Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people make up more than ten percent of the population; that means if you're sitting in a class of thirty people, more than three of those people are LGBT individuals. However, this extremely large minority group continues to be one of the least protected by the government and the most heavily targeted by discrimination and hate crimes. Despite the strong change in public opinion towards LGBT people over the last twenty years, hate crime laws have remained unchanged. A hate crime is an act of aggression against an individual's real or perceived race, ethnicity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. or genre. Examples include assault and battery, acts of vandalism or threats involving indicators of prejudice, evidence such as bigoted slurs or graffiti. These crimes do not target the individuals who are physically or verbally beaten, but the community where the individual is or is thought to belong. a member as a whole. These crimes are much more harmful as they attack someone for who they are rather than what they have done or possess. They also undermine the fragile existence of a society by making it feel isolated and vulnerable. There are currently only two federal laws and 21 states, plus the District of Columbia, that protect sexual minorities from hate crimes, and both federal laws are useless in persecuting nearly all reported cases. The first, the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, simply requires the FBI to collect and review hate crime statistics provided by state and local law enforcement agencies. However, these statistics must be provided voluntarily by agencies, which leaves a rather large gap… middle of paper… speechless; they would rebuke the criminal action which is already punishable in the courts. Hate crime legislation is needed. Crime is on the rise, becoming more public, more violent and more acceptable in some areas of society. Without the proposed laws there is little chance that this situation will become less widespread. As the NGLTF, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a highly respected agency that advocates for equal rights for homosexuals, stated in its December 1997 article, the exclusion or removal of sexual orientation from sexual orientation legislation hate crimes by lawmakers is morally indefensible on a moral level. a time when anti-gay violence is widespread. Failure to resolve this critical issue sends a dangerous message to law enforcement and the public: anti-gay violence does not exist or, worse, is somehow less reprehensible than violence against other minorities..