Killing a gay man is no worse than killing a disc jockey

24 June 2006

So now she is serving a jail term of two years and eight months — which, interestingly, is almost exactly half the maximum tariff she would have received for the undoubted wickedness of transmitting a computer virus. She may be back on the loose within a year or so. You may wonder about the apparent levity of this sentence. You may suspect that our courts are possessed of a certain sexual prejudice; men who have casual sex with women are asking for it, one way or another, whether it be through the avenging angel of the Child Support Agency or a retrovirus. And Ms Porter was undoubtedly a victim herself, wasn’t she? So instead of a life sentence, which is what serial killers usually get, she will probably be banged up for a year.

Meanwhile, two thugs who murdered a barman because they knew he was a homosexual have been sentenced to much more than the normal tariff of a life sentence (‘middle-starting point’, as the legal profession puts it, is 12 years) because of their motivation for the murder. It was something called a ‘hate crime’ and therefore deserving of an impressive 28 years in prison. Hate crimes refer only to gender, sexual orientation and race. If someone murdered you out of hatred because you were an estate agent or a lawyer, they would be eligible only for the normal tariff. Hating homosexuals is, in the eyes of the law, far more serious than hating lawyers. One suspects that if the killers had been gay and the victim a member of the oppressive heterosexual hegemony, the sentence would have been well below average. If the murderers had been women, exacting an exciting Thelma and Louise-style revenge upon predatory heterosexual men, they’d probably be out in time for the Ashes and set up with a weekly column in the Guardian.

Here’s another irony. All of Ms Porter’s victims were black and it is believed that the man who infected her was black. Ms Porter is white. The suspicion is that Ms Porter went hunting for lovers ‘similar’ to the man who infected her in order to exact her revenge, i.e., black men. This, to my mind, epitomises the term ‘hate crime’. Luckily for Ms Porter, the racial element was not made much of in court, otherwise I reckon she’d be banged up for 20 years or so. She usually targeted DJs, but you don’t get an extra tariff for hating disc jockeys so much that you would, if you could, kill them. It’s OK to hate disc jockeys.