The FBI released official statistics yesterday for how many hate crimes were committed last year. The good news: there was a slight decline in the total number of hate crimes, mostly due to a drop in the number of hate crimes committed that involved bias on the basis of race and religion.

But the bad news is pretty troubling:

Incidents motivated by bias based on sexual orientation, however, were up 5.5 percent from 2006 and those targeting people because of their ethnicity or national origin rose 2.3 percent.

Read the Washington Post‘s story about the report here.