U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx has written a letter of apology to the mother of Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming man whose name is on a bill adding sexual orientation to federal hate-crimes legislation.
During recent debate on the bill, Foxx, R-5th, called attempts to label Shepard's 1998 murder a hate crime "a hoax." She said that he was killed during a robbery and not because he was gay.
Shepard, 21, was robbed, beaten and left to die on a prairie fence near Laramie, Wyo., in 1998. Two men pleaded guilty to killing him and testified that they singled him out because he was gay.
Foxx's remarks caused an uproar, and she later issued a statement saying that her use of "hoax" was "a poor choice of words."
Neither Foxx nor anyone in her office would return repeated calls and e-mails from the Winston-Salem Journal for comment about her apology.
In an interview with WXII-TV, Foxx said she was "speaking off the cuff, and I just simply chose a poor word." She said she is sorry she used the wrong word and expects that "people will accept that."
The Matthew Shepard Act passed the House 249-175. Foxx voted against the bill.
She told WXII that she sent a handwritten note to Judy Shepard, Shepard's mother, saying that "if I said anything that offended her, I certainly apologize for it and know that she's hurting, and I would never do anything to add to that."
The Matthew Shepard Foundation confirmed that Judy Shepard received Foxx's note, but offered no comment on it.
"We are not commenting any further on Rep. Foxx's remarks on the House floor, or anything that was contained in a letter," Logan Shepard, the foundation's communications associate, wrote in an e-mail. "Everything that has been said already, is enough. We are trying to focus on the positive, which is, that the (hate-crimes bill) has been passed onto the Senate. We are looking to the future and our energy will be focused on putting the Matthew Shepard Act onto the President's desk."
Foxx declined to say in the WXII interview whether she now considers Shepard's death a hate crime.
Foxx's apology "shows that she doesn't necessarily understand what it was that she said wrong," said Becky Dansky of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "It wasn't just her word choice, it was the sentiment she expressed. It was incredibly disrespectful, not just to the mother of Matthew Shepard but to the thousands of other hate-crime victims out there."
Dansky said that the backlash Foxx received for her comments may show "just how affected so many people were by those words and how important this legislation is to so many people."
■ Wesley Young can be reached at 727-7369 or at wyoung@wsjournal.com.
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