More on Leopold and Loeb 2.0

Holly forwarded me some recent local coverage of the earlier-mentioned savage beating and rape of a Hispanic teen by two white teens in Texas. This contains disturbing details.

"They stomped his head with their boots," said Harris County Sheriff's Lt. John Denholm. "They stripped him naked and sodomized him with the PVC pipe used to hold up a patio umbrella."

Tuck then kicked the pipe, causing even further damage, prosecutors said at a Thursday morning hearing.

"I don't mean just a little bit," Harris County prosecutor Mike Trent told District Judge Michael McSpadden. "He kicked it in and shoved it so far in that he has caused major internal injuries and organ damage."

[David Cook, a former football teammate of the victim] said that one of the perpetrators, David Tuck, is known as a skinhead and “has seen Nazi swastikas painted on the fence at Tuck's house.” Some of Tuck’s neighbors confirm he has “long exhibited a fascination with neo-Nazis,” and that he “paraded around the subdivision with a flag of a swastika on Martin Luther King Day.”

Richard Rogers, who lives next door to the family, answered his door Thursday night with a .357-caliber Magnum in his hand. He said he was carrying it because he was concerned that Tuck would be out on bail.

"The kid is a white supremacist," Rogers said.

The white supremacist movement is also overtly hostile to gays, and we should make no mistake that Tuck’s—and his partner Turner’s—decision to brutally anally rape their victim was not a coincidence, but in fact representative of both the anti-gay sentiment rife among white supremacists and the propensity of oppressors of any flavor to punish their victims, male or female, using sexual torture.

This is what happens when hate is allowed to flourish, when a group is reassured through policy, punditry, and pop culture that they are superior to others. Tuck and Turner are not a disturbing aberration; they are a portent of more ugliness to come if we allow hatemongering to continue to hold its place as a reasonable part of our public discourse. We as a society have turned a blind eye to the inescapable consequences of letting bigots hide their hateful rhetoric behind politics and religion—and so-called progressives who resist race, gender, and sexuality issues as “third rail topics” or “identity politics” are as much to blame as the purveyors of this lunacy. There’s a fucking reason that some of us talk about this stuff day in and day out, and this is it.