Subscribe to Breaking NewsWithers: Another hate crime victim
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is right. The press conferences are getting tiresome. Jack Price was minding his business, thinking he could walk to a corner store. Two culprits thought otherwise and allegedly attacked him, leaving Price with two collapsed lungs, a lacerated spleen, broken ribs and a broken jaw. As the culprits beat him, the whole affair was captured on camera, they shouted anti-gay epithets.
A suspect was arrested this past Sunday and the other—Daniel Rodriguez apparently on the run—was caught yesterday at the home of a relative in Virginia (why is it that criminals who do stuff that makes the papers think they can get away by going to a relative’s house?). Rodriguez’s family is coming to his defense, arguing there is no way he has anti-gay animus.
“This wasn’t a hate crime,” said Christina Rodriguez, the suspects sister. “If he’s guilty of anything, he’ll man up to it.”
So now we wait for the legal system to turn its slow wheels. As for Price, he underwent surgery yesterday and at last word his condition was described as serious yet stable.
“He’s speaking,” said Price’s sister-in-law JoAnne Guarneri. “He’s our miracle. God wasn’t ready to take him yet.”
Anyone want to argue that some straight’s don’t have a certain bigotry?
This isn’t helping your case at all. What these hoodlums did was despicable, no question about it. But that doesn’t bespeak straight people as a whole. I have plenty of straight friends and I’m sure you do too. No matter how ignorant some people act, we have to be better. As soon as we reduce ourselves to their level and start throwing around generalizations of our own, it’s clear that we haven’t learned a damn thing about tolerance.
“Two culprits thought otherwise and allegedly attacked him” Seriously, On tape they are hitting and kicking him and calling him names that prove that it was a hate crime.
Why is it that when a gay person gets attacked they have to decide if ti is a hate crime, yet when a guy pretends he is going to run two women over with his car because they are crossing the street against the light, it is a hate crime because they are wearing some kind of muslim dress. It didn’t take them that long to “decide” that it was a hate crime.
@ Brad…I don’t want to be better, constantly thinking that I have to be better than the average “straight” person because I am gay and have to prove myself. NO, I want to live my life without fear of being beat up when I go to the store.
Preaching tolerance….PLEASE! Gay people can’t even tolerate each other.
James,
Evil people exist both Gay and Straight. The people who did this are evil.
Were you not at Sunday’s March? I was amazed at how many straight folks came out to support us. Also your fears about it being an all white event did not come true either. This weekend I will edit the 5 hours or so of video and post it somewhere, there were people of all shapes, sizes, colors, young, old, male, female, and other.
There is hope that we can come together as human beings. The march even started with a rainbow.
The tone of this article does not help the cause. It appears from this and some of your other articles you are trying to segregate folks vs. trying to pull folks together.
Bob
@teachermahn: I didn’t say be better than the average straight person, I said be better than some ignorant homophobe. We have nothing to gain in being “heterophobes.”
And you’re not telling me anything new about gay people barely tolerating each other. Most of my friends are straight. It’s like, no matter how nice or friendly I act around a gay person, they’ll either ignore me or be flat out rude. There are exceptions (not counting guys I dated, since their intentions were clear from the start), but they’re few.
Bobweekend,
“Also your fears about it being an all white event did not come true either.”
You must be reading another James Withers because the above “fear” was NEVER voiced by me.
James
Withers I was disapointed at your last post, this attempt to back up your argument really really just bemuses me. You should NOT be connecting this with straights.
PEOPLE have bias and bigotry. Gay, Straight, White, Black, Asian, purple with neon red polka dots. As a species we seem drawn to it, and it is only through intense self awareness and a desire to be better than our base nature that we are able to rise above it.
You need to rise above this and stop identifying this as being in any way associated with “straights”. In the most basic data sort of way “some” straights are bigoted, because they are part of the larger “some” people category, and for no other reason. By identifying them specifically you render every argument you have ever made against the association of black people with Prop 8 a huge beacon of hypocracy. I happen to agree with your views on Prop 8, but you aren’t doing the truth any favors by utilizing the same flawed logic that people who point fingers at the black population in that argument use.
it was a hate crime plain and simple …they need to pay….to the full extint of the law..
and to brad you need to read better,he said some not all!!!!!!!!!!
Here’s a link to the video of this latest gay bashing:
http://www.ktla.com/videobeta/watch/?watch=0f8d8b98-a27d-43d4-bcd4-94c7ecfbb014&src=front
Seriously, if anyone can show me one crime victim that wasn’t a result of hate I’d be the first one to codify special rules.
But, to me, if you steal any of my CD’s, iPod, or even a frozen steak in my fridge – fuck you and your hatred of my having property.
So give me your best defense of special laws enhancing crimes. Any crime against me deprives me of what’s mine. So why should any reason to do that be considered special?
Don’t even try to throw out deterrence. There are laws against murder, 15 extra years won’t be like “I can do 10 years for murder, but 20? Oh hell no!”
Jeffrey Barea: Hate crimes have a destabilizing effect on communities. They create psychological issues among even those not directly involved in the crime.
Antisemitic violence, for example, has created a situation where most Jewish organizations border on paranoia regarding the security of their offices and buildings, even though the number of major incidents in a year is usually zero.
Uh, Jeff, the reason hate-crimes laws ever got passed in any US jurisdiction might have something to do with a failure to enforce the existing civil-rights laws. You don’t want hate-crimes specifications, then ENFORCE THE CONSTITUTION. I don’t hear you saying that, and instead you equate hate crimes to stealing an iPod. If I’m standing on a corner in, say, Chelsea, and I see ten, twenty, thirty people go by–men, women, young, old, black, white, asian, hispanic–then I go after one guy. In fact, I signal to a couple of my buddies. He has an iPod, but I’ve seen much nicer ones in the crowd. I’ve seen people with cash in hand, people with expensive clothes and jewelry, people with shopping bags. I’ve seen people with canes, with walkers, with Seeing Eye dogs. People with kids in tow. But I don’t attack any of them. I attack some dude, 5′7″ and maybe 130, with a faux-hawk and a Lady Gaga t-shirt. Me and my two buds spot him, make sure he sees us, herd him into an alley, and beat the shit outta him. Just why do you think that happened? It was presumption of his sexual orientation. Tell me it doesn’t happen, or that it hasn’t happened. Tell me that there hasn’t been a question about the NYPD’s response to something that sure looked like a gay-bashing in Hell’s Kitchen. I don’t care for different standards under the law, because I think it’s corrosive to the concept of equality. However, since we have significant evidence in the last fortnight that it DOES take hate-crimes laws to enforce EXISTING civil rights, then you need to re-examine your rigid ideological stance and stop providing de facto cover to those who choose their targets by identity instead of opportunity.
>Anyone want to argue that some straight’s don’t have a certain bigotry?
You really had to bend logic to write this sentence.
“Anyone want to argue that some gays don’t have a certain bigotry?”
“Some” members of any group will hold some despicable points of view.
>It’s like, no matter how nice or friendly I act around a gay person, they’ll either ignore me or be flat out rude. There are exceptions (not counting guys I dated, since their intentions were clear from the start), but they’re few.
Honey…MOVE! Or hang around the bear community…”step right up…free bear hugs!”
>Seriously, if anyone can show me one crime victim that wasn’t a result of hate…
Hate crimes are not about all hate. It’s about hate for a *group* of people that’s being taken out on a member of that group. The effect of the crime goes beyond the individual(s) beaten or killed–it’s designed to created a chilling effect, to keep all members of that group “in their place.”
The “design” can be either conscious or subconscious. Doesn’t matter.
How tragic and how sad, it has to come to this.This guys were so filled with hate,they forgot the penalties involved if they got caught.Throw the book at them.I am a victim of anti-gay violence and I remember how obsessed these guys were,with battling{usually there own gay demons,but not always.