Oct 21, 2005  |  By: PHIL LaPADULA  | COMMENTS     

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. — “Florida arson is hate crime,” declared the headline at Firehouse.com, an online discussion forum for firefighters. The site then reprinted an Orlando Sentinel article titled “Gay men’s home burns, with epithet left behind.”

The fire that gutted Paul Day and Christopher Robertson’s home in Lakeland, Fla., on July 25 had all the drama of a hate crime, particularly the words “Die Fag” spray-painted on the steps of the burned-out house. As a result, the incident received widespread media attention as a potential hate crime.

But on Oct. 12, Robertson confessed to starting the fire to collect insurance money, Lakeland fire officials said.

Frank Bass, the lead investigator on the case for the Lakeland Fire Department, said he saw “red flags” that pointed to a hoax from the beginning. First, when firefighters arrived at the home, they found the couple’s dog tied up outside.

“They had left the dog inside the house in a cage,” Bass said. “Would someone who is about to commit such a crime take the time to take the dog out of the house and tie it up outside?”

Day and Robertson told reporters that they had been the victims of anti-gay verbal harassment at the King’s Manor Mobile Home Park. But Bass said he interviewed neighbors and could find no sign of anti-gay sentiment in the neighborhood.

“They weren’t the only gay people who lived in the park,” Bass said. “Other gay people in the neighborhood hadn’t had any problems with their neighbors.”

Bass said a hate crime of the magnitude of arson would probably only occur after an escalation of harassing events. But he said there didn’t seem to be much leading up to the fire, just Day and Robertson’s account of being called an anti-gay name once at the mailbox.

“There’s a big gap between calling somebody names and breaking into their home and setting it on fire,” Bass said.

Another red flag was the fact that the fire was set during the daytime, which is not very common in arson cases, Bass said. Finally, Robertson had obtained an insurance policy just two weeks before the fire.

This is not the first incident to get widespread attention as a hate crime, only to be discovered a hoax.

Many fake hate crimes occur on college campuses. That may be because “a person who is a victim of a hate crime can probably expect to get almost universal sympathy on a college campus,” Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate crimes, told the Los Angeles Times in an April 2004 article on the subject. “Out in the world at large, that’s not necessarily true.”

One such case occurred in 2001, at the College of New Jersey. Ed Drago, the treasurer of a gay organization, claimed he had received hate messages and death threats because of his sexual orientation. Classes were canceled at the school after a homemade bomb was found in a wooded area near the campus.

At a teach-in held to discuss the situation, Drago addressed the crowd and said, “I didn’t want to be a poster boy for the gay community. But at the same time, I have to speak against the injustice.”

Police arrested Drago several months later. In March 2003, he pleaded guilty to harassment and providing false information to authorities. He was sentenced to one-year probation, a $500 fine and $2,180 in restitution.

Based on the documented cases, arson seems a common factor in fake hate crimes.

On Oct. 25, 2000, gay Tennessee Tech student Chad Butcher’s dorm room caught fire. Butcher blamed the fire on anti-gay bullies whom he said had been harassing him. But three weeks later, Butcher was arrested and charged with the crime.

Fodder for conservatives?

Fake hate crimes have become fodder for conservative bloggers and columnists who cite them to bolster their position that hate-crime legislation is unnecessary and a threat to freedom of expression.

“There are a lot of more phony ‘hate crimes’ padding the count than the bare numbers reported tell us,” wrote conservative columnist Samuel Francis.

When trong>Chad Butcher’s dorm room at Tennessee Tech caught fire in October 1998, he blamed the arson on anti-gay bias. But police arrested Butcher three weeks later.

He argued that hate-crime laws “are a long step toward the totalitarian manipulation of expression, thought and feeling that George Orwell warned us about.”

But Clarence Patton, acting executive director of the New York Çity Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, said the conservatives are ...