Dayna Morales, the lesbian former Marine reservist and waitress who claimed to have been stiffed for being gay, is reportedly beginning to pay refunds to sympathetic donors who'd heard her story - a story that turned out to be short on credibility.
An ordinary person reports a shocking, sensational instance of bigotry or violence, gets national attention on the media and on the internet, possibly receives donations from kind-hearted people - and then is exposed as a fraud. How many times have we heard this before? And we'll hear it again.
I was taken in by one such story; when the accuser's story fell apart, though, I came clean. The sad truth is that while hate and prejudice still exist - in many forms - there is easy fame to be had in playing on the sympathies of people who are conditioned to react to certain types of prejudice from certain types of people.
