LESBIANS V. GAY

Idiotic Lawyer Claims Lesbians Can’t Hate-Crime A Gay Man

While the LGBT community fares well in the acronym department, the reality is that we are, in many ways, deeply divided. It’s no secret that lesbians are the butt of gay men’s jokes, and that bisexual and transgender people are often written off as side notes to the gay rights movement.

But what happens when those pesky differences infiltrate a court of law?

The Boston Herald reports that three lesbians ganged up on a gay man at the Forest Hills train station, beating him up and yelling homophobic slurs at him.

“My guess is that no sane jury would convict them under those circumstances, but what this really demonstrates is the idiocy of the hate-crime legislation,” says civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate. “If you beat someone up, you’re guilty of assault and battery of a human being. Period. The idea of trying to break down human beings into categories is doomed to failure.”

While this lawyer sounds kind of dumb himself (just FYI, he’s not representing the lesbians or gay in the case)—calling hate-crime legislation “idiocy” is idiotic—his argument is certainly, um, interesting.

The thing here is that it’s not just three women beating up a man—the ladies called him a gay slur.

The victim says he pushed for hate-crime charges because he believes the act was “motivated as a crime because of his sexual orientation” since the three women “called him insulting homophobic slurs.”

Makes sense to us.

What do you guys think—do lesbians automatically get a pass on the whole “hate crime” thing when they beat a gay guy and call him a faggot, or is more about the intent of the crime and not about the sexual orientation of the perpetrator?  (We’re in the latter camp, if it wasn’t patently evident.)

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