Gay rights group Equality California
found a noose Thursday hung outside its Santa Anna office, the Orange
County Register reported.
Police responding to a call from the
group trivialized the incident, dismissing the noose as a string on
the door and saying that sometime you have to live with being a
victim.
The black colored noose “was
shocking,” said Mel Distel, the phone-bank trainer who found the
noose and called the police. “It struck me as something that could
escalate, something that was definitely meant to be hurtful.”
Distel said she “absolutely” plans
to file a complaint against the police.
“This is an outrageous, despicable
attempt to intimidate the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
community just a few days before the election, but we will not be
silenced,” Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California,
said in a statement.
The office's nine volunteers working in
the office on Thursday were placing calls on behalf of Assembly
candidate Melissa Fox.
Fox decried the hanging of the noose in
statement, saying it was a “hateful” act “intended to threaten
and intimidate Equality California and other supporters of marriage
equality from exercising our Constitutional rights to free speech and
free association.”