Matthew Shepard’s mom calls anti-LGBTQ bills a ‘vicious attack’ 25 years after his murder

Judy Shepard said she expected the climate for LGBTQ people to be better than it was 25 years ago, when her son Matthew was killed, but it’s not.

“They’re still being denied basic rights, the community is, and the absolute outward showing of hate again, it’s just infuriating to me,” Shepard said in an exclusive interview with Katie Couric on NBC’s “TODAY” show.

On Oct. 6, 1998, Matthew, a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, went to an LGBTQ resource group meeting to plan a Coming Out Day event, and afterward he went to a bar, according to his father, Dennis. While there, Matthew met two men who pretended to be gay and invited him to a party in order to lure him out of the bar and to a remote area where they beat him, tied him to a fence and left him for dead. Matthew died in the hospital on Oct. 12, and his death drew national attention to anti-LGBTQ violence and fueled the fight for hate crime legislation, which provides additional penalties for bias-motivated crimes.

Over the last year, Republican state representatives across the country have introduced more than 500 bills targeting the LGBTQ community, and 84 of them have become law, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The majority of bills propose to ban transgender student athletes from playing sports on the teams that align with their gender identities, or prohibit minors from accessing certain transition-related medical care.

Judy attributes the increasingly hostile climate in part to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, which she said made it more acceptable to publicly disparage minorities. She compared the surge of proposed legislation to efforts in 2004 to pass a federal ban on same-sex marriage.

“All those who were fighting against the gay community, this is their last gasp,” Judy said. “They know they’ve lost the war, but this battle is just the last, most vicious attack on the community … It’s already over. That’s what they don’t understand. They’re fighting a losing battle.”

While Judy is optimistic in the long term, along with the wave of state bills there has been a surge of  anti-LGBTQ demonstrations, with white nationalist groups showing up to public libraries where drag performers read to children, and several high-profile cases of fatal violence.

Last year, five people were killed at a shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado. In August, 28-year-old dancer O’Shae Sibley was fatally stabbed while dancing at a gas station in New York City, in what police later said was a hate crime. That same month, Laura Ann Carleton, a California business owner and mother of nine, was fatally shot over a Pride flag she displayed outside of her store.

Judy said that she and Dennis still share Matthew’s story 25 years later “so people understand that it’s still happening and they have the power to make the change.”

In 2009, Judy and Dennis stood alongside President Barack Obama as he signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded the federal hate crime statute to include gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability.

Judy said she and Dennis often talk about what Matthew would be doing if he were still alive. He would be 46, which was the age she was when he died. She said his dream was to work for the State Department, because he was gifted in learning languages through immersion.

Before moving back to Wyoming for college, Matthew lived in Saudi Arabia with his parents. Judy said living there made Matthew want to help people.

“He was gifted in languages and really cared about folks he thought had less than they should have had,” Judy said.

Dennis said Matthew was almost “too” tender-hearted. “It was hard for him to even step on a bug,” he said. “He just thought everything had its place, and he didn’t want anybody’s feelings to be hurt.”

Judy said that after Matthew died, she and Dennis received cards and letters from people their son had met only once at an airport bar or in a restaurant, and that they described him as “a light of joy.”

“That was really fun to know that people had experienced Matt’s joy,” Judy said. “I guess there was no such thing as a stranger for Matt. Everybody was a potential friend.”

Dennis said he has mixed feelings about continuing to speak publicly about Matthew and his death a quarter-century later.

“We figured we only had a couple, three years and then go on to something else, that this wouldn’t still be going on, and we still have the same problem,” he said. The couple founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation, an LGBTQ rights nonprofit, in 1998.

“We were getting ready to retire in 2015, and then the election of 2016 occurred,” Dennis said. “We still have to fight harder now to keep what we do have and to improve it for everybody around the country, and all the marginalized communities, because they’re going after everybody.”

Judy added, “I’m so tired of being angry.”

Couric noted that, as more time passes, younger generations are less likely to know Matthew’s story. Judy said she tells them that it was a murder based on anti-gay hate, but that she doesn’t want them to be afraid.

“My point is to make them understand Matt was a human being,” Judy said. “He was not a newspaper story; he wasn’t a photograph. He was a person who had family and friends, and two young men decided he was not worth being on this planet because he was different, because he was gay, and that is just not the way we should live our life.”

She added, “I want them to understand the pain of it and to understand that we’re all different. I don’t want them to feel that fear for themselves or their friends, but I want them to understand that this did happen and is still happening.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com