Bush To Veto Hate Crime Bill Because Of Sexual Orientation Language?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Legislation, Religion, SexualityEverybody knows that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people have been violently discriminated against since anybody can remember.
And yet…
The White House, in a statement warning of a veto, said state and local criminal laws already cover the new crimes defined under the bill, and there was “no persuasive demonstration of any need to federalize such a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement.”It also noted that the bill leaves other classes, such as the elderly, the military and police officers, without similar special status.
“Our criminal justice system has been built on the ideal of equal justice for all,” said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “Under this bill justice will no longer be equal, but depend on the race, sex, sexual orientation, disability or status of the victim.”
Yeah, because all sorts of hate crimes are being perpetrated against the elderly and military folk. Lots of history of those people being killed just for being who they are.
And while we’re at it let’s go ahead and get fishermen in the bill too. Oh, and what about zoo keepers? What about the people who work for the gas company?
So…just FYI…
The Judiciary Committee cited FBI figures that there have been more than 113,000 hate crimes since 1991, including 7,163 in 1995. It said that racially motivated bias accounted for 55% of those incidents, religious bias for 17%, sexual orientation bias for 14% and ethnicity bias for 14%.
Nuf said?
UPDATE:
Well, looks like the Dems offered to include seniors and the military in the bill.
The response by Republicans?
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 and is filed under Legislation, Religion, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:50 pm
For those of you who do not understand what is going on here allow me to spell it out so we can all better understand. The term hate crime speaks to degree of motive. Some one who might be assaulted by another person at a flash point of anger is far different than some one who survives an assault at the hands of a planned and plotted attack.
Think about Murder. There are 4 degrees of Murder (correct me if I am wrong) Lowest being manslaughter and the highest being murder in the first degree. 1st degree Murder is plotted and generally punishable by life in jail or execution. Some one who kills some one in a car crash might be charged with manslaughter and some one who is guilty of a crime of passion-caught up in the heat of the moment-that would be murder in the second degree and one might serve 20 years and be released.
Now the person who plotted an evil deed, and premeditated a murder, is far more dangerous and no one would want them living next door.
By the logic some use when arguing against a hate crimes bill a person who kills some one in a car accident is no different than some one who plots a murder well in advance of the deed.
As a hate crime survivor I urge everyone to put an end to the release of criminals who will plot violence against persons based on ideas, life choices. Remember that freedom only works if everyone has it.
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:08 pm
What if I’m not gay, but someone calls me a gay name while beating me up? Does that qualify as a hate crime? What if I am gay, but no one knows that I am gay, and I get beaten up and they call me a gay name? Is that a hate crime? What if I am beaten up by a gay gang because I’m a heterosexual walking through a gay neighborhood at the wrong time? Is that a hate crime? What if I have gay feels, but I’ve never had gay sex, but I’m obviously gay, and in the course of getting beaten up I get called a gay name? Is that a hate crime? What if I am not gay, but everyone thinks I’m gay, and I get beaten up by a gay person? Is that a hate crime?
It is soooo complicated criminalizing thought, that God I have Justin here to sort it all out for me!
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Dale Carpenter on this line of criticism of the veto: The problem with this criticism, however, is that the bill does much more than simply add “sexual orientation” to the existing federal law on hate crimes passed in 1968. It’s a whole new statute. [...] The bill considerably expands federal jurisdiction over hate crimes in general, for all categories, by eliminating the current requirement that the crime occur while the victim is engaged in a federally protected activity. That jurisdictional limitation has kept federal involvement very limited in an area where state authority has traditionally reigned. The new law also calls for more federal resources to be expended on all classes of hate crimes. The veto of an amendment merely adding sexual orientation to existing federal law would pretty clearly reflect an anti-gay double-standard. A veto of this much more comprehensive bill does not.
To test this proposition, and to put gays on a par with other groups often targeted for hate crimes, Congress could simply amend the 1968 federal hate-crimes law to add protection for sexual orientation. Then we’ll see what the President does.
May 4th, 2007 at 7:51 am
So if I hate religious people I should go out and beat up Jerry Falwell but not Al Sharpton. But wait, both of those guys are senior citizens . OK What if I beat on that minister from Colorado Springs, and claim I didn’t know he is secretly gay? If I do pick out Sharpton do I get off on a lesser assault charge if I can prove that race was not a factor in my beating him, that I hated all religious people without discrimination on age, color, or sexual identity?
May 4th, 2007 at 7:56 am
I suspect that If you beat up Al Sharpton, you would get a higher assault charge because he was a senior citizen and black, but you may be able to reduce the sentence if you argue he is full-blown heterosexual, since no gay man would ever have that hair style.
May 4th, 2007 at 8:13 am
What happens if you just really, really dislike your victim?
May 4th, 2007 at 8:23 am
These groups are protected because they have being traditionally targeted with violent tactics, and therefore need an additional barrier of protection to make potential assailants think twice.
I do think it’s telling that the Congressional Republicans declinced the offer to put the elderly and military personnel in the bill. These people see any other sexual orientation besides heterosexuality as wrong and they don’t feel they should protect them for what they feel is a choice.
However, the plain facts show us that while it may be a choice, these people are still a high target of violent crimes.
Bush is about to use his 3rd veto on something that ties back into his religion, with the first being the stem cell debate. This is a shame, but this is our leadership.
May 4th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Does the life of a PC-maestro in the vast sissy carnival of victimology ever wear thin? Like one of those pathetic thirty-somethings still blaming their parents for their own abject failure.
Here’s my suggestion to gays worried about being assaulted for being gay - don’t rely on panzy-ass fear-mongering liberals to protect you with content-based thought-monitoring legislation - that really is not going to protect you.
Cherish your enemies 1st Amendment rights like your own and then exercise your 2nd Amendment right if you need to. This country needs to get a bit tougher and quit acting a chorus of 5 years girls that just scraped their knee and want Daddy government to come to the rescue.
Don’t be a victim. Be a gay-American and be proud. You don’t need the state to provide you with an extra layer of protection - that is why we have the 5th and 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Dos, to answer your initial question: Yes, the way hate crimes legislation works is that it applies even if you are wrongly held to be a member of a protected group.
But I’m assuming, for the rationale you give, that your objection is not to inclusion of homosexuals as a protected group so much as to the concept of “hate crimes” deserving special treatment per se. Right? That has the virtue of being a defensible philosophical position.
May 4th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Yes, wj - you are correct, but the addition of homosexuals as a “protected class” poses an even greater practical and legal quagmire to the terrain of thought-control, because of the highly debatable status of homosexuality as an immutable trait.
As to your answer to my initial question (assuming that it is correct and I’ll defer to your expertise here), that poses a very big problem - because homosexuals can not be visually identified (as opposed to races): What is to stop any avenging victim of violence from ramping up the punishment by claiming a bigoted motivation of perpetrator.
A lot of foul things come out of peoples mouths when in confrontation and violence. In fact I’m sure that taking the aggregate number of beatings, a greater number of heterosexuals have been called “a faggot” during physical violence than homosexuals. Do all of these count as hate-crimes???
I also just buy Justin’s argument that homosexuals NEED extra protection — its patronizing nanny statism and it makes me what to puke.
May 4th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Dos, It may be debatable (or at least debated) whether homosexuality is voluntary. But there is no question that religion is thoroughly voluntary, and at least as difficult to determine at first glance. Yet religiously-based hate crimes are already part of the mix, with nothing like the resistance that including homosexuals is getting.
It seems to me that reasoned positions are either
- get rid of all of them, or
- include a group (homosexuals) whose members are certainly subject to at least as much “hate crime” as several of the currently protected groups.
Anything else is hard to characterize as anything other than bigotry.
May 4th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
wj, good point. That is probably true and I’m in favor of getting rid of all them.
I’m just worried that I’m going to get busted for “hate crime” someday when in fact, I will only be guilty of a “high-irritated crime” or a “significantly aggitated crime” or a “mean-spirited crime” or a “snarky crime” or a “surly crime.”
Well, Pappi DosPeros always use to say, “If you’re going to commit a crime, do it with love in your heart.” All the more true today.
May 5th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
So, Dos, you’re saying that you expect at some point in the future to be arrested for violent assault? That tells me interesting things about your personality right there.
Since you are obviously an upper class WASP type, you probably have never been subjected to, say, the boys with baseball bats that beat up several gay men at the San Diego gay pride festival last year…thinking, “Gee, it’d be kinda fun to beat up some queers”. I think San Francisco gay pride and Halloween festivals have also had a few knifings and shootings over the past few years, usually drunk straight people who went there to laugh at the “freaks” and cause trouble. I’m sure with a few minutes Googling I could come up with a list of at least a hundred incidents of violence where someone was severely injured or killed by people who were obviously and deliberately “hunting for faggots.” Generally hate crimes legislation doesn’t get applied in cases where someone got a black eye from a punch.
I’ve never been quite sure whether or not “hate crimes” laws are useful, or if they achieve their intended goal (making those who would commit hate crimes less likely to do so), but the specific exclusion of the group with the highest per-capita likelihood of being assaulted specifically for who they are makes no sense whatsoever. The fact that 14% of ALL hate crimes is against homosexuals, yet we represent somewhere around 5-10% of the population is a telling point, especially since only a small fraction of that population is visibly identifiable as homosexual or tends to go to gay areas or events.
I would also make the comment that anti-homosexual violence is probably the most under-reported category, because many people who are targeted are either in the closet and terrified of the publicity, afraid that coming forward will incite more violence against them, or sometimes even afraid the police will do worse things to them than their assailants. Hate crimes legislation if nothing else raises the visibility of the problem, and thus makes it more likely that these sorts of assaults won’t be just ignored or considered as “appropriate punishment” for the “sin” of homosexuality.
Even worse, aside from those high-profile incidents that hit the news, there are literally thousands of other assaults that occur each year, just because someone has been taught by their parents (or their religion) that god hates faggots, or faggots are unnetcherul so it’s ok to beat them up or kill them. In particular, rural areas and red states, where hate crimes legislation never includes homosexuality, these sorts of incidents are often applauded by (or perpetrated by) the authorities, rarely if ever reported, and would certainly never go to court, even under normal assault charges.
One final point I would make is that many court cases related to assaults against homosexuals tend to get a far lighter sentence than any similar assaults against any other group. This is similar to the earlier days of last century, when those performing lynchings and assaults against black people were given either light or no punishment. Often the “gay panic” defense is used, somehow trying to equate someone making an advance at you with your response of beating them to death. Hate crimes legislation will hopefully make it more difficult to avoid reasonable punishment for these kinds of attacks and murders.
May 5th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Aren’t they already crimes? Why do we have stupid laws that target motivation? In the end, if they hurt or kill someone or people, we already have laws to cover them.
As for the point of “lighter sentences” for certain crimes — they are issues with our judicial system, not for our legislative branch to try to remedy. Hate crimes don’t cover any of those situations.
You know what hate crimes are? Pandering to certain groups just to get their vote.
Don’t you feel like a tool, sleipner? I’m laughing at you.
May 5th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Is “upper class WASP type” a protected class? If not, it should be, we are the most hated group in the country and I need an extra barrier of protection.
May 6th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Huh…should I feel like a tool because about a dozen times in my life I’ve been yelled at from a passing car by someone shouting “faggot” at me? Or perhaps the time that a couple guys in a pickup with a loudspeaker chased me and my boyfriend around a parking lot in Houston yelling that to the entire parking lot (with us wondering if they had a shotgun with them)? Perhaps because the idea of walking home alone at night can be scary since you never know when someone’s out for a thrill ride to beat up a faggot. I think until you know what it feels like to be a targeted class you should just keep your comments to yourself.
And Dos…yes, it is already the most protected class in America. You already get the best police protection in your neighborhoods, the best school systems for your kids, and the best tax breaks. Why should I feel sorry for you?
May 8th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
DosPeros:
First I’ll answer your question about someone calling you a gay name while committing a violent crime. Prosecutors would still have to prove that the crime was motivated by you being gay or appearing gay. Sometimes names referring to LBGT people are used solely as insults, so name calling alone would not be considered grounds for a hate crime.
Secondly on sexual orientation motivated hate crimes _by_ gay people against straight/seemingly straight people. Yes, the attack scenario in a gay neighborhood that you gave could be prosecuted as a hate crime. Of course, the scenario is very unlikely. There are very few openly gay people compared to the general population, so there are much fewer that are willing to form gangs. There are also a very significant number of gay people (such as myself) that have no or very little visual characteristics of being gay. Attacking a person based on appearance would be extremely risky for a gay gang.
Last, the mutability of sexual orientation. The science is in on that one. Sexual orientation is purely biological. People can force themselves back into the closet, but they cannot change their sexual orientation. All sorts of tests involving multiple types of stimulation all point to the same thing. Reaction to sexual pictures, faces, and even pheromones reveal fundamental differences between gays & straights.
sleipner:
The hate crime share versus population share is even worse than that. The real LGBT percentage of the general population, based on recent scientific studies, is about 2-4%.