Perhaps no other domestic social issue divides the two major political parties more than hate crimes and hate crime legislation.  You'd be hard-pressed to find an issue with such consistent party-divided voting records as the ones that occur regarding hate crime legislation.  In 2000, for instance, the U.S. Senate voted on the "Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act of 2000", a hate crime amendment (S. Amdt. 3473) meant to beef up an already existing federal hate crime law sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy. The amendment vote had 44 of 45 Democrats voting for the measure (only West Virginia's Robert Byrd opposed it) whereas only 13 of 55 Republicans voted for it (one Republican abstained).  The amendment fell short by three votes to move it closer toward passage.

Here's some mind-numbing irony from the far right.

I had intended to write my third and final diary about an alleged hate crime that took place recently in Champaign, Illinois, after the case had been adjudicated.  The defendant, Brett Vanasdlen, 18, of Minooka, Illinois, goes to Court on May 6th.  However, since last night when I posted part two of my series of diaries on the April 12, 2008 incident, the Brett Vanasdlen case has spread further around the blogosphere with increasing vitriol directed at the victim, Steven Velasquez, a gay man who suffered some head trauma in the alleged hate crime that took place near his school, the University of Illinois. (And if you don't want to read my diary, but I hope you take a short break from all the election-focused diaries and check it out, then please take the poll).

We know from examining the FBI's hate crime statistics from 2006 that hate crimes based on hatred toward non-heterosexuals accounted for 1,387 of all 9,080 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2006.  Over nine hundred gay men were the victims of reported hate crimes that year; they constituted 9.46% of all reported hate crime victims.  That percentage is totally out of proportion to the estimated percent of gay men that make up the population of the United States which is about 2.8%, according to a reputable study from the National Health and Social Life Survey by Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels titled "The Social organization of sexuality in the United States".  In other words in 2006 gay men were 3.38 times more likely to be the victim of a reported hate crime (often genteelly called a bias-motivated crime) than would be expected.  

Understandably, there was national outrage and sadness about last year's very probable hate crime murder of a young gay man from South Carolina, Sean William Kennedy, 20, of Greenville.   A stranger with hatred in his heart and homophobia swirling in his mind is said to have thrown a single, fatal punch at Kennedy--a college student with a life's worth of promise--on a sidewalk in downtown Greenville in May, 2007.  Less than two months later in early July, a west coast picnic outing with friends similarly ended in a violent, homophobia-fueled death.  The single-punch hate crime murder of 26 year old Satendar Singh outside Sacramento, California, will be another tic-mark in the "Murder and non-negligent manslaughter" column of the FBI's annual report of hate crime statistics for 2007 to be released later this year. Whether or not the FBI chooses to bring Mr. Singh's alleged killer to justice is another story; Andrey Vusik, 29, fled to his native Russia and there seems to be no political will to have him returned to the United States to face a murder charge, although he has been charged with manslaughter.