“Hatred paralyses life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.” -Martin Luther King Jr.Hate reared it’s often-seen head on a Brooklyn street this week and took the life of a man named Jose Sucuzhanay. He and his brother were walking arm and arm when an SUV pulled up shouting anti-gay and racist slurs at them. In the merciless attack that soon followed, the two brothers were viciously beaten and bloodied with a beer bottle and baseball bat. Jose suffered severe head trauma and died on Friday evening.The news of this incident ripped open the gaping wound in my heart that is consistently being ripped open by the hatred in this world. When will it stop? When we be free to be who we are without the threat of death looming over our shoulders? How can this disease of hate and ignorance be cured before it reaches plague level? I fear it is reaching plague level as I write this, and I am begining to understand why.As long as we continue to sanction the denial of civil rights to ANY group of people, we unwittingly sanction hatred and violence toward ALL minorities because we collectively brand diversity of any kind as wrong. The blood of all victims of hate crimes is on the hands of religious zealots, because they are the harbingers of the fruit of hate, which as it rots, stinks of violence and death. All of those who turned up to vote in favor of proposition 8, yes, the blood is on your hands.  By denying civil rights to an entire community of human beings, you gave the OK to hate, to divide, to extinguish freedom, and to render an entire population of people as “less than worthy” or somehow tainted. Unworthy of living free. And the hatemongers? You fed them. You fed their vehement hate and you are responsible. You are just as responsible as the people waving their hate-filled signs in front of abortion clinics are responsible for every abortion clinic bombing and doctors murder. There is no such thing as passive hate. It is A...