From the Buffalo News
She sat Tuesday morning in the center row of the small downtown courtroom, a young woman with dark hair and a white bandage covering her right eye. Aside from her father and a friend, she was alone.
She was there on her own, but in a sense, thousands of people sat with her.
Lindsay Harmon was attacked outside Roxy’s, a downtown gay bar, early on New Year’s morning. She and some friends were, she said, taunted with gay slurs by a passing group of men and women. After a verbal back-and-forth, Harmon was knifed in the eye and upper arm. Suzanne-Deanna Grover, 21, was arrested last week and charged not just with assault, but with a hate crime.
I am glad that District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III decided to prosecute the case this way. If Harmon was attacked because she is a lesbian, it is an assault not just on one person, but on a way of life. That is why the story was front-page news, and not just another gruesome but fairly common attack.
Aside from anything else, the hate crime charge sends a message: Being attacked simply because you are gay will not be condoned or ignored by society. This may not seem like much to most of us. But most of us cannot—in certain places and circumstances—be legally fired from a job, denied an apartment or not have a marriage acknowledged because of our sexual orientation.
“It is an acknowledgment that this is seen as a crime against a group of people, not just a single person,” said Tim Moran, publisher of Outcome, a locally based gay online newspaper.
That is what the hate crime law is about. The punishment hammer comes down harder because you attack not just one person, but—by extension—thousands.
I know that people disagree about whether the law is justifiable or accomplishes anything. I think it is not only necessary, but healthy. A society that looks the other way is as potentially frightening as a knife to the eye. Take the “So what?” attitude to the extreme, and you are in Nazi Germany, where the state did not just condone group hate— it institutionalized it.
Granted, America today is thankfully light-years removed from 1930s Germany. I think that the hate crimes law cements the condemnation.
“We’re talking about creating a climate [whereby] this cannot be accepted in our society,” Sedita said.
Other than self-defense, I cannot think of a good reason to pummel, stab or shoot anyone. Assaulting someone because of what he or she represents gives new meaning to the term “senseless violence.” As Moran said, “Being a [gay] human being is not a reason to get beaten up.”
I give Sedita credit for sending a message about hate crime. Motive is never easy to prove, especially in a late-night confrontation outside a bar among people who have knocked back a few.
Predictably, authorities say there are a handful of different witness versions about who said what to whom. Sources say Grover contends that she acted in self-defense and that somebody in Harmon’s group uttered a racial slur. As I said, this thing could get messy.
“I thought there was sufficient evidence to charge it,” Sedita said. “Whether it passes muster with a grand jury or a trial jury will be up to them.”
Chances are that in the months between the grand jury hearing evidence and a jury rendering its verdict, the hate crime charge will be jettisoned because it does not fit or is too tough to prove. If so, fine. What I think matters is that Sedita did not reject it out of hand. That, in itself, sends a message to the gay community, from the larger society.
There were just a couple of people sitting Tuesday with Lindsay Harmon in the courtroom. In a legal sense, an army stood behind her.
desmonde@buffnews.com
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