Editorial Page

WASHINGTON - On the day 21-year-old Matthew Shepard died, essentially executed for the crime of being a homosexual, the U.S. Supreme Court decided it was OK for the city of Cincinnati to turn its back on the gay community.

In a unanimous decision, surprising since a similar Colorado statute was struck down, the high court decided a charter amendment, adopted in 1993 that prohibited the sort of protections desperately needed by gays and lesbians, was simpatico and further determined it didn't want to consider an appeal of the measure.

The court does this every now and then. The justices are inundated with appeals of various stripes and are unable to consider every issue brought before them. Rather than embrace certain cases, the court looks for reasons not to hear appeals. That fate appears to have been visited upon Cincinnati's anti-gay statute.

So once again, members of the minority group that suffer most under the majority's heel - more than African-

Americans, more than women - have been told that they aren't as good as the rest of us and don't deserve the rights we all take for granted simply because they happen to be in love with someone of the same sex.

The law in question, among other things, prohibits city council from adopting any ordinance that provides gays with any claim to ''protected status'' or ''other preferential treatment.''

These are loaded words which, by any reasonable reading, declare open season on homosexuals. Presumably now, if a landlord doesn't wish to rent an apartment to anyone suspected of being a homosexual, he or she doesn't have to. What's to stop an employer from rejecting an able worker because she's a lesbian or, for that matter, firing someone who admits to being gay?

The ''special rights'' that proponents of the anti-gay law are so quick to point to are instead necessary protections for members of an abused minority who deserve better. It's not right and any sugar-coating isn't going to make the medicine any easier to swallow.

Think about this: why were gays singled out as being underserving of any claims of minority or protected status, quota preference or other preferential treatment? Why didn't the charter amendment's proponents include blacks in their diatribe? Or women? Why do African-Americans and women deserve ''special status'' and not homosexuals?

Gay people are accused of all sorts of venal things that have no basis in fact. Gay men, we have been told, become elementary school teachers so they can recruit young people into their lifestyle. Gay people are constantly accosting straight people to see that their sexual needs are satisfied.

What baloney. Yet folks believe this and more. They're scared of what they see as a sinful homosexual agenda and will do whatever it takes to assure that the movement is crushed - including depriving them of the sort of civil protections middle-aged white guys like me never think twice about.

Matt Shepard was a nice guy by all accounts. He was small, 5-foot-2 and 105 pounds, easy pickings for queer bashers who seek to boost their own testosterone levels. He was pistol-whipped and tied to a post - his skull so badly fractured that surgery was out of the question.

Shepard was from Colorado but the incident points to why Cincinnati and other spots have to afford gays ''special status'' for their protection - not just to save them from savage beatings but to make sure they're not discriminated against when it comes to housing, jobs and other vital needs.

Whether proponents of the anti-gay ordinance want to admit it or not, their action sends a message that it's still okay to hate gays and lesbians, that you don't have to treat them like all others and that, hopefully, we can someday make them march around with a red Q tatooed to their chests to take the guessing out of the equation.

It's all very sad. The Supreme Court had an opportunity to draw a line in the dirt and it failed. Of course, what else can you expect from a panel that upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law some years back? Forgive them, for they know not what they do.