Hate crimes are bullying

On March 16, a Colum-bia Falls man was attacked and brutally beaten in his driveway. The man's jaw, nose, eye sockets and ankle were shattered. His nostril was ripped, two bones in his feet were broken, his palate was cracked, and his septum damaged. This man was assaulted because his attacker found out he was gay.

Regardless of whether you believe people are born or choose to be gay and regardless of your religious beliefs, no one deserves to be assaulted, taunted, hurt, or degraded because of their sexual orientation.

Because anti-gay hate crimes attack a person's identity, they have more serious psychological impacts on the victim than do differently motivated crimes. Anti-gay hate crimes send a message to the entire gay and lesbian community. They send the message that all gays and lesbians are unwelcome and unsafe.

According to a study by the Washington Institute for Mental Illness Research and Training, hate crimes are committed by people who see little wrong with their actions and may even believe that these actions are sanctioned by society.

This dynamic doesn't just apply to adults who commit hate crimes against the gay community. We also see it in Montana schools.

Young people who bully their gay peers also believe that their victims deserve it and that the larger community agrees with them. Neither being bullied nor bullying in school should be treated simply a "rite of passage" — it has lasting implications on the bully and the victim.

Studies on bullying show that a bully's anti-social behavior is not limited to school but continues in other settings and into adulthood.

Approximately 60 percent of boys who were classified by researchers as bullies in grades six through nine were convicted of at least one crime by the age of 24.

In other words, violent, anti-social kids more often than not grow up to be violent, anti-social adults. Thus, bullying prevention is crime prevention.

Children and teens who self-identify as gay, or are perceived as being gay, are disproportionately targeted by bullies.

Gay and lesbian youth are five times more likely than their straight counterparts to miss school out of fear and three times more likely to commit suicide.

The Montana Legislature has chosen to forgo the opportunity to include sexual orientation as a protected class in human rights law despite countless incidents in the state of discrimination, violence and harassment against the gay and lesbian community.

Similarly, though the Montana Board of Public Education understands the harassment and bullying of gay and lesbian students to be a significant problem in Montana schools, too many local school districts do not address this problem in their anti-bullying policies.

The victim of the Columbia Falls attack endured bullying throughout middle and high school and, at one point, felt so threatened that he brought a gun to school for self-protection.

No student should have to take such a drastic measure to access their education.

Bullying and being bullied is not just something that every kid has to go through. It's not harmless, and it often doesn't end at graduation. It is one phase in the life cycle of abuse and violence.

Just as Montana law should protect its citizens, Montana schools should protect its students.

By refusing to extend this protection to a subset of our community that experiences consistent discrimination and violence, we compromise every Montanan's safety, rights, and freedoms.

If you would like to learn more about how to create safer school environments, please contact the Montana Human Rights Network at 1-406-442-5506.

Rebecca Leinberger is an Organizer with the Montana Human Rights Network.