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NJ activist fears school play will distort facts of Matthew Shepard murder

A New Jersey pro-family group is raising objections to a high school's plans to sponsor a play intended to honor a slain homosexual college student.



The drama club at Ocean Township High School will perform a controversial play called "The Laramie Project" for a school assembly and on three other occasions in November. The play is about the reaction to the brutal murder of homosexual University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in 1998.

Superintendent Thomas Pagano initially opposed the performance, but after receiving a flood of protest from homosexual activists in New Jersey, decided he will allow the play on campus. Steve Goldstein, who heads the homosexual advocacy group Garden State Equality, claims 2,000 of the group's members sent letters to school officials protesting Pagano's original decision.

Len Deo, president of the New Jersey Family Policy Council, says Goldstein's group wields a significant amount of power and has become very active in homosexual-related issues in the Garden State.

"They were extremely involved in the movement for domestic partnership benefits, then for civil unions," Deo notes. "And now they're ... aggressively working to have marriage totally redefined in the State of New Jersey, and to be legislatively enacted, [Goldstein] says, within the next two years."

Deo says he fears by allowing "The Laramie Project" to be performed on campus, facts surrounding the Shepard murder will be distorted -- something he claims homosexual activists and their supporters have already done.

"[W]hat the gay activists have done is they've spun this into what they believe to be a hate crime," Deo asserts. "And so [they] are using it and using this young man's life as a wedge issue to move their political agenda further down the field, so to speak."

The murder, in fact, occurred during "somewhat of a drug deal that went bad," Deo claims. "It involves basically an issue of drugs ... and that's why you had that horrendous crime," states the Family Policy Council spokesman.

The family advocate fears allowing the play may not only blur the facts surrounding the Shepard murder, but also give the impression that Ocean Township High School has no problem with the homosexual lifestyle.