This is news, rating a huge color photo on page one of the Globe's second section: A candlelight vigil by a bunch of young people for the one-year anniversary of a crazy man's rampage in a New Bedford bar? All this hypercoverage just because it was a homosexual bar? What was the point of the vigil? Are we going to quell the incidence of insane outbursts by lighting candles?
Why didn't the Globe cover the dangerous sadomasochistic practices -- including cozying up to death and sometimes achieving murder -- being taught at the Sheraton Hotel in Danvers last weekend? Learning about this sick bunch of people reminded us that also just about a year ago a "professional dominatrix" got off scot free in court, though she had a "client" die during a bondage session! (She chopped his body into little pieces and disposed of it in Maine.)
Why weren't there vigils outside the Quincy condo where this hate crime happened -- to protest the increasing practice and acceptance of torture? (And the adoption by the Boston Globe of their twisted terminology: "professional dominatrix" and "bondage session"?) And why did no one have a vigil outside the BDSM conference last weekend in Danvers, where such practices were taught? There just might be fewer deaths of this sort if the BDSM culture couldn't exist so openly, advertise its conferences, and take over "respectable" suburban hotels.
Here's the report from just one year ago (Jan. 31, 2006):
Professional dominatrix Barbara Asher was acquitted yesterday of involuntary manslaughter in the death of a New Hampshire man who prosecutors said suffered a fatal heart attack while strapped to a bondage rack in her Quincy condominium.
Prosecutors had argued that Asher, 56, did nothing to help Michael Lord, 53, of North Hampton as he died during the July 2000 session, out of fear that calling authorities would have jeopardized her dominatrix business. The prosecutors said she and a boyfriend chopped up Lord's 275-pound body and dumped the parts in a trash bin behind a Chinese restaurant in Augusta, Maine....
The prosecution's case -- and the narrative about the fatal bondage session presented in court -- rested on an alleged confession by Asher. Several police investigators testified that Asher had admitted to watching Lord die on the bondage rack without calling for medical help and then dismembering his body the next day...
