TRENDS IN HATE

They Burn Horses, Don't They?

2011-04-26T18:41:00.020-04:00

Morgan County, Ohio farmer Brent Whitehouse is quoted as saying the following about one of his pregnant quarterhorses and the tragedy that followed:

"I knew the way she was acting Saturday and Sunday that she was ready [to give birth]. My one dog was acting funny, and I looked out the window and saw this orange glow coming from the barn. I ran out there, but the doors of the barn wouldn't open and suddenly, flames were shooting up through the roof. That barn was gone in five minutes."

All eight of his horses—Elvis, Barney, Floyd, Ethel, Love, Bella, Princess, and a one-week old guy named Buddy who was Princess' new foal—perished in the blaze that began around 11:30PM EST on April 24, 2011, a blaze that was so hot a tractor inside the barn melted; but, this was no brushfire gone astray. The state's Fire Marshal classified it as an arson, and a reward is being offered for information leading to the perpetrator(s). It should also be classified as a hate crime, and the Morgan County Sheriff's Department is weighing that possibility as they investigate. Spray-painted on the charred remains of Mr. Whitehouse's barn in McConnelsville were homophobic remarks according to various news sources. From what I can tell by examining a photograph of the barn taken by Chris Crook of the Times Recorder it appears the perpetrator(s) wrote something like "Burn in Hell" and the beginning of a word that begins with the letter "F." Another published photograph of the side of the barn showed this anti-gay phrase: "FAGS ARE FREAKS."

Said Mr. Whitehouse, "Whoever did this had to walk right by all those horses, including the baby, and didn't care that they were killing a gentle, loving animal." That's the take-away message about hate crime perpetrators—whether they prey on someone because of their race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation—they don't care about anyone's life but their own. Arrogant and callous, hate crime perps don't even care about the lives of animals, just their twisted worldview where they are first-class citizens.

It's doubtful that few, if any, arsons that lead to the deaths of horses are classified as hate crimes. However, when arson investigators find themselves at a loss for why such fires are started, perhaps—given the tragedy that Mr. Whitehouse is enduring— fire investigators should consider the sociodemographics of the human victim and the possibility that such arsons are hate crimes. Whoever killed Mr. Whitehouse's horses, one thing is certain, and that is the motive: the perpetrator had animus for the horse-breeder's perceived sexual orientation. Had the barn's walls been completely destroyed and the spray-painted homophobic messages gone unread, we may never have known the motive behind such a cruel and life-destroying act.

This was previously published at DailyKos.

Racism denial in hate crime convictions

2011-04-14T22:40:00.013-04:00

Within the past nine days, two hate crime cases in two different parts of the United States—both involving white defendants—came to a close. After juries rendered their guilty findings in both cases, absent were words of remorse or even regret from the convicted perpetrators. There was no lesson learned, no sense of self-reflection. Instead, both men uttered statements of complete denial about just who they are. It's not believable when a man convicted of sexual assault asserts, "I'm not a rapist," or when a convicted murderer says, “I’m no killer.” Equally unbelievable are the racism denials from Michael F. Jacques and Zachrey D. Harris.

Let’s start with the Massachusetts man, Michael Jacques, 26, who with two others torched a largely African-American church to the ground hours after America elected its first black president. The Macedonia Church of God in Christ, which was located in Springfield, Massachusetts, burned to the ground, on November 5, 2008, just hours after election polls had closed in the Bay State. Quickly, authorities launched an investigation as to whether the Tinkham Road church fire was a hate-related arson set in retaliation for the election of President Barack Obama. They concluded it was, and on January 16, 2009, authorities arrested three white men—Benjamin F. Haskell, 22, Michael F. Jacques, 24, and Thomas A. Gleason Jr., 21—all of Springfield, Massachusetts. Fast-forward past the guilty pleas of Haskell and Gleason: this afternoon (April 14, 2011) after almost three days of jury deliberation, Jacques was found guilty in a federal courtroom in Springfield of conspiracy to violate civil rights, destroying religious property, and using fire to commit a felony. Several minutes after the verdicts were announced Jacques said to reporters, "The jury got it all wrong; I’m innocent. I’m not a racist." Not “I’m sorry for the pain I caused the church members and the greater Springfield community.” No guilt-ridden apologies, no acceptance of responsibility for a race-based criminal act. No. Jacques’ short proclamation was all about race denial.

Then there is the case of Zachrey Harris, 23, from Colorado ski resort country. On April 6, 2011, a jury convicted Harris of misdemeanor bias-motivated harassment for hurling racial slurs at a black University of Colorado student, Mr.Olubiyi Ogundipe, a native of Nigeria, and his friend from Saudi Arabia, Mr. Ahmad Abdulkareem. Mr. Ogundipe was physically assaulted during the September 18, 2010, incident, but not by Zachrey Harris. However, a Boulder County prosecutor told Harris’ jury that Harris said to the two men of color, "We bought your parents, and we'll buy you." The men were also called "monkeys." News reports of the verdict indicated that Harris cried upon hearing the verdict. One might hope that his tears signaled regret for his actions. They did not. Instead, Harris’ racism denial kicked in, and he was reported to have said softly while still in the courtroom just moments after his race-based hate crime conviction, "I'm not a racist.”

Follow hate crime cases for any length of time and you will learn that such self-denials are not uncommon. Which is too bad because if there was ever a teachable moment for those prone to hurl words or fists at another simply because of the color of the other person's skin, then a hate crime conviction would certainly seem to be that wake-up call.

London Calling: 2nd International Day Against Hate Crime

2010-10-07T07:15:00.011-04:00

An important rally will take place in London, England on Saturday night on October 23, 2010. The second International Day Against Hate Crime is scheduled at 7:00pm GMT until 9:00pm with a two minute period of silence to occur at 8:00pm to remember and reflect on those killed by hate crime pertpetrators. The anti-hate crime event will take place at Trafalgar Square.

Trafalgar Square was the location of the September 25, 2009 gay hate-crime homicide of Ian Baynham, 62, of Beckenham, Kent—a crime that spurred the launching of the International Day Against Hate Crime. Mr. Baynham was walking through the historic square with his partner, Phillip Brown, 30, on a busy Friday evening when the unprovoked homophobic attack on him occurred. The civil servant was knocked unconscious by a single blow to the head allegedly Joel Alexander after another person, Ruby Thomas, is said to have shouted anti-slurs at Mr. Baynham and Mr. Brown. After falling to the ground and suffering a severe brain injury, Mr. Baynham was then stomped on allegedly by two intoxicated teenaged females. They are said to have stomped on his chest and head repeatedly and then left him for dead. Subsequently, Mr. Baynham was pronounced brain dead and 18 days after the attack on him, on Tuesday October 13, 2009, doctors turned off his life-support machines. Joel Alexander, 19, of Thornton Heath in South London, Rachel Burke, 18, of Three Oaks in East Sussex, and Ruby Thomas, 18, of Lichfield in Staffordshire, were charged with manslaughter. The trial for the three began in April, 2010, and no verdict in the case has been revealed.

Whether because of a person's sexuality, homelessness status, disability status, race, religion, ethnicity, national origin or gender, a hate crime is an attack on the entire community. Therefore, it is up to the community to speak out against hate crimes. So, if you are in London on Occtober 23, 2010, please spend two hours standing with others against hate crime.

A Movie Review for National Bullying Prevention Month

2010-10-05T21:11:00.002-04:00

Bullying is pervasive in schools and it has horrible consequences [pdf], some of them life-ending. October is National Bullying Prevention Month. Timed to coincide with it, the Southern Poverty Law Center has released its seventh educational film, available free to schools. Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History, the documentary film by the Montgomery, Alabama-based nonprofit civil rights organization—which is known for its successful lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups—has many lessons for many people.

The movie tells the story of Jamie Nabozny who was bullied relentlessly by classmates when he attended junior high and high school in Ashland, Wisconsin, a "probable" Sundown town that sits on the shores of Lake Superior.

In the film Jamie’s ordeal is recounted by his mother, by eyewitnesses and by Mr. Nabozny himself (as an adult) as he speaks to a group of teenagers in a school gymnasium. Narrated by Emmy Award-winning actress Jane Lynch, the 38-minute film is a must-see for middle and high school students. Bullied is also required viewing for teachers, for school counselors and for school administrators. Moving back and forth from interviews to re-enactments of actual events, Bullied tells the horrifying "education" of verbal and physical abuse Jamie endured, survived, and ultimately conquered.

If you are an American school student and you're gay or lesbian or transgendered (or perceived to be), or if you're comparatively very short or tall, or comparatively overweight; or, if you’re black in a nearly all-white school in a nearly all-white town; or, if you speak with an accent because you are the only foreign-born student at your school; or, if you're artistically or academically gifted in a school that worships its athletics program; or, if you choose to wear your clothes and your hair differently than most of your peers at school, or if you are in some way disabled, then chances are you know all too well about the endless, psychologically tortuous days at school that Jamie Nabozny had. You’re not alone. And I beg you: don't give up. In addition to teaching that bullying is the opposite of tolerance, not giving up is one of the messages to students Bullied provides (the film is in memory of 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover who, God bless him, could no longer live in the same world as his tormentors). If you are a parent of a school aged child, now is the time to have a disucssion with her or him about bullying; and, now is the time to learn what you can do to make sure your child's school is a place for education, and not a place for her or his victimization.

The first half of Bullied is a heart-wrenching downward spiral account of a young midwestern kid with lots of psychological resiliance who is stripped of much of his fortitude by his classmates: those who bullied him with homophobic slurs and repeated assaults, for sure, but also those who bore witness to his suffering and did nothing. In his attempt to deal with the hell that was his public school education—complete with invalidating, and willfully impotent school administrators—Jamie goes from isolating himself (at school and at his loving home) to taking more drastic measures after school officials failed to stop the escalating attacks on him, and after desperate pleas from Jamie and his parents were callously ignored.

The second half of the film deals with the federal lawsuit that Jamie Nabozny filed against his schools and their administrators, after he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Going on the offensive—and winning his civil suit against the school administrators—must have been empowering and healing for Mr. Nabozny, because the film showing him as an adult reveals an empathic, seemingly well-functioning, psychologically mature and happily-out-of-the-closet man. He won $900,000 in the lawsuit, and the jury took just minutes to decide the case. That is the sobering lesson the film gives to teachers, school counselors, and school administrators who might be tempted to—as Mr. Nabozny's school administrators did—blame the victim and allow known bullying to continue on their watch.

As an aside, it doesn't take much delving to discover that those who are opposed to hate crime statutes also fight vigorously to stop anti-bullying measures in schools. That's probably because these people want to pass their hatred on to future generations. Bullying, you see, when committed by young adults and adults is often considered a hate crime. But even when tormenting someone to death because of their sexuality—or for some other reason—might not be considered a hate crime by the legal system, as in the criminal case against Rutgers University students Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, the "sport" of tormenting someone because of some physical or sociopolitical characteristic that they possess, seems to me, is a form of bullying and must be stopped. As the lyrics to a song by Everything But The Girl go, "Little Hitlers, Little Hitlers grow up into big Hitlers, look what they do."

If you are a junior high school teacher or high school teacher, or a school administrator, and if you are serious about preventing bullying, then please get your school a free copy of Bullied and make sure it is shown throughout your school. The film is the perfect primer for a classroom discussion about not only bullying, but also about diveristy and tolerance and the benefits of both. If you are an elementary school teacher, and you are serious about preventing bullying, then please visit this site and also this site for useful online tools to help teach your class this important message: bullying is never OK.

Cross-posted at: DailyKos

The Summer of Hating Latinos

2010-08-07T07:37:00.008-04:00

Tweaking a recently coined phrase by Tim Wise, this diary's title describes an American phenomenon that few, if any, in the national mainstream media are saying much about this summer, even though it's a problem that seems to be spreading: hate crimes targeting Hispanics, most often immigrants, that are rarely called race-based attacks by the powers that be. Although I could have chosen any of a number of communities in the United States to describe the phenomenon, I've chosen Summit, New Jersey.

If you've never been there, Summit, New Jersey, seems at first blush like a pretty nice place, and I suppose for most of its residents it is. According to its Wikipedia page, the Union County city is an affluent Big Apple burb ("affluent" as in a good percentage of its approximately 20,000 residents are Wall Street stockbrokers). With a median family income of $141,659, a family poverty rate of only 2.5%, Summit, New Jersey boasted of a median home price of $655,500 as of October 2009, a point in time well after the national and international economic meltdown and after the onset of America's subprime mortgage housing collapse. Not bad considering. Nope, not bad at all considering that just before the beginning of the bottom falling out of financial industry's greed-fest, Business Week magazine ranked Summit, New Jersey #6 on its list of "American communities likely to be pummeled by the economic crisis," a September 2008 prediction that did not come to fruition. While Main Street U.S.A.'s financial status went down the proverbial toilet, no doubt thanks to some of the free-wheeling Wall Street investment bankers who call Summit home, Summit itself was spared (in no small part because of the government's white-collar welfare program, er, because of the Wall Street bailout). Three thousand dollar per month condo rentals aside, no place on earth is perfect (again from its wiki page):

A New York Times reporter and Summit resident criticized the city for being an "economically, racially and ideologically homogenized populace" with "a growing divide between Summit's haves and have-nots." He elaborated in 2006: "there's an ever-diminishing corner of the city akin to the so-called slums of Beverly Hills, where middle-income homeowners like me can take advantage of the schools and services of Summit without the million-dollar price tags so ubiquitous on the other side of the Midtown Direct tracks."

By my standards a city that defines its "slum" as the spot where its middle-income homeowners live is fairing pretty well, economically-speaking. That's Summit: the 16th wealthiest place in New Jersey, a state teeming with millionaires. In addition to being pretty rich, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Summit is also pretty White. As of the 2000 census, Summit was 87.77% White which is significantly less racially diverse when compared to the nation (75.1% White) or to the rest of the Garden State (72.6% White), including Union County (65.51% White). Is Summit, New Jersey this white on purpose? Well, it's not a Sundown Town, but measures have been taken to make certain Summit residents are of a certain type, nudge-nudge-wink-wink (again from the Summit wikipage with the emphases being mine):

Summit...adopted a policy of zoning ordinances requiring a single family house on a large lot and could thereby "exclude any undesirable influences that might erode property values." The requirement excluded apartment buildings and multi-family dwellings, and tended to raise the price of houses. One study found that since 1945, the single family house on a large lot zoning mechanism "has been increasingly used in suburban and rural areas to safeguard particular vested interests."

But that's not coded language for anything, I'm sure.

Unlike most of the rest of the nation, in the fall of 2008 when local Democrats fared much better at the polls than their GOP opponents because the country yearned for political change, Summit elected a Republican town councilmember in its second ward which I think says something about the place. But, like most of the rest of the nation, Summit, New Jersey has seen a rise in its Hispanic population over the past decade; and, in a place that reeks of wealthy white privilege those changing sociodemographics can be fatal.

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By all accounts Mr. Abelino Mazariego-Torres, a 47-year-old married Salvadoran immigrant and father of two sons and two daughters, was a hard-working man. A good man who came to the United States from a poor country—a country with its share of war wounds—he immigrated to America 13 years ago for the same reason most of our white, Asian, Caribbean, and Hispanic family members/ancestors immigrated to the United States: for a better life. A dishwasher and occasional assistant cook at an Indian restaurant in downtown Summit, New Jersey, for the past several years, Mr. Mazariego set out on foot on July 17, 2010, from the Dabbawalla Restaurant after completing his day's work and after filling his pockets with his earnings: $640 in cash. It was while he was relaxing on a park bench in the Summit Promenade shortly before 9:30PM, possibly tipsy from alcohol he had purchased, that he would be taken from his wife and his four children, taken from a country he had fled to in order to avoid violence in his war-torn country of birth, in order to create a happier life for himself and his family. Taken in a most gruesome and callous manner.

Mr. Mazariego's funeral was touchingly described by columnist Mark Di Ionno, but let me not get ahead of myself.

These are the undisputed facts surrounding Mr. Mazariego's death. While sitting alone on a park bench in downtown Summit after he left work on July 17th, Mr. Mazariego was approached by a group of teenagers. Most of their identities have not been revealed by the police, so it cannot be verified whether the teenagers were primarily from Summit or from various towns. The police have reported that some of the teens were Summit residents, and that some were not. Five were females and nine were males. Only the identities of two teenagers have thus far been released. R&B singer Robby Guarantee, 19, of Morristown, New Jersey, whose real name is Nigel Dumas, and Khayri Williams-Clark, 18, of Summit, both African-Americans, were each charged with felony murder on July 21st, as was an unidentified 17-year-old male. (He is to be tried as an adult prosecutors said, so it is a matter of time before the public learns his identity). Then on July 30th two more unidentified Summit teenagers, one 15 years old and the other 17 years old, were charged with conspiracy, aggravated assault, and robbery. At first it was thought that no crime had occurred until evidence surfaced days later that pointed to a violent, unprovoked attack.

The allegations go like this: Nigel Dumas, Khayri Williams-Clark, and the other three teenagers charged with Mr. Mazariego's attack, along with nine other teenagers, approached Mr. Mazariego as he sat on a park bench. One of them is said to have sat down next to him, while the other is said to have covered Mr. Mazariego's head with his own t-shirt (one ABC television affiliate said his head was covered with a sheet). Then the police said Mr. Mazariego was punched several times about the head and body by Dumas, Williams-Clark, and the unnamed teens. The mob of teens then immediately fled. A 17-year-old video-taped the entire pre-meditated beating on a video-phone. The video then circulated among Summit teenagers for days just like old lynching postcards used to circulate among white townsfolk in the 19th and 20th centuries.

While the video of Mr. Mazariego's attack was making the rounds in Summit, Mr. Mazariego, who was found unconscious at the scene of the crime immediately after the attack, lay in a coma at Overlook Hospital in Summit. He died there on July 20, 2010, without ever regaining consciousness.
Understanding the current anti-Latino sociopolitical climate in the United States these days, one commenter at the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center made these insightful remarks about Mr. Mazariego's slaying:

Blame the hatred spewed out on Fox and Rush for terrible things like this. To think this guy escaped the madness in El Salvador only to be painfully killed by children here. Is there a chance to get this more publicity? Maybe a statue of this guy in a city park? Not that these kids listened to Rush and Beck but they’re smart enough to pick up the idea that this guy doesn’t matter so they can do snything [sic] to him.

This last statement—that the alleged perpetrators are smart enough to absorb the anti-Latino sentiment swirling around this country, perceptive enough to grasp the repeated notion that the lives of Latinos in the United States are somehow worth less (or worthless)—has deep historical roots in this country: racism.

For example, this quote by Brent Staples summarizing the lynching of blacks in America and the response by the larger community has eerie similarity, I think, to the attack on Mr. Mazariego:

Black American lives were viewed as expendable in the pre-civil rights South. The murderers who hanged, dismembered or burned black victims alive — before crowds of cheering onlookers — knew well that the law would not act against them. These savage rituals were meant to keep the black community on its knees.

Ironic how we keep repeating our past. Today's racism is, to quote David Bowie, the same old thing in brand new drag. Oh sure, African-Americans continue to be the victims of race-based hate crimes more than any other group; however, it should be clear that in communities across America, from Summit, New Jersey, to Staten Island to Phoenix and Los Angeles, Latinos are increasingly the people who are lashed to today's whipping posts. This despite the findings that the higher Latino immigration is, the lower the crime rate is.

It's racism, and just like the days of old, you can't always count on law enforcement to do the right thing. As Peggy MacIntosh began her essay on white privilege: "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." Or, the flip side, conferring submission on another group.

Illuminated here is the "invisible system" that seems to be working hard to confer submission onto Latinos with respect to Mr. Mazariego's death. On July 30th came these bold-faced lies from Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow who seems almost Lady MacBeth-like in his compulsive attempt to deny that Mr. Mazariego's death was a race-based public spectacle slaying:

It was a crime of opportunity. The defendants saw he [Abelino Mazariego] had $640 in on cash on him and intended to rob him.

At the same news conference, attorney Romankow goes on to repeat (because when you want people to believe your lie, you have to say it over and over again):

It was a crime of opportunity, they saw he was intoxicated, that he had money and a watch and decided they were going to take it.

And Romankow said this too at the press conference which is, of course, a permutation on the we're-not-racist-in-our-racially-skewed-town meme heard so often in covered-up race-based hate crimes, and now heard in everyday civic affairs:

This isn’t about him [Mr. Mazariego] being Latino.

Oh yes it was Mr. Romankow which is why you doth protest too much. The beating death of Mr. Mazariego was an anti-Latino sport-slaying; like the lynching of blacks, it was a spectator-attended, race-based hate-crime homicide. Period. Like many black lynchings, Mr. Mazareigo's lynching was recorded by the crowd who came to watch. Like the lynching of so many blacks in America, Mr. Mazreigo's lynching took place in the center of town with plenty of people around. Yes, the victim had hundreds of dollars on him at the time he was attacked. However, not one of the persons who beat Abelino Mazariego robbed him, not one of the persons who watched his beating robbed him (there were a total of 14 teenagers present), and the teenager who filmed the beating on a mobile phone also did not rob Mr. Mazariego. In nearby Suffolk County, New York on Long Island, the racist youth have an accurately racist term for this kind of targeted hate-crime attack. They call it beaner jumping. (Other targeted groups have long-known terms for hate crime attacks aimed at them; for gay men it's known as gay-bashing, and then, of course, there is the term lynching which was coined to describe the oodles of hate-crime slayings of blacks long before the term hate-crime was created).

Romankow—the prosecutor in this case—has chosen to take the public lead in white-washing this hate crime homicide by saying that those arrested had intended to rob their victim, but then (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) forgot to! Seriously, think about how mind-screwingly absurd that statement is. This is what Romankow wants the world to believe: that a bunch of upper-middle class/rich kids were so hard up for cash and a wristwatch that they selected, not one of the city's rich stockbrokers coming out of any of the nearby posh eateries wearing Rolex watches, but a Latino dishwasher, and that, oooops, they actually forgot to rob their so-called robbery victim while beating him up (and outnumbering their victim 14 to 1, you have to ask, couldn't they have robbed almost anyone without laying a finger on them?).

What about the videographer? Well, at his press conference Romankow likened the teenager who recorded the attack on Mr. Mazareigo to a—stay seated for this—photojournalist! Romankow said that this individual would not be charged with any crime.

Let me add this: Mr. Mazareigo was robbed. When he was brought via ambulance to the Overlook Hospital shortly after the attack on him, unconscious and clinging to life, someone stole the $640 he had in his pockets. Charged with third-degree theft was emergency room nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, New Jersey. Rolling a comatose patient: that, Mr. Romankow, is a crime of opportunity.

Mr. Mazariego's anti-Latino beating death on a downtown Summit park bench, the prosecutor's public, pre-trial denial of the obvious motive of those charged with Mr. Mazariego's death, along with the economy-maiming default-swaps and other investment bank schenanigans masterminded by Summit's financial barons makes you wonder if there isn't something in the drinking water in Summit, New Jersey that makes the powerful people there lie and deceive and cause harm to others. Ohio-born artist Jenny Holzer's phrase comes to mind: The Abuse of Power Should Come as No Surprise. But, sadly, anti-Latino sentiment and violence are not unique to Summit, New Jersey; and, as the hateful rhetoric against the largest growing ethnic group in America continues, as it has this summer, expect to see more hate crimes directed at Latinos...and expect to hear denial that that is what they are.

This blog was posted originally at DailyKos on August 5, 2010.

University of North Carolina Issues Pathetic Hate Crime Conduct Code

2010-02-24T11:16:00.016-05:00

Having staunchly protected a group of its racist students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in late 2008, the UNC educational system is back at it: protecting the status quo while making itself seem like it's taking progressive, thoughtful measures. Specifically, on February 12, 2010, The University of North Carolina Board of Governors approved a uniform code of conduct to address hate crimes on the 16 campuses in the UNC school system. It's a pathetic, meaningless code of conduct, and it comes as no surprise to us. In our February, 2009, blog we predicted a white-wash job by the UNC administration, and earlier this month, they delivered. No, we're not psychic; we just saw the writing on the wall.

On election night in 2008 four North Carolina State University students spray-painted violent, racist messages about Barack Obama in the campus' Free Expression Tunnel. Although these messages would not be considered constitutionally protected free speech by anyone other than dyed-in-the-wool racists because they called for the assassination of an elected president—one statement read, "Let's shoot that N----r in the head" and another said, "Hang Obama by a noose"—the NC State's administration refused to classify the grafitti as a hate crime, refused to expel those responsible for writing the death-threat directives aimed at President Obama, and refused to release the names of the students. The message from the school was clear; threatening, racist language by its students is acceptable at North Carolina State University.

Phase One of UNC's political white-wash of the graffiti incident came when UNC President Erskine Bowles created a "panel" of people to look at campus hate crimes and the issue of what constitutes free speech. Phase Two came on February 12th when the UNC Board of Governors approved a uniform code of conduct that (clutch your pearls ladies) prohibits on-campus actions defined by federal and state laws as hate crimes while expressing support for free speech on campus. Wow, it took a panel of higher education experts and a large public school system's board of directors to lower itself to state it will now recognize state and federal hate crime laws. They threw in support for the First Amendment as a patriotic bonus. What next from Erskine Bowles and the UNC Board of Governors? A position statement about the Declaration of Independence? Pathetic.

We're still left wondering who those four racist NC State students are who spray-painted the threats on President Obama's life in 2008 and who these students are connected to. Either white privilege hit a new low in the state of North Carolina or the four NC State students who got a free-pass to threaten the president without being charged with a hate crime and without being expelled from school are somehow well-connected. Since white privilege and well-connectedness often go hand-in-hand, perhaps both were at work.

Huffington Post goes Right Wing Nutty in Hate Crime Analysis. Yes, HuffPo.

2009-07-24T10:44:00.010-04:00

It's irritating as hell when the neo-cons blather about being against hate crime laws. Stupid garbage typically falls out of their mouths (oh, and this is no small point: the people are almost always persons of privilege, people who are demographically not likely to be victims of a hate crime). They'll toss out the tired, incorrect chirping points of those who hate and those who want to stay in power (they're very often the same people). Without regard for America's hateful history, they'll spout phrases like "all crimes are hate crimes" and "you can't tell what a person's motivation is let alone prosecute it" and "hate crime laws are thought crime laws." If you follow the loony hate crime dialogue of The Right in the United States, you know this. But, it's enraging when the Huffington Post gives credence to this crap as it did when it published Diane Dimond's article on July 21st titled, "Hate is the Name of the Game in Crime."

Partly because reducing racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of prejudice is so close to my heart. Partly because I had just read this awesome diary by fellow Kossack Maimonides. Partly because according to wikipedia (boldface mine):

The Huffington Post is an American liberal news website and aggregated blog founded by Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, featuring various news sources and columnists.

For these reasons, my blood pressure rose while reading a staunchly right wing opinion piece on the current debate regarding hate crime legislation posted on a supposed liberal website. Let me tell you this: The HuffPo's Diane Dimond's opinion about hate crime legislation is not a liberal position, it is a solidly conservative one. Claiming to be liberal but being against including sexual orientation and gender to the federal hate crime statute is akin to saying you are liberal and are also for racially segregated schools. Dimond's avowedly anti-civil rights position is the opposite of being a liberal. Let me count the ways.

Dimond first stupidly asks why we should label as hate crimes the murders of abortion provider Dr. Steven Tiller and the murder of Holocaust Museum security guard Stephen T. Johns when we already have strict laws against murder. It's a ridiculous set-up for the rest of her article. To begin with, doctors who perform abortions are not part of a protected class of persons in any pending hate crime legislation or any American hate crime law. The murder of Dr. Tiller, while fueled by anti-abortion hatred, does not meet the definition of a hate crime, and no person knowledgeable about hate crimes would state otherwise. (Had Dr. Tiller, who was murdered in his church during a worship service, been killed because of anti-Christian hatred, then the perpetrator could have been charged with a hate crime). Current hate crime laws vary from state to state (as outlined in this pdf), but they typically protect persons based on race, color, religion, national origin, and ethnicity. Some state laws include sexual orientation, gender, and disability. None include "abortion doctor" status as a protected class of citizens. You'd expect Arianna Huffington, the Editor-in-Chief at HuffPo, to know this basic fact about hate crime laws before allowing Dimond to publish what she did.

Wingnuts always focus on hate crime murders as a reason to oppose hate crime laws--laws that permit enhanced punishment. So does Dimond and she uses the same wingnutty logic. She asks what difference would it make if the term "hate crime" is attached to a killer's deadly actions. It's a strawman question that requires no critical thinking whatsoever; lack of critical thinking is another common feature of opponents of hate crime laws (which is probably why Democrats vote in bloc [pdf] in support of expanding the federal hate crime law to help aid oppressed minority persons while the GOP overwhelmingly vote against it). The answer to Dimond's rhetorical question is this. Finding someone guilty of a hate crime murder couldn't lead to increased punishment, because life in prison is, well, life in prison. In states with the death penalty, there is no enhanced punishment greater than death. Yawn. OK, but moving beyond the rhetorical question, one must ask: but what about the 99.9% of all hate crimes that aren't homicides? In those cases an enhanced punishment could be handed down to the hate crime convict. Thus, there is no reason to toss aside hate crime laws because enhanced punishment could only be used in 99.9% of cases.

Then Dimond tosses this wingnut doozy:

The first hate crimes legislation in America was passed forty years ago. Yet according to the Southern Poverty Law Center hate groups continue to flourish. The SPLC displays a map of their locations on its web site. There are 84 in California, 66 in Texas, 56 in Florida, 45 in South Carolina, 40 organized hate groups in New Jersey and Georgia, nearly that many in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Alabama and Missouri. Does anyone truly believe the label "Hate Crime" and the additional jail time it tacks on to a sentence deters criminals?

First of all, connecting the SPLC's hate group data to hate crimes creates a false correlation between hate crimes and hate groups. Very few hate crime defendants belong to an organized hate group; some hate crime defendants went to college, happily trying to obtain yet another level of privilege (the privilege that comes with higher education). You don't have to belong to the Westboro Baptist Church to gay-bash, Diane, and you don't have to be a member of a neo-Nazi group to attack a Jew. Second, like it or not, in America there is this right called the freedom to associate. People have the right to belong to a hate group. Third, because hate crimes continue to happen long after hate crime laws went into effect is no reason to repeal them. This from the Q & A section of the Trends In Hate website:

...laws can only reduce, but not eliminate, crime. For example, there are strong laws in the United States prohibiting rape and murder. Despite these laws, rapes and murders continue to occur in America daily. From 1996 through 2005, for instance, there was an average of over 45 homicides in the United States daily. Prohibiting murder has not eliminated it. Yet, people unwaveringly understand the continued need for laws criminalizing such society-destroying behavior. As is the case for all criminal codes, one reason for having hate crime laws is deterrence. Hate crime laws serve the purpose of reducing the frequency of bias-motivated crimes, even though the laws can’t eliminate them. Generally speaking a so-called hate crime enhancement allows for the possibility for greater punishment of a perpetrator than would normally occur had the crime not been motivated by hatred. Added punishment serves as a means of deterring to some extent bias-motivated crimes from taking place in America. This benefits society because, as we’ve described, hate crimes terrorize communities. Additionally, because hate crime perpetrators premeditatively select their victims, increasing the punishment for a hate crime perpetrator makes sense. Why? Because hate crime laws by their definition take into account the motive for the crime; and, perpetrator motivation (or lack thereof) has long played a role in American law for establishing culpability and exacting appropriate punishment. For instance, killing someone is agreed to be more heinous when premeditation occurred as compared to the negligent, unplanned killing of another. This is why planned (first-degree) murders carry harsher punishments than unintentional killings of persons by, say, drunk drivers.

Another reason for hate crime laws to exist is to provide an added measure of protection to groups of people who are made more vulnerable in society because of the prejudices of others. In examining the history of the United States, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans have all been targeted—because of their race or ethnicity—for unfair treatment, discrimination, and worse: violence. This does not mean that only persons of color are made more vulnerable by the prejudice-based criminal acts of others. Anyone can harbor anti-ethnic or racist beliefs and act them out criminally, not just whites. This is why hate crime laws include protected categories (e.g., race) that include everyone, not just one particular group of persons (e.g., people of color). So, for example, hate crime laws in the United States provide protection to Protestants and Muslims, and not merely to those who historically have been discriminated against or otherwise have been targeted in the United States because of their religious affiliation, such as Jews or Catholics. Which groups within a protected category are more vulnerable than others in our society have changed in some respects over time; and, they will likely continue to change as society changes. So hate crime laws which protect everyone are defensible on practical as well as constitutional grounds.

That pretty much rebuts this neo-con talking point that Diane spat out in her article:

Declaring there is hate in a person's heart when they act in a criminal fashion seems to be a shaky proposition to me. We should stick to punishing people for what they do -- not what we believe they were thinking at the time of the crime.

So, Diane, you're saying the premeditated murderer should receive the same punishment as the person who, through recklessness, killed someone in a motor vehicle accident? The logic in your argument means that James Byrd's killers should receive the same punishment as the over-stressed parent who kills his or her infant by inadvertently leaving said infant in a hot minivan after a trip to the grocery store.

Dimond's and Huffington's lack of fact-checking aside (hey, they have deadlines to meet and it's only journalism so it's no big deal), what about the fundamental question: why should a murder, or any crime, ever be labeled and prosecuted as a hate crime? A Black man gets hooked up to a Texas pickup truck and dragged to his death by a clan of white guys simply because the victim was black, why should that motive matter? A gay man gets lashed to a fencepost in Wyoming and is murdered because of his sexual orientation; again, why would the hate motive matter? Dimond actually provides the answer in her own article, but is too dense to see it. She concluded her anti-hate crime legislation screed by stating:

Hate is the name of the game when it comes to crime. We don't need a fancy label on it. We need to figure out how to make it socially unacceptable.

Yes, Diane and Arianna, America does need to figure out how to make hatred socially unacceptable. Thanks for that insightful, "progressive" tidbit. And thanks for the non-progressive obfuscation of the real issues here: race-based, ethnicity-based, religion-based, sexual-orientation based, and gender-based violence and intimidation, all of which are rooted in America's history, are community-destroying acts of domestic terrorism. Set a person of color's home on fire and lace your arson with spray-painted racial slurs, you are letting the entire community know that any person of color could be the next target. You're making all person's of color in that community anxious. You're terrorizing them. You're also letting the whites know they're safe. You do get that Diane, right? You do get that there is white privilege in white-on-color race-based hate crimes (and those types of hate crimes account for a high percentage of all hate crimes according to FBI statistics). You do know that in 2007 84% of all hate crimes were committed by white people, right?

Speaking of white privilege, it is unsurprising that Diane Dimond, who is white, fails to let her readers know that her anti-hate crime legislation stance would have the impact of cementing her white privilege in society. By not maximally stigmatizing (i.e., making socially unacceptable) hate crimes--which is done by labeling them "hate crimes" in code of law, in the media, and in the courtroom, and via enhanced punishment to the convicted hate crime perpetrator--as a white person Diane gets to continue to enjoy her significantly lower-than-you'd-expect risk for being a hate crime victim. Just how low is her risk? According to the graphs shown here, it's pretty much in the gutter. If Diane Dimond is heterosexual (me thinks she is), her risk of being a victim of a sexual-orientation hate crime is also in the gutter. But, you didn't read about that heterosexual privilege in her HuffPost article. You also didn't hear Dimond say that by eliminating hate crime laws, there would be no need to tabulate hate crimes as is now federal law. This is what the wingnuts want--the repeal of the federal act that shows hate crimes actually exist. Without that law, the neo-cons could continue to set Black churches and synagogues on fire, continue to beat Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans, and continue to bash the shit out of GLBT people while denying that America has a race, anti-Semitism or homophobia problem. Nice job HuffPo. The Right will play you like a fiddle (to quote Keith Olbermann).

Thanks too Dimond for repeating the right wing and completely false claim that all crimes are hate crimes ("hate is the name of the game when it comes to crime").

Here, I think, is a sufficient response to the all-crimes-are-hate-crimes lie. Again from Trends In Hate:

The notion that all crimes are hate crimes is a preposterous, indefensible claim made by some who oppose hate crime laws and pending hate crime legislation.

We’ve even seen it said that if hate crimes exist, then crimes not deemed to be hate crimes must be ‘love crimes.’ It’s difficult to fathom that people can be so simplistic and illogical. It is patently false that all crimes are hate crimes. In fact, it is not even true that all violent crimes are hate crimes. The vast majority are not. Where greed or financial desperation are the motives for crimes—as is the case of almost all burglaries, armed robberies, and muggings—there is no hatred toward the victims. Criminals just want their victims’ money. Even when a strong emotion drives a crime—such as a so-called crime of passion—that emotion is generally not hatred. It’s typically something shorter-lived like jealousy or rage. Additionally, when someone kills someone—because of some strong negative emotional state such as rage—generally it is not because they hate some socio-demographic feature of the victim, such as the victim’s race or ethnicity. Typically, it is because the killer became enraged at the victim based on some aspect of their relationship. This is why from 1996 through 2006, the FBI tallied 184,604 homicides in the United States, but only 118 hate crime homicides. Even considering that some hate crime murders were not tallied as such, it is clear the nation’s crime data shows us that very few crimes are hate crimes.

As you can see when perusing through this calendar of recent American history, hate crimes happen every day (except, it appears, on Christmas day). Yet, only a miniscule percentage of all reported crimes are hate crimes. Transforming the quoted figures above, only .06% of all American homicides were hate crime homicides during an eleven-year timeframe. OK, so much for the all-crimes-are-hate-crimes rationale for wanting to keep excluding gender, sexual orientation, and disability from the current federal hate crime amendment.

I was unsurprised to learn someone with an affinity for a white racist website like VDARE would take such interest in Dimond's anti-hate crime legislation viewpoint as to send her a link to the VDARE hate site after praising her for her article. That's exactly what happened. She cross-posted her HuffPo screed on her own website and received this "progressive" comment:

Thanks for this. I discussed in [link to the VDARE hate site removed]
Do you stand by your assertion that Vigilant Eagle is monitoring web sites. Has this appeared anywhere in the MSM? Pretty big story, if documentable.

VDARE is a white racist hate site, by the way, and Dimond apparently has made a fan there.

When you hold the exact same position on expanding the federal hate crime law to include gender, sexual orientation and disability that Senator Jim DeMint holds, you lose a lot of progressive cred. In fact, you come off like a white, heterosexual privileged jackass, just like DeMint who recently said this during the recent hate crime amendment debate in the Senate (one the GOP lost):

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said it was "patently offensive" that violence against one class of victims would be considered worse than violence against others.

Channeling DeMint, Dimond asks this in her article, which is the oft-asked question by many dyed-in-the-wool conservatives:

why should an attack on a homosexual or a minority be worth more punishment than a similar attack on a regular Joe?

The answer: to even the playing field. That is, to reduce the huge gap in the risk for becoming a hate crime victim in the first place. Or put more bluntly, to reduce white, Protestant, heterosexual privilege. That is, to reduce hate by reducing hate-based crimes.

But, of course, these people don't want to lose their societal privilege (or they are too damn dumb to see that they have it).

Diane Dimond offers this beauty of a solution (bracketed material mine):

If someone attacks a gay person let's prosecute them for assault [but not as a hate crime] and demand the judge give the harshest sentence possible.

My God this is embarrassing. OK, so she doesn't get that most judges are, demographically speaking, at a really low risk for being a hate crime victim (sexual-orientation based or otherwise) and therefore might be just as cluelessly privileged as she is. Some judges, like Boston Municipal Court Judge Thomas C. Horgan, actually reduce the sentences of hate crime perpetrators (how's that for progressive social justice?!). Is Dimond even aware of this gay-bashing case or any other gay-based hate crime other than the Matthew Shepard murder? Does she even give a shit? Also, Dimond fails to realize that judges are often appointed not elected, so the public can't just oust someone from the bench because of lenient sentences given to hate criminals. "Demands" would fall on deaf ears. Having a more diverse judiciary would help insure that more hate crime victims get the justice they deserve, a justice that in the long-run benefits all. I'm just thankful Dimond doesn't go on to argue that a white person charged with a race-based hate crime assault should be judged by a jury of his peers--other white racists.

Here's an idea for Diane Dimond to chew on: how about making racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc., socially unacceptable by having comprehensive state and federal laws that add extra penalties for hate crimes. There's nothing that says "socially unacceptable" better than attaching a nice, harsh punishment to a hate crime, and to providing local law enforcement with the means to investigate hate crimes. That is, of course, the rationale for having hate crime statutes, not an argument against them. We could even go a step further in our efforts to reduce hatred and have states enact so-called hate crime registry boards. Like a convicted pedophile, the convicted hate criminal would have to register with the state board and notify them of his/her housing location which would be passed along to those in the neighborhood. As a society we've decided that people have a right to know if a convicted sex offender moves into their neighborhood (I received a letter last week, in fact, from my local police department notifying my household of a sex offender who moved into my neighborhood). Don't people also have the right to know if a hate crime convict moves into their neighborhood? Or would that upset the status quo too much? Would people lose too much of their societal privilege?

Arianna Huffington you pay Diane Dimond. You hired her and you sign her checks. As Editor-in-Chief of HuffPo you also signed off on her neo-con words to appear on your site. For this, you also bear responsibility for her words. If, after reading this diary, you conclude you don't owe progressives who tirelessly fight historical oppression an apology for publishing Dimond's right wing article on your website, then as I sit and wonder if you will send Diane Dimond off on assignment to cover the next Council of Conservative Citizens convention, at least edit your wiki page to reflect that The Huffington Post is no longer liberal, because we all know that Dimond's opinions mirror those found at WorldNetDaily.

PS Diane, it's 2009, and the proper word is "gay" not "homosexual" (unless you're posting your screeds on internet hate sites, then you can use the antiquated "H" word, though you may find your homophobia so well received at those hate sites that you might choose to use more colorful words to describe GLBT folks).

This blog was originally posted at DailyKos.

Tancredo Speechwriter, Marcus Epstein, Found Guilty of a Hate Crime (with an Update)

2009-06-03T19:38:00.006-04:00

And this biracial (yes, Jewish and Korean) pixie schmuck, Marcus Epstein, who consorts with European neo-Nazis, is going to the University of Virginia Law School in the fall? What a self-hating nincompoop. He must have some heavy duty sponsorship for his admission to that school. Do the school authorities know what he really is and what he’s done? Better walk a wide berth from this guy if they allow him to come. Or better yet, get the Latino and black law students at UV organized to be on the look out for this creep and his organization, Youth for Western Civilization. What? From the Washington Independent is the U.S. Attorney’s factual proffer:

On July 7, 2007, at approximately 7:15 p.m. at Jefferson and M Street, Northwest, in Washington, D.C., defendant was walking down the street making offensive remarks when he encountered the complainant, Ms. [REDACTED], who is African-American. The defendant uttered, “Nigger,” as he delivered a karate chop to Ms. [REDACTED]’s head.

A karate chop? To a black woman who just walked by minding her business? According to DC Indymedia, here is what happened next.

[Epstein] was briefly detained by the woman’s husband, but was able to escape, only to be arrested minutes later by a Secret Service officer who witnessed the attack. According to the officer’s statement, a friend of Epstein’s informed him that he had been drinking. Well, in vino veritas.

A restraining order to stay away from the couple has been imposed on Epstein. He currently faces a maximum punishment of 180 days in jail and $1000 fine and also had to continue mental health treatment, complete an alcohol treatment program, write a letter of apology to the victim and donate $1000 to the United Negro College Fund prior to sentencing.

People have been onto Epstein for years. The New York Times, for example, came across a collection of his spew.

[..C]onservative writer and activist Marcus Epstein has worked with the mainstream of the immigration restrictionist movement. He wrote speeches for former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) during his presidential bid, and he’s still working as the executive director of Tancredo’s Team America PAC, alongside Bay Buchanan. Epstein has been targeted for years by civil rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the One People’s Project…

Epstein pled guilty, but later took it back. Instead, he admitted that “the government could prove me guilty.” Again, what? His sentencing is scheduled for July 8. Meanwhile, his employer, the former Colorado representative, as well as both Pat and Bay Buchanan, has assumed greater visibility in attacking–you guessed it–Judge Sonia Sotomayor for being a racist.
Well, it certainly takes one to know one.

UPDATE: Talking Points Memo reported late yesterday afternoon that according to Jason Wu Trujillo, UVA’s Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Marcus Epstein will not be attending the University of Virginia, ever. Brian Beutler suggested that Epstein may have deliberately withheld the incident from college authorities, who insist that prospective students disclose any wrongdoing:

Have you ever been convicted of any offense, excluding minor traffic violations which did not involve injury to others?
Are there any charges pending or expected to be brought against you?
….If, after you submit this application, you are charged with a criminal offense or disciplinary charges are brought against you, notify the Office of Admissions in writing immediately.

If Epstein thought he could slide with silence in the age of the Web and e-mail, or by withdrawing and finessing his guilty plea, his gambling just crashed and burned. These people don’t want drunken, anti-social troublemakers, especially one with demonstrated neo-Nazi and racist tendencies, allowed onto their campuses. Even Pat Buchanan had to toe the line in college. And I bet any college official worth his water with the surnames of Wu and Trujillo would especially be on the lookout for that kind of thing.

*************

Cross-posted at: http://thisblksistaspage.wordpress.com/ and DailyKos

Hate Crime Incidents: From Election Day to Inauguration Day

2009-02-07T21:28:00.012-05:00

We've never before known hate crimes to be lubricated by our nation's presidential choice. Being the first elected African-American identified president, however, Barack Obama's success aroused the hateful passions of more than a few Americans. His run for the White House sparked hate incidents which we described in one of our November, 2008, blogs. In addition, his election provoked some to commit criminal acts of hate; and, his inauguration provoked others. Going beyond the headlines, we examine here in detail those hate crime incidents that have come to our attention that were fueled by Obama's election victory and by his assuming the office of the president. After reading this, you’ll learn that there was no randomness to these crimes; rather, similar forces were operating in places with similar histories regardless of where and when they occurred.

In the 78 days from November 4, 2008 through January 20, 2009, we've tallied 14 hate crime incidents that were significantly provoked by the election or inauguration of President Obama. On average, that's about one hate crime every six days, although the crimes did not occur at regular intervals. Ten of the 14 crimes occurred within 48 hours of GOP presidential candidate John McCain conceding defeat. Another Obama-related hate crime occurred on November 14, 2008, and the remaining three occurred four days before, two days before, and on inauguration day. For all we know, there may have been more Obama-related hate crimes, but they did not come to our attention. In these 14 incidents, there were 15 persons arrested; 12 of those arrested were white males, one was a white female, one was an African-American male (said to have posed as a white male on the Internet), and one was a Latino male who worked in concert with three white males. In five of the 14 incidents the perpetrators are unknown with this exception. On election night on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, four N.C. State students spray-painted violent, racist messages about Barack Obama, including two assassination remarks that read, "Let's shoot that N----r in the head" and, "Hang Obama by a noose." Instead of having the students arrested as they should have—calling for a head of state's head is an act of domestic terrorism—the mostly white school's administration instead protected the students. By refusing to take any legal action against them, the school protected the identity of the students, and it refused to discipline them or to expel them from school (although the NAACP demanded expulsion). N.C. State's administration thus sent a chilling message to its current and future black students. Bizarrely, the four cowardly students issued a written, anonymous apology, which of course is meaningless since no one but the N.C. State administration knows who they are. In other words, they said in essence: you don't know who we are, we aren't going to tell you who we are, we're not withdrawing from N.C. State, but now that we've been caught we want to say we are sorry we said we wanted Barack Obama murdered, now shut up and let our college educations be unmarred by our threats of domestic terrorism so that we can use our college privilege to eventually gain well-paying jobs. N.C. State administrators are "studying" the issue of on-campus hate speech, and we can expect their white-washed report out in March.

Turning to the election-to-inauguration hate crime incidents where something is known about those arrested and what they are accused of doing, we've found that in addition to 93% being male, 87% being white, and 80% being white males, the vast majority (93%) were young. The average age of the 15 arrestees is 22.2 years; their ages ranged from 18-42 at the time of their arrests, with five being in their late teens (18-19 years), and nine being in their early twenties (21-24 years). Additionally, only four of the 14 hate crime incidents occurred in former slave states (two in Mississippi and one each in Georgia and North Carolina). The other Obama-related hate crime incidents occurred in New York (where there were four), New Jersey (where there were two), Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California, and Utah. In other words, those arrested don't fit the stereotype of old, white Southerners clinging to hopes of a resurrected Confederacy. But, of course, American racism was never regional as James W. Loewen has taught us.

Of those arrested little is known about any possible prior criminal history; that is, in only two hate crime incidents where arrests were made was something reported by the media about past criminal activity. In the case of Steven Joseph Christopher, 42—a white man who was arrested in Brookhaven, Mississippi after allegedly planning to travel to Washington, DC, to assassinate President Obama during the inauguration ceremony on January 20th—we know that while living in his native Wisconsin, Christopher was charged with knowingly violating a domestic abuse restraining order in February, 2008 out of Walworth County, Wisconsin—a county whose population is 94.5% white, and one of only 13 counties of Wisconsin's 78 counties to give John McCain the nod over Barack Obama. Forty-eight percent of Walworth County voters picked Obama in a state where he garnered 56% of the vote. According to the laudable research of James W. Loewen, Walworth County, Wisconsin is no stranger to racism; it has one probable and four possible sundown towns—entire communities that have a history of banishing blacks from living there or even being present after dark (hence the term sundown town). It's places like Walworth County—historically racist, currently and historically disproportionately white, and largely Republican—where you would expect hateful seeds to germinate into a plot to assassinate Barack Obama.

In the other hate crime case where something is known about the criminal records of those arrested, in Hemet, California, Justin Tyme Hayes, 21, Crystal Lee McCann, 22, Derek Shane O'Brien, 22, and Darrin Peter Thibault, 24—who were all arrested for allegedly being involved in the brutal race-based beating of a 19-year-old Latino man causing him permanent and severe brain damage ten days after the presidential election—are said to be members of a white supremacist hate group, the “COORS Skins”. In addition, Hayes has been charged with drug dealing. What makes the Hemet hate crime connected to the election is the fact that the COORS Skins had a website which included angry messages railing against the election of Barack Obama. Clearly, Obama's race and his victory on November 4th appeared to further enrage the gang. Thankfully, the website was shut down after the November 14th attack on the Latino victim whose name has not been released to the public. Not so coincidentally, Hemet, California—a city in Riverside County with an African-American population totaling just about 2.6% and with a white population of about 80.5%—also has a history of racism: it is a probable sundown town according to James Loewen's research. Hemet's white population far exceeds that of Riverside County (65.5%), and its black population is about two-and-half times lower than Riverside County (6.24%) which is itself about half the national average. Also not coincidentally, the voters of Riverside County were much less likely to have voted for the winning presidential candidate in 2008 (Barack Obama got 51% of the vote in Riverside) when compared with the entire state of California (61%).

In the 14 hate crime incidents we tallied that were sparked by President Obama's election and inauguration, what exactly is said to have occurred? As we've mentioned, in one case a young Latino man with his future ahead of him now will spend the rest of his life severely brain-damaged and the ward of the state of California; and, as we've said, four college students spray-painted a threat and a directive to kill our president at North Carolina State University on election night with no consequences to them, and one white man, who had also allegedly verbalized threats to assassinate President Obama, was apparently making plans to go to Washington, D.C., to carry out his act at the inauguration. In the other eleven hate crime incidents either someone was assaulted (or otherwise intimidated face-to-face) or a fire was set—with the exception of the case of the only black person arrested. Dyron Hart, 19—a former Nicholls State University student and 6-foot-3-inch, 350-pound Nicholls State football player wannabe—allegedly sent to black students at four schools a message via Facebook stating he planned to kill 3,000 people, including them, the day after the November 4th election. Hart stands accused of sending the electronic threats to students at his old school in Thibodaux, Louisiana, as well as to students at Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Alabama. Hart, of Poplarville, Mississippi, allegedly was posing as a white man when he is said to have sent the emails. He was arrested by the FBI on November 12, 2008, and if convicted, Hart could receive up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. Not unlike Walworth County, Wisconsin, and Riverside County, California, the voters in Pearl County, Mississippi, where Poplarville is located, were significantly less apt to vote for Barack Obama (19%) than the rest of the state (Obama won 43% of the vote in Mississippi).

THE ARSONS

Six of the 14 election-to-inauguration hate crime incidents we've tallied involved purposefully setting a fire. In some instances, the physical damage was minor. For example, in South Ogden, Utah—a place where whites make up 91.5% of the population, where African-Americans constitute only 0.74% of the population, and a place that in 2002 had an active Neo-Nazi hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center—the American flag flying at the home of a black family who had just returned home from volunteering at their local polling station on November 4th was torched. The family was publicly known as being supporters of Barack Obama, and the incident was investigated as a hate crime (no arrest was made).

Similarly, in Hardwick Township, New Jersey, on November 6, 2008, while taking his eight-year-old daughter to school, an African-American man, Gary Grewal, 51, discovered that someone had burned a six-foot tall cross on his yard near his political banner that declared Barack Obama president. The banner was torched also. Although no one was arrested in that hate crime incident, nine days after the fire, townspeople marched in unity against hate crimes. Like some of the other places where there were Obama-related hate crimes, Hardwick Township is almost exclusively white (97%) with a very small, relative African-American population (0.6%). And like nearly all of the other places where these community-destroying crimes took place, fewer people in Warren County, New Jersey (of which Hardwick Township is a part) voted for Obama (42%) than the state where it is located (57% of Garden State voters chose Obama).

Then there was the cross-burning on the lawn of the only black man in Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania, the night after the election. In that small town in Susquehanna County, Archie Johnson, 71—a retired architect—and his partner, Ruth Cohen, 63, who is a Jewish retired school principal, discovered the cross-burning on their property, and one week later police arrested two white men, Stephen James Barrett, 22, and Forrest Michael Ashcraft, 19, both of Friendsville, Pennsylvania. The two were charged with criminal conspiracy to commit ethnic intimidation (a third-degree misdemeanor), ethnic intimidation (a third-degree misdemeanor), and trespassing out of the Montrose District Court. Unlike Harwick Township, New Jersey, there was no anti-hate crime rally in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, where just 0.3 % of its residents are African-American and 98.5% are white, and where on election day, its voters—unlike Pennsylvania—gave the nod to John McCain (55% of voters in Pennsylvania chose Obama, but in Susquehanna County, he received only 44%).

On inauguration day in Jersey City, New Jersey, someone burned the front door of a woman's apartment after first taping Barack Obama newspaper articles on it. Thankfully, the woman who had apparently taken the day off of work to watch Barack Obama's inauguration on television smelled smoke at her front door and discovered it was on fire before major damage or injury occurred. No arrests were made to our knowledge in this case which took place in the only location—of all the Obama-related hate crime communities—where the president fared well in the election. Hudson County, New Jersey, where Jersey City is located, overwhelmingly supported Obama (73%) as compared to the rest of New Jersey (57%).

Two of the election-related hate arsons, however, were devastating. First there was the Springfield, Massachusetts church fire. Just hours after the nation elected its first non-white president, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ, a predominately black church, burned to the ground, and authorities launched an investigation as to whether the Tinkham Road church fire was a hate-related arson set in retaliation for the election of President Barack Obama. They concluded it was, and on January 16, 2009, authorities arrested Benjamin F. Haskell, 22, Michael F. Jacques, 24, and Thomas A. Gleason Jr., 21, all of Springfield, Massachusetts. Haskell is said to have bragged to an uncover police officer that he set fire to the church and was responsible for five other arsons. On January 27, 2009, the three white men were indicted on federal civil rights charges. Each faces up to ten years in prison and three years of supervised release, if convicted as charged.

Then in Cumming, Georgia (Forsyth County) two days before Barack Obama was sworn in as our first African-American identified president, the home of Pam Graf was destroyed by fire as she was in Washington, DC, to attend his inauguration. Arson was the cause, and it was related to Ms. Graf's public support of the president. Referring to president Obama, someone had spray-painted a racial slur and the phrase "your black boy will die" on a fence along her Lanier Drive property. Prior to the suspicious fire, Ms. Graf took down an "Obama for President" yard sign after she received a threatening letter. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was called to aid in the investigation. At the time of the suspicious fire, Cumming, Georgia was overwhelmingly white (89% versus 67% for the state of Georgia), and Forsyth County had significantly fewer votes cast for Barack Obama (20.4%) than Georgia (47%) or nationally (53%). A known sundown community, Forsyth County is well-known for its racism, including incidents as recently as the 1990's.

THE ASSAULTS

As of this date, four of the 15 arrested have pleaded guilty; the remaining have not had their criminal cases adjudicated. The three white men and the one Latino man who pleaded guilty went on a race-based terror-spree on Staten Island immediately following—and because of—the election of Barack Obama. In all, four men were assaulted. Ironically, the victim most seriously injured was white. From our This Date in Hate calendar at our website, here is the account of those assaults:

"In the early morning hours on Staten Island, New York, just hours after the 2008 presidential election outcome was known, four men were attacked in separate race-based hate crime incidents by four Staten Island men—three white and one Latino. First, a black Muslim teenager who emigrated to the United States in 2000 from Liberia, Alie Kamara, 17, was attacked with a pipe and police baton by four men who shouted "Obama" in the Park Hill section of Staten Island. Bloodied by the attack, Mr. Kamara was able to escape from his attackers and he made his way home where he then called for help. The four perpetrators also assaulted a black man in the Port Richmond section of Staten Island by pushing him to the ground, and then accosted a Latino man and demanded who he voted for for president. After those three attacks, a white man, Ronald Forte, 38—who was mistaken to be African-American by his perpetrators—was run over and then left for dead on Blackford Avenue in the Port Richmond section as he was walking home at night from his job as a Shop Rite manager. Mr. Forte, a father of five, who had items stolen from his body allegedly by the perpetrators as he lay clinging to life, was in a coma for days following the attack. He suffered significant brain injury, is no longer able to work, and is being cared for by his mother. Two white Staten Island men, Ralph Nicoletti, 18, and Bryan Garaventa, 18, were arrested for attacking Mr. Kamara, and on November 16, 2008, they pleaded Not Guilty to state charges of assault as a hate crime and weapons possession charges in a Staten Island court. Two other suspects—Michael "Dominican Mike" Contreras, 18, and Brian Carranza, 21—were arrested on January 6, 2009, and were arraigned the following day on federal civil rights charges along with Nicoletti and Garaventa in Brooklyn Federal Court for their roles in the election night hate crime attacks. Police discovered Nicoletti, Garaventa, Contreras and Carranza were involved in the attack on Mr. Kamara, and in the hit-and-run attack/robbery of Mr. Forte, because police found items belonging to Mr. Forte in the possession of Nicoletti and Garaventa during their investigation of the two. All four pleaded guilty to federal civil rights violations (federal hate crimes) for their roles in the post-election attacks which they admitted were prompted by their race-based anger about the election victory of Barack Obama. Garaventa pleaded guilty on January 6, 2009, Carranza pleaded guilty on January 26, 2009, Contreras pleaded guilty (also in January, 2009), and Nicoletti pleaded guilty on February 2, 2009. Nicoletti, who was the ringleader and who was the driver who hit Mr. Forte, could get up to 12 years in federal prison plus fines of up to $250,000; the other three could receive up to 10 years in federal prison each and fines of up to $250,000 each."

Never a sundown town and racially diverse with 15% of its population Latino and another 15% black, Staten Island nonetheless has in common with nearly all of the other sites of Obama-related hate crime incidents election results out of sync with its surroundings. While 62% of New York voters chose Barack Obama for president, less than half (47%) the residents of Staten Island (Richmond County) voted for him. Additionally, two presidential election cycles ago, in 2000, Staten Island had two active white racist hate groups (a neo-Confederate group and a white nationalist group). In fact, 7 of the 11 locations where the hate crime incidents we examined have occurred have had an active hate group or currently do have an active hate group, according to data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. An additional community has a history of overt racism aimed directly at African-Americans (Forsyth County, Georgia) in the form of being a sundown community.

CRIME SITE-SPECIFIC ELECTION RESULTS

Although Barack Obama won the popular vote in 6 of the 9 states where there occurred an Obama-related hate crime, the communities in which those hate crimes happened were very often not hotbeds of Obama support as we've shown throughout this report. In only 2 of 11 hate crime communities did Barack Obama garner significantly more votes than in the state in which those crimes occurred (viz., Hudson County, New Jersey, and Wake County, North Carolina). When examining the president's election results, by state-versus-community percentage differences, we discovered that the hate crime communities were very often places significantly opposed to Barack Obama. As listed below, 7 of the 11 communities were places where Obama had relatively weak support. For example, in Richmond County, New York (Staten Island), Barack Obama had 15 percentage points fewer votes than in the state of New York as a whole. Additionally, in only 3 of the 11 communities where an Obama-related hate crime occurred did he have more of the vote than his opponent, John McCain (highlighted in blue).

Forsyth County, GA: -27

Pearl River County, MS: -24

Richmond County, NY: -15

Warren County, NJ: -15

Susquehanna County, PA: -11

Riverside County, CA: -10

Lincoln County, MS: - 9

Hampden County, MA: 0

Weber County, UT: + 1

Wake County, NC: + 7

Hudson County, NJ: +16

In summary, we've found 14 Obama-related hate crime incidents most all of which occurred in clusters around the time of Barack Obama's election victory (10) and around the time of his inauguration (3). In most of these incidents (93%) the known or alleged perpetrators were men, white (87%), or both (80%); and, the vast majority (93%) were young with 14 of the 15 persons arrested being between the ages of 18 and 24 years. These 14 hate crime incidents occurred in ten states, but the places where the crimes occurred and those arrested for them do not fit stereotypes of old, white Southerners clinging to hopes of a resurrected Confederacy. That the majority of those arrested are young tells us that the nation continues to transmit its beliefs of white supremacy. That less than 30% of the hate crime incidents occurred in former slave states, and that 20% of all states had an Obama-related hate crime incident (and these occurred coast to coast) tells us that the transmission of white supremacy from generation to generation is a national problem. The communities where Obama-related hate crimes occurred generally were places of relative weak support for the president. Finally, in general these communities were historically racist places to live; and, they were and are today disproportionately white communities.

Note: This blog is available as a pdf at our website (see our Trend Reports and The Politics of Hate).

Our 2008 Maintaining Hated Award "Winners"

2009-01-02T09:02:00.009-05:00

This year will be the first year that we at trendsinhate.com shine the spotlight on specific individuals and groups of individuals for their work (or lack thereof) in shamefully ignoring criminal justice with respect to hate crimes. These people showed their disregard for the spirit and purpose of hate crime laws in 2008, and in doing so, they degraded not only the positions of public trust that they hold, but also the basic dignity of those who suffered, directly and indirectly, from criminal, hateful behavior that they, as public servants, explicitly reinforced through their actions (or inaction). A selected person or group of people from each of three categories, here are the 2008 Trends In Hate Maintaining Hatred Award "Winners".

Most Hateful Law Enforcement Official in 2008: Demonstrating that African-Americans can turn a blind's eye to race-based criminal activity—even when the perpetrators of that racism target other African-Americans—the winner of the Most Hateful Law Enforcement Official in 2008 goes to Northport, Alabama Police Chief, Robert W. Green. As we detailed in our July 20, 2008, blog "Gaslighting Northport, Alabama" Chief Green showed his audacity by denying that hate crime charges could be filed by his department. He did so by lying to the public asserting that only the federal government could pursue hate crime charges against the two unnamed teenaged individuals arrested for having allegedly tagged a largely African-American and Latino mobile home park with racist graffiti (including the letters "KKK") and shooting a gun repeatedly into the SUV belonging to a black resident of that mobile home park. While it's true that interfering with someone's housing rights based on race is against the federal civil rights statute, Alabama has a hate crime law too, and that law should have been used to charge the teenagers with a hate crime. For their part, the FBI did nothing either; no civil rights charges were filed against the teens. Also, the mayor of Northport has voiced no opposition—let alone moral outrage—to his police chief's Uncle Tom decision. We'll go out on a limb here and speculate that the two arrested teenagers are white, that their parents have some position of standing in Northport, and that, at most, the teens will receive a slap on the wrist for having placed a community in fear. Of course, the public will never know, because since the two arrested were charged as juveniles and not as adults, their court proceedings will not be open to the public. And so, with Chief Robert Green's pathetic decision to not act on the obvious, and with Chief Robert Green's public abdication of his responsibility to the public, Northport, Alabama holds on to the South's racist past...albeit with a twist of irony.

Most Hateful Prosecutor in 2008: This award goes to not one District Attorney but to the entire Dallas County District Attorney’s Office for their refusal to prosecute an obvious hate crime as one. In the early morning hours of July 18, 2008, a white bisexual man, Jimmy Lee Dean, 42, was severely beaten and robbed in the Oak Lawn section of Dallas while walking home from a gay bar in what police tallied as a sexual orientation-based hate crime. An African-American eyewitness, Michael Robinson, 48, who lives in the area of the assault and who was with Mr. Dean at the time of the attack, said two white men shouted anti-gay slurs prior to and during the brutal attack that allegedly involved Mr. Dean’s head being stomped on and him being pistol-whipped near the corner of Throckmorton Street and Dickerson Avenue. The two alleged perpetrators are also said to have stolen a set of keys and a lighter from their victim. The Cincinnati, Ohio native and 20-year resident of Dallas was admitted to the Parkland Hospital in Dallas with life-threatening injuries. He suffered a broken jaw, broken vertebrae, broken facial bones, and significant facial swelling. Witnesses at the scene said Mr. Dean’s nose was attached only by a piece of skin. That is the kind of "overkill", or gratuitous violence, not uncommon in hate crime attacks. Mr. Dean's injuries were so severe that police were unable to interview him for days after the attack. Thankfully, he recovered.

Thanks to smart-acting eyewitnesses, including Mr. Robinson and former security officer and Police Explorer Norman Draper, 26—who, acting as the designated driver for some of his friends, spotted Mr. Dean when driving past the scene of the crime—911 was called quickly; and, the 9mm Glock handgun and the knife used in the crime were recovered. Arrested and charged with first-degree aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon were Bobby Jack Singleton, 29, of Garland, Texas, and Jonathan Russell Gunter, 31, also of Garland. Despite the police's designation that the attack on Mr. Dean constituted a hate crime, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office refused to press hate crime charges, stating that Singleton and Gunter would face the maximum sentence (up to a 99-year prison term each) if convicted as charged, thus arguing that hate crime charges are unnecessary.

Although it might think it is, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office is not making decisions in a cultural vacuum. Far from it. Dallas County, Texas—as we showed in our "Hot Spots of Hate" report—is a city with numerous, well-documented hate crimes, including those against gay people. For example, from 1995-2006, Dallas County, Texas had more reported hate crimes—and more reported sexual orientation-based hate crimes—than the counties where Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and nearby Fort Worth are located. In short, Dallas loves to hate its gays. On August 7, 2008, Dallas Voice reporter John Wright wrote: "The Dallas Police Department has classified the [Jimmy Lee Dean] case as an anti-gay hate crime for statistical reporting purposes, but [Kevin] Brooks [felony trial bureau chief for the Dallas Texas District Attorney's Office] said prosecutors have nothing to gain by filing hate crimes enhancements." We think Mr. Wright hit the nail on the head: prosecutors have nothing to gain. In a place like Dallas, Texas, prosecuting a gay-based hate crime could spell disaster for a prosecutor's political aspirations. The decision by the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office in the attack on Jimmy Lee Dean seems less about seeking a lengthy prison sentence for those accused than about avoiding being seen as tolerant of a marginalized minority group. Their decision seems to be about pandering to the larger, conservative—and homophobic—community. Instead of applying the Texas hate crime statute in the Jimmy Lee Dean case, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office did the lawyerly thing of deflecting away from that fact by talking up how much time they hope the defendants get if convicted.

We disagree too with the stance of a Texas gay-rights group, Equality Texas, which agrees with the D.A.'s decision to not prosecute the Jimmy Lee Dean case as a hate crime. Equality Texas seems to have swallowed the talking points dished out by the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office hook, line and sinker. On August 7, 2008, the Dallas Voice quoted Randall Terrell, the legislative director of Equality Texas as stating: “We certainly can’t disagree with the prosecution that there’s no reason to charge it as a hate crime, because you don’t get any more mileage out of it. The last thing you want to do is endanger a prosecution on something like this.” No reason to charge it as a hate crime? What about the testimony of Mr. Robinson who told police of the anti-gay slurs hurled at the victim? That is reason enough to add a hate crime enhancer to the charge of each defendant. Endanger a prosecution? Here’s the reality: prosecutors run the risk of having a convicted criminal get less punishment if they cannot prove the hate component in a hate crime case, but nonetheless secure a conviction. In the case of Mr. Dean the "hate" evidence seems overwhelming; no witness has come forward to refute what Mr. Robinson told police. Thus, the risk of losing the hate crime component seems to be a small one. In the case of Mr. Dean, less punishment for the two men arrested could be up to 99 years in prison each, if they are convicted of aggravated robbery—that is, if the D.A.’s office “loses” and the defendants are not convicted of a hate crime. That is not a bad consolation prize for the D.A.’s office. Or for public safety.

Other critical points missed by Equality Texas are these. First, by not prosecuting hate crimes the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office is wrongly communicating to the public that hate crime laws are unimportant, and that hate crimes are not more community-damaging than non-hate crimes. In fact, by not pursuing the Jimmy Lee Dean case as a hate crime, another message is given: the eyewitness testimony of a black gay man (Mr. Robinson) in a hate crime case is suspect. That is a racist and homophobic message we hope Equality Texas doesn’t mean to send. Either way, it looks to us as though the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office has played Equality Texas like a fiddle by getting the gay-rights group to parrot their anti-hate crime talking points. Finally, by not prosecuting hate crimes the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office is clearly communicating to the public that those who prey on vulnerable groups of citizens will remain shielded from a law meant to protect the vulnerable. Perhaps that is one reason sexual-orientation and other types of hate crimes are so common in Dallas, Texas.

Through their soft-on-hate-crime stance, who knows how many Dallas-based homophobes the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office has emboldened. They set a low standard for all prosecutors in the Lone Star state by raising the bar high for what constitutes a hate crime in Dallas County, Texas. Jimmy Lee Dean, as quoted by the Dallas Voice, remarked on the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office decision to not add hate crime enhancers to the charges against the two men arrested for allegedly robbing him and nearly beating him to death: “It kind of bugs me.” Mr. Dean, it bugs us too.

Most Hateful Judge in 2008: The first jurist to be named our Most Hateful Judge goes to Suzanne N. Kingsbury. The El Dorado County California judge presided over the Silva hate crime case in 2008. On July 14, in 2007 in Lake Tahoe, California, Joseph Silva, and his wife, Georgia Silva, 49, then of South Lake Tahoe, are alleged to have beaten an Indian American man, Vishal Wadhwa, 38, and to have hurled racial slurs at him, and at his fiancée and her cousin. The Silvas stood accused of knocking Mr. Wadhwa to the ground and while Georgia is said to have sat on the victim, her husband, Joseph, allegedly kicked Mr. Wadhwa in the face repeatedly fracturing several bones in his face at a beach in Lake Tahoe. Out of the El Dorado County Superior Court in Placerville, California, Joseph was charged with felony assault with a hate crime enhancement and Georgia was charged with misdemeanor assault with a hate crime enhancement. The married couple are said to have called the three Indian American victims “terrorists”, “relatives of Osama bin Laden”, and other ethnicity-based slurs at the time of the alleged assault, including “Indian sluts and whores,” and “Indian garbage”. But, the San Francisco banker and his family would not find the justice they had hoped for, thanks to Judge Suzanne N. Kingsbury. On June 26, 2008, the El Dorado County Superior Court judge dropped the hate crime enhancement charges against the Silvas ruling that the evidence did not fit the legal definition of a hate crime. This is, of course, a bizarre interpretation of California's hate crime law, particularly since the defendants are said to have targeted their victims because of their ethnicity. To support the white defendants even further, judge Kingsbury—presiding in a politically conservative county with a white population of 87.5% according to 2007 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau—also dropped the felony assault charge against Joseph Silva.

Rightfully so, many were outraged by judge Kingsbury's outrageous rulings. On August 6, 2008, the Asian Law Caucus called Judge Kingsbury’s rulings travesties of justice, and we believe that the South Asian Bar Association’s Civil Rights Committee chair, Harmeet K. Dhillon, asked an appropriate question about the case: “If this is not a hate crime, then what is a hate crime? If you shout racial epithets and if you break someone’s face based on their ethnicity, it is a hate crime.” Disturbingly, from June, 2004 through June, 2006, judge Kingsbury had served on the Judicial Council of California, which, according to their website, is responsible for ensuring the "consistent, independent, impartial, and accessible administration of justice". Judge Kingsbury bent over backwards for the convicted couple one final time: on September 24, 2008, she sentenced Georgia Silva to one year in jail and Joseph Silva to six months in jail and three years probation; however, Judge Kingsbury ordered that the two will not have to serve their jail sentences at the same time so that one of them will be able to care for their son. The Silvas—who now live in Solano County—have never apologized to Mr. Wadhwa. Given that Joseph Silva no longer resides in El Dorado County, we're guessing his probation out of Judge Kingsbury's court will lack the oversight it deserves.

For the title of Most Hateful Judge in 2008, Suzanne N. Kingsbury barely beat out our runner-up, Orange County California District Judge Thomas Goethals, who on October 28, 2008, dismissed the hate crime (and other felony) charges against three white men who beat an undocumented Latino janitor on his way to work. All three men were drunk from a night of partying on September 9, 2007, first at a Los Angeles Angels baseball game (the Angels lost to the Cleveland Indians 6-2) and then later at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club in Westminster, California. Justin Louis Mullins 23, of Garden Grove, Cheyne Danica Wilson, 25, of Hesperia, and James Joseph Kelly, 26, of California City were arrested and each were charged with one felony count of aggravated assault; Mullins' and Kelly's charges were attached with a sentencing hate crime enhancement. Cheyne Wilson, an officer in the U.S. Army Reserves and a former member of the U.S. Army who served in the Iraq War, was charged with felony aggravated assault and also with one misdemeanor count of carrying a loaded firearm in public. Mullins and Kelly began shouting racial slurs at their victim, Mr. Felipe Alvarado, when their vehicle pulled alongside his at a stoplight on September 9, 2007. The Latino man ignored the men who followed their victim to his place of employment in Garden Grove, and while continuing to shout racial slurs at him, they pulled him out of his car and beat and kicked him. Wilson came along in a second car and joined in. Over a year later on October 28, 2008, Judge Goethals, over the verbal and written protestations of the Orange County California District Attorney's Office, reduced all of the felony charges against the three men to misdemeanors. The three white men then pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charges. Wilson, who continues to train military personnel regularly, also pleaded guilty to the firearms charge.

Probably in part due to protests about the actions of judge Goethals from many in the Latino community and from the D.A.'s office, on December 19, 2008, the judge sentenced Mullins, 24, to four years and four months in prison for violating probation on two prior felony domestic violence and drunken driving charges by incurring charges in the Alvarado assault case. Mullins was also sentenced to one year in county jail for the attack against Mr. Alvarado who, because of the crime against him, has since moved from California and who continues to be fearful to be outside after dark. Kelly, 27, also a former member of the U.S. Army and someone who served in the Iraq War, was sentenced to nine months in county jail and three years of probation for the crime. Wilson, 26, was sentenced to three months in county jail and three years of probation. On the date of sentencing judge Goethals justified his earlier rulings in the case. The judge also ordered the three criminals to pay about $25,000 in restitution to Mr. Alvarado for medical expenses, which begs this question: if the crimes committed by Mullins, Kelly, and Wilson constituted only misdemeanor assault, how could the victim's medical bills be so high (the D.A.'s office has maintained that felony assault occurred).

The Orange County Register reported on December 19, 2008, that judge Goethals was "shocked" by the crime against Mr. Alvarado; yet, if judge Goethals truly thought that the behavior of the three white men constituted just misdemeanor criminal behavior, we wonder how "shocked" he really was. After all, as a college student quoted in the Register's article noted, jaywalking is a misdemeanor. Another Register reader asked what rock judge Goethals has been living under to rule that a hate crime against Mr. Alvarado did not occur.

Fighting Anti-Semitism Proves Too Costly

2008-12-19T11:24:00.013-05:00

For those feeling a little more patriotic—a little more proud to be American—having cast your vote in last month's national election, 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.

On January 19, 2008, the campaign manager for the town's Jewish mayor, Debby Eisinger, had a swastika scratched onto her vehicle. Eisinger’s campaign manager, Lori Green, who is also Jewish, said her car was parked beside her house in Embassy Lakes when the anti-Semitic act occurred. Green, whose husband's relatives are Holocaust survivors, reported the swastika to law enforcement when Lori discovered it, and the Broward County Sheriff's Office has since labeled the incident a hate crime.

That same month the Broward County Sheriff's Office started looking for evidence leading to those responsible for anti-Semitic postings about mayor Eisinger on the now-defunct website www.savecoopercity.blogspot.com, a hate blogsite that was registered to Cooper City Commissioner John Sims. The Sheriff's office considers those postings to also constitute a hate crime. In addition to local law enforcement, the townspeople also took action on the matter. According to South Florida Sun-Sentinel reporter, Elizabeth Baier, more than 1,900 Cooper City residents (10 percent of the city's registered voters) signed a petition for a special recall vote of Commissioner Sims, who has claimed no responsibility for the anti-Semitic postings at his (now dead) registered blogsite. However, as Ms. Baier reported in May, 2008 City Clerk Susan Bernard said the recall vote to remove Sims would require two special elections with a total price tag of $110,000. That amount proved too much to press for the recall vote. Ms. Baier quotes former Cooper City Commissioner, Elliot Kleiman, the man who spear-headed the recall committee and worked his butt off to collect the 1,900-plus signatures to move the recall vote forward, as saying, "Based on the economy and all the problems with city budgets, we just determined that it just wasn't worth it." This statement was made months before the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the Wall Street bailout, and the plummeting stockmarkets; so, if Cooper City didn't have enough cash back in May for a recall vote, they certainly don't have it now.

Well, at least there is an active criminal investigation into the hate crime blog postings, right? Uh, no. According to Ms. Baier's article, the Broward County Sheriff's Office "have suspended the investigation until they get more information." The thing about police investigations is this: you don't get more information about a crime when you suspend the criminal investigation. Perhaps keeping the investigation active was also proving too costly.

For his part, Commissioner John Sims has been quoted as saying the recall petition effort "was a big joke," and he's started another blogsite where, speaking of himself in the third-person, he says, "John has the hands on experience to effectively address and resolve the current moral, legal and political issues facing Cooper City, and to make Cooper City more than 'Someplace Special' to live for our present residents and our future generations." Anti-Semitism, we hope Mr. Sims will agree, is no laughing matter for this generation or the next ones.

Bashing Anti-gay Bashing Legislation

2008-11-22T09:58:00.076-05:00

It's amazing to us how a few oppressed minority group members oppress others; über-amazing is when their words and actions work to oppress members of their own oppressed group. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), for example, did a second story in the summer of 2007 of an African-American man, H. K. Edgerton of Asheville, North Carolina, who had been working to preserve antebellum era memories and to bring back codified racism through his (thankfully now defunct) neo-Confederate group, Southern Heritage 411. For those not in the know about neo-Confederacy, it is a hate ideology with—not surprisingly—white supremacist and neo-Nazi ties. In an interview with the SPLC's Intelligence Report eight years ago, Edgerton said, "it was better to be an African in the Southland as a slave than to be free in Africa." According to Edgerton, a life of whippings, rape and dehumanizing servitude would be a preferred life—for him and other blacks—to one of autonomy, safety and respect. However you try to understand his mental gymnastics, the strange truth is that Edgerton is a black man in favor of black slavery.

Edgerton comes to mind when reading the latest from Ann Rostow, an Austin, Texas resident and lesbian columnist/writer for the San Francisco Bay Times, that city's gay, lesbian and transgendered newspaper. No, Rostow's not a black woman trying to bring back slavery, although her town has not one but two chapters of a known neo-Confederate hate group. Instead, in her November 20, 2008, Bay Times article, Rostow—sounding like a lesbian H.K. Edgerton—denigrates the efforts of those in her own community (and, by extension, those in the larger community) who are working to broaden the existing federal hate crime statute to include sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity as protected categories. Either callously unconcerned or oblivious to the fact that some in her community—gay men—are at a high relative risk of being victims of hate crimes, Rostow asserts that the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered communities "cannot afford" to spend resources on strengthening the national hate crime law. Why not? Rostow offers up a platter of bizarre reasons.

First, reciting the tired, illogical line from other hate crime law opponents, Rostow writes:

"Hate crimes are despicable. But legislation won’t end them. Hate crime penalties are rarely enforced or charged where applicable."

Let's digest those first five words: "hate crimes are despicable, but...". You know what's coming when you hear a white person say, "I'm not racist, but..." or a non-Jew begin a sentence with, "I'm not anti-Semitic, but...". With that leadoff giveaway, it's no surprise Rostow continues on with the faulty logic that because hate crime legislation won't end hate crimes from occurring, then pushing to include sexual orientation as a protected category in proposed federal hate crime legislation is a waste of time and money. Using this same logic, we shouldn't have any laws including those banning murder, rape, robbery, or embezzlement, because the laws that we have now certainly have not stopped those crimes from being committed. Hers is a lame, baseless rationale for allowing people to be victimized because of their sexuality and one we've heard and commented on before.

While not the case in some areas of the United States, in Rostow's state of Texas it is true, as she points out, that hate crimes have been very rarely prosecuted as such, even obvious ones. However, that does not mean beefing up federal hate crime legislation should be ignored by anyone. Lack of appropriate prosecution and lack of appropriate punishment for hate crime offenders means that continued civil rights work—in the forms of activism and education—needs to happen so that hate crimes are seen as the society-destroying acts that they are by all areas of law enforcement. As we've shown, there is a trend in the right direction for voluntarily documenting and reporting hate crime incidents among the nation's law enforcement agencies. This has come about in no small part by citizens demanding that the police take these steps. What needs to happen now is for people to put pressure on District Attorneys and judges so that progress made by police will similarly occur in these other areas of law enforcement.

Strangely, Rostow asserts this reason for having the GLBT communities abandon efforts to push for a hate crime bill that will protect them: "A hate crime law will be the easiest, and one of the least useful, pieces of federal legislation that" the GLBT communities can advocate for. While it is likely true that once her former-governor vacates the White House in less than two months, a veto of an expanded hate crime amendment—should one make its way to President Obama's desk—will likely not occur. Still, Rostow forgets that the two co-sponsors of last year's failed hate crime bill—Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy and Oregon Senator Gordon H. Smith—are in no position to fight for the cause in 2009. Senator Kennedy has been struck with a terminal, cancerous brain tumor, and Senator Smith failed to win re-election last month. It remains to be seen who, if anyone, in Congress will draft an expanded version of the federal hate crime law (and if an updated amendment is to be written during Obama's presidency, we hope that it will include homelessness status as well as sexual orientation, gender and gender-identity). But, even if Rostow is correct—that fighting for passage of a new hate crime amendment would be easy—that is no reason to not fight for it. After all, in early 2008 in California polls showed that Proposition 8 would fail. The response from some in the gay community after those early polls were made public was lack-luster; homophobic forces then mobilized, and Prop 8 narrowly passed. Instead of being useless, we believe that passage of a federal hate crime law that includes sexual orientation would deliver an important message to homophobic America.

Instead of calling on more members from her community to fight for passage of a GLBT-protecting hate crime law, one that should have been passed long ago, Rostow states:

"You know what? A federal hate crime law is not our top priority as a community. And I am not appointing myself Director of the Gay Agenda, I am stating a fact."

Her own irony is lost on her here as Rostow, indeed, anoints herself as the Director of the Gay Agenda; and, she is stating opinion, not fact. Worse, though, is that she forgets a most important lesson in life: safety first. So, in Rostow's mind, what is more important than protecting the safety of every GLBT individual throughout the United States and transforming America by making it perfectly clear in the code of federal law that trolling for a gay victim is very, very wrong? Why that would be legalizing same-sex marriage in just one state (by working to repeal Proposition 8 in California) and working toward the repeal of the military's current closet mandate for homosexual service men and women.

We get it: Rostow's just being an American woman from Texas. Being American means ignoring evil (visit any Christian church in Europe and you'll no doubt see depictions of Satan, but you'd be hard pressed to find many churches in the United States that devote any stained glass to the devil). We Americans don't like looking at evil and hate crimes are acts of evil. Period. It's preferable to thumb through Modern Bride and fantisize about your same-sex wedding than it is to think that if you and your newly wedded spouse chose to visit Shenandoah National Park for a honeymoon stop you could wind up with your throats slit as happened to two lesbians—Julianne Marie Williams and Laura Winans—in 1996. In Rostow's America you could be legally wed to your same-sex partner and have your house burned down with anti-gay slurs scrawled on the home's only brick wall with no chance for added punishment for the perpetrator as happened recently to a young gay man in North Carolina. In Rostow's America as a homosexual you could openly serve in fighting America's immoral war in Iraq—one that began when we invaded a sovereign nation preemptively under false pretenses—and come home to be killed by some of your fellow soldiers or by an Evangelical Christian from another country simply because you are gay or lesbian, again with no added punishment for the perpetrator. During the Vietnam War era, America's youth protested that if they were too young to vote or drink, then they ought to be too young to be conscripted into the military (voting and drinking ages were lowered as a result). We think that today most gay and lesbian people would rightfully want homophobic violence specifically penalized before other, important civil rights are granted. You know, safety first.

We want to be clear here: Rostow paints an either-or agenda for the gay communities. It's either fighting for the repeal of the military's Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy and of California's Proposition 8, or it's fighting for adequate federal hate crime legislation. She makes no room for the GLBT communities to simultaneously fight for a multitude of worthy causes which we believe they can, and should, do. Among the top-ranking of those causes ought to be pushing the federal government to revise its hate crime law to include sexual orientation as a protected category. After all, safety first. However you try to understand her mental gymnastics, the strange truth is that Rostow is a gay woman in favor of having the gay community turn its back on hate crime legislation, legislation that would immediately stigmatize homophobia and penalize acts of domestic terrorism directed at the GLBT communities.

While H.K. Edgerton fails to see he is on the same side as the oppressor when it comes to resegregating the South, we hope that Ann Rostow learns soon that when it comes to gay hate crime legislation she is on the same side as some notable homophobes, such as the Reverend Ted Pike and Peter LaBarbera.

The Week in Hate: November 9 - 15, 2008

2008-11-15T09:34:00.014-05:00

Please read the other hate-related news stories at our This Date In Hate calendar.

Sunday November 9, 2008: In rural Sun, Louisiana (St. Tammany Parish), Raymond "Chuck" Foster, 44, allegedly shot and killed Cynthia C. Lynch, 43, of Tulsa, Oklahoma who was recruited via the Internet to participate in a Ku Klux Klan ceremony. Her murder took place after an argument erupted when she attempted to leave the ceremony after changing her mind about joining the Klan. Ms. Lynch was to have participated in the ceremony and then return to Oklahoma to recruit Klan members. Foster, who lives in Washington Parish and who is the leader of a local Klan chapter called Dixie Brotherhood, was charged with second-degree murder, and seven other Klan members, all from Washington Parish, were charged with trying to help conceal the murder. These Klan members were charged with obstruction of justice in the case: Random Hines, 27; Danielle Jones, 23; Frank Stafford, 21; Alicia Watkins, 23; Timothy Michael Watkins, 30; Andrew Yates, 20; and, Shane Foster, 20, the son of Chuck Foster. The victim's body was found dumped on a roadside the day after her murder. Ms. Lynch's murder underscores the violent nature of America's oldest domestic terrorist organization.

Monday November 10, 2008: The Greenville, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP demanded a "strong response and punishment" for the four North Carolina State University students who spray-painted "Let's shoot that N----r in the head", and, "Hang Obama by a noose" in the school's Free Expression Tunnel on election night. Other than the NAACP, no one is taking any action against the students: the Secret Service has deemed there was no threat to the President-elect; campus police have said no crime occurred (even though communicating a threat to kill someone is not protected free speech and the use of a racial slur would qualify the threats as a hate crime), and school administration is keeping secret the identities of the four students who admitted painting the threats. With the presidential election votes still being counted in Missouri, the nation, with the aid of North Carolina State University police and administration, has just lowered the bar for the safety of a nationally elected official by allowing someone to publicly call for the murder of our president-elect.

Monday November 10, 2008: Although expanded hate crime legislation failed last year in the United States, on this date the Hungarian Parliament passed two measures designed to curb hate crimes and hate speech. One law allows victims to civilly sue perpetrators for engaging in degrading or intimidating behavior directed toward a person or a group of people based on the victims' nationality, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The other law prohibits hate speech directed at someone based on their nationality, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation, speech that is designed to "incite hatred of a group of people."

Wednesday November 12, 2008: Alexander Edward Ou, 20, of Rochester, Minnesota, who was charged out of the Olmsted District Court with gross misdemeanor fourth-degree assault motivated by bias (a hate crime) for allegedly assaulting a 48-year-old man early on June 6th because of the man's race, was scheduled for an evidentiary hearing. Alexander's brother, Anthony Shieha Ou, 17, was been charged out of the Olmsted District Juvenile Court with the same crime.

Wednesday November 12, 2008: In Poplarville, Mississippi, former Nicholls State University student, Dyron Hart, 19, of Poplarville, is alleged to have sent, via Facebook, black students at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Alabama, a message stating he planned to kill 3,000 people, including them, following Barack Obama’s presidential victory on November 5, 2008. Hart, who is himself African-American but who was posing as a white man when he sent the emails and who was a Nicholls State University football hopeful, was arrested by FBI agents on November 12, 2008. If convicted, the 6-foot-3-inch tall, 350-pound man, could receive up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release if convicted.

Thursday November 13, 2008: On the campus of North Carolina State University over 500 people attended a rally to demonstrate opposition to the life-threatening and racist graffiti written by four known, but unidentified N.C. State students. The four spray-painted "Let's shoot that N----r in the head", and, "Hang Obama by a noose" in the school's Free Expression Tunnel on election night.

Friday November 14, 2008: In Syracuse, New York, Moses Cannon, 20, of Syracuse, was shot and killed while sitting in a car with his 18-year-old brother, Mark, allegedly by Dwight R. DeLee, 20, also from Syracuse, because DeLee did not like that Moses was openly gay. Police have charged DeLee, who allegedly left a party where anti-gay slurs were being directed at the Cannon brothers to get the murder weapon, with second-degree murder. Mark Cannon was slightly injured in the lethal anti-gay attack of his brother.

The 2008 Presidential Election Unleashes Rage

2008-11-08T13:48:00.062-05:00

Politics is ugly. This presidential season, it got uglier. Some Americans responded to the first seriously viable black presidential candidate with hate speech; others responded by taking hate-fueled action, or at least by making plans to do so. In West Hollywood, California, ChadMichael Morrisette hung in effigy the likeness of vice-presidential hopeful, Sarah Palin. A life-size doll of presidential candidate John McCain sitting in a chimney surrounded by paper flames was perched nearby. The real GOP presidential candidate was booed by some of his own supporters when he announced at a campaign trail stop that Barack Obama is someone "you do not have to be scared of", a statement apparently the Arizona senator felt he had to make to quell media buzz about McCain-Palin rally attendees shouting "Kill him" and "terrorist" (referring to Obama), about GOP supporters making Barack Obama monkey dolls, about news reports of "Obama for President" signs being stolen from the lawns of his supporters or vandalized with racial slurs, and about vehicles sporting "Obama '08" bumper stickers being vandalized with racist graffiti. Unlike the issue of how to turn our failing economy around, Jesse Jackson's oft-quoted remark that in the United States "race matters" was hardly debatable this national election season.

From the beginning of his bid for the White House, during the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama's ground game team had been subjected to overtly hostile—and racist—remarks from the public. They would never vote for a n----r, some registered voters told Obama volunteers. Barack Obama, who is Christian and a member of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, was repeatedly and erroneously called a Muslim by some detractors, and the 28 million DVD distribution two months before the election by at least 70 newspapers in swing states (such as the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio) of the hate-filled propaganda piece titled Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West no doubt fueled Islamophobia and Obamophobia. Additionally, hate-filled emails found their way into the inboxes of Obama supporters; in at least one case, the FBI was contacted. One Republican blogger posted a poster of Barack Obama next to a noose with the headline that read: "Asphyxiation/The Fucking Solution." Evangelical minister Steve Foss, along with Homer Owen, spammed folks with a dire warning about how evil Barack Obama is. (Owen is an Evangelical guy who hawks born-again intolerance—and lip balm and soap—at his strange website, all in the name of Christ, of course). Although Foss said God was speaking to him about Obama and that it was God who was warning him about an Obama victory—Foss thereby disowning himself from his own hatred and throwing God under the bus at the same time—we predict that in four more years another right-wing Evangelical Christian will read tea leaves, hear God's voice, or stumble across something in the Bible that states, to them, that the next Democratic presidential candidate is—like Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and now Barack Obama—someone akin to the anti-Christ. As revelations from God go, pitching a Democratic presidential candidate as demonic is a pretty tired and overworked one.

Receiving less media attention, but occurring against the same history-making presidential election backdrop, was the Duval County Florida School Board's 5-2 vote along racial lines to retain the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, this despite the facts that (a) Nathan Bedford Forrest (to quote Brenda Priestly Jackson, one of the two black board members who voted for a school name-change) "was a terrorist and racist" (Forrest was a member of the Ku Klux Klan) and (b) the majority of today's Nathan Bedford Forrest High School students are black.

Then there were the hate-crime incidents. In Denver in late August, four white men were arrested for plotting to assassinate Barack Obama when he was to give his party nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Next, within weeks of the election two white supremacists—Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tennessee and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of West Helena, Arkansas—were held without bond in Tennessee after authorities alleged that the pair had planned to rob a Tennesse gun store which was to supply the men with the means to carry out a killing spree against African-Americans. According to law enforcement officials, the two white supremacists also planned to assassinate Barack Obama while wearing white tuxedos and black top hats. On election day in South Ogden, Utah, an African-American family hung the American flag from their home after returning from the polling station where they had worked; within a half an hour, their flag had been set ablaze.

Such acts were not isolated to states where John McCain posted election-night victories either. In Springfield, Massachusetts, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ was suspiciously burned to the ground just hours after Barack Obama's victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park. Just hours before that, on Staten Island, a black Muslim teen was beaten while walking home by four white men apparently enraged that a black man had won the presidential election. Although they yelled no racial slurs—a hallmark sign of a race-based hate crime—the four angry white men yelled "Obama" as they descended upon their African-born victim with a baseball bat, and police ruled the unprovoked attack was, indeed, a hate crime. Meanwhile, at North Carolina State University on election night four students there spray-painted violent, racist messages about Barack Obama: one read, "Let's shoot that N----r in the head" and the other said, "Hang Obama by a noose." True to slave-state tradition, the administration has protected the students. According to WRAL Channel 5, the CBS television affiliate in Raleigh, the school's administration has not released the names of the students, and it said the four students will not be charged with a hate crime. For its part, the NAACP has called for N.C. State to expel the four. What would also be appropriate would be for the case to be turned over to the FBI for criminal investigation and prosecution. Since the identities of the racist spray-painters have been cloaked by the school's administration, we're guessing that the incident must be leaving N.C. State's black students with questions about their own safety on campus.

Hate crime incidents were also not limited to election night. On November 5, 2008, in Poplarville, Mississippi, former Nicholls State University student, Dyron Hart, 19, of Poplarville, is alleged to have sent, via Facebook, black students at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Alabama, a message stating he planned to kill 3,000 people, including them. The 6-foot-3-inch tall, 350-pound Hart, who is himself African-American but who was posing as a white man when he sent the emails and who was a Nicholls State University football hopeful in the spring of 2008, was arrested by FBI agents. He is said to have confessed to sending the emails in order to get a "reaction." Two days after the election in Hardwick Township, New Jersey, in Warren County, an African-American man discovered that someone had burned a six-foot tall cross on his yard. He discovered the cross, which was near his pro-Obama banner that had also been deliberately charred, when taking his eight-year-old daughter to school.

Hate crime incidents this presidential election season were also not limited to targeting blacks. The unleashed racism brought about by an African-American man's run for the White House also unleased other forms of hatred. In La Qunita, California, Robert Sylk, the only Jewish candidate running for the City Council, had one of his political lawn signs stolen and vandalized—with a swastika. Then there was the California gay hate-crime assault: a man wearing a political button against "Proposition 8", which denies gay/lesbian couples the right to become legally married in that state, was attacked by a man who first directed a gay slur at his victim. Poignently, the attacker allegedly used a pro-Proposition 8 lawn sign as a weapon with which he is said to have beaten his victim. In Irvine, California, a City Council candidate who is Muslim, Todd Gallinger, received a death threat on October 7, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Some say that John McCain and Sarah Palin fueled their base's race-based emotions by attempting to characterize Barack Obama as someone who "pals around with terrorists" (to quote Ms. Palin) and someone who does not think like "we" do. London Telegraph journalist Tim Shipman reported that Ms. Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's character "provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling 'terrorist' and 'kill him' until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric." Mr. Shipman also wrote: "Sarah Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president, Secret Service agents revealed during the final weeks of the campaign." One thing is clear, the McCain-Palin attacks failed them: pre- and post-election polls showed that members of the public—Republicans and Democrats—did not care for the GOP's negative campaign stating that it went too far.

All of this election hatred is illuminating and it leads to two conclusions. One is that racism (and other forms of hatred) isn't killed off easily, even with a bi-racial (and self-identified African-American) president-elect. The other is that for the nation to continue to make civil rights gains—that is, for tolerance to trump intolerance—hate crimes must be dealt with swiftly and decisively by every level of the criminal justice system.

Gaslighting Northport, Alabama

2008-07-20T02:19:00.070-04:00

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:

"Eight different Hate Crime Acts were reported...Six of the victims were Black and two were Hispanic. The following egregious acts were reported: One victim found nine bullet holes in her vehicle, the lettering 'KKK' painted on the left side of her mobile home from front to rear, the victim's vehicle was also keyed. A second victim had his tires cut. A third victim had 'KKK' painted on the side of her residence, and the racial slur, 'I hate N.......' painted on the front. A fourth victim had the racial slur, 'N.......' painted on her home. A fifth victim had the windows to his vehicles knocked out with large concrete blocks and 'KKK' painted in red on the side of his vehicle. A sixth victim had "KKK" painted on the side of her trailer and the same painted in the street in front of her residence. A seventh victim had the following racial slur painted on the hood of her vehicle, 'I hate N.......' The same was also painted on the south side of the victim's residence. An eighth victim had her tires cut.

Additionally, there was one White female who reported that small holes had been poked in the front and rear of her trailer.

The actual offenses ranged from Shooting into an Unoccupied Vehicle to Criminal Mischief in the First Degree."

The work of the KKK? Maybe. The Klan has been active in Alabama for well over a hundred years, and while the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported no specific Klan groups active for years in Tuscaloosa County, where Northport is located, there are certainly chapters of the KKK that act statewide; and, the county seat, nearby Tuscaloosa, has an active white racist hate group. Regardless of whether the culprits are members of a hate group or not, the poor folks at Quail Ridge are no strangers to hate crimes. In October, 2006, when Northport was preparing for its annual Kentuck Festival, the Northport Police were dealing with hate crime acts at and near the trailer park. According to the police's webpage, these hate crimes—referred to collectively as "Incident 1"—have yet to be solved. The October, 2006, hate crimes involved the burning of a Mexican flag, slashed tires, burned crosses, and racist comments and symbols (including the letters "KKK" and swastikas) painted on homes.

Perhaps because the Northport Police Chief, Robert W. Green, is African-American, law enforcement in the west-central Alabama town of about 21,000 appeared very prepared to solve the recent hate crimes. From their Unsolved Hate Crimes webpage:

"We have intensified our efforts and we have also received the valuable assistance of the FBI. Additionally, a $12,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those parties who were responsible for these Hate Crime Acts.

Anyone with any information regarding the Hate Crime Activity at Quail Ridge Mobile Home Park should contact one of the following: The Northport Police Department's Criminal Investigation Division at: (205) 333-3008; Crime Stoppers at : (205)752-STOP or the FBI at (205) 758-4277"

The Quail Ridge hate crimes did not go unnoticed by the media. The Tuscaloosa News reported the crimes, including an ominous photo of Antate Wilder's SUV which was shot full of bullets among other photos of the crimes. Tuscaloosa News staff writer, Stephanie Taylor, noted that an anonymous person had donated $10,000 for reward money for the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s). Rightfully, the Northport police immediately began its investigation; and, since intimidating someone at their home because of their race also violates the federal civil rights law, the local police were correct to involve the FBI. Northport Mayor Harvey Fretwell promised the perpetrators would be brought to justice at a press conference attended by Mr. Charles Dorsey, the head of Tuscaloosa's FBI office. An editoral said those responsible for the Quail Ridge attacks must be dangerous sociopaths; it called for incarcerating the perpetrators. It was the kind of community chorus one wants to hear after a hate crime has been committed. The kind of chorus that leads to appropriate action.

Probably because of the combination of quick police responsiveness, adequate press coverage of the crimes, appropriate outcry from the community, and a sweet reward, results came swiftly. The Northport police announced on July 18, 2008, the arrest of a 15-year-old boy in the hate crime attack on the mobile home park; they also arrested a 17-year-old the following day. The 15-year-old suspect was charged with two felony counts of Criminal Mischief, seven misdemeanor counts of Criminal Mischief, and one felony count of Shooting into an Unoccupied Vehicle. The 17-year-old male was charged with 3rd Degree Criminal Mischief. The police did not release their names to the public, because the pair were charged as juveniles.

But then a funny thing happened in the town comprised of 26% Black folks and 2% Hispanics, the town with the black police chief.

The hate crime part of the hate crimes perpetrated against eight persons of color at the Quail Ridge Moble Home Park vanished. Specifically, Tuscaloosa News staff writer, Steve Reeves, reported:

"[Chief of Police] Green said, however, that the juvenile arrested Thursday has not been charged under hate crime statutes. He said that came under federal law and that the FBI, which helped with the investigation, indicated that it would not apply."

Reeves was not misreporting; NBC13's Jon Paepcke also said the town will not file hate crime charges against the perpetrators and that the FBI is not pursuing the case. FBI agent Dorsey's appearance at the mayor's press conference days before the arrests was, apparently, just window-dressing, a way to kill a few hours on the tax-payer's dime. Guess there was nothing really needing attention at the Tuscaloosa FBI office, so what the hell, might as well show up at the Northport mayor's press conference.

In addition to law enforcement changing the reality of what really occurred at Quail Ridge, some in the media were changing the reality of what occurred also: suddenly a blatant, race-based series of hate crimes directed at eight people of color was being called something else. Jon Paepcke reported the letters "KKK" and the phrase "I hate Niggers" that were scrawled at the trailer park were mere "racial undertones." Specifically, Paepcke wrote on the NBC13.com website whose banner reads "ACCURACY MATTERS":

"Despite the racial undertones of the graffiti, Northport police said Friday [July 18, 2008] the juveniles don’t face hate crime charges."

Let's remind Paepcke of Merriam-Webster's definition of the word undertone: "a low or subdued utterance." Let's remind him also that KKK stands for Ku Klux Klan, the oldest domestic terrorist group in America. Let's remind him that factions of the Klan have been persecuting African-Americans since its beginnings. Since when have KKK and N-word graffiti ever been subdued utterances, Jon Paepcke?

Should the hate crime victims here be feeling had and mad? Yes, of course. Failing to file hate crime charges against someone who allegedly slathers a neighborhood with racist graffiti, who allegedly shoots bullet holes in the vehicle of an African-American, and allegedly damages vehicles while on a racist crime spree is absolutely inexcusable. Mayor Fretwell should insist hate crime charges be filed against the two teenagers arrested or else ask police chief Green to tender his immediate resignation (or else be fired). But let's be real: when was the last time a white mayor demanded of a black police chief to file hate crime charges because of attacks specifically targeting black and Hispanic folks?

What about the tipster, the person who provided the police with information that led to the arrests of the two alleged offenders, should this person be feeling bad? Absolutely not, this person is a silent hero who no doubt took some personal risk coming forward to provide information to the police about a hateful person who owns and shoots a gun. But, should this person be feeling had? Yes, of course. Steve Reeves reported:

"Police received a tip that led to the first boy’s arrest immediately after announcing a $12,000 reward in the case Wednesday [July 16, 2008], [police chief] Green said. Payment of the reward is contingent upon a conviction.... Green was concerned that the case would be difficult to solve [get a conviction] because none of the residents of the mobile home park, which is off of Harper Road, near the Tuscaloosa Regional Airport, saw or heard anything that night."

Translation to the tipster and also to anyone else in that community who might want to trust the genuiness of the Northport police: thanks for the information, it led us to make two arrests which make us look good, but we aren't going to bother to get the forensic evidence left by the bullets and the bullet holes, so we won't get a conviction, because the pair we arrested don't have to testify against themselves and we have no eyewitnesses to testify against them, and so you won't get your reward money. Now go away.

Were the victims set-up to believe that its city actually cares about them and about vigorously combatting hate crimes when in fact that isn't the case? Yes. Was the tipster set-up to place himself/herself in some jeopardy with the false promise of a reward? Yes. Will the secrecy of the juvenile defendants' identities prevent the public from knowing who exactly has been accused; and what, if any, punishment might come their way for placing in fear an entire community? Of course. Without the ability of the media and the public to be able to track the outcome of the legal case against the two accused of the hate-crimes-not-being-pursued-as-hate-crimes, no one will know if any measure of justice will be served here. For sure injustice has already occurred: unmistakable hate crimes perpetrated against eight good folks at the Quail Ridge Moble Home Park happened, and no hate crime charges—federal or state—will ever be brought against the two teens arrested. For the victims and the larger community, that's a psychological injustice as well as a legal one.

Aside from the "these-hate-crimes-aren't-really-hate-crimes" lie being now voiced by the police chief, let's not forget another lie in all of this. As reported by The Tuscaloosa News and NBC13 television, Northport Police Chief Robert W. Green communicated to the public that hate crime laws are federal, not state, laws. His words lead one to falsely conclude he has no power, no authority, to press hate crime charges against the two teens recently arrested, or anyone else for that matter. Green's words erroneously suggest only the FBI could do that. This is a lie, because, of course, a police chief knows better. Police chiefs in Alabama know that Alabama has a hate crime statute which covers race-based crimes, regardless of the age or other demographic features of an alleged assailant. This would be Code of Alabama § 13A-5-13, chief Green, which is part of a larger document you may want to familiarize yourself with. Words and inaction like that of police chief Green—words and inaction that allow hate to flourish in his community on his watch—have been called an inaction of evil by one famous social psychologist who has studied similar forms of abdication of responsibility. That's a fair assessment, but there's another way to describe chief Green's inaction and the words of some in the media.

Gaslighting.

One Man's Quest to Quell Free Speech

2008-06-26T21:15:00.023-04:00

"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 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.

Coon was arraigned in Maumee Municipal Court Monday June 23, 2008, on three counts of felony ethnic intimidation (that’s Ohio’s kindly name for a hate crime) for allegedly sending "hate emails" to Dr. Hussain in apparent response to Dr. Hussain’s published editorials in The Toledo Blade. Coldly, some of the emails were sent after Dr. Hussain was the victim of a violent home invasion where he was sprayed with mace and pistol-whipped; and, heartlessly, Coon’s emails expressed delight in that crime. So much for the Golden Rule of Christianity. It seems Coon has been on a one-man campaign to quell the free speech of Toledo residents whose political viewpoints differ from his. He firmly supports the war in Iraq and is opposed to universal health care. Coon has admitted he has telephoned people who have publicly shared sociopolitical viewpoints different from his own—persons who have had their letters to the editor published in The Toledo Blade—and he has said that these people "are far-left nuts." Of course if he’s checked opinion polls lately, Coon will see that most Americans (even many self-described Christians like himself) are disappointed with our President’s performance in office, are against the war in Iraq (like Pakistani-born Dr. Hussain), and are desperately hungry for something other than our current health care system. We hope Coon has good telephone and internet service plans; he's got a lot of Toledo residents to contact.

According to the meticulous reporting of Toledo Blade staff writer, Kate Giammarise, since Coon’s hate-crime arrest, others have come forward to say that they have received harassing, scary telephone calls from Coon. One woman said she changed her telephone number to an unlisted one after Coon's menacing calls to her home following her letters to the editor in the Toledo Blade criticizing Tom Noe for orchestrating the investor-theft, money-laundering scheme now known as Coingate, and criticizing the war in Iraq. So frightened was this woman after Coon's telephone calls that she also contacted the police.

In his defense about his charges, Coon has said that he never threatened or intimidated Dr. Hussain who is Muslim. Talking about himself in the third-person, Coon said: "Coon is not a psycho, Coon is an American patriot." Coon may not be psycho, but Coon may have crossed the line from constitutionally protected free speech to the kind considered criminal--the kind that threatens and intimidates--because one email sent from Coon to Dr. Hussain, quoted from Toledo’s NBC affiliate, is said to have contained the following words:

"...Beheading Islamists will be as fun as a turkey shoot. You are in my sights!!!"

Even without the national backdrop of increased violent crimes committed against Muslims and those perceived to be either Muslim or from the Middle East since the 9-11 terroristic attacks, such a statement can hardly be viewed as free speech, can it? "Beheading Islamists" followed by "turkey shoot" followed by "You are in my sights": how could that be considered free speech? How could that not be seen as criminal intimidation based on religious hatred? Coon is also reported to have communicated to Dr. Hussain:

"frightened scared immigrants like you have it coming big time."

Coon has said he posed "zero threat" to Dr. Hussain, which of course a jury will decide. One thing is for sure, we wouldn't want to take our chances dealing with a man with a violent past, such as Coon. As Ms. Giammarise wrote:

"in 2002, Coon pleaded no contest and was found guilty in Lucas County Common Pleas Court to aggravated assault, and attempted intimidation of a crime victim or witness. The charges stem from Coon's attack on a 19-year-old neighbor with a bat, lacerating his head and breaking the young man's left arm, according to a police report."

Wow, a then 46-year-old businessman taking a baseball bat to the body of a 19-year-old neighbor. So much for the Christian tenet Love Thy Neighbor. In that 2002 case, Coon initially pleaded Not Guilty, but it appears that on December 10, 2001, he entered a new plea of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, and was referred the following day for a psychiatric evaluation. The case was then scheduled for trial on January 3, 2002, but on that date there was a question about Coon's competence to stand trial. So, the case was postponed until January 8, 2002, at which time Coon changed his plea again; he entered his No Contest plea for the two fourth-degree felony charges, thus avoiding trial. A month later Coon was sentenced. He was ordered to pay a $2,500 fine, plus restitution and court costs, he was ordered to three years of probation (though in reality he was off probation after two years), and he was ordered to have no contact with the victim. Pleading No Contest to a violent criminal act is a savvy thing to do for a person with substantial financial assets, by the way, because evidence from a criminal court case that has a No Contest finding cannot be used against a defendant in a civil lawsuit. And it appears Coon has assets.

According to Ohiobiz.com, Coon’s Holland Benefits Group, a company with fewer than five employees, rakes in between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in annual revenue. You’d think with a business that lucrative, Coon would be too busy to track down and contact those whose sociopolitical beliefs differ from his own. Or, you'd think that Coon could see an obvious reality and maybe say to himself: Coon's not fighting in war-torn Iraq, Coon has a cushy white-collar lifestyle. You'd think he'd grasp that clear reality and that it would have motivated him to want to protect and keep his sweet CEO lifestyle, a lifestyle likely flushed down the toilet, if convicted as charged, just as the cushy lifestyle of Republican money-launderer Thomas W. Noe was flushed after he was convicted of laundering more than $45,000 to President Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. (Noe was convicted in November, 2006, of 29 felonies in Ohio, and was sentenced to 18 years in state prison, which is to be served following his 27-month federal prison term. Noe, 53, is serving his federal prison term at The Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) - Low in Coleman, Florida, and he is expected to complete his federal prison term on October 27, 2008).

Detective Mark Woodruff of the Lucas County Sheriff's Department, who is the chief investigator in the Coon case, said, "There's a line somewhere out there between freedom of speech and criminal conduct" and police believe that line was crossed in the emails to Dr. Hussain. Regarding the accusations against him and his pending trial, Coon has said defiantly:

"We'll see if 12 real Americans will think this guy was abused, harassed, or intimidated. I can't wait to get to trial."

Neither can we, Coon, neither can we.

Coon is scheduled to appear in court July 3, 2008. In the meantime, he has been barred from having any contact with Dr. Hussain and he has also been barred from entering any building where Dr. Hussain is, according to a civil protection order issued by Lucas County Common Pleas Judge James Jensen on June 24, 2008.

Anatomy of a Hate Crime (Part Three)

2008-05-25T07:44:00.030-04:00

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. A second attempt to strengthen hate crime laws was made in 2002. That year the Senate voted on the "Local Law Enforcement Act of 2001", and like the Senate's vote in 2000, the outcome was highly partisan. Only one Democrat (South Dakota's Tom Daschle) voted against it; and, only four Republicans voted for it. Three Republicans abstained and the measure was defeated (this time by six votes).

As the Democrats were in the past with racial desegregation legislation, they appear again to be in a tug-of-war with Republicans over one of today's important civil rights issues: hate crime legislation. For example, President Bush threatened last year to veto a hate crimes bill that might have gone to his desk had it been passed by Congress. That would have been only Bush's third veto as President; but, the measure did not make it to his desk, because it was suffocated when it was connected to an unpopular Iraqi War funding bill. It doesn't take a genius to predict that a federal law both bolstering aid to local law enforcement in their efforts to go after hate crime offenders and including sexual orientation as a protected category will pass once the Democrats have control of both the White House and the Congress. Until then, local law enforcement agencies will struggle to investigate and prosecute hate crimes, and elected Republicans (except freshman Oregon senator Gordon H. Smith and a few others) will likely continue to vote against and to slander hate crime legislation as they have done repeatedly.

In two previous blogs (Anatomy of a Hate Crime, Parts One & Two) I have reported on the national social climate surrounding one recent hate crime allegation out of Champaign, Illinois. It is a case involving an alleged gay bashing of a University of Illinois student, Steven Velasquez, that saw little media coverage; yet, even with scant media attention the internet was abuzz, in places, about the allegation. As I initially blogged getting answers to questions about the Champaign, Illinois hate crime allegation has proved difficult, although I learned the accused, Brett Vanasdlen (sometimes spelled VanAsdlen), was a star college baseball player at Parkland College where he is a freshman. While the legal end to this story is not yet in sight (the next court date is July 1, 2008), Brett Vanasdlen was temporarily kicked off of the baseball team following his arrest in early April, though his coach has said he expects Vanasdlen to be back in uniform by next season. (The Parkland College Cobras are fairing quite well without Vanasdlen, losing just 9 of the 27 games they played since he was removed from the team). If convicted of the hate crime he has been charged with (a fourth degree felony) Vanasdlen could do jail time.

Since initially blogging about the Vanasdlen case, where I have stressed that but for the angle and force of a single punch or shove a hate crime assault could become a hate crime murder, other hate crime head-injury victims have had their lives forever changed, yet punishment has not followed. Hate-based assaults targeting gay men have become so common in Boston, Massachusetts recently that the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office has hired a victim's advocate for sexual minority hate crime victims to help them as their legal cases navigate their way from indictment to trial or plea agreement.

Although Boston-area victims and their families have the needed support from their local D.A.'s office, nearly all other Americans are much less fortunate. Take, for example, the March 2, 2008, race-based hate crime murder of a young black man in Los Angeles, Jamiel Shaw, Jr., 17, a star football player at his high school. Shaw's family has had less than an empathic response from the L.A. D.A.'s office which has thus far refused to file a hate crime charge against the Latino man they believe is responsible for gunning down the teenage athlete solely because of his race. Shaw's parents have been pressing the D.A.'s office to file such a charge and they have been pushing for a law that would allow L.A. police to ask criminal suspects about their immigration status (Shaw's alleged killer is an illegal alien who had previously been jailed and had his immigration status been uncovered while incarcerated, Jamiel Shaw, Jr. would be alive today). Here is an example of how victims of hate crimes are sometimes treated by those whose job it is to prosecute criminals as reported by the Associated Press on May 13:

The rift between the Shaws and the district attorney's office was exposed last week when Jamiel Shaw Sr., 47, and his ex-wife Anita Shaw, 43, met with District Attorney Steve Cooley to complain about Michele Hanisee, the prosecutor on the case. Jamiel Shaw said Hanisee pressured him to stop pushing for the law and threatened to depict their son as a gang member unless they dropped demands that she prosecute the case as a hate crime.

Depict Jamiel Shaw Jr., as a gang member? Ah, prosecutorial discretion. It reminds one of Ohio artist Jenny Holzer's famous phrase: the abuse of power should come as no surprise. At least Hanisee was booted off as prosecutor after the Shaws' complaints, so perhaps Jamiel's parents will have an ally in the newly-appointed D.A. Although some on the outer fringes of sociopolitical conservatism have attempted to use Shaw's murder for an opportunity to bellow an anti-illegal immigration song (which is really a racist, anti-Latino song) instead of focusing on what the tragedy appears to be by many--yet another hate crime murder of an African-American man in the United States--these same conservatives go silent when immigrants who happen to be white evangelical Christians commit hate crimes against homosexuals. Just as nativists are trying to re-paint Jamiel Shaw Jr.'s senseless hate crime murder into something it isn't for sociopolitical gain, some anti-gay activists and a few white nationalists (such as the like-minded former Ku Klux Klan head, David Duke) are trying to alter the reality of the Vanasdlen-Velasquez hate crime assault case. In doing so the blogsite, DailyKos, (where this blog was initially posted) has been called a "hate site" by one of Brett Vanasdlen's cheerleaders, Peter LaBarbera (never mind that DailyKos is featured on the website blogroll of one of the nation's hardest-working anti-hate organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and never mind that that immensely respected anti-hate organization has exposed Peter LaBarbera for the poisonous man that he is).

As I've said in previous blogs, the support for the accused, Brett Vanasdlen, has been loud. However, some of his supporters have gone beyond merely supporting him. They've attacked the concept of hate crimes and the need for hate crime laws (and they like to put the words hate crimes in quotes as if to pretend these crimes do not exist), and in doing so they have used Brett Vanasdlen as a pawn for their cause. With groundless accusations from Ronalee Vanasdlen, Brett's mother, they have accused the Champaign, Illinois police department of "trumping up" a hate crime charge against Brett to meet some sort of hate crime arrest quota. (Seriously, who's heard of such a thing: purposefully increasing hate crime arrests would likely only leave people with the perception that the town is unfriendly and steer people away from it, and no police chief who wants to keep his or her job would dare speak such patently illegal nonsense let alone make it policy). With the assistance of his mother, they've focused on the alleged assailant's religion claiming the Champaign, Illinois hate crime assault case is about religious freedom and not about a case of homophobia-fueled violence as the police allege. Brett's mother calls herself and her son "conservative Christians" and she reported that the Vanasdlens attend an off-label Christian church in Brett's small Illinois hometown of Minooka. A little digging reveals that their church is a Rapture-focused evangelical one that declares its believing members are "holy" and "saints". That's the kind of we're-better-than-you arrogance needed to fertilize a hate crime, and the kind of arrogance that can tarnish all humble Christians with a bad name. Brazenly, a few self-identified Christians have posted accusations that the victim in the case, Steven Velasquez, is trying to forward some type of homosexual agenda.

This latter assertion is cruel and has nothing to do with the type of Christianity that many Americans practice--including many Evangelical Christians such as Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter--the type where bearing false witness against someone is forbidden by God. The cruel accusation is like asserting that when a female rape victim goes to court to testify, she is doing so because she has some feminist axe to grind, and not because she wants to see justice prevail. It's a hideous character-smearing claim made about Steven Velasquez with no basis in fact made all the more grotesque given that the only agenda that is being forwarded in the Vanasdlen-Velasquez case is the one by anti-hate crime activists and anti-gay activists. They have claimed that "the hateful homosexual spin machine" is running at full-tilt activism (and they talk like DailyKos is one cog in that machine), simply because two gay-themed blogsites--Box Turtle Bulletin and 2015place--have mentioned the hate crime allegation (in addition to my diaries). In reality the opposite is true: only the anti-hate crime/anti-gay folks are calling for action. They are demanding that the felony hate crime charge against Brett Vanasdlen be dropped (which, prior to a finding of fact, they have determined is "bogus"), and they have called for their supporters to make telephone calls to the D.A.'s office not to influence the outcome of the legal process, but to kill it. Anti-hate crime activist and notorious anti-Semite, Reverend Ted Pike, has urged his whacky following to call the Champaign, Illinois mayor and police chief to protest Brett Vanasdlen's arrest. Their activism suggests they want more than hate crime legislation overturned; it suggests they want religious-based gay bashings made legal. So much for Brett Vanasdlen's constitutional right to a trial and Steven Velasquez's constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness.

What has also occurred since Brett Vanasdlen's first pre-trial hearing (held on May 6th) is that Brett's mother, Ronalee, injected herself smack into the middle of her son's hate crime story by proclaiming "We're being persecuted" (although she was not at the alleged crime scene and, as such, she has been charged with no wrongdoing). I can find no comments about the mother of four that even remotely sound persecutory--by the press or by any bloggers. Ronalee Vanasdlen has not said who, when, or specifically how she has been persecuted vis-à-vis her son's arrest (she also said the arrest of her son has been an ordeal for her and her family, and I don't doubt it, as I'm sure the incident has been for Steven Velasquez, the man who was rendered unconscious and taken to the hospital on the night Brett Vanasdlen was arrested). Ronalee Vanasdlen's "we're being persecuted" line just sounds tabloidish, narcissistically sad in a lime-light-grabbing kind of way, not to mention desperate, and it clouds the fact that her son is innocent of a crime until proven guilty in court. Yes, her false claims of persecution, and her false claims that the Champaign, Illinois police department has a hate crime quota policy erases whatever credibility one might afford Brett in his latest (post-defense-attorney-hiring) remarks about the case (remarks that, according to even his supporters, are markedly different from what he told the police at the time he was busted in early April). I, for one, grow highly suspicious when a criminal defendant starts changing his story, and that suspicion turns to a loud peal of laughter when arrest-quota conspiracy theories get introduced.

Ronalee Vanasdlen has further claimed her son was so blithely unconcerned about his arrest that, she claims, he failed to make supposedly important statements to the police. Oops. She also said Brett "never dreamed that something like this could happen to him." Well, really, how could he: he was raised to believe that he is "holy" and a "saint". Brett Vanasdlen's mother also asserts that her son is "so naïve it’s scary" and thus he could not grasp the gravity of his being arrested. Really? What's not to get about a set of handcuffs being placed on you, taking a ride to the police station in the backseat of a patrol car by men in blue uniforms, and the Miranda Warning being given to you prior to the mug-shot and the fingerprinting? That level of cluelessness--if the statement by his mother about his naivety is true--makes one wonder whether Brett Vanasdlen didn't leave Purdue University after just one semester because he couldn't conquer the strenuous academic load required there (his advocates say he scaled down to an in-state, lesser school--one that requires not even a GED for admission--to have more "playing time" on the baseball team). Regardless of the reason for his transfer to Parkland College this past semester, here's the thing about Brett Vanasdlen and naivety: Brett Vanasdlen is not so naïve as to have failed to learn anti-gay slurs (learned where mom?) and he is not so naïve as to have failed to direct said homophobic slurs at a gay man walking down the street (that part of the hate crime allegation is not in dispute by either side in the Vanasdlen-Velasquez case). If you're trying to find Jesus' do-unto-others teaching in those acts, forget it, they aren't there.

Additionally, Ronalee Vanasdlen also has complained how much money her son's privately retained attorney will likely cost. She fails to grasp that moaning about attorney's fees sounds like an upper-middle-class person bitching about their upper-middle-class privilege (how many Americans have the luxury of being able to actually afford to retain a criminal defense attorney?); it falls on deaf ears the way complaints about the high cost of a vintage bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon hits the ears of working-class Joes when made by rich, long-time diners at Spago's or the French Laundry. If worse comes to worse, Ronalee Vanasdlen--who lives on her enormous Vanasdlen family compound--could use some of her rental income from one of her two resort condominiums to help her son foot his legal bills. From her Naples Bay Resort condominium alone, she rakes in between $3,800 and $6,500 per month. In addition, Ronalee Vanasdlen's Dominican Republic property nets her between $2,800 to $4,200 a month, so even if her son's legal bills go as high as she says ($20-$30K), that only totals a few months of her rental income. Also, boo-hooing about attorney's fees posted at hate-fomenting websites that ask for donations comes close to cyber-begging for your hateful sociopolitical cause. Any thinking member of her evangelical church must be worried that Ronalee Vanasdlen's obsession with hanging onto every possible almighty dollar has got to be lessening her chances of her resurrection when the Rapture happens.

If Ronalee Vanasdlen's views about hate crime laws weren't so similar to those shared by a still-bigoted ex-Klansman (David Duke), and the likes of someone discredited by a large body of psychologists for his homophobic propaganda peddled as respectable social science (Peter LaBarbera), and if she weren't using anti-gay/anti-hate crime hate mongers (like Ted Pike and the far right news agency World Daily Net) to blame a host of people, institutions and laws for her son's legal situation, one might feel some pity for the woman whose eldest son is possibly facing jail time next year instead of his sophomore year in college. Instead, Ronalee Vanasdlen comes off as sympathetic as the character of Hillary Swank's mother in Clint Eastwood's film Million Dollar Baby and as classy as Brandine Spuckler.

The reality is that Brett Vanasdlen is a grown man expected to be responsible for his own actions including decisions about his finances (he supports his education at Parkland College via an athletic scholarship after all). If he had chosen, he could have a public defender represent him instead of a pricey private attorney (of course, he also might have chosen to not hurl an anti-gay slur at Steven Velasquez). It's hard not to conclude Brett's mother should have taken the advice of her son's attorney and kept mum on the whole incident. The sum total of Ronalee Vanasdlen's politically- and personally-motivated baseless complaints and her alignment with homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic hate-mongers, coupled with her assertion that her son, Brett Vanasdlen, is "so naïve it's scary", now makes one wonder how far away the apple and the tree are here.

Anatomy of a Hate Crime (Part Two)

2008-05-04T06:06:00.035-04:00

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. Reported is an operative word here because there is some federal data that for every hate crime reported, there are about 20 that go unreported. Logic thus dictates that the relative risk for gay men is much higher than 3.38. We also know from examining the FBI's hate crime data that most hate crimes involving violence directed at a person (such as murder, rape, etc.) are of the assault variety (aggravated and simple assault). Again looking at the FBI's most recent dataset, we learn that of the 5,449 reported hate crimes directed against persons (not property) in 2006 most (53.5%) were assaults.

Most hate crimes are barely covered by the media--unless they end in murder as in the case of Larry King, end in permanent disfigurement or damage as in last year's David Richeson case or involve torture as in the Megan Williams case last year. If a non-lethal hate crime is covered by the press at all it typically involves only reporting that a suspected hate crime occurred; if an alleged perpetrator happens to be apprehended immediately following the hate crime incident, that too will be reported. Rarely, however, do journalists follow-up on a case, following it through to the end of its life: to conviction or acquittal. It's ironic that assault crimes targeting gay men are so common that we've coined a term for them, but yet they scarcely go noticed by us, in large part because they go unreported by the press. Few, it seems, care about gay bashings except the bashers themselves. Or, perhaps, such assaults are as common as summer baseball games, and so, from the perspective of a media editor, unless there is something unique about a particular hate crime assault, it's not considered worthy to report.

In my previous blog (Anatomy of a Hate Crime, Part One), I began my attempt (as a non-journalist) to report as much as I could about one hate crime assault allegation (on a college student named Steven Velasquez) and the alleged perpetrator of that crime for reasons detailed in that diary. Let me repeat a point from that blog, a point not to be lost when reading this one. But for the angle or force of any particular punch or shove any hate crime assault could have been a hate crime murder. Last year alone two young gay men, targeted precisely because they were gay, were each punched only once; both died. Trying to obtain some basic factual information about the case I am following and reporting has proved difficult as I said in my previous diary. It's interesting who's communicated with me, who hasn't, and perhaps most interesting of all, who's discussing the case (beside me) online and what's being said.

Brett Vanasdlen, an 18-year-old freshman at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, was arrested on April 12, 2008, in Champaign, after he allegedly yelled anti-gay slurs at Steven Velasquez, 20, who was walking near his college campus with three friends, and then allegedly pushed Velasquez so forcefully that when he hit the ground he was knocked unconscious and suffered from a head injury. Born in podunk Minooka, Illinois, Vanasdlen, a talented baseball player, had played baseball at Purdue University very briefly in his first and only semester at the West Lafayette, Indiana university, before transferring (for reasons unknown to me) to Parkland College. His choosing to attend Parkland was very likely based on the successful baseball program the Division II school has: the Parkland Cobras won the National Junior College Athletic Association's World Series in 2002, finished fourth in 2003, and finished second in 2005, according to the school's baseball webpage. By my calculations, during the five weeks and 27 games he played for the Cobras (from February 29, 2008 until on or around April 8, 2008) Vanasdlen had the fifth best batting average (.342) of the 13 Parkland players who batted in at least ten games (the team had an average of hitting .334). He was the second leading player on his team in terms of RBIs and he was tied for 19th in all of Division II college baseball by April 12th.

Jodi Littleton, the Executive Director of Community Relations at Parkland College, and the only school administrator who would talk to me, told me on April 21st that she did not know whether Parkland has, as some schools do, a policy or procedure for possibly expelling students accused of a violent crime. Ms. Littleton told me that Vanasdlen was kicked off the baseball team, but her words suggested he was still enrolled in school. I realize that for student privacy reasons college administrators cannot talk about a particular student to the press or even to a blogger like myself. What's astonishing about the school's response to my question about its policies are these facts.

Ms. Littleton told me on April 21st that Linda Moore, Parkland's Vice President of Student Services, and/or Damien McDonald, Executive Director of Community Relations, would know if Parkland College has a policy or procedure for possibly expelling students accused of a violent offense. Ms. Littleton said she would email Moore and McDonald about my question; she took my telephone number so that either administrator could speak with me. Marsha Kaster, Moore's administrative assistant, confirmed to me later in the afternoon on April 21st that Ms. Littleton had emailed both Moore and McDonald of my request to speak with them. After placing me on hold briefly--to see if Damien McDonald was available to speak with me--Kaster returned to state somewhat tersely that he was not available and that, "They'll contact you at their earliest convenience." I had the distinct impression from the new tone in her voice that I would not hear from either Moore or McDonald. I haven't. Now I'm left to speculate whether or not Parkland College has bothered to follow its own student safety policy:

"It is the policy of Parkland College to keep its faculty, staff and students informed of all matters concerning safety and security. The Department of Public Safety has developed a plan to notify the campus population...The level of notification depends upon the type and severity of the incident."

I could find no evidence that Parkland notified its student body that one of its freshman was arrested for allegedly causing head trauma to a gay college student at a neighboring university in an alleged hate crime gay bashing, and that the freshman has not been administratively expelled from school, even temporarily, pending some type of school investigation. A gay student at Parkland might want that information, even if they aren't told the assailant's identity. Perhaps the administrators at Parkland College could care less about the safety of its gay students. Perhaps they care more about the reputation of its successful baseball team. (If it's any consolation to the student body at Parkland College, the school has a policy regarding sexual assault that can include a disciplinary hearing.)

I also made attempts to speak with the Champaign County State's Attorney's Office about the allegation against Brett Vanasdlen, because the one and only television news account of the incident offered no details about whether or not Vanasdlen was with anyone (as Steven Velasquez was) at the time of the incident, whether he was arrested immediately following the incident, and where exactly he was arrested. What I learned when I spoke to the woman who answered the telephone at the State's Attorney's Office on April 21st is that the case had not been assigned a prosecutor. The woman stated, "It’s being looked at but it has not been assigned." She said that it was being examined by two attorneys (presumably those responsible for assigning cases to D.A.s), but the unidentified woman I spoke with at the State’s Attorney’s Office would not give me either of their names when I asked. She did state, however, that May 6, 2008 in Courtroom S (#315) would be the date and location of the next hearing on the matter. So, more than a week following the alleged hate crime assault the state has not bothered to assign the case. One is left to wonder how much the deck might be stacked against the victim seeking justice in this case. After all, Brett Vanasdlen, the State's Attorney's Office had told me, had already done what any savvy person in his shoes would do. He retained an attorney. Specifically, attorney Carol A. Dison at Becket & Webber out of Tuscola, Illinois was retained as defense counsel. With a little digging, I learned that that law firm has a partner with the same last name as Parkland College's Vice President of Student Services, so I also intended to ask Linda Moore if Parkland College had retained Ms. Dison for their baseball star or directed him to Becket & Webber, but as I've said, no one at Parkland has returned my calls.

Little has been reported by the media about the alleged attack on Steven Velasquez, but that has not stopped people from commenting online about the incident. What's surprising to me is not only the content of the comments, but also where some of them have been posted. Other than my own blogging on the subject, two other websites that reported the initial media report of the alleged hate crime against Steven Velasquez allowed readers to comment on the incident and how it was covered. One is a Seattle-based gay-oriented blogsite run by a guy named Tom. The other was the CBS affiliate in Champaign, Illinois that initially broke the story. This is where, I think, things get interesting; it's where the sociopolitical climate of our country gets illuminated. The Seattle blogsite had a whopping ten postings to the Champaign, Illinois incident, as of May 2, 2008, which is unusual because of the location of the blogsite relative to where the incident is said to have occurred and because the alleged attack was not a fatal one or one widely publicized. (As I said in my previous diary I was the author of one of those postings). Yet the Champaign, Illinois website had just three postings, and this too is surprising because, as mentioned, the attack took place right there in Champaign.

OK, let's have a look at what people have said about the alleged hate crime and where they said it. At the Seattle-based gay blogsite, excluding my posting and the two postings by Tom the blogsite owner, four of the seven postings were in support of the alleged assailant! One person claimed to know the assailant and to know he is not guilty, another claimed to know the victim and to know he lied about the incident, and a third claimed to know that one of the three Champaign, Illinois police officers involved in the incident just wants to make life miserable for the accused, Brett Vanasdlen. In my first blog, I wondered whether Brett Vanasdlen himself wasn’t the author of one of the first postings at Tom’s blogsite—that drunken-sounding posting on Friday April 18th just six days after his arrest declares Vanasdlen’s innocence:

"all this is bullshit brett didnt do shit its jsut some pussy looking for a way out"

I specifically wondered how, if he was the posting's author, Brett Vanasdlen could be so careless as to not even bother to at least pose as a gay man when attempting to deny the accusations against him at a gay-themed blogsite. Then, as if magic, a second posting at Tom’s blogsite in support of Brett Vanasdlen sprang up on April 20th, and this person wanted it known—as if to add credibility to his claim—that he was (you guessed it) gay. What next, a posting from someone who could provide damning information about the Champaign, Illinois police officers responsible for Vanasdlen’s arrest? Yep. This April 23rd posting on Tom’s blogsite reads in part:

"From my understanding, there were 3 cops on the scene, and 2 did not want to even write the incident up, while the third was very intent on making life miserable for Van Asdlen, and won out."

These are pretty amazing postings at a gay blogsite. Whether or not someone was trying to do damage control for the accused at the blogsite, Tom, the blogsite's owner who moderates all submitted posts, certainly can't be accused of censorship. What is also clear is the poor-him-sounding theme of these postings: Brett Vanasdlen, although charged with a fourth-degree felony crime, we’re supposed to believe, is really the victim in the assault on Steven Velasquez, not Mr. Velasquez. We’re told to believe that the victim had it out for Vanasdlen (why we don’t know) and that a police officer had it out for Vanasdlen (why we don’t know). What the person or people who posted at Tom's blogsite fail to see is that complaining about the calls that umpires make in the game of life does not change those calls.

Similar to the postings at Tom's gay-themed blogsite, the comments left at the CBS affiliate that broke the story didn't seem to show much support for the man who suffered a concussion in the attack. One commenter sang praises for the assailant stating:

"I would like to stick up for Brett VanAsdlen. I know him. He's a very nice young man."

That commenter went on to say that the CBS news story that included a brief comment by the victim and one of the eyewitnesses shouldn't have been aired. A second commenter basically agreed, adding that he is not "a fan" of hate crime laws, and suggesting the news station had some sort of bias in reporting this particular crime allegation. Then there was the third and final commenter from yet another Brett Vanasdlen fan. This commenter said:

"I would also like to stand up for Brett V. I too know him. He has been like an older brother to me sinse i was little...Brett is a good guy. I do not believe this was a hate crime at all. I believe that the fact that the victim was gay should have nothing to do with it. Maybe the media should have heard what happened from Brett VanAsdlen first before they put that clip on t.v. Now I'm not saying that Brett didn't do anything because I wasn't there and i don't know what happened but i do believe that he should be given a chance."

To be clear the Champaign, Illinois CBS affiliate did not state or imply that Vanasdlen was guilty in their report of the incident; they merely said he was accused of attacking a gay University of Illinois student that allegedly included anti-gay slurs and that resulted in the victim needing to be hospitalized for head trauma. Apparently seeing the victim describe his version of what happened to him--seeing a gay man stand up for himself, seeing a gay man give voice to his ordeal and listening to a story of a gay man who vowed to seek justice following an alleged unprovoked assault on him--hit a raw nerve with middle America.

Judging from the comments from the locals, Brett Vanasdlen ought to plead not guilty and demand a jury trial. He's certain to get an acquittal. Some people just refuse to believe that some crimes could be based on the assailant's prejudice and hatred of persons from a specific group. To think that this could be a possibility a case involving a male, presumably heterosexual college athlete is apparently an affront to many. Like baseball, gay bashing seems an all-American sport never to be sullied. To dare to report just an allegation of a gay bashing hate crime, especially one that involves the arrest of a college baseball player, as two news sources did in the Brett Vanasdlen case, has brought much ire. It's as if the press attacked mom on the Fourth of July with an apple pie and then burned Old Glory.

Brett Vanasdlen, the alleged hate crime perpetrator in the Champaign, Illinois case, has received some supportive words from rightwing hate-mongers. Typical of one of his histrionic rants, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, über-Christian, and anti-hate crime activist, Reverend Ted Pike, published a blog in support of Brett Vanasdlen whereby he claims to know that the victim was the one who actually put his hands on Brett Vanasdlen, and not the other way around as the police allege (the good man of the cloth comes to this conclusion not by speaking to one of the eyewitnesses at the scene of the alleged gay bashing, but by speaking with someone not present when the incident occurred...Brett Vanasdlen's mother!). Reverend Ted Pike broke one of God's commandments and lied when he wrote:

"The homosexual and public media in the Champaign area are now in hue and cry to convict Brett. Homosexual groups are publishing articles against him in their media and on the internet. (See, http://illinoishomepage.net/content/fulltext/?cid=12590) They have posted his address on the internet. Homosexuals are now picketing on the street where this alleged hate crime occurred."

As I've shown, quite the opposite has occurred. The media barely touched the story, only one gay blogsite mentioned the story, and the support for the alleged perpetrator has been shockingly loud (I say shockingly because not one eyewitness has reported something contrary to what the police have alleged). Incidentally, I could find no published address of Vanasdlen, and I could find nothing about a single person picketing, as Rev. Pike claimed (although the University of Illinois' GLBT student group held a rally opposing hate crimes and supporting tolerance in response to their fellow student, Steven Velasquez, being assaulted). But this is what we can expect from someone who is adored by none other than ex-Klansman, David Duke, who, unsurprisingly is as vehemently opposed to hate crime legislation as Rev. Ted Pike. (For anyone reading this who is opposed to hate crime laws, just so you know, these are the dogs you are laying with: dyed-in-the-wool bigots, neo-fascists, and members of known hate groups).

Speaking of those with résumés that include membership in known hate groups, I found another posting about baseball slugger and accused gay-man-slugging Brett Vanasdlen. This one came from the Vanguard Network News forum, which is a virulently anti-Semitic, white supremacist hate site. As of May 3, 2008, twelve white supremacists commented on Rev. Ted Pike's call-to-arms in support of "Christian" Brett Vanasdlen. The responses from the white supremacists were less homophobic (and more anti-Christian) than I would have guessed, but unsurprisingly none of the white supremacists came out in favor of hate crime laws or supporting the gay victim in the case (and, yeah, some were sickeningly homophobic, but mostly the comments were a slurry of anti-Jewish invective).

From my examination of hundreds of reported hate crimes in the United States, more often than not the alleged assailant avoids trial and pleads guilty to a lesser (non-hate crime) charge; or, the hate crime charges are dropped prior to trial. Also, from my examination of recent cases of college students arrested for allegedly committing a hate crime rarely does the District Attorney vigorously prosecute the case, and never do such students receive any time in jail. Judges just won't have that (call it college student privilege or call it preserving the status quo).

Vanasdlen is not the first college jock to be charged with a hate crime, and he'll probably have the same fate as those before him. It is my prediction in the case of Brett Vanasdlen that at most he will receive probation for a charge other than a hate crime (I'll guess something equivalent to disorderly conduct or simple assault). Unless the victim in the case, Steven Velasquez, is tenacious (and he may very well be, he has eyewitnesses and it sounds like he has some really supportive friends and a supportive college community), Vanasdlen has a 50-50 chance of having the charge against him dropped. Regardless, I predict he'll be back on the Parkland College baseball team next year.

Anatomy of a Hate Crime (Part One)

2008-04-23T18:01:00.003-04:00

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. Fizzling out quickly in the daily media lifecycle are the dozens of hate crime attacks on gay men that do not, thankfully, end in a homicide. But for the angle or force of a particular punch or shove any of these gay hate crime assaults could end up as tragically as the attacks on Sean Kennedy and Satendar Singh.

One such attack occurred on April 12, 2008, in Champaign, Illinois. Barely mentioned by the media and not covered at all by his own school's newspaper, gay University of Illinois student Steven Velasquez, 20, of Urbana, Illinois was walking on or near campus with two female friends and a male friend when, allegedly, a stranger to the group began yelling anti-gay slurs directed at Velasquez. According to one of two news reports I found on the internet about the attack, Velasquez was shoved so forcefully to the ground by the assailant that the U of I student was rendered unconscious and required medical attention. At the risk of calling Velasquez lucky, unlike Sean Kennedy and Satendar Singh less than a year before, he did not become a gay hate crime murder victim. From hearing his tearful, brave words about his attack and when it occurred in his life (it happened at a time when he was just beginning to embrace his sexual orientation after a period of self-struggle), we know Velasquez was also psychologically wounded by the ordeal.

The first media account of the attack piqued my curiosity about the man arrested in the case. Amanda Evans of WCIA 3 News reported the name of the alleged assailant, Brett Vanasdlen, but she gave no other details about him, except that he was out on bond. No age, no address, no other details about the alleged attacker or how he was apprehended. From reviewing dozens of hate crime stories this lack of reported information struck me as unusual, and it made me want to dig deeper. Since I'm no investigative journalist, digging deeper for me started with a simple google search of "Brett Vanasdlen." Here's what I found.

Brett Vanasdlen (sometimes spelled VanAsdlen), shown here during high school, is a 2007 high school graduate from Minooka, Illinois, a middle-America, rural, dot-on-the-map just 4.25 square miles in size with a nearly all-white population of under 4,000 located 50 miles southwest of Chicago. By the numerous published reports of his athletic skills, in high school Vanasdlen was a talented baseball player (mostly a catcher) with a promising college career. The Chicago Tribune, for example, commented on his contribution in the 2007 WJOL Area Invite in Joliet, Illinois last April. On opposite ends of the country, as Vanasdlen played ball at the Joliet tournament in the last weeks of his high school career, Sean Kennedy and Satendar Singh were, unknowingly, living out the last weeks of their lives. After high school, Vanasdlen attended Purdue University, where he played baseball for the Boilermakers for one semester. In fact, he played in only one game in 2007 while at Purdue and he went hitless with four at-bats. For reasons unknown, but perhaps because he played little or because he played poorly, Vanasdlen returned to Illinois transferring to Parkland College in Champaign where he played baseball (first base) for the Cobras until April 8, 2008, according to the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) website. He played in 27 Parkland games starting on February 29, 2008, batting 73 times with 25 hits, a respectable .342 batting average. He knocked in 19 RBI's and two home runs, and when Vanasdlen was on the team, the Cobras racked up an impressive 21-7 record.

One factoid about six-foot-four-inch, 220-pound Vanasdlen that I couldn't help connect to the attack on Mr. Velasquez was a quote by Vanasdlen's Minooka high school baseball coach, Jeff Petrovic. Coach Petrovic said: "Brett uses his size to his advantage and hits with a lot of power." Though he was referring to hitting a baseball, not a gay man, Petrovic's quote about Vanasdlen might make the prosecuting attorney salivate, I thought. But, I also thought that with Vanasdlen's size and power, it's lucky Steven Velasquez wasn't killed, assuming Vanasdlen was his assailant. For reasons unknown, it appears from his NJCAA webpage that he stopped playing baseball after the double-header between Parkland College and Lincoln College on April 8, just four days before the assault on Mr. Velasquez. Why? Why had a talented baseball player stopped playing ball in mid-season? An injury, perhaps? Academic difficulties? Substance abuse? I had other questions about Vanasdlen. Why had this player transferred after just one semester from a Division I team (Purdue) to a Division II team (Parkland), only to stop playing days before his arrest for a hate crime attack?

The second news account of the assault on Mr. Velasquez kept me puzzling even more about Vanasdlen. On April 16, 2008, Steve Bauer wrote the following at The News-Gazette.com:

"According to Champaign police, Benjamin Vanasdlen, 18, is accused of pushing the Urbana man, causing him to fall down and strike his head about 1:35 a.m. Saturday. The Urbana man was knocked unconscious and was taken to a hospital for treatment of a head injury, police said...Vanasdlen, 18, who listed an address in the 2000 block of Moreland Boulevard, Champaign, was arraigned and pleaded innocent Monday to a Class 4 felony charge of hate crime. Bond for Vanasdlen, who also listed an address in Minooka, was set at $10,000, and he was due to return to court for a pretrial hearing May 6."

I know journalists sometimes get facts wrong, but the name of a person charged with a crime shouldn't be one of them. What's the assailant's name, Benjamin Vanasdlen or Brett Vanasdlen? My google and white pages searches of "Benjamin Vanasdlen" returned nothing but the citation of Steve Bauer's article. I learned, however, that the 2000 block of Moreland Boulevard in Champaign, Illinois, is just a few miles from Parkland College, where Brett Vanasdlan attended college and played baseball.

To find out the actual name and identity of the person arrested for allegedly attacking Mr. Velasquez, I google-searched the name "Brett Vanasdlen" again. What I found this time was a blog of the attack by someone in the Seattle area named Tom at 2015place.com, which, according to the blogger, is a "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Inter-sexed and Allies (GLBTQIA) [blogsite] Operated by a homosexual providing news and more intended for the above mentioned audience." Tom's blog, posted two days after Steven Velasquez was attacked, was actually just a cut-and-paste of Amanda Evans' report, but still, Tom cared enough about the story that I thought he might follow up on the lead I gave to him in my April 18th Anonymous post:

"Anonymous said... After doing a google search of the name "Brett Vanasdlen" and after reading a second media report about the attack on Mr. Steven Velasquez, I began to wonder this: is Benjamin Vanasdlen (who in one media report is the name of the man charged with the hate crime) Brett Vanasdlen? Did Vanasdlen give an alias name to the court/police? My google search reveals a baseball player from Minooka, IL (Brett Vanasdlen) who graduated from Minooka High School, then played baseball for one semester at Purdue U. before transferring to Parkland College in Champaign, IL. His baseball skills and his physical power are well-documented on the internet.

Is this the same man as the accused? Is someone (the media, the school, the defendant) hiding his true identity? Could it be that the accused is the college baseball jock I've found on the internet? My search in Illinois and neighboring areas found no Benjamin Vanasdlen, just Brett and his younger brother Jon."

Blogger Tom replied to my post stating he has no more information about the hate crime assault on Steven Velasquez; however, he said when he has new information, he'll share it. Curiously, just eleven hours after posting my response to Tom's blog, someone else posted a comment about the Champaign, Illinois hate crime attack at Tom's blogsite; it was a response that had me even more curious than I had been previously. This anonymous posting reads as follows:

"all this is bullshit brett didnt do shit its jsut some pussy looking for a way out "

That posting prompted a number of questions. First, why would someone visiting a gay/lesbian/bisexual, etc., blogsite rush to the defense of someone accused of committing a hate crime against a gay man? That someone apparently knows Brett personally given the content of the posting. Also, how common is it, really, for someone posting at a GLBTQIA blogsite to use the word pussy in a sexist and emasculating way? Notice too the word "just" is misspelled. Clearly, the poster is nervous and defensive, but why? Is Brett Vanasdlen, like me, trolling the internet to find out how much information there is about the attack on Steven Velasquez? Would Brett Vanasdlen really be so desperate as to make a pathetic, albeit disguised, denial of committing a violent hate crime against a gay man--at a gay-themed blogsite no less? Would he be so careless to not even bother to at least pose as a gay man when attempting to distance himself from the accusations against him at said gay-themed blogsite? The questions that I posted at Tom's blogsite still remained unanswered more than a week after the hate crime attack: did Vanasdlen give a fake name to the court/police, and if so, to what end? To avoid getting suspended from school or the baseball team? Or did Steve Bauer and The News-Gazette err in reporting the name Benjamin? The blog-posting person claiming to know Brett Vanasdlen--and to not so articulately profess his innocence--led me to think more and more that reporter Amanda Evans had the alleged assailant's name correct. And as I thought more about Steven Velasquez's attack, I also wondered what was Vanasdlen doing out alone in the early morning hours at the time Steven Velasquez was walking down the street with his friends, and where was Vanasdlen going?

Some of these questions were answered on April 21st, after I spoke with the Circuit Clerk in Champaign, Illinois, after I spoke with an administrator from Parkland College, and after I received an email from Steve Bauer (on April 17th I twice emailed Mr. Bauer inquiring about the actual name of the assailant in the Velasquez hate crime assault). The Circuit Clerk's office told me that Brett Vanasdlen was arrested by city police and charged with committing a hate crime on April 12th. Steve Bauer told me that he double-checked the information provided by the Champaign County State's Attorney's Office and the records in the Circuit Clerk's Office, and that the man charged with assaulting Steven Velasquez was indeed Brett Vanasdlen. One question answered: the defendant did not provide false information about his identity; instead, The News-Gazette printed the wrong name. Parkland College informed me that they are aware that one of their students was arrested and charged with a hate crime. They also told me that the student arrested was suspended from the school's baseball team. A second question answered: Brett Vanasdlen, the now-former Parkland College baseball player, is Brett Vanasdlen, the accused hate crime perpetrator.

Readers might be wondering why I care. It's simple really. It's called fighting back, and here's the possible push-back in this case. If the man who assaulted Steven Velasquez is someone who stands to earn millions of dollars in a few year's time playing major league baseball, even a slight chance, I want to do what I can to prevent that. I want to do what I can to stop a violent homophobe from becoming a well-paid role model to American boys who dream of playing in the big league. The thought of that happening, the thought of hate being rewarded like that, sickens me.

The nervous blog-poster may be right about one thing: the assailant in the Steven Velasquez hate crime assault case may be looking for a way out. He may be looking for a way out of a life that is sliding downward, toward a jail sentence. He may be looking for a way out of the shame and disgrace that will be the talk of whatever town he's from. Or, he may simply be a confused, self-loathing young American man raised to love baseball and taught to hate gay men looking for a way out of the closet. Whatever the reason, one thing we can all be inspired by is the absolute courage it took Steven Velasquez to appear on television still acutely pained from being called a faggot then assaulted to unconsciousness on the street in front of his friends. Affirming his newly embraced sexuality on camera and vowing to seek justice in his assault case, Steven Velasquez showed the world his fortitude. Steven, you hit a home run.