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Remember the sad story of Tyler Clementi several months ago?  He was the Rutgers student, caught up in homosexuality, who jumped to his death.  And in so doing he became a cause celeb for the gay community in much the same way as Matthew Shepherd had been after being brutally beaten to death years before.

Now, the two cases are very different right off the bat.  Shepherd was murdered.  Clementi killed himself.  But there are some remarkable similarities between the two accounts.  First, both lives should be mourned because both were human beings made in the image of God.  Second, just as Matthew Shepherd's death was exploited by the homosexual lobby to advance their political agenda, it appears the same is happening with Tyler Clementi.  And I use the word "exploited" because of the third similarity: the story the homosexual community has told, which has been repeated without skepticism or research or scrutiny by the liberal media that has sworn a blood oath never to criticize or question any claim from the homosexual community (lest they be guilty of homophobia), is largely fabricated.

Remember that the narrative surrounding Shepherd was that he was targeted for death and beaten because he was gay.  That wasn't true at all.  He was the victim of a drug-obsessed robbery gone bad.  That was verified by ABC's 20/20 program shortly after the actual incident.  Yet, that simple fact didn't stop the homosexual lobby, their friends in the media, and Democrat lawmakers from perpetuating the lie that his death was an example of the type of anti-gay terror taking place around the country that demanded swift and aggressive legislation to stop.  The Matthew Shepherd Hate Crimes law is what came of this.

In terms of Clementi, you know the narrative: his roommate, Dharun Ravi, secretly filmed him having gay sex with his webcam and broadcast it to the student body and world...Clementi, so distraught about having been "outed" in such a public and humiliating way felt like he had no option but to leap to his death.  Radically intolerant homosexual activists like the disgusting Dan Savage have been given plenty of ink to weave the tale that everyone who fails to say adoring things about homosexuality is a Dharun Ravi waiting to strike.  Yet, what is the truth?

Rich Lowry paraphrases a much larger, well researched piece by Ian Parker in The New Yorker, that tells the real story:

"There was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet."

Incredible, isn't it?  Seemingly everything that has been told about this account is not true.  News reports to this day talk about Ravi transmitting sexual acts over the internet.  It didn't happen.  The only sexual material broadcast over the internet in this story were the sexual images Clementi reportedly posted of himself on homosexual websites.  But that's been whitewashed.  Here's the real account:

Parker's piece won't make anyone warm up to Dharun Ravi. He is portrayed as an arrogant showoff, desperate to cover his tracks with authorities once he finds out about Clementi's awful fate. But he is not worthy of prison time, either. It can only be misplaced zeal on the part of New Jersey's prosecutors that makes them so determined to define Ravi's conduct as criminal spying and (in the charge that brings the most jail time) "bias intimidation."

 

Ravi and Clementi agreed to become roommates their freshman year after finding one another online. Ravi quickly discovered that Clementi was gay, since his prospective roommate was posting on a gay website. (Clementi came out to his parents shortly before leaving for school.) Ravi and a friend engaged in juvenile banter, making fun of Clementi for being gay, "poor," and uncool. It's painful to read, but no different than what high-school students say about one another all the time.

 

Clementi and Ravi barely talked when they lived together. One night, Clementi asked Ravi to leave him alone with a nonstudent in his mid-20s for what turned out to be an assignation. From a friend's room across the hall, Ravi briefly turned on his webcam and saw the two in an embrace. He derisively tweeted that he saw his roommate "making out with a dude."

 

Clementi later saw Ravi's tweet and agonized about what to do. In the meantime, he asked for the room again for another tryst, and this time Ravi tweeted that people should tap into his webcam for a show. But Clementi turned off Ravi's computer, and the viewing never happened. Clementi requested a change of roommates. With that, and disciplinary action against Ravi, it should have ended.

 

Ravi is a jerk.  Ravi should have been punished by the school.  And speaking of the school, perhaps the pairing of gay students with heterosexual students wasn't a great idea.  But then again, not doing so would have undoubtedly violated a liberal college campus's rules on compelled "tolerance."

But none of this changes the reality that Clementi's decision to leap to his death was his own.  Based on the evidence that has surfaced, there is no reason to believe that Ravi would have acted any differently towards Clementi had he been shacking up with someone Ravi believed to be an ugly girl. 

But regardless of this, prosecutors in New Jersey have decided to go after Ravi with everything they've got.  And while I feel little sympathy for a college-aged jerk, I worry about the implications for our culture.  When hate crimes laws can be enacted in response to an event where no hate crime took place...when jerks are prosecuted for subjective reasons like "bias intimidation" based on accounts of homemade sex films when no filming took place...all because the homosexual lobby is seeking to exploit another death, I fear where that leads us.