Hate Crimes in the United States on LGBT

Hate crimes against homosexual and transgender people happen on a daily basis in the United States. 1.51% of the United States population are LGBT people. That percent is equal to 4,300,000 people out of the 284,800,000 people total in the U.S. That number is not counting the people who have not yet “come out of the closet.” Physically and emotionally, LGBT people are attacked every single day. LGBT means Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, and Transgender. Hate crimes, or bias-motivated crimes, happen when someone targets a victim because of his or her social group such as racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender identity, or political affiliation. Hate crimes can occur in two types: “hate crime” refers to criminal acts which are seen to be motivated by hatred. The second type is “hate speech” which is speech motivated by hatred that is also considered a crime. Hate speech is controversial because it can be considered as blocking freedom of speech to punish people for what they say. Homophobia is the unreasoning fear of homosexuality. Very often, the reason for homophobia is because of ignorance and religious views.

The amount of hate crimes in the United States have been rising more and more each year. 1, 017 hate crimes were reported in 2005, 1, 195 in 2006, and 1, 265 in 2007. Gay rights advocates suspect that the number of hate crimes is much more than that because of two reasons. The most common reason is because LGBT are attacked but don’t tell police their sexual orientation in fear that the police will be hateful also; therefore the attack is counted as a normal attack and not a hate crime. The other reason is because not all states count attacks motivated by anti-gay bias as hate crimes.

Many hate crime victims make worldwide news because of how outrageous the crimes were. One of the many famous attacks was the attack on Matthew Wayne Shepard, a twenty-one year old gay man. On August 7th 1998, Matthew Shepard was taken from a bar in Laramie, Wyoming to a remote area where Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson continued to demonstrate unimaginable acts of hate. They tied Matthew to a split-rail fence where they beat him and left him to die in the cold. It wasn’t until eighteen hours later that a cyclist found him, at first glance thinking he was a scarecrow. He was taken to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado where his entire family stayed by his side during the last few days of his life. He died on October 12th 1998, five days after the attack. Friends and family from around the world attended his funeral, and it also received media attention that brought his story to help fight against hate.

Another hate crime that gained a lot of media attention was that of Duanna Johnson, a forty-three year old transgender woman. In February 2008, Duanna Johnson was arrested for prostitution. While in police custody, the two police officers that arrested her beat her for being transgender and yelled anti-gay words at her. A video was recorded of it and, when posted on the internet, the officers were fired. She filed charges against the officers and got 1.4 million dollars. In November 2008, she was found shot in the head. There are still currently no suspects for who committed the crime against the transgender woman.