In the wake of the hate-motivated murder last week of Mark Carson in New York City’s Greenwich Village — just one in a string of anti-transgender and anti-gay hate crimes plaguing the city, LGBT rights activist Scott Wooledge challenged LGBT rights opponents to repudiate the violence:

A white supremacist named Wade Michael Page opened fire at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, on Sunday and killed six worshippers, so how did media handle it? The tension over whether this was “domestic terrorism” or a hate crime or neither appeared on air as CNN host Don Lemon tried to hush Rajwant Singh, chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education, who attempted to place what had happened in the context of prior vigilante-type attacks against Sikhs after the September 11th attacks.

How do we stop the ignorance, hate, & violence directed against people just trying to live their lives in peace (& in theory, equality)? A simple question.

Corrective Rape is a hate crime that for the most part goes unreported and unprosecuted in South Africa.

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) released its report, Hate Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and HIV-Affected Communities in the United States in 2011 on Thursday, and the statistic that jumped out is the rise in anti-LGBT murders, up 11%.

The Justice Department and the FBI, responding to a growing display of outrage, will open an investigation into the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17 year-old African-American killed in a gated community in Sanford, Florida by a neighborhood watch captain. This follows a month of protests over the shooting and the failure of local authorities to arrest the shooter.

As many Americans suffer long-term unemployment, lose their homes, and wonder how they will pay for the groceries or the utility bill, an urge to find a scapegoat is increasingly common. And it is often Latinos and undocumented workers that are blamed for the nation’s economic ills.