Unfinished Lives

Remembering LGBT Hate Crime Victims

Lesbian Couple Beaten By Mob in Chicago; One Suspect Arrested

Terry Glover, 24, charged with anti-lesbian hate crimes and robbery in West Side Chicago neighborhood [Chicago PD photo].

Terry Glover, 24, charged with anti-lesbian hate crimes and robbery in West Side Chicago neighborhood [Chicago PD photo].

Chicago, Illinois – A mob of 10 men assaulted a lesbian couple, yelling anti-lesbian slurs as they pressed their attack on Saturday, July 6.  The Chicago Tribune reports that a single suspect, Terry Glover, 24, has been apprehended, and is being held in a Cook County jail on $1 million bail for two counts of felony hate crime and two counts of felony robbery.  The two women, aged 23 and 25, were robbed and beaten late in the night in the West Side neighborhood of Austin.  Nine other suspects remain at large.

In personal accounts of the harrowing attack, the women, who wish to remain unidentified, say that their assailants yelled that no “bitch dykes” were going to walk through their neighborhood.  The assault, they say, was initiated by Glover who was a former school classmate of one of the women.  The couple allege they were taunted for their sexual orientation, knocked to the ground, and kicked while they were down.  “It was punches, kicks, everything being thrown at us,” one of the victims told the Tribune. “We just held onto each other until somebody said, ‘Here come the police.'”  One of the women had her shirt ripped from her body during the attack, and the cash and cell phones of them both were taken.  The mob ran at the approach of police officers.

By Monday, Glover was in custody, and was hauled before a Cook County judge, according to DNAinfo Chicago.

The younger of the two women told the Tribune, “It really shouldn’t matter who I like or who I love. I should be able to walk the streets wherever I want to go and talk to whoever I want to talk to.”  

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Supreme Court decisions of last month, the violence against LGBTQ people in America continues, apparently unabated. Rick Garcia, policy director of The Civil Rights Agenda, a Chicago-based LGBTQ rights organization, told Tribune reporters, “We see cases like this all the time, all over the city and all over the state.  It shows that animosity toward lesbian and gay people is just below the surface. We think we’ve made such big gains, but right below the surface we see this animosity and violence.”

July 19, 2013 Posted by | Anti-LGBT hate crime, Beatings and battery, Gang violence, GLBTQ, Hate Crimes, hate speech, Heterosexism and homophobia, Illinois, Lesbian women, LGBTQ, mob-violence and lynching, Slurs and epithets, Social Justice Advocacy, The Civil Rights Agenda (TCRA), women | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lesbian Couple Beaten By Mob in Chicago; One Suspect Arrested

Ugandan Gay Activist Killed in Cold Blood: Were Christians Accomplices in His Murder?

Kampala, Uganda – Prominent defender of Gay Rights in Uganda, David Kato, was murdered in his home by two blows with a hammer this Wednesday. Kato, 40-something at the time of his slaughter, was a well-known voice around the world for human rights, and an outspoken leader protesting Draconian legislation in his home country which would make consensual same-sex activity punishable by law, perhaps even requiring the state to execute convicted homosexuals. What responsibility does the Christian Church bear for the outrageous murder of David Kato? Many in Uganda, including leading church officials, priests, missionaries, and ministers, fervently believe in a sort of “gay conspiracy”on the part of same-sex loving men whom they say will infect their children with the “virus of homosexuality.” Friday, Kato’s funeral was marred by the homophobic outburst of an Anglican priest, Fr. Thomas Musoke, who loudly invoked dire comparisons with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah until mourners wrenched a microphone out of his hands, according to 365 Gay.  The Ugandan Anglican Church, active in encouraging resistance among conservative Episcopalians to the elevation of gays and lesbians as bishops in the United States in recent years, is well-known for opposing LGBTQ rights in the Central African nation.  Christian evangelical missionaries and so-called “experts” on homosexual sin from the United States, such as the notorious Watchman on the Walls Scott Lively, have preached the judgment of God on the Ugandan people if gays and lesbians are allowed to live and love openly in society. U.S. evangelicals exerting influence in Uganda teach that gays and lesbians could be changed to heterosexuality by prayer and counseling if they had enough faith. According to masslive.com, Lively, part of a 2009 evangelical mission to Uganda preaching anti-gay messages to officials and churchmen (Lively even spoke before the Ugandan Parliament during the tour), now says that it is “too early to call Kato’s murder a hate crime,” since the police have rushed to claim that the murder was the consequence of a simple robbery. In rebuttal, Val Kalende, chairwoman of an LGBT human rights group in Uganda said to the New York Times, “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S. evangelicals in 2009. The Ugandan government and the so-called U.S. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood.” Indeed, well-funded groups such as the shadowy Washington C Street evangelical organization, “The Family,” have sent funds and encouragement for the “Kill The Gays” legislations still making its way through the Ugandan Parliament. M.P. David Bahati, primary sponsor of anti-gay legislation in Uganda, is affiliated with “The Family.”  NPR host, Michel Martin, explored the culpability of Christians for Kato’s murder with guests on her weekday broadcast, “Tell Me More,” this Friday.  Martin interviewed Jeffery Gettleman, East Africa Bureau chief for the New York Times, asking him directly, “This has also been a big story in the United States, of course, because of the participation of a group of American evangelicals whom we also interviewed on this program. One in particular named Scott Lively, who many human rights activists have said helped to create this context of intolerance. Do you think that that’s true? Do you think the American evangelicals’ visit there was really that influential?” Gettleman replied, “I do think it was influential. I think a lot of people in Uganda and the part of Africa where I live, in Kenya and most of this continent and probably most of this world, there’s many people who are homophobic. But it didn’t take a violent form. It was – people thought that, in Uganda, people thought gay people were strange, that they were outliers, but they weren’t really fired up to do anything about it.” Gettleman continued, “It was only after the visits by these Americans who billed themselves as experts in dealing with homosexual issues that the Ugandan politicians and church groups got really angry about it and suggested killing gay people.” Religious hate speech, whether “soft” in its rhetoric (“Love the Sinner/Hate the Sin”), or blatantly hostile (“Gays and Lesbians are an Abomination in God’s Sight, and Deserve to Die”) has consequences for the safety of LGBTQ people wherever they live. This is certainly true, in our opinion, in Central Africa. David Kato was deservedly called “the father of the Uganda gay rights movement.” In the wave of hostility in tabloid media toward LGBTQ people following the 2009 U.S. evangelical tour of Uganda, Kato’s lynching was suggested in the press. When Christian leaders justify the demonization of LGBTQ people for their sexual orientation or gender presentation, either by selectively quoting scripture and subsequently distorting its life-giving meaning, or by reading their own homophobia back into church teaching to claim that “Gays and Lesbians are sinners,” these clerics are not only exposing a vulnerable minority to religious, political, and social persecution.  They are also exposing their own theology and ethics as woefully bankrupt and void of spiritual integrity. Clerics in Uganda and the United States who stoke hatred against LGBTQ people are no longer messengers of God. They have become a mob of theological thugs.  Anglican Archbishop Emeritus of Capetown, Desmond Tutu, is one of the few courageous voices of Christian integrity in Africa willing to speak out against religious intolerance and hate speech. In the Washington Post last March, Archbishop Tutu appealed for the church to own up to its role in fomenting hatred against gays and lesbians, and instead to commit its resources for repentance and reconciliation for all people.  He said, in part, “Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity — or because of their sexual orientation.” Tutu continued, “Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear. And they are living in hiding — away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said ‘Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.’ Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.” Amen, Archbishop!  Tutu must be joined by a world-wide chorus of Christian voices denouncing the murder of David Kato, the terrorization of his LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and renouncing the use of religion to incite bigotry and fear. Unless the world Christian community repents of its role in murder and mayhem like that in Uganda and Central Africa, Christian theology itself will continue to collapse from “heart-failure”–failing to discern and apply the heart of the message of Jesus Christ which was never bad tidings of fear, but Good News of mercy and justice for everyone.

January 29, 2011 Posted by | "Kill the Gays Bill", Africa, anti-LGBT hate crime murder, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Beatings and battery, C Street "The Family", funerals, gay bashing, gay men, harassment, Hate Crimes, hate speech, Heterosexism and homophobia, home-invasion, Law and Order, Legislation, Lesbian women, mob-violence and lynching, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, Politics, Protests and Demonstrations, religious hate speech, religious intolerance, Slurs and epithets, Social Justice Advocacy, soft homophobia, Uganda, Unsolved LGBT Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Desecration of Gay Corpses in Senegal; Gay Men Hunted Like Animals

Madieye Diallo, picture held by his grieving father; AP photo by Ricci Shryock

Thies, Senegal – Madieye Diallo was a young gay man.  He died due to unconfirmed causes, and was buried in on 2 May 2009.  His sorrowing father, Ousmane Diallo, a shop owner in Thies, returned home to grieve.  In a matter of just a few hours, according to AP International, a gang of  homophobes dug up Madieye’s freshly buried body, pulled it out of the grave, spit on it, and dumped the desecrated body on the doorstep of his aging father and mother.  Proud of their work, the perpetrators used a cell phone to record their revenge on young Diallo for being gay, made a video out of it, and sold it in markets across Africa.  The heinous video has gone viral, spreading horror among African gay men in Senegal, Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Uganda.  In South Africa, the only African nation to tolerate LGBT citizens, the outbreak of desecration and violence against gay people has ignited a series of “corrective actions” against suspected lesbians, rapes intended to straighten them out once and for all.  Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, is leading the fight against a groundswell of homophobic violence on the African continent, but his is a lonely voice.  thirty-seven countries in Africa outlaw homosexuality, and as has widely been reported, Uganda is officially considering law that would carry the death penalty for homosexual behavior.  “Across many parts of Africa, we’ve seen a rise in homophobic violence,” London-based gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell said to Rukmini Callimachi, reporter for the AP.  Tatchell’s organization records and monitors abuses against lesbians and gay men throughout the continent. “It’s been steadily building for the last 10 years but has got markedly worse in the last year,” he said.  Many suggest that a clandestine gay wedding in suburban Dakar, the capital of Senegal, sparked the current wave of anti-gay violence.  A Senegalese tabloid obtained photos of the wedding, splashing it across its front page in February 2008.  On the heels of this yellow journalism, in March 2008 a major international conference of Muslim clerics and the faithful was held in Senegal, and officials began oppressing any forms of behavior deemed “un-Muslim,” such as prostitution and homosexuality.  Police began rounding up men suspected of being gay.  Muslim preachers,Imams, have started denouncing homosexuality from their pulpits, egging the persecution further, as reported by the AP.  Massamba Diop, a militantly anti-gay imam and head of Jamra, a powerful political group linked to Senegal’s parliament, preached in one of his Friday sermons, “During the time of the Prophet, anytime two men were found together, they were taken to the top of a mountain and thrown off.”  Diop continued for his rapt congregation, “If they didn’t die when they hit the ground, then rocks would be thrown on them until they were killed.”  Callimachi, the AP reporter, noted that Diop’s homophobic sermons and others like it were broadcast by loudspeakers to mobs of worshipers who could not get into his crowded mosque in Pikine, and and have been covered in Senegal’s over 30 magazines and newspapers.  Scholars of anthropology have indicated that Muslim faithful are now blaming prostitutes and gay people for high inflation, bad weather, and poor harvests, as the outbreak of homophobia continues unabated.  Ironically, Senegal has been viewed as a paradigm of tolerant Islam, but this outbreak of repression and violence is putting an end to that opinion.  The tabloid hysteria and the religious crackdown drove gay men into exile in neighboring countries, but they failed to find sanctuary even there.  Gambia’s president published an edict warning Senegalese gays that they had a day to leave his country or face decapitation.  As early as mid-2008, deceased men suspected of being gay were refused religious burials in Senegal, and a wave of ghoulish desecrations of their bodies began to sweep the nation.  In Madieye Diallo’s province alone, just before he died, four other gay corpses were exhumed and abused.  A 31-year-old gay friend of Diallo’s, struggling with HIV, told Callimachi that after learning about the mob’s treatment of Diallo’s corpse, “I locked myself inside my room and didn’t come out for days. I’m afraid of what will happen to me after I die. Will my parents be able to bury me?”  Now, gay men are being hunted like animals…even after their deaths.

April 11, 2010 Posted by | "Kill the Gays Bill", Africa, Decapitation and dismemberment, desecration of corpses, funerals, gay men, harassment, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, Law and Order, Legislation, Lesbian women, mob-violence and lynching, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, rape, religious hate speech, religious intolerance, Senegal, Uganda | , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Desecration of Gay Corpses in Senegal; Gay Men Hunted Like Animals

Special Comment: Living Hope

by Stephen V. Sprinkle

Living Hope

A Keynote Address for “Hope, Not Hate” 2008

in Remembrance of Matthew Wayne Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.

University Baptist Church

Austin, Texas

October 12, 2008

~ ~ ~

A paraphrase of Edwin Markham’s poem, “Victory in Defeat,” goes something like this: “Defeat as well as victory can shake the soul and let the glory out.” We are here tonight to tell the history of hope, not hate: hope born out of the hateful deaths of two men ten years ago, James Byrd, Jr. of Jasper, Texas, and Matthew Wayne Shepard of Laramie, Wyoming. Their stories brought us all together tonight. A decade ago, in the United States of America, they each died brutally at the hands of men who had learned to hate someone different.


University Baptist Church in Austin, Texas

Dragged behind a pickup truck in the Lone Star State of Texas for over three miles, James Byrd, Jr. died dismembered in a ditch in the wee hours of a June Sunday morning. People going to church found his body, minus his head and right arm, lying in the road in front of a little cemetery. They called the police, and as the police were speeding on their way to the crime scene, other citizens flagged them down because they had found James Byrd’s head in a drainage ditch.

Bludgeoned into a fatal coma with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol, young Matthew Shepard was robbed of his shoes, his wallet, and ultimately his life in the Equality State of Wyoming on a cold October night. High in the desolate prairie, Matt’s bloody, broken body was trussed to a buck fence where he was abandoned to freezing wind and unforgiving sun for over 18 hours. When his near-lifeless body was found, the deputy sheriff who cut him free from that buck fence testified that he no longer looked like a human being, but more like a beaten Halloween scarecrow, limp on the ground. She said that his face was slathered with blood except for the tracks of his tears on his cheeks where the blood had been washed away. A few days later, Matt’s heart gave out, and he lost his fight for life in an Intensive Care unit.

Yes, defeat can shake the soul. That is what the poet, Edwin Markham said. Markham was a youth in the American Civil War, and the cataclysm of war ravaged the country in the years of the poet’s childhood. African Americans know the earthquakes of hatred and defeat. Long after that awful war was over, new battles faced African Americans, new defeats challenged hope with hate. Jim Crow, Separate But Equal, Strange Fruit with so many thousands lost to the rope that a sinister new term had to be invented to describe it: “lynching.” Hanging from the limbs of southern trees, shot and cut by the Ku Klux Klan, bombed in their Sunday School rooms, cut down by gunfire on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel… in the defeat of death they lay like rows of grain chopped down in a grisly harvest. We remember their names: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Emmet Till, the four little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham: Addie May Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair. Their killings and the murders of too many others to recount tonight show us what hate crimes against a whole race of people can do to shake the soul.


James Byrd, Jr.

Another slow-rolling holocaust swept the United States from the time in the late 19th century when the term “homosexual” was first coined by doctors who said it was a disease. Who someone loved had already been contested ground in America. In 1958, Mildred Jeter (a woman of white, African-American and Native American heritage) and Richard Loving (a white man) fell in love in the racially mixed, low-income farmland of Caroline County, Virginia. Because of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, they traveled to Washington, D. C. to get married. Shortly after their return to Virginia, police burst into their bedroom at 3 a.m., arrested husband and wife, and carried them away to jail. The Lovings pleaded guilty to being married; they were sentenced to one year in prison. Though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Virginia law against “miscegenation,” or interracial marriage, in 1967, there are haters who still believe loving someone is a crime worthy of death.

Though silent and hidden for much of the 20th Century, loving someone of the same gender, or seeking to live into a different gender than the one assigned at birth by a doctor, or even being perceived as belonging to such an orientation has often meant assassination and terror. The defeat of death has shaken the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community, with thousands of fatal attacks throughout this land of the free. Their homes have been desecrated, their bars bombed and burned. They are shot in their classrooms before the eyes of their fellow students, beaten to death with fists and clubs, mutilated with knives, and immolated on stacks of kerosene-soaked tires down lonely, desolate roads. Their lives were counted as less worthy than the lives of other citizens, and scriptures have been endlessly quoted to justify their extermination. We remember their names, tonight, too: Harvey Milk and Diane Whipple, Larry King and Simmie Williams, Billy Jack Gaither and Scotty Joe Weaver, Talana Quay Kreeger and Sakia LaTona Gunn, Paul Broussard, Nicolas West, and Kenneth Cummings, Jr., Fred C. Martinez, Jr., Amancio Corrales, and Gwen Amber Rose Araujo.

The ground of hope on which we stand tonight still shakes with the defeat death brings to African Americans and LGBT Americans. Too many times our respective communities have been shaken apart by differences. As the Dallas Voice has said, it would be hard to find lives of two men more different than the lives of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard. James Byrd was a 49-year-old black man, a father and a grandfather, living in Southeast Texas. Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old white man, a son of privilege going to school at the University of Wyoming.


Matthew Wayne Shepard

One of them was a political science major, longing to advocate for the poor and oppressed, ready to launch out into life for the very first time. One of them was unemployed, living on disability checks, and like the Black Church tradition sometimes says, “tryin’ to make a way out of no way.”

But if they are indeed united in the defeat of death, the souls of the Byrd Family and the Shepard Family shaken by the earthquake of terror that only a hate crime can effect, we believe James Byrd and Matthew Shepard are united in something far wider and more vast than the shadow of death. They are forever united in the history of hope, a living hope, a hope worth living for.

James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard represent living hope. As Rev. Karen Thompson, Senior Pastor of MCC Austin at Freedom Oaks has said so well, “It is important that we not let our lasting images of these two men…be images of them as victims of hate. Rather,” she goes on to say, “we are called by their memories to do all we can to ensure that hate will not be the final word.” Ignorance and fear would have us accept defeat in the face of hate, but we cannot do that, because we cannot permit the killers to own the stories of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard.


Rev. Karen Thompson, Senior Pastor of MCC in Austin

When the intense spotlight of publicity glared down on the families of these slain men, the Byrd Family and the Shepard Family showed the way to healing and not hate.

Ten years ago, Diane Hardy-Garcia, former executive director of the parent organization of what is now Equality Texas, approached Stella and James Byrd, Sr. to ask that a Hate Crimes act be named after their son. As she recounted recently to the Dallas Voice, “[James Byrd, Jr.’s] mother was so gracious to us. I explained the history [of the Hate Crimes Law in Texas] to them, and how it had failed before and how we wanted to present it this time as a whole package. And I told her, ‘I’ve got to tell you the truth. I think they will pass it if it is just about race. The hang up is including sexual orientation.’

“I had given [Mrs. Byrd] my card,” Hardy-Garcia remembered, “which clearly said Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby.” After about a minute of silence, Mrs. Byrd said, “Follow me,” and took Hardy-Garcia into a room filled with condolence gifts from all over the world. Then Mrs. Byrd said, “I sent Matthew Shepard’s mother a note. We don’t have a problem.” Though the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Act went down to defeat the first time, as Hardy-Garcia predicted it might because of the inclusion of sexual orientation, the Byrd Family never wavered in their steadfast support.

The Byrd Family kept on calling for healing, not hating, and went on to establish the James Byrd, Jr. Foundation for Racial Healing. Ross Byrd, James Byrd, Jr.’s son, has chosen to oppose the death penalty, and he has campaigned against executing the very men who bludgeoned, spray painted, and chained his father to the back end of a pickup truck, dragging him to his death—all because he and his family believe in hope, not hate.


Stephen Sprinkle delivers the keynote address at “Hope, Not Hate” in Austin

Matthew Shepard’s parents, Judy and Dennis Shepard, chose hope, not hate, and spoke out against the execution of the two young men who killed their son. Along with Matt’s younger brother, Logan, the Shepards became active in educating against hate through the Matthew Shepard Foundation, an organization they founded to erase hatred through programs of diversity and education.

No one has been more courageously outspoken for the passage of state and federal hate crimes legislation than Judy Shepard, who has said to all who will hear her:

“Matt is no longer with us today because the men who killed him learned to hate. Somehow and somewhere they received the message that the lives of gay people are not as worthy of respect, dignity and honor as the lives of other people. They were given the impression that society condoned or at least was indifferent to violence against gay and lesbian Americans.”

She went on to say, “Today, we have it within our power to send a very different message than the one received by the people who killed my son. It is time to stop living in denial and to address a real problem that is destroying families like mine, James Byrd Jr.’s, and many others across America.”

If we are to rise to the challenge these two great families give us, to shake the soul of Texas and the nation, and to let the glory of a better, more just America shine through, then we have to get real about what it means to live out the hope we proclaim tonight.

  • The real problem is that it is ten years since the murders of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard, and the United States still does not have a federal hate crimes law that includes sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. There is still no Matthew Shepard Act on the books ten years after—why not?
  • The real problem is that even when the Lone Star State has a hate crimes law, the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Act, though there have been over 1800 hate crimes perpetrated in Texas since its passage, there have been only nine hate crimes cases tried under the provisions of this law. Ten years after, why only nine?
  • The real problem is that hate crimes are real and are on the rise in America. Don’t let anyone tell you there are not such things as hate crimes, or that “all murders are alike, and we already have the laws to cover them.” Hate crimes are brutally real, targeting whole populations of people with acts of terror. Hate crimes are significantly more violent and brutal than any other forms of domestic crime. You see, every locale and demographic of American society are affected: First Nations, Anglo, Black, Latino/Latina, South and Southeast Asian, Transgender, Gay Men, Lesbians, Disabled, young and mature. Homophobia and racism have long, crooked arms, reaching out to snatch the life away from women and men whose murders are underreported to begin with, and whose memories vanish so quickly.


Candlelighters at the “Hope, Not Hate” vigil in Austin, Texas

We can’t talk about crimes like these tonight in the abstract. What does hate crime look like in the year 2008? Here is what it looks like:

  • February 14, 2008: the senseless shooting of Lawrence “Larry” King, 15 years old, who was targeted because of his sexual orientation and non-conformity with traditional gender roles, in Oxnard, CA.
  • June 17, 2008: a hate crime attack perpetrated by 12 young men and women against Black teenager Tizaya Robinson, 17 years old, in Marshfield, MA.
  • July 17, 2008: the brutal and tragic hate murder of male-to-female transgender Latina, Angie Zapata, 18 years old, in Greeley, CO.
  • July 29, 2008: the killing of Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala, 25 years old, an undocumented Mexican immigrant of Shenandoah, PA who was fatally beaten at the hands of five white teenagers.
  • September 4, 2008: openly gay man, Richard Hernandez, 34 years old, murdered and dismembered inside his apartment in Dallas, TX.
  • October 6, 2008: Pvt. 2nd Class Michael Handman, 20 years old, a Jewish soldier in the US Army, was moved to a secure location at Fort Benning, GA far from the scene of an anti-Semitic assault by a fellow soldier that left him hospitalized with a concussion and other serious injuries.

What must we then do, if we are to move through the manifold defeats of hate crime violence in this land, to a land of hope, and not hate? Like you, I take courage from the leadership of the Byrd and Shepard Families. Like you, I need that courage tonight, to rededicate myself to healing and not hating, to hope, and not hate.

I believe we must first move past our personal feelings of powerlessness and denial, beyond the natural psychological barriers we all face when we stare into the mirror of such violence, and see our own part in it. Oh, yes, though it would be convenient to lay the blame exclusively somewhere else, we in the LGBT and Racial/Ethnic minority communities still have much understanding to learn, and much forgiveness to ask of each other, if we are ever to move beyond being defeated people ourselves, and find our way together into a better future for all our people. Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-female Black a capella choir, say it this way in the lyrics of their song, “Rise in Love”:

“Though we’re victimized, We’re not innocent…”

We have much work to do if we are to live into the hope we long for and talk about. We must renew our efforts to name, claim and reject the racism that too many LGBT people harbor against people of color, and to name, claim and reject the homophobia and heterosexism that too many racial/ethnic communities still hold against gay folk. We have to get over it! In a paraphrase of the Good Book, how can we say that we love justice and harbor ill will against others of us? We have to get “shook up and shook a-loose” ourselves if we are ever to lead our nation to a better society.


Candles in remembrance of Matthew Wayne Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.

And finally, we must move beyond just feeling bad about injustice. Americans are good about feeling bad. Perhaps we get angry, perhaps we get mad enough when we hear the outrageous stories of hate crimes in our community that we pay attention for a news cycle or two. Perhaps we attend a rally like this, and even write a little check to an advocacy group. And once we are past the first flush of emotion, then the economy gets our attention, or the fine Texas autumn, and we go dormant until hate strikes again, for hate surely will strike again if we do not act. Yes, Americans are good at feeling bad, until we start to feel better.

We cannot afford to let emotion alone motivate the work of justice. We who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes! (An homage to “Ella’s Song,” by Sweet Honey in the Rock.) When memory shakes the soul like an earthquake, we have the obligation and opportunity to remember James Byrd, Jr., and refuse to rest until Texas perfects the hate crimes statutes it has, and applies them not just nine times, but all 1800 times.

We who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes! When a mother like Judy Shepard challenges us to send a different message to America than the one delivered by the men who killed her son, we must embrace that memory with all its pain, and break out of defeat into action. We must join Judy Shepard in agitating our lawmakers and opinion-makers until the Matthew Shepard Act is passed in the new Congress, and signed into law by a new President of these United States.

We who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes! Until Black folks and gay folks, women and men, Latinos and Latinas, and all the citizens of this nation can live free and love without fear of acts of violence, until hate is overcome by acts of love and forgiveness and hope, until the glory of this land of the free and this home of the brave shines on all people without distinction and without discrimination.

Not another ten years! Not another 12 months! This very night, each one here must find the courage and resolve to lift up Byrd and Shepard as signs of our hope, a hope worth working for, a hope worth agitating for, a hope worth staying shook up about…

For we who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes!

Stephen V. Sprinkle
Director
The Unfinished Lives Project

October 20, 2008 Posted by | African Americans, Anglo Americans, Anti-Semitism, Beatings and battery, Bisexual persons, Bludgeoning, Decapitation and dismemberment, gay men, Hate Crime Statistics, Heterosexism and homophobia, Latino and Latina Americans, Law and Order, Legislation, Lesbian women, mob-violence and lynching, Native Americans, Neo-Nazis and White Supremacy, Politics, Racism, Remembrances, Special Comments, Texas, Torture and Mutilation, transgender persons, Uncategorized, Vehicular violence, Wyoming | 2 Comments

Pattern of severe of anti-LGBT violence increases nationwide

stop hate hand

The Hate Crimes Bill has provided an excellent summary of a new report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs showing anti-LGBT violence has been on the rise since the murder of Lawrence “Larry” King in Oxnard, California, at the beginning of this year.

“The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) reports a recent rash of at least 13 brutal and violent hate crimes that have occurred throughout the country on the heels of the murder of 15 year-old Lawrence King in Los Angeles and the brutal beating of Duanna Johnson, both in February of 2008,” says the Hate Crimes Bill’s website. “NCAVP reports that these hate crimes may indicate a frightening trend of increases in both the number and severity of anti-LGBT violence.”

The NCAVP findings come after several anti-LGBT hate crimes, including the police beating of a transgender woman in Memphis, Tennessee; the harassment and beating of a gay man on a New York subway; the murder of a transgender woman in Memphis, Tennessee; the alleged police beating of a gay man in Greeley, Colorado; the beating of a priest in Queens, New York, for protecting a group of LGBT youth living at a shelter for homeless youth; the midnight home-invasion and arson, in Central New York, by a self-proclaimed Neo-Nazi, who targeted a sleeping 65-year-old gay man (the victim was able to flee the home, unhurt); the fatal bludgeoning of 18-year-old Angie Zapata, a transgender Latina woman in Greeley, Colorado; the beating of gay man Jimmy Lee Dean, in Dallas, Texas, whose injuries were so severe that he was in intensive care and could not be interviewed or identified until five days after the crime; the severe injury of a man in upstate New York, whose two assailants beat, kicked, and shouted anti-gay slurs until they had broken ten bones in their victim’s face; the attack against an 18-year-old living in St Helens, in the United Kingdom, who died a week later from his injuries; the (at least partially) anti-gay-motivated shooting rampage in a Knoxville, Tennessee, church that claimed two lives and wounded seven others; the mob-beating and stabbing of a man perceived to be gay in Staten Island, New York; the ongoing and escalating harassment (for nearly 8 years) of a gay male couple living in Cleveland, Ohio, by anti-gay neighbors; and the ongoing and escalating harassment (for nearly 20 years) of a gay male couple living in a rural Pennsylvania town, who have suffered incidents of gunfire, vandalism, stalking, acts of intimidation, and the indifference from local police.

In a grim coincidence, more than one anti-LGBT hate crime has occurred in both Memphis, Tennessee, and Greeley, Colorado, since the beginning of 2008.

Unfinished Lives also offers our own analysis of the significance of anti-LGBT hate-crime statistics in the United States. The NCAVP’s findings and the Hate Crimes Bill’s detailed summary confirm what has been a growing concern for LGBT persons living in the United States.

August 19, 2008 Posted by | Arson, Beatings and battery, Bludgeoning, Colorado, gun violence, harassment, Hate Crime Statistics, Hate Crimes, home-invasion, mob-violence and lynching, multiple homicide, Neo-Nazis and White Supremacy, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, police brutality, religious intolerance, stabbings, stalking, Stomping and Kicking Violence, Tennessee, Texas, vandalism | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pattern of severe of anti-LGBT violence increases nationwide

Remembering Satendar Singh

July 21 marks the birthday of Satendar Singh, the victim of a 2007 anti-gay hate crime in Lake Natoma State Park in California. Russian evangelical Christians mobbed Satendar, shouted homophobic slurs, and beat him severely enough to cause a fatal brain injury. What began as a day to picnic and dance with friends is now a day of mourning for the LGBT community.

On Satendar’s birthday, we remember and celebrate his life.  Singh would have been 28 years old today.

 

This “Being Gay Today” video describes the events leading to Satendar Singh’s death:

July 21, 2008 Posted by | Asian Americans, Beatings and battery, California, gay men, mob-violence and lynching, religious intolerance, Remembrances, Slurs and epithets | , , , , , | 3 Comments