Rutgers Student Paper Daily Targum Continues To Dishonour Tyler Clementi

The Daily Targum, the Rutgers University student newspaper, continues a campaign to deny that the tragedy of 18 year old freshman Tyler Clementi committing suicide is and remains an issue of anti-gay hate. Earlier this week, as previously posted, the Targum ran an editorial titled "Media exploits University tragedy" that began “The death of University student Tyler Clementi might have been properly mourned if it were not for the massive rallies and aggressive news coverage that altered the nature of the situation. The truth is that an 18 year old boy killed himself – he was a student just like the rest of us, someone just trying to receive and education. Yet people’s relentless agendas took his death and turned it into a cause based on false pretences,” postulating, I’m assuming, that Clementi’s tragedy is not analogous to the murder of Matthew Shepard in that the Shepard’s tragedy transcended the crime of a young University of Wyoming killed for being gay into a catalyst for change that continues to resonate today. The Daily Targum emphatically insists that Clementi did not kill himself because he was gay, arguing that “Turning his death into a push for gay rights is a fallacy.” Predictably, the response to the Monday’s editorial has been fast and furious, Patrick Danner writing Thursday that “The backlash from the editorial has been incredible, and I speak specifically of the slew of online comments posted at the dailytargum.com. In no uncertain terms I will stand by my view that the backlash against the article was more disgusting than the crime it discussed.” Mr. Danner and the Targum editorial board seem unable or unwilling to recognize that Tyler Clementi’s death and the events that precipitated it are about an epidemic of homophobia – the childish, cruel snickering of juveniles who thought it funny to mock someone’s sexual orientation – but are also about an erosion of privacy that has become a pandemic. But they didn’t; opting instead to speak from a odd stance meant to minimize what happened, an act itself criminal.