DON'T FORGET NORTHERN HATE. Via Keith Boykin: LGBTQ advocacy groups in New Jersey have asked Newark Mayor Corey Booker and the U.S. attorney general for the state to consider investigating the execution-style shootings of four Newark college students as a homophobic hate crime. You remember the case: On August 4, robbers supposedly randomly approached the young people hanging out on a school playground, lined them up against the wall, and shot. Three of the victims were killed. It was a strangely vicious crime. "After reviewing the myspace pages of several of the victims, I wondered if they might be gay," Boykin writes. He's not the only one. Despite a lack of media attention paid to the sexual orientation of the victims, black gay activist James Credle has written to Booker and the attorney general to inform them that "several sources including friends, boyfriends/lovers of at least one of the victims and perhaps one of the parents knew that one or more of the murdered students were gay. At the same time, failure to fully expose and examine this issue will mean that the clarity that comes with the truth is clouded with distortion and rhetoric." Some of that rhetoric is coming from the right, which seized upon the fact that the killers were Latino undocumented immigrants. Newt Gingrich used the tragedy as a jumping off point in this National Review screed against immigration. If it turns out the perpetrators were motivated by hate, do you think Gingrich will pen an eloquent attack on homophobia? --Dana Goldstein
