Why Are Murders Of Gay And Bi Men Up A Staggering 400 Percent?
A 20-year-old man linked to a neo-Nazi group was charged last month in
the brutal stabbing death of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein, an openly gay Jewish college student who was reported missing by his family in Orange County, California, in early January and whose body was found in a wooded area.
Samuel Woodard, who allegedly stabbed Bernstein more than 20 times,
is a member of the group Atomwaffen Division, ProPublica reported.
Men with connections to the group have allegedly killed four other people across the country within an eight-month period.
HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias described the Atomwaffen Division as “a well-armed neo-Nazi group enamored with Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler whose members harbor grand and demented delusions of fighting a ‘race war’ and overthrowing the U.S. government.”
In a recent report by the Anti-Defamation League, killings committed
by white supremacists more than doubled in 2017. And hate-motivated homicides of LGBTQ people
were up a whopping 86 percent nationwide in 2017 over the previous year, according to a report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Transgender women of color have consistently been the most targeted group among LGBTQ people, each year making up the highest number of hate-motivated killings.
Those numbers have been increasing dramatically. “In 2017, there were 27 hate-violence related homicides of transgender and gender non-conforming people, compared to 19 reports in 2016,” according to the NCAVP report. “[Twenty-two] of these homicides were of transgender women of color.”
And then there is the staggering statistic from the NCAVP report on murders of cisgender queer, gay or bisexual men: a 400 percent increase in hate-motivated homicides in 2017 ― from four in 2016 to 20 in 2017.
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