Vandals Strike University's Gay Center

Vandals struck a building at North Carolina State University, located in Raleigh, NC, reported the local NBC News affiliate, NCB17, on Oct. 18. The university's GLBT student group has space in the building that was targeted, with vandals spray-painting slurs on a door and bulletin boards.

NBC reported that the police log for the university's security indicted the building, Harrelson Hall, was struck within a half hour space of time, somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 on the evening of Oct. 17.

The person or persons behind the property-damaging attack used purple spray paint to scrawl the words "Fags burn" on the door to the GLBT Center. The word "DIE" was also spray-painted on the glass enclosure over one of two bulletin boards in the hall, and a slash mark was painted over the other bulletin board, which bore the message "Welcome to Our GLBT Center" and featured photos of the staff.

"We do not have any suspects at this time," Sergeant Jeff Sutton of university security told the student-run newspaper The Technician, which posted an account of the attack on Oct. 17. "We're going to try to look at some camera footage going into Harrelson Hall during that time frame."

"No one was able to see who sprayed-painted this, but believe me, there will be a University response," a Facebook posting by the center's graduate advisor, Adam Ward, vowed. "We will continue working with University Police, and I thank all of our community members and allies for standing up for equality and what's right."

Sutton explained that the anti-gay graffiti was not a "hate crime," but rather a "hate incident."

"A hate crime has to be against a person," Sutton told the student newspaper. "Nobody was named in the writing," the security officer added.

Anti-gay groups such as the national Organization for Marriage have made strenuous and repeated attempts in recent years to paint GLBT equality advocates as lawless vandals and thugs who damage property and threaten innocents for simply speaking about the tenets of their religious faiths.

A group similar to NOM recently lost a court case to keep donor records relating to an anti-gay ballot initiative in Washington state concealed, in defiance of state election laws, purportedly to protect the donors on the list from retribution by criminally violent gays.

"But U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle said in his ruling [on Oct. 17] that petitioners who advocated for privacy provided only a few experiences of indecent statements and other uncomfortable conversations," an Associated Press article on the ruling noted. "Also, there was only speculation that those incidents were connected to the issue, he said.

"If just a few instances of harassment were used as the standard for preventing the release of names, then disclosure would become the exception, rather than the rule, Settle said," the AP article continued.

"I believe there will certainly be harassment, and I pray to God there isn't more than that," said Gary Randall, spokesperson for the anti-gay group Protect Marriage Washington.

The referendum sought to overturn a comprehensive domestic partnership law that gives same-sex families in Washington most of the same state-level rights as heterosexual married couples. Voters defeated the attempt to deny same-sex families those protections in November of 2009, marking the first time that an anti-gay initiative had been turned away at the ballot box.

The narrative of thuggish gays targeting the homes, businesses, and families of people who speak out against them and campaign to restrict their liberties has been used for some high-profile successes, such as preventing court proceedings that challenged California's 2008 anti-gay ballot measure Proposition 8 from being broadcast.

Supporters of the anti-gay measure had argued that allowing the trial to be viewed by the public at large would place their witnesses in jeopardy. Marriage equality advocates rejoined that allowing the public to view the trial would have educated ordinary Americans about the issue and made it plain to the man on the street that the campaign to yank marriage rights away from gay and lesbian families was motivated by anti-gay sentiment rather than any legitimate concern for the "traditional" family unit or the institution of marriage itself.

Minor acts of vandalism involving yard signs supporting Proposition 8 were held up as examples of gay marauders placing society in general at risk, but those narratives refrained from mentioning similar vandalism targeting anti-Prop 8 yard signs.

Nor have ongoing attempts to characterize equality supporters as violent and threatening acknowledged vandalism such as the property damage that targeted the GLBT Center at NCSU, a spate of anti-gay hate crimes that has rocked Boise, Idaho, or the ongoing harassment and cyber-bullying linked with a rash of GLBT youth suicides last year, as well as a new rash of suicides in recent weeks.