Wes Ferguson

“Of  all the red-tailed hawks that have ever soared on a Texas breeze, only one gets to live in Charlie Alvis’s house, at least during the winter hunting season. ‘My bird has its own bedroom,’ said Alvis, a falconer who’s based in the unincorporated community of Porter, just beyond the northern outskirts of Houston.”

“Culture warriors had shaped dueling narratives from an incident that, while horrific for the few people involved, would not have been a blip on the national consciousness if it had occurred anywhere but the U.S.-Mexico border. Even now, nearly five years later, the question of who shot Walker Daugherty still feels like a political Rorschach test.”

Homophobia and religiosity divided the town of Kilgore, Texas over the famous play. The divisions also helped liberate some local citizens, allowing them to define their own worldviews apart from that of their parents’.