Friends don't let friends attack innocent people...

I was talking to one of my best friends who recently returned from a year long teaching gig in South Korea. She had a really great time and we were discussing how common it was for girls to walk arm in arm with girls and guys to walk arm in arm with guys and they weren't gay. It was just something they did, it was apart of their culture and very normal.

She now works with students here in the states and when they come over they are met with culture shock so to speak, that people look at them weird for doing this. She said it isn't uncommon for her students to ask her why Americans act like that. It's weird how even though they didn't grow up here, they know that it is unacceptable behavior to simply hold hands or walk arm in arm with someone of the same gender.

This is what occurred to me when I read an article about two Ecuadoran brothers who were attacked in an apparent hate crime. On their way home from a church party, they stopped off at a local bar and then went on their way. But they couldn't even make it home without being accosted.

Three men came out of the car shouting at the brothers, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay — something ugly, anti-gay and anti-Latino. Vulgarisms against Hispanics and gay men were heard by witnesses, the police said. One man approached Jose Sucuzhanay, 31, the owner of a real estate agency who has been in New York a decade, and broke a beer bottle over the back of his head. He went down hard.

Romel Sucuzhanay, 38, who is visiting from Ecuador on a two-month visa, bounded over a parked car and ran as the man with the broken bottle came at him. A distance away, he looked back and saw a second assailant beating his prone brother with an aluminum baseball bat, striking him repeatedly on the head and body. The man with the broken bottle turned back and joined the beating and kicking.

In general, I am not a violent person. You know that whole "Thou shall not kill" thing I take pretty seriously. But with groups talking about their not being a need for hate crime legislation, it really infuriates me. This is unacceptable. A man lost his life. How much longer can people go along with this anti-gay movement?