ShareThisPresident Barack Obama has signed into law the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Actually, he signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act tacked onto which was the hate crimes legislation.
Sen. Harry Reid, our brave Democratic majority leader, slipped the hate crimes bill into the defense authorization bill to avoid having to have our senators consider the controversial hate crimes bill on its own.
It's for good reason that our Democratic legislators wanted to hide under a rock while passing this terrible piece of legislation. It may help them with the far left wing of their party. But weakening and damaging our country is not something to be proud of. And that is exactly what this new hate crime law does.
The bill adds extra penalties to violent crimes when they are deemed motivated by gender, sexual orientation, or disabilities. It's the first major expansion of hate crimes legislation originally passed in 1968, targeted then to crimes aimed at race, color, religion, and national origin.
After signing this new law, Obama celebrated it by saying that in this nation we should "embrace our differences."
But law isn't about embracing our differences. It is about providing equal and non-arbitrary protection to all citizens.
Equal protection for every individual American under the law is what the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, passed after the Civil War, guarantees. That this nation takes this guarantee seriously -- that there are no classes of individuals treated differently under the law -- has been a justifiable obsession of blacks.
A society in which all life is not valued the same, where murder of one citizen is not the same as the murder of another citizen, is a horror that black Americans have known too well.
So it is a particular irony that this major expansion of the politicization of our law has been signed by our first black president.
What could it possibly mean that the penalty for the same act of violence -- for murder -- may be different depending on what might be deemed to be the motivation?
Can you imagine a football game where the penalty for roughing the passer is 20 yards rather than 15 yards if the referee concludes that the violence perpetrated was motivated because the quarterback was homosexual?
Is it not a sign of our own pathology that we now have codified that it is worse to murder a homosexual than someone who has committed adultery, even with your husband or wife, or who has slandered or robbed? Isn't the point murder?
Can we really believe that someone capable of murder is less likely to do so if the victim is a homosexual and the penalties are greater?
It should be clear that hate crime law has nothing to do with improving our law but rather with creating favored political classes. It is something that should be hateful to everyone who cares about a free society, and particularly hateful to those, such as blacks, who have been victimized by politicization of law.
How about the sad and pathetic recent murder of a 16-year-old Christian black honor student in Chicago by four teenage thugs, also black?
A hate crime?
Black on black homicides are tearing up our inner cities. Hate crimes?
The social breakdown that produces the disproportionate violence in black America is the product of the same moral relativism and politicization of law that has produced hate crime bills.
We already have a source, which instructs against murder and to love your neighbor as yourself.
But this has been banned from our schools and our public spaces.
So once again, in what is becoming our Godless nation, we mistake the disease for the cure.
(Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org). She can be reached at parker(at)urbancure.org)
COLUMN
Why all the fuss NOW?
Why all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the hate crimes statute NOW? The current hate crimes law has been on the books since 1969, and NEVER over the past 40 years has someone been prosecuted for expressing prejudice against members of a race or a religious group. Christian pastors have been invoking Scripture against non-Christians for as long as there have been Christians, and the hate crimes statute has never been used against them. Take Pat Robertson, for example: He has been railing against Muslims for his entire life and went completely apoplectic when an Imam first delivered the invocation at a session of the House of Representatives, but he was still within his rights to do so. The fact that the hate crimes law now includes sexual orientation will not inhibit the venting of his spleen.
But there is a BIG difference between expressing personal prejudice against a group, and being motivated by that prejudice to attack someone’s person or property. I don’t care if Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Sean Hannity or Lou Sheldon hurl their anti-Gay invective until the cows come home; but if someone uses Scripture as a justification for beating up someone who is Gay, that’s a different story.
Likewise when it comes to delineating between different crimes against property: There’s a big moral and ethical difference between someone who spraypaints a “tag” on a highway overpass, and someone who spraypaints swastikas on the front of a synagogue.
Until conservatives mount a concerted effort to repeal the federal hate crimes statute that has been in effect for past 40 years, I’ll continue to see their arguments against the legislation that President Obama signed as pretty disingenuous.
Not that's hypocritical
We endured 12 years of Republicans slipping pork and fat-cat extras into legislation... like sneaking
bush immunity from prosecution for war-crimes he hadn't even committed yet, and you're just now waking up to this???
Maybe the GOP should've passed the line-item veto when they had the chance?
Thank the Heavens This Bill Passed!!!
It has been long awaited in the GLBT community that a bill of this magnitude has been put into motion. Sure, there is the Hate Crimes bill that has been in effect since 1969, but never once has it been about sexual orientation. Now that we have it, we of the GLBT community can and will have the same rights as everyone else. It's not a question about race, creed, or religion for that matter, its about the principal of the matter. You can't discriminate us and HATE us for being who we are, proud individuals that stand up for what we believe in. So Thank you President Obama for doing what is right and making the change for us to live a somewhat "normal" life. This bill was just what we needed to fight back against those that fight us! Maybe now there can be some real Justice!