Will the People Who Hate Please Answer My Question?

Jul 16, 2009

While reading up on the pending Senate vote for the Defense Authorization bill which will include the much anticipated and sorely needed Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, I came across a website that states the following…

What Are The Facts About Examples Of Hate Crimes?

FBI statistics on "hate crimes" against a person's sexual orientation from 2007 (the latest available) reveal the following: In 2007 there were 1,521 victims of "sexual orientation" bias (Table 7). However, the breakdown of these crimes is listed as:

335 were crimes of intimidation (shouting or name-calling)
448 were crimes of simple assault (defined as pushing or shoving without physical injury)
242 were crimes of aggravated assault (defined as bodily harm)
(source: FBI statistics 2007)

In short, there were only 242 crimes against a person's sexual orientation that could be considered "violent." And, 27 of these bias crimes were directed against heterosexuals! All together, there were 9,535 victims of bias crimes in 2007. This includes bias against race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, disability, or multiple-bias incidents.

The FBI statistics do not indicate how many of these "violent hate crimes" were committed by homosexuals against other homosexuals – or what provoked the violence.

Out of a total number of 855,856 cases of aggravated assault in 2007, only 242 were directed at LGBT individuals. This is only 0.0002827% of all aggravated assaults! This is not an epidemic of hate against LGBT individuals.

No Epidemic Of Hate Crimes Exists! S. 909 falsely claims in Section 2, without any evidence, that "the incidence of violence motivated by the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability of the victim poses a serious national problem."

I won't post the rest of the garbage that appears on the website because it's so stupid it makes you want to punch something really hard just to let the anger out.

Now, to be fair, if some people want to say 242 assaults out of 855,856 isn't an epidemic of hate crimes…OK I guess that's their right.

However, those same people need to answer this question — if 242 cases isn't enough, how many assaults and/or deaths is it going to take before we put an end to allowing people to think it's OK to push around, belittle or beat-up LGBT individuals?