Peter Hansen, founder of Jersey Conservative, has a most thoughtful take on the tragic — on so many levels — case of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers freshman who leaped from the George Washington Bridge after a roommate secretly taped and posted to the Internet a humiliating video:

A very sad case out of Rutgers today shows how the modern mania for livestreaming video, combined with an absolute lack of moral standards, has led to the suicide of a talented young violinist.
The facts of the case are simple. Mr. Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers, requested exclusive use until midnight of the room he shared with Dharun Ravi. Mr. Ravi acceded, but then went to the room of his high school friend Molly Wei. Mr. Ravi turned on a hidden webcam to watch the unwitting Mr. Clementi have an encounter with another man. Mr. Ravi posted the video of this encounter online, and another such video two days later. Mr. Clementi soon thereafter leapt to his death from the George Washington Bridge.
As seems clear from Mr. Ravi’s Twitter feed (since deleted, tellingly), Mr. Ravi was disgusted at having to share a room with a gay man. That’s his prerogative – everyone is entitled to feel safe in a private refuge. Mr. Ravi, however, denied the same right to his roommate. If Mr. Ravi did not want to live with Mr. Clementi, he could have asked for a room transfer. Instead, he used streaming video to expose and humiliate Mr. Clementi to all the world. Through Mr. Ravi’s malevolent act, the Web turned a human life with all its complexities into just another meaningless, tawdry Web image for people to laugh at.
The horrible irony is that a fleeting Web shot, so easily forgotten by viewers, is to the victim as shattering as a bullet. The immediate impact is over instantly, but the damage is permanent. Mr. Ravi created an image that could be dredged up from a hard drive at any moment, to haunt Mr. Clementi for the rest of his life. This goes beyond blackmail. It is the reduction of a human life into one degrading instant, forever replayed, allowing no progress and no redemption.

Hansen goes on to argue — and unsurprisingly I agree — that labeling this a “hate crime,” as some gay rights groups in New Jersey are advocating, badly misses the point. There are other elements of the post I’d quibble with (I cringed a bit when he referred to marriage and the military as “social constructs,” and think that linking to a documentary by Dan Savage — who is as divisive a force in the homosexuality debate as there is — is inapt), but all-in-all I think he gets the best of it.