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A political hate crime
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Now comes a fairly clear-cut case of a politically inspired assault by
right-wingers on a gay man in Atlanta -- in fact, it appears they drove
all the way from at least Kansas to commit the crime.
The assault -- which included raping the man with a sawed-off broomstick
and holding a knife up to his scrotum and threatening to cut it off --
was in apparent retaliation for a LiveJournal post in which the victim,
an Atlanta artist, depicted (through the wonders of Photoshop) George W.
Bush as a Grand Dragon at a Klan rally. Using information they gathered
from the Web, they stalked him and brutalized him into unconsiousness,
leaving him for dead in an alley.
A fellow named spatula at morons.org pieces together most of the details
from the victim's continuing LiveJournal posts:
So they stalked him using information they gathered from LiveJournal,
attacked him outside an Atlanta restaurant, cut his hand so as to inflict
nerve damage (apparently to prevent him creating any more art their found
offensive), sexually assaulted him with a sawed-off broom handle and left
him naked and bloody in an alley.
All this because they were so weak and pathetic that they just couldn't
cope with a Photoshopped jpeg image. And they had a gang of them against
one small guy, hitting him over the head first so he couldn't fight back.
>From what he could remember, authorities were able to locate a van that
had been stolen from a used car lot in Topeka, Kansas in which [the
victim's] blood was found. If Topeka sounds familiar to you, it may be
because that's where Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church who
bring us GodHatesFags.com are located. It's far too early to say whether
Phelps and his clan had anything to do with this assault, but detectives
have found [the victim's] name posted on several sites of similar ilk.
A few points:
-- There's no reason to connect Phelps' gang to this other than the
locale. Topeka may have simply been a way station. It's significant,
moreover, that the main motivation for this assault appears to be the
victim's Photoshop post. That suggests a pro-Bush political motivation --
and Phelps is decidedly not pro-Bush.
-- At the same time, the case has the classic appearance of a gay-bashing
hate crime: The overkill violence, the stalking, the intentional
selection, the clear bias motivation. Even if there proves to be a
political motive involved here, that factor should not preclude an
anti-gay bias motivation.
Unfortunately, that will not make a lot of difference in this case.
Georgia is one of 23 states that do not include sexual orientation as a
bias category in any hate-crime statute. (Kansas, as it happens, is one
of the 27 that do.)
This is the kind of case where a federal hate-crimes bill would make a
real difference. It clearly involves the interstate commission of a
crime, but unfortunately, those kinds of cases are typically only
enforced under the bias-crime provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1968,
which covers only race, ethnicity and religion as bias categories. The
FBI is constrained by federal law from involving itself in this case as
things stand.
The Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act -- the most recent version of a
federal hate-crimes bill that includes that category -- has been
languishing in the Judiciary Committee since its introduction in 2003,
and continues to remain buried there, thanks to the tender mercies of its
reigning chair, Sen. Orrin Hatch, and his fellow Republicans (with the
noteworthy exception of Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Oregon, one of the lead
sponsors of the bill).
-- The Web-oriented nature of the stalking is reminiscent of the recent
case in which a right-wing blogger posted the name and home address of
another blogger who had participated in various kinds of anti-Bush
activity, urging readers to do something about the guy and wishing for
his death.
-- Finally, it should be pointed out that spatula's denunciation of the
attackers as "wild animals" ("Creatures like this aren't human beings")
is perfectly understandable, but wrong. These people are all too human --
which is, frankly, the more disturbing thought.
UPDATE: I've deleted the victim's name, at his request, because
publication of the story has apparently provoked further harassment.
----
"I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth. Why
would I be attacked for telling the truth?" Paul O'Neill, 60 Minutes
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