“Mother Turned Anti-Hate Advocate” Speaks to Plymouth: Tolerance Through Education

Though it was a cold and rainy Wednesday evening, excitement and nervousness was in the air at Samuel Read Hall. There was a line at the door and stirring chatter coming from within, Judy Shepard had come to give a lecture.

Five years ago she received a call a parent never wishes to receive. Her eldest son, Mathew, was in a coma after being brutally beaten by two young men. She was shocked to see the state of her son. “He was so badly beaten that I at first didn’t recognize him. Logan, Mathew’s younger brother, didn’t want to go in to see him. He didn’t want his last memory of Mathew to be that way, but he soon realized that this would probably be the last time he would talk to his brother.”

She talked about how their lives afterwards had been effected.

The entire lecture wasn’t spent on his death, but what she had learned from it. The presentation started off with an eight-minute video on some of the commercials Mrs. Shepard had done. One commercial showed how hatred and intolerance can be just as powerful through words as it can be through physical acts of violence. She then went on to talk about how Mathew was involved in theatre and had an interest in politics.

Judy then turned the lecture from serious to light but no less meaningful. She said that the only way to make a difference was to go out and do it. “You have to come out and stay out, all day every day, that’s the only way we are going to make a difference.” She told the audience that we need to talk to our senators and representatives, write letters and do everything we possibly can to make a change.

She brought up same sex marriages and the continuing fight for the gay rights. That we should, as a society, look at Gay and Lesbian marriages the same way we looked at interracial marriages in the 1950’s. She talked about organizations such as P.F.L.A.G. (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.) and that some people, such as Reverend Fred Phelps and Senator Santorum, who are against Gay and Lesbian rights. Such people have been known to compare and group homosexuality with polygamy, sodomy and pedophilia.

When asked how she and her family felt about Reverend Fred Phelps, the same man who protested her son’s funeral her response was, “We love Fred, he is just stone deaf, that’s all. He can’t hurt us and in fact he is only helping our cause by bringing more attention to the topic.” Another question asked by a curious spectator was how much involvement did Judy and her family have in the Laramie Project; a play displaying the aftermath of a hate crime, specifically her son’s murder. Judy told us that her family never actually wrote anything for the play but was very happy to see how accurate it was being portrayed.

After the presentation I got to talk to some of the ALSO members, who helped put this whole event on. When asked how the event went over, Sara Brown said, “This has been more than I expected. We sold over 100 tickets the first day and today we were completely sold out. We actually had to turn people away.”

Fran Page commented with his deep satisfaction on how many people attended. He added, “What I learned from this whole experience is that through education we can learn to be tolerant.”