Please accept this as a Letter to the Editor:
Another hate murder in Colorado marks the third or fourth in a few years: the victim was Kevin Hale, 36, of Montrose. Todd Fiske and Adam Hernandez stand accused of an ambush-murder. Their defense will say he wanted to pick one of them and that justified stalking him for weeks and then killing him.
These murders occur while the extremist christian-Republican axis escalates their bigotry, focusing on denying our humanity – the way we’re genetically engineered to live, claiming our lives are ‘unforgivable’. That superstitious poison emerged during the madness of the Dark Ages. Today it’s utilized by sociopaths to excuse compulsive violence. Just as the Nazi’s irrationally blamed Jews for Europe’s ailments, christians scapegoat us to counteract their waning influence and divert interest in child rape scandals, etc. and the Republicans to divert attention from their illegal war and plunging polls. They’re joined by many Democrats who blame us for election losses.
Their repulsive bigotry metastasizes into violence, giving a green light to ‘hands on’ thugs. According to GLSEN, 84% of gay/lesbian high school students’ endure regular verbal harassment while 40% are physically harassed. An April 2005 report of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs indicates growing violence, with a 4% overall increase, as murders and lynchings rose from 18 in 2003 to 20 in 2004. (The numbers are likely greater because of unreported or misleading data.)
Whatever the numbers they’re intolerable. We need to campaign for laws guaranteeing that those who provoke bigotry and violence are jailed along with their thug partners. We hold the moral high ground and ought to claim our full rights as citizens. Recalling how bigoted ‘racial purity’ laws were used from 1933-1945 by an earlier religious-political axis, the Nazis, as a prelude to mass murder, anything less than winning full equality puts us in with the sharks. Victim lawsuits such as those used to push the KKK back into the garbage heap in the 1980’s would be a great benefit.
(For information see these websites: www.splcenter.org, www.glsen.org and www.ncavp.org.)
Bill Perdue
(Please don’t publish my e-mail address which I’m providing for verification purposes.There are 326 words in the body of the letter.)
