The San Jose Mercury News is reporting a sharp jump in hate crimes against GLBT people in Santa Clara County. The increase is assumed to be related to California’s Prop 8, which eliminated marriage equality in California last November.
Surge in anti-gay hate crime cases
Hate crime cases involving anti-gay sentiment shot up in Santa Clara County last year, a striking increase that a leading prosecutor attributes to controversy over Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban on gay marriage.
Anti-gay incidents accounted for more than half of hate-crime cases last year — 56 percent — a big jump from only 15 percent in 2007. There were 14 anti-gay cases out of 25 hate-crime cases in 2008, compared with only 3 out of 20 in 2007.
“My belief from having done this work for many years is that surges in types of hate incidents are linked to the headlines and controversies of the day,” said Deputy District Attorney Jay Boyarsky, who is assigned to monitor hate crimes. “Marriage equality and Proposition 8 have been in the news, and we have seen an increase in gay-bashing.”
A hate crime is defined as a criminal act committed in whole or in part because of one or more of the following actual or perceived characteristics of the victim: race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability or association with a person or group with one or more of these characteristics.
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“When there’s a lot more information about gays and lesbians on TV or in the news, it brings out the worst in people who have an inherent bias against groups they don’t belong to,” said Leslie Bulbuk, president of BAYMEC, a regional political action group representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. “It seems like visibility makes people come out of the woodwork.”
Frank Schubert, head honcho at Protect Marriage, maintains, “I certainly hope Proposition 8 did not result in more crime. But if it did, it did so on both sides.”
Right. Only there’s a world of difference between a few kicked over Yes-on-8 yard signs and a couple of show-biz types voluntarily tendering their resignations after their Yes-on-8 contributions were revealed and the death threats, extortion and violence that came from the Yes-on-8 side, as Sapphocrat at Lavender Newswire points out in great detail.
Sapph’s wife Buffy, writing at Gaytheist Agenda expounds on the Yes thugs’ descent to acts of violence:
For Proposition 8 gave full license to you and your ilk to consider us inferior, less than human, even inhuman. It treats us as legal second-class citizens, and in doing so gives bigots like you the assumed privilege to put us in our places by whatever means you deem necessary.
