>Yeah, that's the narrative of those sons of privilege that did the
>last marquee ready gay-bashing in Houston, referred to above.
In today's NYT, Michael Cooper writes:
<quote> Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University and an author of "Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed" (Plenum Press, 1993), said it was not unusual for anti-gay crimes to buck the trends of other bias crimes.
"Most hate crimes respond to economic factors like the unemployment rate, but not gay-bashing," he said. "Gay-bashing has nothing to do with money, with economic survival. That's why so many perpetrators are teen-agers and come from every point among the economic continuum. It is typically done by young people, with their hormones raging, feeling confusion about sexual identity.
Young guys in denial about their own homosexual feelings who see the very presence of a gay person as a threat." </quote>
By the way, I talked yesterday with someone who studies the sociology of the right who said that the Christian right is populated mainly by households with median and above incomes (most in the $35-70k range).
So this argues against gaybashing as a lumpen habit.
Doug