TruTV legal analysts covering the trial in Bartow, Fla., of one of the men accused of killing Ryan Skipper spent considerable air time yesterday speculating about the prosecution’s decision to remove the hate-crime charge against the defendant, Joseph Bearden.

It is true that Bearden and his co-defendant, William Brown, who will be tried later, knew that Skipper was gay. And the level of brutality in the murder — they stabbed Ryan 20 times and then dumped him, still clinging to life, on the side of rural road — suggests the two young meth addicts had motives beyond just fencing Ryan’s car for drug money.

Bearden has been in prison since he was charged with the murder two years ago. He has covered himself in tattoos, including a dagger or spike on his face that appears to pierce his skull above and blow his left eye, a large cobra in strike pose on his chest and neck and a small teardrop under his right eye. In gang and prison culture, teardrop tattoos are usually a sign that the bearer is a murderer.

The TruTV analysts speculated that hate-crime charge was dropped because prosecutors feared it would make the jury less sympathetic to the gay victim and more inclined to be lenient with the defendant — the young man sitting before them with a tacit admission of guilt tattooed on his face.

The prosecutors in Polk County expressed similar concerns to Ryan’s Skipper’s family:

[Ryan Skipper’s stepfather] Lynn Mulder said Assistant State Attorney Cass Castillo advised him that any conspicuous presence by the gay community, inside the courtroom or demonstrating outside the courthouse, could jeopardize the trial, which began Monday in Bartow. So the Mulders are asking [their gay supporters] to show their support, but silently, unobtrusively. Until the trial is over, they’re being asked to become invisible and voiceless.

“The jury cannot be influenced in their decision by any demonstration of support,” Mulder said. “My only concern is they [the gay community] ought not to be easily identified as supporting one side or the other.”

This is particularly problematic for Vicki Nantz, whose documentary on Skipper’s killing, “Accessory to Murder,” is largely responsible for publicizing his death and making him the face of hate crimes against gays in Florida. But she is among those in the local gay community who have developed a close relationship with the Mulder family.

“If I didn’t love Pat and Lynn Mulder, I would be standing there with a sign,” Nantz said. “But the people most inclined to demonstrate have a personal relationship with Lynn and Pat, and that comes first with all of us. We’ll put our activist hats in the drawer until this gets resolved for Lynn and Pat.”

As Willoughby Mariano, a right-leaning reporter who blogs about crime for the Sentinel, put it:

It’s not explicitly addressed by the [Sentinel] story, but I wonder whether the assumption is that a Polk County jury will be biased against gays and therefore less inclined to convict a killer of a gay man than the killer of a straight one.

Anti-gay bigotry in Polk County has been the hallmark of this case from the beginning.

“What we do know,” Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters then, “is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening.”

Of course, Judd knew nothing of the sort. And even if Ryan had been trolling the streets of Wahneta — and no matter what he was doing that night — nothing he was “looking for” warranted murder.

In the early days of the investigation, Judd also accused Ryan of conspiring with his killers to forge a check — a story almost certainly sourced to the killers, and which Judd quietly recanted a month later.

Almost as bad as blaming Ryan for his own murder, Sheriff Judd took the unusual step of immediately releasing the murder victim’s arrest record, which included a couple of juvenile pot busts — while dismissing the rap sheets of the accused killers as “nonviolent” charges. This formulation suggested that Ryan and his killers were cut from the same disreputable cloth.

In fact, Joe Bearden, then 21, had seven prior arrests, including one for grand theft auto. William Brown, then 20, had at least four prior arrests in the county, including one six days prior to the murder on cyberstalking charges.

A few days before the murder, Sheriff Judd said in an interview with the Sentinel, “I don’t intentionally say anything that will impugn anyone other than a real criminal, and then I’m not too concerned about that … God is No. 1 in my life. And I make no big decisions for this organization without first praying about it.”

The homophobia didn’t stop with the sheriff, however. It took the local congressman, Rep. Adam Putnam, a member of the U.S. House GOP leadership, months to acknowledge the murder. At a memorial for Ryan, only one politician — the county’s lone Democratic official — showed up.

All of this explains why Vicki Nantz, the filmmaker, gave “Accessory to Murder” the subtitle, “Our Culture’s Complicity in the Death of Ryan Skipper.” (And, by the way, the film includes an interview with Pensito Review editor Trish.)

All that being said, it is doubtless a fact that protests during the trial would be counter-productive, and not just because the sight of dozens of gay people chanting on the courthouse steps might make the more benighted souls on the jury more sympathetic to the speed freak defendant.

Mainly, protests in Polk County today would be useless. The “cure” for the sickness of homophobia that infects places like Polk County can’t be forced on the community from outside. The cessation of gay hatred has to come from within — and it will have to start in the churches, where, over time, a selective reading of the Bible by religious leaders has dehumanized gay people,which, in turn, has given a certain stripe of Christians a license to hate them.

The tacit blessing of gay-hatred emanates from pulpits in local churches in Wahneta and Bartow as well as megachurches in California, Colorado, Texas and elsewhere, the television ministries of Pat Robertson and his ilk and the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City and the Vatican in Rome. The strange fruit born of blessing homophobia is violence, ranging from the psychic scars of schoolyard name-calling to the murders of Matthew Shepard, 15-year-old Larry King and hundreds of others. In Polk County, the blessing of gay hatred filtered down to the unchurched souls of Bearden and Brown who interpreted it to mean that the life of a gay man was worth less than the value of his car.

Violence against gays won’t end until the Christian establishment understands that the violence is a byproduct of its senseless persecution of gay rights. That day is likely decades away, not least because there is no easier way to raise big bucks than preaching homophobia.

In Polk County today, however, nothing is more important than finding justice for Ryan Skipper’s family and friends. Strategy in the case against Joe Bearden has to be based on the situation on the ground, not on the idealized constructs of journalists who parachute in from New York and citizen opinionists safely ensconced in West Hollywood and other gay Meccas.

That fact was underscored yesterday by a statement released by Ryan’s family:

We’ve been advised to prepare for “blame-the-victim” tactics, which are frequently used by those trying to escape justice. They have taken his life but we will not allow them to sully our memories of our son, brother and friend. Nothing that is said at trial could ever shake our confidence in that. We will remain focused on seeking justice for the life that has been taken. Ryan was loved and important to his family and friends, a good and valuable member of this community and society.

All that the family and their supporters across the country can do now is brace for it — and hope that decency will prevail over prejudice in the hearts of Joe Bearden’s jury.

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