y room. Some people also fear "re-victimization" from police. This can and has included verbal or physical beatings from the police, reluctance to report the crime, as well as laying blame on the victim for the crime, stating things like "If you dressed like you're supposed to, maybe they wouldn't have hit you." Most importantly, perhaps, is that in areas which are not protected by hate crime laws, many people feel that reporting these crimes to the authorities would be futile, draining time and energy that the victim may be unwilling to relinquish. If laws were in place, most believe that there would be a large influx of reported crimes.Many people believe that hate crimes are unnecessary because they are punishing a perpetrator twice for the same offense, this is untrue. The punishment levied is merely an addition to the original sentence. This is because the crime is not merely an attack on an individual; it is aimed at the community on a whole and is used to spawn fear in its denizens. Therefore, the added penalty is a placed upon the person for the malicious ultimate intent of the crime, not the crime itself. Not only this, but studies show that victims of hate crimes show two to three times as many symptoms of trauma than victims of the same crime under alternate motivations . The Religious Right is also strongly against granting rights to homosexuals, for they believe that the lifestyle is sinful and contrary to Christian doctrine. The infamous "anti-gay" line in the Old Testament is found in Leviticus 18:22 and states "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination". However, many congregations have rebuked this idea because of Romans 4:13 where Paul states "For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith"; this claims that Jesus's arrival nullifies any statements made in the Old Testament. Nowhere in the Ne...
