re: #35 Aceofwhat?

There is a reason for them.

When a person is mugged and killed, it is bad enough…but that doesn’t generally get taken as a political or social attack on a community. When you hang a person (like African American tended to have happen to them) on the night before election day, then you are in a whole different territory.

There is no doubt that you not only murdered a person, but you were sending a terroristic warning to other similar people that the same thing will happen to them if they get “uppity”. Terrorism laws are similar in nature. We all know damned good and well that the 9/11 hijackers did not just commit 3,000 acts of murder. They attacked each and every one of us, so that is why terrorism charges connected with murder are even more serious than “just” murder.

When a gay person or transgendered woman is assaulted, raped or killed, the trend has been that the crimes are often unusually graphic (typically, victims are stabbed dozens of times and often decapitated and burned) and tend to be interpreted as a warning to other “fairies”. Also, local law enforcement often ignores these types of crimes (especially in rural areas where GLBT people may be unpopular) or juries may refuse to convict on murder charges (this has happened more than once) because they have religious objections to GLBT people and may feel that “the faggot had it coming, and I would have killed him/her too.”

Testimony in federal this week reveals that GLBT people are the minority most likely to be assaulted or otherwise victimized for reason of social hatred.

Until people are willing to leave people like me alone and law enforcement actually aggressively pursues crimes against us, I will carry a concealed weapon and I will support hate crimes laws.