Hate Crime Victims
In the United States, racist anti-black bias is the most frequently reported hate crime motivation. Of the 8,208 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2010, 48.2% were race related - with 70.0% of those having an anti-black bias. Other frequently reported bias motivations were anti-Hispanic, anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic, anti-white, and against a person's sexual orientation.
High profile murders motivated by the victims' sexual orientation have prompted the passage of hate crimes legislation, notably the cases of Sean W. Kennedy and Matthew Shepard. Kennedy was mentioned by Senator Gordon Smith in a speech on the floor of the US Senate while advocating such legislation. The Matthew Shepard and James E. Byrd Jr. Hate crime Prevention Act was signed into law on October 28, 2009 by President Obama. It included sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, the disabled and military personnel and their family members. This is the first all-inclusive bill ever passed in the United States, taking 45 years to complete.
Read more about this topic: Hate Crime
Famous quotes containing the words hate, crime and/or victims:
“A short life and a merry one, my buck!
We used to say we’d hate to live dead-old,—
Yet now . . . I’d willingly be puffy, bald,
And patriotic.”
—Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
“The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.”
—Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919)