This week is National Coming Out week, and what a propitious time for it, as well, what with the plethora of letters the Daily has been receiving from proponents on both sides of the gay rights issue.

Now is as good a time as any to talk about coming out.

Far too often, people get hung up on the sexual aspect of homosexuality.

Having accepted whole-heartedly the Moral Majority’s claims that God was punishing homosexuals by bringing AIDS to the world in the ’80s, nearly ten years later, we still see those willing to argue the justness of any punishment laid against gays.

When Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered last year, it opened a lot of eyes in this country.

Even Dennis Shepard, Matthew Shepard’s father, recently admitted in a Washington, D.C. press conference that even as the father of a gay man, he was ignorant about the nature of hate crimes in the United States.

“I did believe gay people experienced equal treatment before. I have never been so wrong in my life,” Shepard said.

Dennis Shepard, along with Attorney General Janet Reno and the family of James Byrd Jr. (the black man killed in June of 1998 when he was dragged to death by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas), appeared on behalf of a campaign to convince Congress to include attacks on homosexuals in federal anti-hate crime legislation.

The confusion most people have over this kind of legislation is that they choose to see it as “special protection.”

This is the greatest of fallacies.

When members of our society are singled out for “special” attention by white supremacists and violent homophobes, equal protection under the law becomes nearly impossible.

For those members of our society who have never had to experience the pain and humiliation of being victimized because of the color of their skin or their sexual orientation, it is difficult to make them understand how this is a civil rights issue.

When the law as it stands cannot protect all citizens equally, then it becomes time to enact new laws to ensure that protection will be afforded equally.

Right now, in this time and place, our legal system cannot do enough to protect gay members of society.

Even those virulently opposed to gay rights must be able to see how the fine line between moral objection and hate gets blurred.

If you cannot, ask Dennis Shepard where that line is drawn because he now knows better than ever.