What Religious ‘Hostility’ Looks Like
And I’ll end with some sobering statistics for Perkins and his colleagues at Liberty Institute to contemplate:
The FBI reports on hate crimes every year, broken down by motivation. In 2010, the most recent year I could find, racism trumped religion as a motivating force, 48% to 19%.
Drill further and cries of religious hostility become even sillier. Among the 19% of hate crimes that were religion-motivated, 67% were committed against Jews. So only 1 out of 5 hate crimes had to do with religion, but even two-thirds of those were committed against a religious minority that comprises 2% of the population. Following Jews, are Muslims—also roughly 2% of the population—against whom 13% of religion-motivated hate crimes were committed. And then Catholics at 4%, followed by Protestants at 3%. In fact, at 9%, “other religions” suffered more attacks than Catholics and Protestants put together.
It’s also worth noting, as long as we’re discussing hate and hostility, that sexual orientation was the motivation for nearly the identical number of hate crimes as all religions put together.