Oklahoma Teen Beaten In Anti-Gay Attack
According to KOKI-TV, 18 year-old Cody Rogers was attending a party in Tulsa. Party-goers in the apartment were using homophobic slurs, which prompted others to ask them to leave the party. At that point, one of the men using the slurs allegedly attacked a female in the apartment.
When Rodgers stepped in, he became the victim of both a brutal assault and vicious anti-gay slurs.
Unfortunately, similar attacks take place against LGBT people all across the country. What makes this particular incident so disturbing, however, is that it takes place in Oklahoma – where just last week anti-LGBT state lawmaker Mike Reynolds (R-Oklahoma City) pushed hard for a bill that would have stripped municipalities of their ability to protect sexual orientation and gender identity in their non-discrimination policies.
Oklahoma has no hate crime protections that cover LGBT people. Because of this void, the attack on Cody is being classified as a simple assault.
Earlier this year, Reynolds was pushing legislation that would have implemented an even more extreme version of the archaic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on Oklahoma’s National Guard. Reynolds’ actions send a dangerous and false message – that LGBT people are second-class citizens not worthy of the same respect, recognition and protections that other Oklahomans receive.
Read More: http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2012/02/oklahoma-teen-b...
Gay/Bi/Stright You are Who You Are You Can't Change To Please The World Like I Have Been Sayin From Day 1 You Live Once Be Comfortable With Who You Are & Who You Love They Had No Right What So Ever!
There is no registered things as 'LGBT community citizens' and there are no more or less of these assaults on gays than anyone else.
Equal protection under the law my ass.
"Oklahoma has no hate crime protections that cover LGBT people. Because of this void, the attack on Cody is being classified as a simple assault."
Maybe you didn't say it was simple assault, but that's how it's being tried.
Wow, I must be loosing it bad because you are seeing me do thing that I have no memory of. I will be sure to get my head examined right away.
"Hate crimes are message crimes. Gay men beaten outside of a gay bar are rarely robbed. Vandals do not often spray-paint messages like "Jane Loves Bobby" on the side of synagogues; it is much more frequently defacement featuring threats and a swastika. And bigots do not burn parallelograms on the front lawns of African American families who have just moved into a previously all-white neighborhood. The message of the parallelogram might be misunderstood. Not so the remains of a burned cross. As Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in a 2003 case involving a First Amendment challenge to the Commonwealth of Virginia's cross-burning statute:
… the burning cross often serves as a message of intimidation, designed to inspire in the victim a fear of bodily harm. Moreover, the history of violence associated with the Klan shows that the possibility of injury or death is not just hypothetical.…when a cross burning is used to intimidate, few if any messages are more powerful. (Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 357 [2003])
In addition, over the past thirty years, many studies and surveys about hate violence—and the impact on the victims—indicate that these crimes are qualitatively different from other crimes. They are more serious ("…hate crimes are...
"Hate crimes are message crimes. Gay men beaten outside of a gay bar are rarely robbed. Vandals do not often spray-paint messages like "Jane Loves Bobby" on the side of synagogues; it is much more frequently defacement featuring threats and a swastika. And bigots do not burn parallelograms on the front lawns of African American families who have just moved into a previously all-white neighborhood. The message of the parallelogram might be misunderstood. Not so the remains of a burned cross. As Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in a 2003 case involving a First Amendment challenge to the Commonwealth of Virginia's cross-burning statute:
… the burning cross often serves as a message of intimidation, designed to inspire in the victim a fear of bodily harm. Moreover, the history of violence associated with the Klan shows that the possibility of injury or death is not just hypothetical.…when a cross burning is used to intimidate, few if any messages are more powerful. (Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 357 [2003])
In addition, over the past thirty years, many studies and surveys about hate violence—and the impact on the victims—indicate that these crimes are qualitatively different from other crimes. They are more serious ("…hate crimes are inherently more harmful to the social fabric than comparable crimes without bias motive," McDevitt, Balboni, Garcia, and Gu, 2001); more likely to involve violence ("…the victim of a hate crime assault is four times more likely to require hospital treatment than the victim of a parallel assault." McDevitt and Levin, 1993); more harmful in their aftermath ("The negative effects of hate crimes may be longer lasting than those of other crimes." Herek, Gillis, and Cogan, 1999).
FEW INDIVIDUAL CRIMES can spark riots, but bias-motivated crimes can. Civic leaders and police officials have come to recognize that strong enforcement of these laws can have a deterrent impact and can limit the potential for a hate crime incident to explode into a cycle of violence and widespread community disturbances.*"
"Hate crime statutes—federal criminal civil rights statutes and laws now on the books in forty-five states and the District of Columbia—do not punish speech or thoughts. The First Amendment does not protect violence, nor does it prevent the government from imposing criminal penalties for violent discriminatory conduct directed against victims on the basis of their personal characteristics. Americans are free to think, preach, and believe whatever they want. It is only when an individual commits a crime based on those biased beliefs and intentionally targets another for violence or vandalism that a hate crime statute can be triggered.
Under these laws, a perpetrator can face more severe penalties only if the prosecutor can demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the victim was intentionally targeted on the basis of his or her personal characteristics because of the perpetrator's bias against the victim."
"We should have no delusions about hate crime laws. Bigotry, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism cannot be legislated out of existence. The law is absolutely a blunt instrument; it is much better to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place.
But when these crimes do occur, we must send an unmistakable message that they matter, that our society takes them very seriously. Hate crime laws demonstrate an important commitment to confront and deter criminal activity motivated by prejudice. Like anti-discrimination laws, hate crime statutes are content-neutral, color-blind mechanisms that appropriately allow society to redress a unique type of wrongful conduct in a manner that reflects that conduct's seriousness.
Hate violence merits priority attention—and hate crime laws help ensure they receive it."