Some of you may have already heard of the case of Larry King, a fifteen year-old high school student who was shot and killed on February 12 in what is widely believed to have been a hate crime. King, a gay student who was apparently harassed on a regular basis but who was open about his sexuality, died after he was shot in the head while attending class. Brandon McInerney, 14, was charged with first degree murder and also faces a hate crimes allegation. I have not reviewed California's sentencing guidelines for this case, but his exposure appears to permit parole eligibility once he reaches his sixties, assuming prosecutor's obtain a conviction. Yesterday, a Superior Court judge ruled that McInerney could be tried as an adult. More after the jump.
In the early morning hours on July 14, 2008 in Northport, Alabama, which bills itself as an All-American City (no immigrants allowed?), a number of residents of the Quail Ridge Mobile Home Park—which is nestled between Harper Road and Park West Drive—had their vehicles, homes and yards vandalized with painted racial slurs and the letters "KKK". The Unsolved Hate Crimes webpage of the Northport Police Department's website described the attack on the mixed-race trailer park community which sits adjacent to the Tuscaloosa Regional Airport in detail:
We all hear about how Illegal Immigrants are causing crime, ruining our country. Well Mr. O'reilly, Mr. Dobbs, Mr. Hannity..... I know you won't cover it but some of us will....
This horrendous crime happened in Shenandoah, PA. not far from where my parents are originally from. Local news has barely covered it and Harrisburg's Patriot News hasn't covered it all.
I was born in Pottsville, Pa not far from here and most of my extended family come from here.
I lived in Harrisburg until I was 18. I am just appalled and saddened by this. The fact that nobody has been arrested or charged shows you how out of wack our system is.
Correction: I have removed the AP article. Sorry about that! I've replaced it with a link to Marina's diary....
Another death of an undocumented immigrant. As much as we hear the drumbeat of "illegals commit crimes against upstanding Americans", we rarely hear statistics about how many immigrants are subjected to hate crimes.
Read all the way through this link (warning: AP) and see what you surmise from the description whether this was a hate crime or not.
For those looking to feel a little more patriotic--a little more proud to be American--as the Fourth of July approaches, please, don't read this. Cooper City, Florida, a town in Broward County of about 31,000 folks, whose motto is "Someplace Special", has had some ugliness--ugliness in the form of anti-Semitism--directed at its mayor and her staff this year. Hopefully, the folks at Family Circle magazine will catch wind of this story and re-assess whether Cooper City really is worthy of its Top 10 Best Towns for Families, unless of course the author of that list, Michael J. Weiss, wishes to specify that the list is for non-Jewish families. Oh, it's not that the good people of Cooper City haven't tried to beat down the hateful beast of anti-Semitism, they have. The problem, they've concluded, is that fighting their local anti-Semitism is simply too financially draining.
"Far-left nuts" of Toledo, Ohio beware: should you publicly voice your opposition to the war in Iraq, voice your support for universal health care, or dare to criticize former Lucas County (Ohio) Republican Party chairman turned federal (then state) inmate, Tom Noe, you could be hearing from Michael Edward Coon, the 52-year-old white, Christian owner of Holland Benefits Group, a 24-year-old employee benefits consulting firm based in Ohio. If you’re retired surgeon Dr. S. Amjad Hussain, a University of Toledo trustee and guest editorial writer for The Toledo Blade, you already have heard from Coon who lives in the Point Place section of Toledo.
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.
This video and this incident hit so close to home for me. I was outed in high school. I was spat upon and beat up and ostracized. I almost dropped out because of it. Then Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay. That inspired me to go back to school to say FUCK YOU to all of the people who hated me for what I was.
To know that ten years later this same type of hate goes on, breaks my heart.
You can read the story about what happened at this link.
Now this diary is not about ENDA or John Lewis, but it's about the place of the homosexual within the Progressive community.
Within Left and Center-left movements the push has been about breaking down barriers, or structures, or signs (as John Lewis alludes to in this video) within a community or nation.
We've been trying to break down age-old structures that are inherently racist, or sexist. Many have tried to break barriers within the economy, to help the working man. Fewer have tried to break the economic structure itself, viewing it as inherently oppressive.
Ten years after college student Matthew Shepard was murdered because of his sexual orientation, a California middle schooler was shot and killed last week because of his sexual orientation and gender expression, according to classmates.
Vigils in memory of Lawrence King, calling for an end to violence and harassment directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in schools, are being organized in communities across the country this week.
Please visit www.rememberlinglawrence.org to find an event in your area or register your own. Anyone can hold a vigil/remembrance/event. The website was created to support the efforts of organizations and individuals nationwide. The more events we organize, the louder our collective voice. Please help make sure that what happened to Lawrence never happens again.
Four members of Princeton's Anscombe Society, a socially conservative student group, and a conservative Professor received death threats last week, ordering the recipients to "shut the fuck up," and stating that "We will destroy you."
The Anscombe society's website explains that the group supports chastity before marriage and rejects marriage for homosexuals.
One of the society's members, Francisco Nava, reported that he had received written threats in addition to the e-mail, and expressed his concern that the threats might be coming from within the University itself:
If the email is from off-campus, I feel a little better because it's some wacko or something, but if it's on campus then you start to wonder.
I'm pretty blessed to attend a wonderful liberal arts school, Colorado College, which despite being in the midst of Focus on the Family country has been a bastion of tolerance and openness, particularly after I recently came out of the closet. That all changed this November, when a gay residence life staff member had "FAG" and "ENJOY AIDS" written on his door. This is a story of our response as a campus and as a queer community.
You just knew... with the insane fulminations of Radio Rwanda and the rest about the horrible War on Christmas, that sooner or later, real people were going to get hurt.
You know--some shop clerk, forced to say "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings," would snap and gun down a store full of frazzled secular humanists, screaming "Jesus is the reason for the season!" (actually, it's axial tilt, but... never mind) Or some schlub would wish someone he was holding the door open for a "Merry Christmas" and be brutally assaulted, beaten within an inch of his life, and abandoned--only to be shoved into the gutter by some hard-hearted Jesus-hating Jew or Muslim.
And a final PS. The bill is already passed in the House as a free-standing bill, and it's already been passed as part of the defense bill in the Senate. That means that the real issue here is whether the Dems have the courage to keep the hate crimes provisions in the House-Senate conference report (i.e., after they reconcile the House and Senate versions of the defense bill). The Dems run the House and Senate, so if it drops from the conference report, it means that senior Dems agreed to drop it. Just remember that.
What happen to we just do not have the votes? This is the very same person who on ENDA tried to throw the Transgenders out of a community we have been part of because the votes just weren't there.
