Fact: Richard Kennedy, an 18-year-old theater student living in the UK, considers himself gay. Fact: Kennedy suffered injuries in February that were so severe that he will now need reconstructive facial surgery and will lose his front teeth. Fiction: Kennedy’s injuries came at the hands of “homophobes” who violently assaulted him because they disapproved of his alternative lifestyle.
He told the British newspaper the Mirror that he was attacked outside a gay bar in the city of Preston on the night of Feb. 26 by “a group of men shouting homophobic abuse at me.”
The next thing I know I was punched in the back of the head. I was violently assaulted all because of my sexuality.
I was covered in blood and had my face stamped on causing my teeth to go into my gums.
I might need surgery to amend the damage done.
From all of this, all I want is awareness, that we need to stop ignoring attacks like these.
No matter what, no-one deserves to be attack [sic] for being true to who they are or what they look like.
I want people to use me as an example. I want people to see what can happen if you are as stupid as me to be alone on a night out — be safe, stick with people you know.
This is just another homophobic attack that happens every day, but it needs to stop, this is wrong, this is disgusting and using sexual preference as a motive to be violent and abusive is utterly inhumane.
According to the Mirror, Kennedy “bravely posted shocking pictures of his injuries online, where they have been shared 175,000 times.” The paper also quoted Detective Sergeant Martin Pearson from Lancashire Police, who said, “This was a particularly nasty assault, aggravated by the homophobic comments which were made before Richard was attacked.”
‘Whilst we are keeping an open mind, we do believe he may have been targeted because he is gay.
Yesterday another UK publication, the Metro, ran a piece with this headline: “Gay student was not the victim of a violent homophobic attack — he just ‘fell over’.” The article, which was less than half of the length of the Mirror piece, began:
A student who claimed he was the victim of a violent homophobic attack on a night out has admitted that he just fell over.
It’s not as though Kennedy had pangs of guilt and admitted he made the story up to clear his conscience. Rather, the police obtained a TV recording which showed that “the University of Central Lancashire student had in fact simply tripped over on the walk home.”
“We managed to recover some CCTV footage which shows the injured party falling face-first onto the pavement,” explained Detective Inspector Paddy O’Neill.
Whether Kennedy was literally falling-down drunk or just stumbled, pitching headlong onto the pavement, remains to be seen. What does not remain to be seen is what his motives were. Like the unnamed transgender California teen who falsely reported being beaten in a high school bathroom last week or like the fictional story of a mother who scrawled anti-gay sentiments on a party invitation from an elementary school classmate whose parents are gay, Kennedy was responding to the paucity of real anti-gay sentiment by inventing tormenters. He was following the advice of one-time Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel and not letting a crisis go to waste.
Are there real incidents of anti-gay bias? No doubt. There is also no doubt that the hoaxes are doing more harm than good to the cause of gay rights.
As for Kennedy, he will not be “charged for wasting police time.” That won’t do much to help the cause either.
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