San Francisco has been a bastion for gay rights and acceptance, famously charioted by Harvey Milk’s election to the city’s board of supervisors. Yet even 37 years after his assassination, 60 percent of all of San Francisco’s hate crimes are against gay men.
Sgt. Peter Shields of the San Francisco Police Department’s Special Investigation Division is tasked with investigating these and other hate crimes. He says the other common ones include violence against transgendered people and graffiti against whites, blacks, Jews, and other groups.
Blog
August 13, 2015 - 4:46pm
In light of the recent attack in Charleston, SC, there has been a great deal of conversation about the cultivation of racial hatred that led to the massacre where nine people lost their lives. In his article "No One Is Exempt From the Responsibility to Combat Hate," excerpted below, Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, the former Executive Director of the Interfaith Alliance, explains his understanding of hate cultivation as seen through the lens of religion. Read the full article here.
By Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy
August 12, 2015 - 10:10am
Although there remains a lot of discussion and resistance on the global level, the recognition that LGBT people do have human rights is on the rise. In the European Union, there is progress on employment rights, the recognition of same-sex marriage and even trans* rights. However, a notable laggard in this list is the right to education.
August 11, 2015 - 10:10am
As an adult now, I have turned my experience into a positive one, if you can call it that. With the encouragement of my late mother I have written and had published two anti-bullying children’s books.
August 4, 2015 - 12:15pm
My partner and I had a Civil Partnership this summer. We stood up in front of friends and family and made vows to each other, exchanged rings, had a Celtic handfasting, and signed on the dotted line to declare that we are joined in law as well as in spirit. Afterwards we ate, drank and danced with those closest to us, all coming together to celebrate our relationship. We were able to do so because of the Civil Partnership Act 2004, which extends legal rights to same-sex couples, almost identical to those enjoyed by married mixed-sex couples. Such legal protections and rights were unimaginable to me as a teenager coming out in my home town in the early 1990s, when Section 28 still prevented ‘the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.