ANTI-HATE RALLY HELD IN PHILADELPHIA

Love Park has been where we rallied for Trayvon and Mike Brown. On Thursday, coming off a vicious anti-gay attack, the city came out in support of strengthening hate crime laws to include the LGBT community.

One People’s Project

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Hundreds came out on a drizzly afternoon to call for a extension of Pennsylvania’s hate-crimes statute to include gender and sexual orientation in the wake of a brutal attack on a gay couple on Sept. 11.

“Despite the passage of federal legislation in the Matthew Shepard Act to address anti-LGBT violence, the number of hate crimes in the US has not decreased, due much in part to the fact that state governments are not addressing this issue,” State Rep. Brian Sims told the crowd of hundreds assembled in Love Park in Center City. “Our state has a moral responsibility to address hate crimes and we remain complicit if we fail to pass hate crime legislation that protects those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or even perceived as being LGBT”

In 2008, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down hate crime protections for the LGBT community on a technicality and there has been efforts to reinstate that provision since, galvanized by the attack in Center City where the couple were allegedly first asked if they were gay and were beaten and robbed when they said they were. After social media identified suspects, three persons were arrested and charged for the assault.

One of the charged, 24-year-old Kathryn Knott, the daughter of a local police chief whose Twitter account included controversial and bigoted postings, was fired from her job as an emergency room technician at position at Abington Health’s Lansdale Hospital after reports of potential privacy violations – reportedly posting X-rays to her Twitter feed – came to light. An assistant basketball coach at Archbishop Wood High School, a Catholic school in Warminster, PA, resigned after his own involvement in the attack was revealed. He was not among the charged.

Other state and local elected officials spoke at the rally, as well as community organizers. Council President Darrell Clarke repeated a sentiment from a few days earlier by Councilman Jim Kenney when he said that bigots are not welcome in Philadelphia. “If you can’t figure out a way to conduct yourself in the City of Philadelphia, guess what, don’t come here!” he said to applause. Community Organizer ShaRon Cooks noted in particular the other attacks that have taken place that she wanted everyone to be mindful of. “This particular incident was met with swift newspaper and television, social media coverage that I am utterly thankful for and appreciative,” she said. “But let’s not forget that there have been many violent crimes fueled by hatred toward LGBT community people in the past whose assailants were not caught or identified, nor did they receive the same range of coverage that this particular incident did.”

Bigoted radio talk-shit host Dom Giordano recording what is being said at the rally so he can spin it on his radio show on Friday. Never trust a right-winger in your crowd that complains about salsa being the #1 condiment in the U.S. because it shows how “we” are losing “our” country.

While conservative opposition was silent at the rally, local radio talk show host Dom Giordano, who over the past two weeks has been cautiously supporting the gang involved in the attack, was there to cover the rally as he said he would on his radio show earlier this morning. While he maintains that they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, he has also defended the trio for a number of reasons, some of them particularly odd, ranging from his belief that they could not get a fair trial in Philadelphia, to the simple fact that Kathryn Knott was a woman, to his anger that District Attorney Seth Williams, whose office will be prosecuting the case would be “taking a side in this”, to the charge of conspiracy being invalid, to his general opposition to hate crime laws overall. “It makes Philadelphia feel better about themselves,” he said Wednesday morning. “They’re holier than thou!”

Coincidentally , one of the victims was celebrating a birthday on the day of the rally.