when is a hate crime not a hate crime?

When it's inconvenient for Andrew Sullivan

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Drudge flunky Andrew Dimbart takes another belated whack at the Gay Right's favorite whipping boy, Matthew Shepard. Says Andy, "A street in West Hollywood still stands in [Shepard's] name despite ABC News reporting the story false: He was killed by crazed meth addicts for drugs and money -- not because he was gay."

This proclamation is Sully Joe's cue to chime in. Dimbart's "right," says Sully, though he later qualifies that claim by sniffing a whiff of "homophobia" in the killing, "even if it was grotesquely distorted as a pure hate crime by the usual suspects."

Shepard's death was, Sullivan approvingly quotes, purely about drugs, although he adds that it was "not devoid" of homophobia.

This is what Sullivan had to say about Cheney's appalling anti-gay voting history and lack of support for his gay daughter's right to, among other things, raise a child

Cheney comes from Wyoming, the state where Matthew Shepard was murdered, and had to represent his constituents in the 1980s.

That piece was written in 2000. In it, Sullivan laid out a scathing indictment of homophobia in the Republican party and called on Cheney to repudiate it. He didn't. Sullivan eventually walked out on his party when it decided to use anti-gay initiatives to rally its base for the '04 election.

Apparently a negligible amount of homophobia is enough to turn an entire state whiffy when Andrew Sullivan's ox is being gored.

edit: the invaluable Orcinus explains