^{Jadon Higganbothan, 4, was shot to death for being seen as gay by the leader of the "Black Hebrews" hate-group, and Antoinette McKoy, 28, was murdered by the same man for being unable to have (his) kids.}

     The Southern Poverty Law Center, among this nation's most successful and fearless organizations confronting hate from so many quarters says that the leader of an anti-gay, anti-Semitic sect pleaded guilty to murder for killing a four-year-old boy because he thought the child was gay.

     You read that right. 

     Twenty-seven-year-old Peter Moses, the leader of  the so-called “Black Hebrews,” will, as part of a plea agreement, testify against his brother, mother, and sister. If he fulfills his end of the agreement, prosecutors say his life will be spared, his sentence cut to life in prison for the murders of young Jadon Higganbothan and Antoinette McKoy.

     Mr. Moses and other members of his group had shared a house in Durham, North Carolina at the time of the murders. He defended killing the toddler saying that he "believed he saw him" pat one of his own sons on the seat of the pants while the two boys were playing. Prosecutors say that Mr. Moses then took the boy's mother and the boy to his garage, where Mr. Moses then shot the child in the head, apparently in front of his mother. They say further that several "Black Hebrew" women had blared the Lord’s Prayer over a speaker system to cover the sound of the shot. Those women have been charged as accessories in the murder of the little boy.

     [Mr. Moses was later charged with murdering the woman pictured above, Ms. McCoy, upon learning she could not bear him children.]

    The Black Hebrews hold that they and not today's Near Eastern Jews are the true descendants of the Torah's Hebrew clans and the SPLC says the group has grown increasingly anti-gay and anti-Semitic and more violent. The group holds modern Jews are frauds, that Jews such as I am are stealing and capitalizing on their authentic identity. They hold further that inauthentic Jews protect gays (and others) from the punishment the group has been called upon by God to deliver.

     Now, it isn't enough to write this off as, to marginalize it as individual psychopathology.  If we do, we must affirm that for the behavior of most leaders in all hate-groups. We should not affirm that because doing so would miss a larger point. These groups are about more than individual emotional disarray; they are about hate-based religious ideology. This particular group's ahistorical, lunatic bigotry could be sidelined, would be laughable, were it not for a murdered woman and were it not for a murdered four-year-old 'gay' toddler.

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^{Some information here has been drawn from the Unfinished Lives" web site.}