At The Atlantic, Emma Green writes—The Extraordinarily Common Violence Against LGBT People in America:
No matter what, he picked a gay club. He carried out his attack during Pride month, on a weekend when cities across the country, from Washington, D.C. to Detroit to Los Angeles, are hosting celebrations and parades. This is an unprecedented shooting attack in scale and violence, but not in kind. It is an extraordinary example of an extremely common kind of violence in the United States: hate-motivated attacks on LGBT people.
In a 2011 analysis of FBI hate-crime statistics, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that “LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be the target of a violent hate-crime than Jews or black people,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the center. Because the population of LGBT Americans is relatively small, and the number of hate crimes against that group is significant, LGBT individuals face a higher risk than other groups of being the victim of an attack. “They are more than four times as likely as Muslims, and almost 14 times as likely as Latinos,” Potok added. Sexual orientation motivated roughly 20 percent of hate crimes in 2013, according to the FBI; the only factor that accounted for more was race.
The vast majority of those crimes are not carried out by Muslim extremists, Potok said. “It’s a mix of white supremacists and their ilk and people who would be considered relatively normal members of society,” Potok said. “The majority of attacks on gay people do not come from people who are members of organized hate groups.”
This is not the first time someone has targeted a gay club with violence in the United States.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—Women's pay gap looks better because men's average pay has gotten worse:
As my colleague Laura Clawson wrote earlier this week, 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, 97 percent of women working full-time still earn less than their male counterparts. A number of reasons have been offered for this, but one of them is still, half a century after corrective measures were taken, outright discrimination.
Another round of proof came last October in a study by the American Association of University Women, Graduating to a Pay Gap. It showed, just one year after they obtained their diplomas, college-educated women were on average already making $7,600 less each year than their male counterparts. And that wasn't because they were having babies or because they all chose fields that were less lucrative. The reason for the lower pay was simply because they were female.
Over the past three decades, there has been improvement, a narrowing of the gap. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, the median hourly wage for women in 1979 was 62.7 percent of the median for men. In 2012, it was 82.8 percent:
However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.With the exception of the period of labor market strength in the late 1990s, the median male wage, after adjusting for inflation, has decreased over essentially the entire period since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 1996, it dropped 11.5 percent, from $19.53 per hour to $17.27 per hour. With the strong labor market of the late 1990s, the median male wage partially rebounded to $18.93 by 2002. It then began declining again; at $18.03 per hour in 2012, the real wage of the median male was 4.7 percent below where it had been a decade earlier.
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