Ten Shot at Halloween Celebration in SF

Go read Pam, who's got the whole story and a great piece care of Blender and gay activist Paul Barwick. I'm with Paul; I've seen enough pick-ups full of suburban miscreants cruising for trouble in Chicago's Boystown on a plain old Saturday night, shouting "Faggot!" and other really original things out the window, to be looking for alternatives to the likelihood it was motivated by plain, old-fashioned hatred. I'm not suggesting we all must agree it was a hate crime, before all the facts are in, but why on earth, with an epidemic of hatred permeating the country, juxtaposed against a ruling party that trades regularly on negative attitudes toward the LGBT community, would we start dismissing out of the hand the possibility that it was a hate crime? It just baffles me that there are progressives who seem anxious to try to argue away the real possibility of a homophobic attack, immediately and against all logic. Maybe it will turn out to be some other thing, but what purpose does it serve in the interim to suggest it probably was, which is necessarily predicated on minimizing the real dangers facing the LGBT community in this country today?