Monday, November 30, 2009

More anti-gay, religious-motivated crimes reported - Yahoo! News

More anti-gay, religious-motivated crimes reported - Yahoo! News: "By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Devlin Barrett, Associated Press Writer – Mon Nov 23, 10:14 am ET
WASHINGTON – Reports of hate crimes against gays and religious groups increased sharply in 2008, according to new FBI data released Monday.
Overall, the number of reported hate crimes increased about 2 percent. These same figures show a nearly 11 percent increase in hate crimes based on sexual orientation, and a nearly 9 percent increase in hate crimes based on religion.
The largest category, racially-motivated hate crimes, fell less than 1 percent.
Among all categories of hate crimes, roughly a third are vandalism or property damage. About 30 percent involve intimidation of some kind, and another 30 percent were physical attacks against people.
The FBI does not compare year-to-year trends in hate crimes, saying the number of agencies reporting changes too much. And in fact, the bureau cautioned that the increase reported Monday might well be due to more agencies tracking such incidents.
In 2008, 2,145 different agencies reported hate crimes incidents, while the year before 2,025 agencies did this reporting.
In total, there were 7,783 hate crimes reported to the FBI last year, and seven murders were categorized as hate crimes"

3 comments:

  1. People who hate another people for their orientantion or religion are wrong. These aren't doing anything wrong. This is an American, land of the free. People should be able to believe in whatever they want or be able to decide their sexual orenitation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This has been a hot issue in my life as of late. Two of my girlfriends best friends are gay, and yea before I met her I had a bit of trouble around gay people, but once I got to know these two dudes, I think there funny as anything. Now that I am more educated on the matter of homosexuality, I understand a lot more things about them. There really is no need to judge them for this and whenever I see it happen, it really gets under my skin.

    As for the religious aspect of this, the war on religion will never die. It's been going on for years, and as long as their are hardcore members of a religion, they're going to act out upon their "rival" religion. As ridiculous as that may be, I still don't see an end to that any time soon.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unfortunately there will always be discrimination in this country. I guess that's one of the bad parts of freedom of speech! I hate to see that innocent homosexuals are discriminated against. They haven't done anything wrong and just want to live a normal life like anyone else. And I agree with Rich that no matter what the war on religion will never end!

    ReplyDelete