STUDY: FBI Hate-Crime Report Has Bad News For Gay Men

Federal Bureau of Investigation just released its Hate Crime Statistics report for 2010. And while the figures haven’t changed so much from last year’s, they’re still troubling.

Local law enforcement agencies reported 8,208 hate-crime victims. A majority of the victims fell prey to racist violence (47.3 percent). Of the 3,949 victims of racially-motivated attacks, 70 percent were attacked for being black and 17.7 for being white. Of the 6,008 known offenders in all hate crimes, 58.6 percent were white and 18.4 were black.

It’s interesting to note that religion and sexual orientation got targeted for attacks at similar rates (20 to 19.3 percent or 1,552 to 1,528 victims respectively). But before you go believing NOM’s line that Christians and “marriage defenders” are being targeted for their faith, keep in mind that Jewish and Islamic faiths faced the brunt with of violence (accounting for 67 to 12.7 percent of the the 1,552 anti-religious attacks) while Christians ranked just over seven percent.

Furthermore, of the 1,528 attacks motivated by sexual orientation, gay men got targeted 57.3 percent of the time and lesbians got targeted 11.8 percent of the time—presumably including bisexuals. Sadly, the report does not include anti-trans crime yet, but thanks to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2009, local authorities have begun tracking such data