(San Francisco, California) A three-fold spike in homophobic hate crimes in Santa Clara County over the past year is being blamed on the fallout over Proposition 8, the voter measure than banned same-sex marriage in California.

More than half the hate crimes reported in the county south of San Francisco were directed at the LGBT community. Last year, 56 percent of hate crimes were designated as homophobic. The year before, it was 15 percent.

“My belief from having done this work for many years is that surges in types of hate incidents are linked to the headlines and controversies of the day,” Deputy District Attorney Jay Boyarsky told The Mercury News.

Boyarsky monitors hate crimes for the District Attorney’s office. “Marriage equality and Proposition 8 have been in the news, and we have seen an increase in gay-bashing,” he told the paper.

Statistics from other California counties have not been released. The figures will be included in the state Attorney General’s annual hate crimes report to be released in July.

LGBT rights activists said they were not surprised by the report.

“When there’s a lot more information about gays and lesbians on TV or in the news, it brings out the worst in people who have an inherent bias against groups they don’t belong to,” Leslie Bulbuk, president of BAYMEC, told The Mercury News. “It seems like visibility makes people come out of the woodwork.”

Prop 8 leaders don’t dispute the findings but claim the report does not reflect cases in which supporters of the measure were harassed.

“I certainly hope Proposition 8 did not result in more crime,” Frank Schubert of Protect Marriage told the paper. “But if it did, it did so on both sides.”

Earlier this month the California Supreme Court heard arguments challenging the way Prop 8 was placed on the ballot.

The lawsuits charge that Proposition 8 is invalid because the initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution’s core commitment to equality for everyone, by eliminating a fundamental right from just one group – lesbian and gay Californians.

They also say that Proposition 8 improperly attempts to prevent the courts from exercising their essential constitutional role of protecting the equal protection rights of minorities. The suits say that under the California Constitution, such radical changes to the organizing principles of state government cannot be made by simple majority vote through the initiative process, but instead must, at a minimum, go through the state legislature first.

The California Constitution itself sets out two ways to alter the document that sets the most basic rules about how state government works, the groups said in a written brief to the court.

Through the initiative process, voters can make relatively small changes to the constitution.  But any measure that would change the underlying principles of the constitution must first be approved by the legislature before being submitted to the voters.  That didn’t happen with Proposition 8, and that’s why it’s invalid, the petitioners said.

The court has 90 days to issue a ruling.

A public opinion poll released last week found that prospective voters remain deeply divided over the issue of same-sex unions.  Forty-eight percent said they would vote to repeal the proposition. Forty-seven percent would vote to maintain the ban.  Five percent are undecided.