Bullied bullies, part 1

Anti-gay activists have been claiming to be the victim of bullying and oppression for a long time. The go-to response when anyone points out their intolerant attitude has always been to accuse that person of being intolerant. So in one sense this isn’t new. But the attempts to paint themselves as victims have escalated lately, including being invoked as a “justification” for the political action branches of these anti-gay organizations to ignore, violate, or only half-heartedly comply with campaign finance disclosure laws and tax filings.

Last week a new claim began making the rounds: that anti-Christian hate crimes were now happening as often as anti-gay hate crimes. A claim that the numbers just don’t support…

They cite the just released FBI statistics on hate crimes for 2012, which gave an overall breakdown of single-bias crimes as follows:

• 48.3 percent were racially motivated.
• 19.6 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias.
• 19.0 percent were motivated by religious bias.
• 11.5 percent stemmed from ethnicity/national origin bias.
• 1.6 percent were prompted by disability bias.

If you assume that all religious-bias crimes mean anti-Christian bias, the claim seems credible. But that’s not the case, In fact, 59.7 percent of the religious-bias crimes were anti-Jewish, while 12.8 were anti-Islamic. Christians don’t come in until 6.8 percent for anti-Catholic, and 2.9 percent for anti-Protestant.

Remember, those numbers in that last paragraph apply to the 19.0 percent of all hate crimes that are anti-religious, so if we break break down the list for the entire country we get:

• 48.3 percent were racially motivated.
• 19.6 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias.
• 11.3 percent were motivated by anti-Jewish bias.
• 2.4 percent were motivated by anti-Islamic bias.
• 1.4 percent were motivated by anti-multiple religion bias.
• 1.3 percent were motivated by anti-Catholic bias.
• 0.6 percent were motivated by anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.2 percent were motivated by anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc bias.
• 1.7 percent were motivated by anti-other (unspecified) religion bias.
• 11.5 percent stemmed from ethnicity/national origin bias.
• 1.6 percent were prompted by disability bias.

Note that I’m rounding off to the nearest tenth of a percent, so numbers may not appear to add up. Also note that the FBI won’t start reporting anti-transgender crime statistics until next year, so those are completely ignored, here.

To be fair, “sexual-orientation bias” can include anti-heterosexual bias, and it does. Of the sexual-orientation bias motivated crimes: 54.6 percent were classified as anti-male homosexual bias, 28.0 percent were reported as anti-homosexual bias, 12.3 percent were prompted by an anti-female homosexual bias, 3.1 percent were classified as anti-bisexual bias, 2.0 percent were the result of an anti-heterosexual bias.

So, our initial table could be broken down as:

• 48.3 percent were racially motivated.
• 10.5 percent resulted from anti-male homosexual bias.
• 4.3 percent resulted from anti-homosexual bias.
• 2.4 percent resulted from anti-female homosexual bias bias.
• 0.2 percent resulted from anti-bisexual bias.
• 0.4 percent resulted from anti-heterosexual bias.
• 11.3 percent were motivated by anti-Jewish bias.
• 2.4 percent were motivated by anti-Islamic bias.
• 1.4 percent were motivated by anti-multiple religion bias.
• 1.3 percent were motivated by anti-Catholic bias.
• 0.6 percent were motivated by anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.2 percent were motivated by anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc bias.
• 1.7 percent were motivated by anti-other (unspecified) religion bias.
• 11.5 percent stemmed from ethnicity/national origin bias.
• 1.6 percent were prompted by disability bias.

Just looking at these numbers without further analysis shows that their conclusion is complete hooey. anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant bias only adds up to 1.9 percent of all hate crimes in 2012, which is smaller than each of the anti-non-heterosexual groups except bisexuals. If we combine all the non-heterosexual categories together, we get 18.8 percent, which is nearly ten times the number of anti-Christian crimes.

So, in no way is it “about equal.”

But there is a much bigger issue: by the FBI’s estimate, only a about 2.1 percent of the population is openly gay/lesbian/bisexual, whereas about 78.4 percent is Christian (51.3% Protestant, 23.9% Catholic, 3.2% other Christian {Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, etc}). Jewish people are estimated to make up 2.2% of the population. Oddly, I can’t find their estimate of the percentage that is muslim, which is a bit annoying. According to the Pew Research Center it’s about 0.6 percent of the population.

Knowing what percentage of the population falls into each group, and applying the percentage of hate crimes that happen to those groups, we can calculate the Relative Risk of Being a Victim of a Hate Crime. According to the statisticians at TrendsInHate.Com, the relative risk for the period from 1995 to 2011 graphs out like this:

Relative Risk means, if you are a member of the group that is victimized, how likely are you to be the victim of such a hate crime? While anti-gay crimes make up about 18.8 percent of all hate crimes, openly gay people make up a very small portion of the population, so our chance of being a victim of such a crime is much higher. The Relative Risk to Christians of being a victim of anti-Christian hate crimes doesn’t even make it into the top four, clocking in at well under 0.1 percent, as in less than one-tenth of a percentage point.

The folks at Trends In Hate do provide a Relative Risk by Religious group chart:

Muslims wind up nearly as at risk as Jews, despite there being about 5 times as many anti-Jewish crimes as anti-Islamic crimes because Muslims make up a much smaller portion of the population.

It’s really easy to go down the rabbit hole on any of these statistics and get lost in the weeds. In an earlier draft I was trying to draw some conclusions about Christian-on-Christian crime, for instance. The problem is that such a tiny fraction of hate crime perpetrators are ever identified (and fewer prosecuted), that I realized such conclusions would be dubious, at best. And I probably lost a lot of people by the third bulleted list, anyway.

However, when we have people such as the Chief Justice of the United States claiming that gays are so powerful politically, they don’t deserve constitutional protection, we need to keep putting these facts about hate crimes and other forms of real oppression front and center.