ONE YEAR ago this week, the Obama administration celebrated the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage by festooning the White House in the rainbow-coloured lights of the gay pride flag. Last week, the White House stars-and-stripes flew at half-mast to honour the 102 people who were killed or injured on June 12th while dancing in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The attack was, in Barack Obama’s words, “an act of terror and hate” targeting young gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans, most of them Hispanic.
The Orlando shooting was unique in its lethality, but it is far from the only recent example of anti-gay violence in America. In 2010, a 30-year-old man and two 17-year-olds living in the Bronx were kidnapped and tortured by a group of men in their teens and 20s. The attackers, who called themselves the Latin King Goonies, beat the victims for being gay, sodomised them with a plunger and a plastic baseball bat and forced one of the teens to burn the older man’s genitals with a cigarette. Many of the gang...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/28Q5YNE
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