Laramie Project Part One

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The Laramie Project
The Laramie project is a narration about the place called Laramie, through this narration the people who live in Laramie give their personal accounts and experiences of the place hence allowing the true picture of the place to come out. The plays main idea is to give an account of what life was like before the murder of Matthew Shepard. The play focuses on the townspeople particularly on how they confront and seek to overcome their inherent fears and prejudices. The hatred is well exemplified in the words of Rev. Fred Phelps, who made an appearance at Mathew’s funeral accompanied by his fundamentalist Christian cahoots, praising a God who according to them "hates fags" and who had already condemned Mathew to hell where he will dwell eternally. It would suffice to say that this kind of rhetoric only bolsters a culture of intolerance, and that the murder of this young man is a material expression of a spiritual disease that is deep.
It is frightening – as the play seem to communicate – that we live in a culture where the culture allows mental health professionals and legal practitioners to use the doctrine of "gay panic" as the basis to commit murder. It is a doctrine that seeks to silence once and for all the people who appear to be insecure about their sexual orientation as long as they intimate to have a feeling of being threatened by unwelcome advances from m...