If you ever get discouraged by the fact Harper and the Conservatives are in power, just remember it could be worse - someone like Bush could be the Prime Minister.
The Democratic-controlled House passed today a new bill called The Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would “expand federal hate crime categories to include violent attacks against gays and people targeted because of gender..gender identity or disability“. Basically, the bill would give new funding to help state and local law enforcement agencies prevent and prosecute hate crimes, and close gaps in current US federal hate crimes law. Sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, Bush is threatening to veto it. Apparently his conservative fundamentalist religious-right base (the remaining 30% or so that still thinks he’s a good president) has decided that protecting gays from violent attacks means somehow that pastors who preach against homosexuality are going to be arrested:
Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, warned that the true intent of the bill was “to muzzle people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about homosexuality.” If you read the Bible in a certain way, he told his broadcast listeners, “you may be guilty of committing a ‘thought crime.’”
The bill will not do anything of the sort, of course:
“It does not impinge on public speech or writing in any way,” countered Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers , D-Mich., pointing out that the bill reaffirms First Amendment and free speech rights.
Unfortunately, its folks like Dobson and his supporters that gives Christianity a bad name and paints us all who practise Christianity as being narrow-minded and hateful of groups that aren’t “normal” or in our mould. Anyway, I give the Democrats a thumbs up to trying to extend protections to these additional groups, and I look forward to the US becoming a more progressive society when a Democratic President gets elected in 2008 and this Bill can be passed into law in 2009.
I don’t agree with hate crime legislation. Crime is crime, it matters not the rationale of intent except in deliberating the cause and effect. “Hate” crime is an oxymoron, as all crimes are a matter of hatred. Whether a pakistani man is attacked and told to “go back to Asia”, or whether an old woman is robbed of her purse, I see no difference whatsoever in terms of criminal intent. The fact the attack on the Pakistani was motivated from bigotry should be irrelevant to the proceedings as it asserts that some crimes are “more equal” than others.