I am splitting this over here.
I was involved in the early efforts regarding hate crimes. What was eventually enacted had little to do what we were trying to do.
In 1994, I had to attend the funeral of a young man I knew. The last time I saw him alive was about a week before, when he came to me for support. He had been raped. When he had gone to the police department to report it, the officers laughed at him and made comments about “why would a fag complain about getting fucked?”
He committed suicide a few days later.
While at the funeral, I met his parents. I knew full well that they didn’t “approve” of homosexuality. I smiled as best as I could, conveyed my condolences, and remarked that I could understand, after what the guy had gone through, how he might feel there was no other choice. They had no idea what I was talking about. The father ushered me into a side room of the funeral home, and I explained to him what had happened. He was shocked, and ashamed that his son hadn’t felt that he could go to his father for support and help.
That news never made the newspaper. The newspaper also didn’t cover the issue when the father went to the police to demand an explanation.
What we were trying to do back then was not to claim special status or call for special punishments. We never addressed the perpetrators of the crimes at all. What we were trying to do is force the police to take the reports, take them seriously, investigate the complaints, and include the reports in the usual tallies of crimes. We were trying to force the prosecutors to actually take the cases to court, and to stop actively trying to dissuade the victim from pressing charges. We were trying to force judges to apply the same sentencing criteria to the perpetrators of these crimes as the criteria applied to people who committed crimes against non-gays.
But when we finally got some politicians to listen (thanks to allies like parents and other relatives of victims) and do something about it, they didn’t want to penalize those nice, normal, hardworking people at the police department, the district attorney’s office, or the courthouse. No, the only way we could get anything done was to focus solely on the perpetrators and impose different penalties.
And no, what we got is not working. The term “hate crime” has been co-opted in so many different directions, we still don’t have the numbers that we need to address the violence or the callousness of the system. There are no penalties for a police officer who pretends that he didn’t get a crime reported to him. There are no penalties for a lawyer who “accidentally” moves the case file into the recycling bin. There are no penalties for the judge who gives the perpetrator a wink and a suspended sentence.
Please don’t blame the activists. Blame the politicians (and their staffs) who are horrified by the concept of holding people accountable for not doing their job.