Words Have Consequences: Anti-LGBT Hate Crime

The American Family Association’s chief spokesman, Bryan Fischer, has a special fondness for calling gay people ugly names.

They are “perverts” and “sexual deviants,” he says. They are 10 times more likely to molest children than heterosexuals, he claims against all the scientific evidence. They were specially selected by Hitler because “homosexual soldiers basically had no limits” to their “savagery and brutality” — an assertion no serious historian agrees with. LGBT activists are “Nazis” who will “do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents,” he insists, and gay people are “the single greatest perpetrators of hate crimes on the planet, outside the Muslim religion.”

Well, not really. Actually, LGBT people are the minority who, by far, are the most victimized by hate crime violence in the United States.

An analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be attacked in hate crimes as black people or Jews. They are more than four times as likely to be attacked as Muslims. And they are vastly more likely to suffer violent hate crime attacks than either Latinos or, especially, white people. Fischer’s claim that gay people regularly target Christians for hate violence is completely unsupported.

Fischer and the American Family Association would certainly deny it, but it seems obvious that their reckless rhetoric contributes mightily to an atmosphere in which hate violence is all but inevitable. Fischer calls himself a Christian, but he is remarkably quick to bear false witness against his LGBT neighbors.