determine who might be condemned to hell. The flaw in the rebuker's logic was that the character was a fictive construct; and I think it is a commonplace of all literature, whether professional or amateur, whether major or minor, that an author has the right to control a created character.
Because I am ill, I do not remember as quickly as I should, and I had forgotten that this same rebuker had told me, about three years ago, that Matthew Shepard could not be in Heaven. The rebuker, who does not share the Christian Faith, attemped to twist Christian Scriptures in order to deny Matthew entrance to Heaven. Does that not seem like a multi-layered hypocrisy: to cite Christian Scriptures without believing them; and to rebuke a poet for playing a fictive character in Hell, while, just a short while before (relatively) denying the possibility of Heaven to a now deceased fellow human being?
Starward
