The Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force with local organizations call upon the community, both gay and non-gay, to join us in a press conference and vigil on:
Thursday, October 22, 1998
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm.
Lewis Quadrangle
(between 5th-6th at Market Street,
across from the Liberty Bell)
Philadelphia, PA
(Speakers will be announced shortly)
Please bring a candle and, if you can, prepared signs that communicate your message about this and so many other brutal murders of our people. Some messages you may want to consider:
You may wish to convey your personal message to public officials who fail to support or who assault our civil and human rights; to education professionals who silence or ignore multiracial and cultural curricula; to religious leaders who assail our rights and demonize our humanity, for it is each in concert, that continue to create an environment that promotes bigotry and hatred, fear and ignorance—violence and discrimination.
(attached press release)
Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force
For Immediate Release-1 Contact:
Advisory--October 12, 1998
Further releases will follow
Rita Addessa 215-772-2001 10-10 pm
215-724-8244
plgtf@op.net
Larry Gross, Ph.D. CoChair
215-898-5620 and 215-PEANUTS
Kathryn Furano, CoChair
215-557-4463
On the matter of Hate Crime and Public Officials’ Culpability and Response
This Week: The Murder of Matthew Shepard
Needed: Substantive changes in our economic structure, in our social structure, in our educational systems, and in our family structures to reflect a commitment to justice and equality, to knowledge about and respect for our differences.
"…..Bigotry and hatred have no place in a democratic society….the brutal torture and murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming and last year of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas are a logical consequence of public officials’ political and moral failure to establish basic civil rights protections for all people and where such civil rights protections do exist, failure to enforce, rigorously, such laws. At the same time, the unmasked hatred behind these crimes and the demonization of innocent human beings as "other," reveals a deep chasm between rhetoric and action in US politics generally and most particularly in education policy…said Rita Addessa, executive director of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force.
….(t)he hate-driven murders of Shepard and of Byrd are symptomatic of a culture in which racism, sexism, and heterosexism are the institutionalized norm that undergird all social and economic policy in this country. The appearance of civility, of pleas for so-called "tolerance" and the purported concern of the President and other public officials about human life ring hollow in the face of such brutal deaths.
…..The President’s response to the recent and heinous anti-gay murder of Matthew Shepard , on its face, is inadequate in its call for strengthened hate crimes legislation and is hypocritical within the context of the President’s own capitulation to the Department of Defense’s anti-gay witch-hunts and employment discrimination policies, to the U.S. Congress in its adoption of the misnamed Defense of Marriage Act to codify marriage as a heterosexual-privilege, and in his failure to support the rights of lesbian and gay citizens as the U.S. Supreme Court deliberated Colorado’s Amendment 2. These acts of omission and commission legitimize the terrorization of gay and lesbian people as second class citizens, as people who are defined as "other." (more………)
Plgtf. October 12, 1998. 2 of 3. Addessa at 215-772-2001 and 724-8244 before 8 a.m.
Bias crime legislation, while important, is reactive. Twenty three states, not including Pennsylvania, have extended hate crime legislation to include the category sexual orientation and while such legislation is symbolically important, increasing penalties for the commission of hate crimes cannot be shown to deter hate crime nor does such legislation address the multilayered causes of hatred and bigotry.
In contrast, civil rights laws are proactive and create, at least formally, an "equal playing field" for all citizens. Only nine states have extended basic civil rights protections in employment, housing, and in public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, and only one state further expands these basic protections to transgendered people. Overall, forty-one states, including Wyoming and Pennsylvania, sanction discrimination against our community. In Pennsylvania, state legislators have refused to introduce twin civil rights bills to prohibit discrimination in all areas including education and have repeatedly refused to act, as well, to amend bias crime statutes to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
Where federal and state statutes do prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and religion, such statutes are rarely enforced meaningfully, a function of our political structure and chronic underfunding. Where education policies that affirm the need to teach multiracial-cultural-gender fair studies exist, they are not enforced -not in Philadelphia, not in Pennsylvania, nor in the rest of the nation.
Hate crime does not occur in a vacuum and will continue until we, as individuals and as institutions, exert our moral and political will on the construction of a social environment that is grounded in respect for human life – an environment that affirms each of us as human beings entitled to basic human rights under law and in public policy.
In Pennsylvania: a brief summary.
In December 1986, a young gay man named Anthony Milano, then 27, was brutally murdered in Bucks County; several months later, a young white woman named Rebecca Wight was maliciously murdered on the Appalachian Trail in Adams County. That same year, seven or eight African American and Puerto Rican gay men who identified as transgender were murdered. In 1990, Pennsylvania experienced about 20 anti-gay murders and several years ago in Pittsburgh, a middle age white gay man was slain by a young man who bragged about the murder. The Task Force has issued repeated studies over the last decade that show a high incidence of discrimination and violence against lesbian and gay people. Our 1996 study shows that one of every two gay and lesbian respondents have experienced discrimination over their lifetimes. Respondents were one and one-half times to three times more likely to experience criminal violence than USA adults. A substantial number of study participants suffered abuse in school settings and in family settings (n-3086). (Call for a copy of the 1996 Study-72 pages) Despite the incidence of anti-gay murder and despite the findings of our studies over the last decade, Pennsylvania legislators have refused to support our proposed introduction of twin civil rights bills, have refused to amend bias crime statues, and, under the Ridge Administration, are aggressively working towards dismantling limited education equity reforms related to multiracial-cultural-gender fair curricula policies.#####