::Shrug:: That goes to me, Everlong. I opened a post that
touched on religion. I view the question of religious persecution (or the claim thereof) as a cultural/political phenomenon, not dependent on actual proof of the goodness or badness of a given belief system.
I'd like to get back to the original question, which
can be approached with empirical data. Here are the 2012 hate crime stats - I've focused on the religious bias stats for obvious reasons.
FBI ? Victims
48.5 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offender’s bias against a race.
19.2 percent were targeted because of a bias against a particular sexual orientation.
18.7 percent were victimized because of a bias against a religious belief.
12.1 percent were victimized because of a bias against an ethnicity/national origin.
1.4 percent were targeted because of a bias against a disability. (note: special circle of hell for
those mother frockers. I mean it's all bad, but really?)
Of the 1,340 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:
62.4 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
11.6 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias.
7.5 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
6.4 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias.
2.6 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias.
0.9 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
8.6 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
This was partially what I expected, and partially eye-opening.
It seemed very likely that anti-Semitism would be very high on the list.* It also seemed likely that Islamophobia would be high on the list.
I was a little surprised, regardless of the sizes of the respective groups, that Catholics represented a full 1/10 of the number of Jews victimized. With
78.2 million Catholics in the country and some saying
6.7 million Jews - that is, a twelvefold difference in population - a Catholic had about 1/100th the likelihood of actual persecution, at the criminal level, based on his religion, as a Jew. (There would be a similar but not as extreme "likelihood gap" as compared with a Muslim.)
Finally, I was astonished at the low number of anti-agnostic/atheist crimes. This (to me) points to the "internecine" nature of religious-motivated violence. Despite the often purposefully provocative expressions of atheism (not so much agnosticism,) atheists are apparently not a lightning rod. Or perhaps there are just no atheist cemeteries or houses of worship. ::shrug::
As to anti-Protestant hate crime bias, it is comparatively miniscule as compared with other religious groups.
I know 13 has a handy explanation for such stats: He has maintained in the past that if you're 1/10th of the population, based on the number of people with an opportunity to hate you, you should be hated 10 times as much as the 10:1 majority. Even so, the 100:1 difference between Jews and Catholics is difficult to justify; even more difficult would be the extreme difference between Jews and Protestants.
Now, these are criminal acts - acts usually considered instances of persecution. That's how we'd do it for any other society: are people being singled out for mistreatment?
Where the difficulty comes in is the claim that people not liking Tim Tebow's song-and-dance make them anti-Christian and the like. That sort of thing is more difficult to quantify.
However, the fact that Christians are staging stories (mock arrests, for example,) seem to bolster the author's contention (in the OP) that it's a phenomenon visible only to the Faithful.
* I am aware that Arabs are also Semites, and so some Islamophobia is also anti-Semitism, by a broader definition. I use "anti-Semitism" as a convention of historical convenience; if you would prefer, read "anti-Jewish bias."
PFnV
