Hate Crimes

[Nat]

States that have no hate crimes laws:

Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Wyoming

States that have hate crimes laws that cover neither sexual orientation nor gender identity:

Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nebraska, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina

States that have hate crimes laws that cover sexual orientation but not gender identity:

Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine,
Massachusetts, Michigan (2002-data collection only), Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin

States that have hate crimes laws addressing sexual orientation and gender identity:

California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and Vermont

[SuperFemme]

Denny’s employee stabbed in alleged hate crime

A Santa Maria man was arrested early Thursday morning on charges of attempted murder and committing a hate crime after an employee at a Denny’s Restaurant was stabbed in the neck and throat.

Police responding to the call of battery at 3:28 a.m. found the victim, an adult man in his 30s, outside the restaurant at 1019 E. Main St. with a laceration to the side of his throat. He also had been stabbed in the side of his neck. The man was specifically targeted by 24-year-old Curtis Martin because of his perceived sexual orientation, police said.

The victim was transported to Marian Medical Center by ambulance for treatment.

“The injuries were not life-threatening and he’s expected to fully recover,” said Santa Maria police Lt. Dan Ast, noting that the knife did not pierce any vital body parts.

Ast said that Martin knocked on the window of the restaurant, which was closed, and asked to use the restroom. He was let in and approached a group of Denny’s employees sitting at a table. Martin asked the victim, a waiter, if he was gay and when the victim replied that he was, he was attacked, according to Ast.

Martin used a knife he had brought with him, Ast said.

After the assault, Martin ran to his vehicle and was seen fleeing the scene westbound on Main Street, police said. His vehicle was located a short time later and Martin was arrested and booked into county jail

http://www.santamariatimes.com/news/...cc4c002e0.html

[miss entycing]

[QUOTE=Nat;189858]States that have no hate crimes laws:

Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Wyoming





sadly, I'm here in SC.
I've had my car trashed because of my sticker, had tires slashed,
been in a semi brawl with an ex (Hy took most of the brunt) while walking thru a flea market one saturday-
simply because my ex had the 'nerve' to place Hys hand on the small of my back to guide me thru the crowd.
2 guys started running their mouths, following us, and cornered us in the parking lot. Someone gratefully called the police,
although not before my ex got slammed up against our car after swinging on the guy who tried to grab my chest.

It was awful, and it scared me... I mean really scared me.

There are still active laws here in SC that state we can go to jail for same sex public affection-
I kid you not

A few years ago here in Greenville, there were so many attacks here in a certain part of one city park-
nobody ever seemed to care that gay men were being bashed and killed.
Edited to add.... that same park has now been re vamped and is all part of the 'trendy' downtown redevelopment.
and the gay bar that's been here for years upon years STILL has Greenville County PD posted there during business hours
it's sickening, and scary.

scary indeed, do I feel safe? If Damon is with me, then yes- but then again, that's also the time when we BOTH could be in danger.

[Soon]

Stonewall Attack: Two Staten Island Men Arrested For Gay Hate Crime At Stonewall Inn

[chefhottie25]

I live in toledo, ohio. I have lived in several other states, like atlanta, chicago, raleigh and new paltz new york. I have always felt safe in all the places that I have lived. I have never been attacked, threatened, or taunted for being a boi. I do live in a bubble. The recent attacks on gays and the stories in this thread have opened my eyes to the hatred and ignorance that exsists in this country. It makes me sad and angry. I was wondering if anyone knows of any activist groups or planned protests that are trying to educate the masses. I haven't been part of any type of activism since college. I would love to hear about what some of you are doing. It's time for me to leave my bubble.

[Cyclopea]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nina-b..._b_721173.html

Nina Burleigh
Posted: September 17, 2010 01:21 PM

A Holy War on Women

If anyone still doubted, or hadn't noticed, that misogyny is the fundamental pillar on which radical Islam is based, the news that poison gas was pumped into girls' schools in Afghanistan, likely by the Taliban, ought to confirm it.

The story, first reported in the U.S. in the New York Times two weeks ago, goes like this: For the last two years, girls and women in certain schools around Afghanistan have been turning up sickened by fumes in their schools. At first, authorities disregarded the reports, chalking them up to female hysteria due to nervousness over outright attacks on girls schools by murderous Taliban enforcers.

Then the U.N. went in and tested their blood, and voila -- it appears the Taliban, taking a page out of the Nazi playbook, has been pumping stuff like Zyklon B, the notorious Holocaust gas, into girls' schools, to further their goal of keeping their females illiterate. (A Taliban spokesman denied responsibility.)

This horrific story is only one of many pieces of evidence that should make it ever more obvious to the world that subjugating females is the driving force behind Islamist rage. It was there in 9/11 attacker Mohammed Atef's will, in which he demanded that no pregnant woman be allowed to come near his grave; it's there in the acid attacks on pretty girls who dare say no to their men in Pakistan; it's there in the stoning sentences in Iran and Somalia, it's there in the prohibition on women driving cars in Saudi Arabia, it's there in the black blankets millions of women think -- know -- they must throw over their heads whenever they dare step outside their homes.

Apparently, in these countries, men fear losing control of their women more than they fear death itself. Jihadists and their supporters are an entire movement afflicted with the syndrome psychologists have identified in garden variety domestic abusers everywhere: men who confuse love and power, and for whom losing their women is so painful that they would rather see them dead. For women affiliated with such men, the most dangerous moment comes when they try to leave. The possible awakening and emancipation of women worldwide has put women in these cultures at grave risk right now.

With so much evidence piled up that the status of women in the West is what radical Islamist fighters revile most about us, the only question left is why haven't the Western countries made support of women a fundamental element of the diplomatic, military and political response? Where is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on this subject? Where is President Obama?

For years, our governments have treated outrageous depredations against women as quaint cultural customs. Only the French have officially rejected the burka, and for that faced international criticism and drivel about "racism."

Of course womanhood is not a "race," and that's precisely the problem in getting supported. If blacks or Jews were consistently mistreated the way women are from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, and in many of the nations in between, the United Nations, the Europeans and the people of the United States wouldn't stand for it, and our elected representatives would be holding hearings, issuing sanctions, putting the issue front and center every single day.

On the contrary, those on the right who support the "War on Terror" talk about supporting the troops, or about the almost nonexistent threat (since 9/11) of violence on our shores. The practice of wholesale annihilation of females isn't much discussed.

Those on the left who want the troops out of Afghanistan by next week are also missing the point. There is a just and a good reason for our men and women to be over there bravely trying to eradicate the Taliban. It has to do with the fates of millions and millions of women, who face not just lifelong psychological abuse, but actual violence and death among these men.

And if no one stands up to these men and their supporters and enablers in the less warlike quarters of the Islamic world, on that fundamental tenet, here's what happens:

Today, we read that the lunatic American Imam Al-Awlaki has issued a "fatwa" against a Seattle newspaper cartoonist named (not for long) Molly Norris, who has apparently been told to change her name and go into hiding. Now, an American woman joins Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonist in the long list of individuals the "pure" men in white robes are trying to cow into silence.

It's time for all American women and their elected officials, on the right and the left, to stand up against this nonsense, support free speech and expose and oppose, in the strongest and loudest terms possible, the misogyny that is a tenet of this vile, so-called holy war.

[Nat]

9 accused of torturng 3 in Bronx - Lured Into a Trap, Then Tortured for Being Gay

(link to video report)

He was told there was a party at a brick house on Osborne Place, a quiet block set on a steep hill in the Bronx. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped.


A gay man was tortured in the house, at left, at 1910 Osborne Place in the Bronx, the police said.

All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay.

There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, the police said. Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said — until the boys — one of whom was sodomized with a plunger — admitted to having had sex with the man.

The attackers forced the man to strip to his underwear and tied him to a chair, the police said. One of the teenage victims was still there, and the “Goonies” ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.

The beatings and robberies went on for hours. They were followed by a remarkably thorough attempt to sanitize the house — including pouring bleach down drains, the police said, as little by little word of the attacks trickled to the police. A crucial clue to the attackers was provided by someone who slipped a note to a police officer outside the crime scene, at 1910 Osborne Place in Morris Heights, near Bronx Community College.

Seven suspects were arrested on Thursday and Friday, and two were still being sought in a crime that the leader of the City Council called among the worst hate crimes she had ever heard of. “It makes you sick,” said the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, the city’s highest ranking openly gay official.

The charges included abduction, unlawful imprisonment and sodomy, all as hate crimes.

“These suspects deployed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference.

The assaults are the latest in a string of recent episodes of bullying and attacks against gays. A Rutgers University student jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge last month, prosecutors said, after his roommate had secretly set up a webcam in their room and streamed over the Internet his sexual encounter with another man. Two men were accused of robbing and beating a man in the Stonewall Inn, a landmark gay bar in Greenwich Village, last weekend while shouting slurs.

Neighbors on Osborne Place said the house, nondescript but for its door painted a bright lime green, had been vacant for some time. A group of teenagers and young men had moved in as squatters, neighbors said, and hosted loud parties.

“You could smell it from them,” said a neighbor who gave only his last name, Gomez. “From the start, you could tell they were trouble.” Mr. Gomez said he and other neighbors had discussed whether anything could be done about the squatters, but nothing came of it.

The nine suspects — the group seemed not so much part of an established gang as a loose group of friends who adopted a nickname — knew some or all three victims. The idea for the attacks seemed to have been hatched last Saturday, after one member of the group saw the 30-year-old man, who he knew was gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the gang, the police said.

Hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, the group grabbed the 17-year-old, took him to the house and slammed him into a wall, the police said.

He was beaten, made to strip naked, slashed with a box cutter, hit on the head with a can of beer and sodomized with the wooden handle of a plunger, the police said. And he was interrogated about the 30-year-old and asked if they had had sex.

The teenager said that they had. The gang members set him loose, warning him to keep quiet or they would hurt his friends and family. The teenager walked into a nearby hospital and said he had been jumped by strangers on the street and robbed.

At 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, the police said, the group members grabbed a second 17-year-old, beating and likewise interrogating him about his contact with the 30-year-old. He, too, said he had had sex with the man. They took his jewelry and held him while the 30-year-old arrived for what he thought was a party, his arms filled with 10 tall cans of Four Loko, a caffeine-infused malt liquor. He had cleaned out a store of its entire stock.

He was immediately set upon and tied up. Then the assailants ordered the second teenager to attack the 30-year-old, and they joined in the beating. The beating lasted hours, the police said. The attackers forced the man to drink all 10 cans of liquor — each about twice the size of a can of beer, with a higher alcohol content, 10 percent to 12 percent, according to Four Loko’s Web site.

While the man was held captive and attacked, five of the Latin King Goonies went to his house, which he shared with his 40-year-old brother. Using a key taken from the 30-year-old to get inside, they found his brother in bed. They pulled a blanket over his head and hit him, demanding money. When he refused, one placed a cellphone to the brother’s ear, and he heard the voice of his younger brother, who said he had been kidnapped and who pleaded, “Give them the money.”

The brother complied. The men took $1,000 in cash, two debit cards and a 52-inch television.

The brother managed to free himself about three hours later, and he called the police, leaving out the fact that his brother was being held. By then it was Monday morning. Detectives went to the brothers’ home and, upon leaving, saw the 30-year-old, passed out on the landing from the alcohol he had consumed. But having no reason to believe he had been a victim of a crime, they did not question him.

Detectives returned later that day, suspicious of how the robbers had entered the brothers’ home without using force, and the 30-year-old told them he had been picked up in a van by strangers and forced to give them his keys and address, the police said.

Officers still had no idea about the first teen who had visited the hospital, because he had not called the police, and hospitals are not required to inform the authorities about assaults, the police said. The man had said he was robbed near 1910 Osborne, and police officers tried to obtain a search warrant for the house but were told they did not have enough cause, the police said.

Late on Tuesday the second teenager walked into a Bronx police station house and gave a version of what had happened, the police said. None of the three victims, in their first interviews with the police, were fully forthcoming, fearing reprisal and wanting to keep their lives a secret. But the second teenager gave an address, and a second request for a search warrant was granted.

On Wednesday morning, officers entered 1910 Osborne Place and found a surprising sight: an immaculate house, with fresh coats of paint and the smell of bleach hanging thick in the air. One detective called the house “the cleanest crime scene I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Kelly said.

“Lots of bleach and paint were used to cover the blood shed by their tortured prey,” he said. “They even poured bleach down the drains.”

Rugs and linoleum had been ripped out. Detectives were able to scrape evidence, including pubic hair and empty liquor cans, from the house, but not much was found, Mr. Kelly said.

The break in the case came later Wednesday when someone in a crowd of onlookers outside the house quietly slipped an officer his phone number and, when a detective called, gave the name of the man believed to be the ringleader of the group of nine: Ildefonzo Mendez, 23. Officers later learned the name of the first victim from the other teenager.

By Wednesday night, all three victims had given full accounts of the attacks, and for the next 36 hours, officers with the Hate Crimes Task Force, the Gang Division and Special Victims squad worked up a list of nine suspects.

Arrests began Thursday.

The other suspects under arrest were identified as David Rivera, 21; Nelson Falu, 18; Steven Carballo, 17; Denis Peitars, 17; Bryan Almonte, 17; and Brian Cepeda, 16. They were being held by the police in the Bronx on Friday night, with no arraignment scheduled. Still being sought, the police said, are Elmer Confessor, 23, and Ruddy Vargas-Perez, 22.

One suspect confessed, a law enforcement official said, others have not given statements.

[Gemme]

I'm speechless.