Behind the wave of anti-gay hate crimes

[Hazumu]

Jessica Hansen-Weaver reports on an increase in anti-gay hate crimes, and the connections to bigoted political initiatives like California's Proposition 8.

Society at large has moved in the direction of supporting LGBT rights, as ideas around sexuality have moved to the left in the past decade. One example of this is the fact that in 2004, the anti-gay Prop 22 in California won by a 14 point margin as opposed to the 4 percent margin of Prop 8.

However, as the trend of tolerance and acceptance has been increasing, so has the growth of right-wing religious organizations that have focused on getting anti-gay legislation passed across the U.S.

To make matters worse, these backward ideas about gender and sexuality aren't being opposed in the way they should by the Democratic Party, which has failed to support the right to equal marriage today and, in the past, worked against it, as with the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) during the Clinton administration.

Prop 8 and similar legislation not only deny civil rights to gays and lesbians, but they give a green light to violent attacks against LGBT people. Anti-gay legislation gives credence to the idea that LGBT people are "immoral," "unequal" and don't deserve protection from hate. And the silence of politicians like Barack Obama on repealing DOMA gives a free pass to the homophobia expressed in legislation like Prop 8.

And when Obama asks someone like Rick Warren--who has compared gay and lesbian people to pedophiles and perpetrators of incest--to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, he's giving an international platform to a hate-monger.