College student in Colorado attacked

Speaking of hate crimes, there was another attack this past week against a lesbian student at Naropa University. 365gay has more:

Police say the young woman had met two men in a mall who said they were from California and did not have enough money for a hotel. The woman invited them to sleep on a couch at her home.

When they made a sexual advance to her she told them she is a lesbian and at least one of the men began beating her. She was punched and kicked in the face.

The student said that she is doing better every day.

Now I'm noticing a trend with these two cases, the student's and Anthos'. The assailants always pick victims who, regardless of sexuality, were far less able to defend themselves against their attackers than their attackers would have been able to defend themselves against the victims. In this case, it was two men against one woman. The article said that only one of the men attacked her, but it didn't say that the other helped her out. In Anthos' case, the attacker came up on him from behind, had a weapon, and was far younger. It goes on and on like that in other cases.

There is something more than hating gay people going on here. These people need to feel big, so they choose victims who they know won't be able to fight back. They probably also think that no one will care about GLBT victims, making it easier to get away.

That's why hate crimes legislation is so necessary - these people have to be shown that the law is not on their side and that they aren't more powerful than the collective moral will of the American or the Hoosier people.

(Crossposted to bilerico)

Andrew Anthos passed away last Friday

Andrew Anthos, the 72-year-old man who was attacked after getting of the bus on February 13th, passed away Friday. The assailant apaprently asked him if he was gay while on the bus and then followed him when he got off and hit him in the back of the head with a pipe. Anthos was helping a friend in a wheelchair, and that friend was able to give the police a description.

The police still haven't found the assailant almost two weeks after the attack, and the only witness who came forward was the friend. I'm sure that other people saw this person while on the bus, I mean, it was 6 pm on a Tuesday in Detroit. More people probably saw this guy berate Andrew than saw Janet's boob pop out of her outfit two years ago. I don't know why more people haven't come forward with a cold-blooded murderer on the loose in Detroit, but that just may be a question for the ages.

But I do know some people who are partly responsible for this who won't be doing any hard time. Shakes has a post that describes how I feel about this. Here you have an elderly gentleman who was taking the bus home from the library. That's it. But following him were the specters of years and years of heterosexual supremacist rhetoric and millions if not billions of dollars pumped into that machine that labeled him in a way that was neither accurate nor kind.

You have people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who put the blame for 9/11 on Andrew. You have people like Paul Cameron who said that Andrew was out to molest your children. You have Gary DeMar who says the Bible calls for killing Andrew. You have Fred Phelps who will probably organize a demonstration to show how happy he is with Andrew being killed. And you have presidents like GWB who normalized and legitimized all those accusations against Andrew by trying to get an amendment into the Constitution to solidify his status as a second-class citizen. Yeah, they pretend like they're talking about some non-specific group of people, but it's only reasonable to interpret what they're saying as an attack leveled against each and every GLBT person individually.

So I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

Because when you set up a by any calculus powerless minority to be the demon for all of societies evils, some people out there are going to take matters into their own hands. Have we heard any condemnation of this from any of those people mentioned? The most we can expect is a statement that says the killer gives them a bad name. Probably in the same way that a sloppy hitman can get the person who hired him into trouble.

They can hide behind their "religion" to justify what they say, but let's remember here, this is not what Jesus would do. Straight up, 100% certain on that one. Look at how Jesus treated the Pharisees. He disagreed with them, and he told them so. Did he protest their funerals? No. Did he blame them for Rome taking over the Holy Land? No. Did he say that they were going to molest everyone's children? No. Did he say that fighting them was the greatest war of his time? Hell no. So if they want to use their junk theology to defend their positions, they should at least have the decency to not take the Lord's name in vain while doing so.

So now, after all that, a man was killed because someone thought his singing on the bus was too gay. Is it any surprise that the murderer, like the far right, picked someone who was more defenseless than he? A 72-year-old, who had his hands full pushing a wheelchair, and he came up from behind to hit him. I want to see the Dobson, et al., crowd to find the honor in that.

Oh wait, they haven't put out their statement about how they're the ones who were really hurt by this.

(Crossposted to bilerico)