Hate Crimes Bill Passes House of Representatives
Filed under Law & Politics, News on April 29th, 2009 by Marcus French
The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (HR 1913) passed in the U.S. House of Representatives today, April 29th, in a 249-175 vote. 231 Democrats voted in favor of the bill, 17 Democrats voted against, 18 Republicans voted for the bill, and 158 Republicans voted against.
Hours of debate preceding the bill included a stirring account by Rep. Jim Jordan of his attempt to add “the unborn” to the list of protected persons on the bill, with the amendment being voted down because the unborn were “not persons.” Contrasted with this were libelous and vacuous declarations by those for the bill, including one representative who quoted from the Ten Commandments as he accused those against the bill of “bearing false witness” in their attempts to raise warnings about the possible use of this law to muzzle and/or prosecute religious leaders when they attempt to speak negatively about homosexuality, and a declaration from another congressman that thinking the Hate Crimes Bill was about thought-crimes was like believing anti-lynching laws were about knot-tying.
Before the final vote, an attempt was made to “expand the applicability of the bill to the age, status as a current or former member of the Armed Forces, or status as a law enforcement officer beyond the scope of groups mentioned in the bill. ” [source: House Floor Summary] This was rejected however, and the bill was passed.
Following the vote, the Human Rights Campaign released a statement declaring:
“All Americans are one step closer to protection from hate violence thanks to today’s vote,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “Hate crimes are a scourge on our communities and it’s time we give law enforcement the tools they need to combat this serious problem.”
Is this vote really a positive step, however? A Denver lawyer made an interesting point when he looked at the “politically correct” requirements in hate crime legislation in a guest commentary in the Denver Post:
Isn’t every criminal act that harms another person a “hate crime”? And Colorado’s law does not even begin to criminalize “hate” in general; it selects only politically correct, unacceptable categories of “hate,” only those derived from current zeitgeist that preferred minority classifications should receive extra special protection.
When a Colorado gang engaged in an initiation ritual of specifically seeking out a “white woman” to rape, the Boulder prosecutor declined to pursue “hate crime” charges. So the “hate crime” law does not apply equally, instead criminalizing only politically incorrect thoughts directed against politically incorrect victim categories.
A government powerful enough to pick and choose which thoughts to prosecute is a government too powerful.
In addition, Robert Gagnon raised fair warnings of where this Hate Crime Bill will lead in his piece:
In establishing an official “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” protection category, “sexual orientation” hate laws make inevitable, so-called “employment nondiscrimination acts” for “sexual orientation” that turn out to be “employment discrimination acts” against people in the workplace who do not want to support a homosexualist agenda. Together they make inevitable the passage of legislation that mandates acceptance of “gay marriage.” It is not possible to be for a “sexual orientation thought-crime” bill and not also be for the enforcement of “gay marriage” because the former leads inevitably to the latter. That is how the courts in Massachusetts and, recently Iowa, operated. They moved from “sexual orientation” laws in “hate crime” and “employment” to treating as intrinsically discriminatory any opposition to “gay marriage.”
Look at how far things have already gone in Canada. Among those recently fined thousands of dollars are: Father Alphonse de Valk and Catholic Insight Magazine for speaking against homosexual behavior; Bill Whatcott, a Catholic activist, for producing pamphlets that called homosexual practice immoral (Whatcott was also “banned for life” from criticizing homosexuality); Stephen Boisson, a pastor, for a letter to a newspaper denouncing homosexual practice as immoral (also ordered to desist from expressing his views on homosexual practice in any public forum).
Can’t happen in the United States? Even though some high court justices have already made appeals to precedents in foreign law to support the homosexualist agenda here? Tell that to the freelance female photographer who on the grounds that it violated her Christian belief declined to photograph a lesbian wedding and, as a result, was ordered by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission to pay over $6000 to the lesbian couple.
Ought not these and other points be seriously explored before we move headlong into uncharted territory? We are seeing change, as Barack Obama promised, but is it really for the better?
Tags: congress, Denver Post, hate crimes bill, homosexuality, House of Representatives, Human Rights Campaign
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In Luke 17 in the New Testament, Jesus said that one of the big “signs” that will happen shortly before His return to earth as Judge will be a repeat of the “days of Lot” (see Genesis 19 for details). So gays are actually helping to fulfill this same worldwide “sign” (and making the Bible even more believable!) and thus hurrying up the return of the Judge! They are accomplishing what all of the Bible-thumpers couldn’t accomplish! Gays couldn’t have accomplished this by just coming out of closets into bedrooms. Instead, they invented new architecture - you know, closets opening on to Main Streets where little kids would be able to watch naked men having sex with each other at festivals in places like San Francisco (where their underground saint - San Andreas - may soon get a big jolt out of what’s going on over his head!). Thanks, gays, for figuring out how to bring back our resurrected Saviour even quicker!
(I saw what is above on the internet and only want to share it with all of you - Maria)
Maria,
Do you believe what you quoted? Or are you sharing it for other reasons?
I find it a little un-nerving with this kind of legislation. I can see the logic behind it, however ignorant it is. it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the further this country ignores and bans the laws of the Holy bible on which this country was founed. The more and more laws have to be passed to make up for the mindless and Godless people who live in this country who have no concept of morales or consequences. However, as can be seen. Mans laws are almost always flawed and create more issues than the ones they’re supposed to fix. This is an opinion and NOT “hate speech”.
Peace
The government of the U.S. was hardly founded on the Bible or by Bible believers. The Ten Commandments have four commandments that have nothing to do with any laws at all but are commands that have to do with the proper worship of a single desert deity. I hate to be the one to inform you Christians but this country was founded upon religious freedom. The Ten Commandments specifically deny religous freedom and demand the worship of only one God. The Bible’s laws are archaic, often brutal and unfair and actually promote and regulate the industry of slavery. Fortunately morals and ethics evolve like everyting else on the earth and humanity has outgrown the nonsense in the Bible. Well except for about 20 million poorly educated and badly misinformed Americans.
So Bernie, you reckon the “Bible’s laws” are archaic and “brutal”? So I presume then that conversely you reckon modern man’s laws to be civilised, like that one that permits and encourages the violent murder of millions of preborn human beings? Sounds like a case of Isaiah 5:20 to me.
Ewan,
In the fascist and communist dictatorships where abortion is illegal about 200 women die every day from botched abortions. That is archaic and brutal and the kind of holocaust fundamentalist Christians wish they could inflict on women in the United States. Abortions are not murder because a fetus is not a human being it is a potential human being. It cannot have rights that conflict with a woman’s rights because rights have to be considered as a whole.
Abortions have been performed as long as there have been humans and in every society that has been studied. They were openly advertised in America at the time the U.S. Constitution was written. If our founders had wanted to make abortion illegal they would have done so. Our founders also could have made slavery illegal but they did not. Now the Bible not only condones slavery it actually regulates its practice. Thankfully human morals evolve like everything else and we humans are now sophisticated enough to know that slavery is harmful not only to individuals but civilization as well and abortions cannot be curtailed by making them illegal.
There are always going to be problems and chaos when people think there is some kind of invisible absolutist lawgiver. We humans have invented the words “morality” and “ethics” and we have given them our own definitions. We humans have decided on our own value systems. The Bible prescribes the death penalty for over twenty crimes other than murder. The Bible is a very dangerous, archaic and stupid collection of nonsense. For this reason we atheists have sentenced the Bible to death and its believers to be swept up and deposited in the dustbin of history.
Bernie, actually, under most communist regimes abortion is legal. That hundreds of women die from ‘backyard’ abortions is a myth promoted by pro-abortionists. Even if your grossly exaggerated figure were true, it still wouldn’t be a justification of legal abortion. Somewhere in the region of 40 to 50 million abortions are carried out each year worldwide. That’s 40 to 50 million innocents murdered against a far smaller number of deaths due to backyard abortions and those deaths are of women engaging in the immoral act of killing their baby, so the term ‘innocent’ cannot be applied to them as it can to the pre-born victims of abortion.
The fact that any practice can be said to have been present “as long as there have been humans” is hardly an argument to justify it. Murder has been around longer than has abortion and yet I don’t hear you arguing that it should be legal to kill your brother (as in the first murder when Cain killed Able). (Of course abortion is murder but you know that I’m talking here about murder of the born as against murder of the pre-born.)
The freedoms provided by Western civilisation owe their very existence to Christianity so if you atheists ever succeed in eliminating Christian concepts from Western society and government you will have succeeded in cutting off the branch on which you are sitting. It is like biting the hand that feeds you or cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s ironic really, but sadly you will take the rest of us down with you.
[...] Editor’s Note: Press Release from Flip Benham of Operation Save America regarding the Hate Crimes Bill [...]
Ewan,
Our Founders unanimously rejected all Christian principles when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Christian leaders harassed the founders constantly demanding references to Jesus and Christianity be put in our founding documents but they were rejected every time. Our nation was founded instead on philosophical enlightenment and democratic principles both of which are constantly disparaged in the Bible. The Ten Commandments is a fascist document that has four commandments that describe and demand the proper worship of just one God. Obviously our Founders rejected this archaic and idiotic document and opted for more rational and modern non-religious principles.
Christianity isn’t a hand that feeds anybody. As with everything you else you say to defend your religion quite the opposite is true: “Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported… It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.” – Robert G. Ingersoll
Bernie, I’m sure it would be news to the Founders to be told they “unanimously rejected all Christian principles when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” I guess they were all atheists then.
Ewan,
No they were Deists who believed in Nature’s God if you check the Declaration of Independence. Notice they gave God second billing to Nature. Would Christians do that? Hardly. I wouldn’t be so quick to claim that men who wrote all men are created equal while owning slaves, who denied women the right to vote, denied full citizenship to African Americans and started a war because they didn’t want to pay their fair share of taxes were Christians if I were you. Just take the high road and stop trying to revise history to justify your anti-separation of Chuch and State agenda.
Bernie, for the benefit of other readers I submit the following:
From Were America’s Founders Deists?
Once cut and paste deserves another:
“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” comes from a long philosophical tradition dating back to Socrates. ”the Laws of Nature” refers to natural law. ”Nature’s God” actually refers to the divinely revealed laws of God. The phrase is a shortened version of the statement “the Laws of Nature and the Divinely Revealed Laws of God.” By the tradition of the time, “Nature’s God” was theistic, specifically the Christian God, so Christians might argue that the inclusion of “Nature’s God” defines the Declaration as a Christian document and the US as a Christian nation.
In practice the Christian argument would not work. The Founders appointed the Deist Jefferson to write the document, and appointed the Unitarian Adams and the Deist Franklin to edit it. The Founders certainly knew the minds of these three individuals. They demonstrated by these appointments their intent to acknowledge the legitimacy of Deism as an instrument of social framing.
Even though “Nature’s God” was traditionally theist, the Declaration does not explicitly state a single understanding of God. This was by intent. There were discussions at the time about what the national religion might be. The Founders came to see that they could not select one understanding of God over any other because they would risk alienating those people who disliked the selected understanding. That would have been problematic politically because the Founders were trying to get as many people as possible to support the revolution. The Founders intended to make all statements of the understanding of God neutral with respect to establishments of religion, while at the same time they obviously intended to invoke the name of God as the highest authority over government. Having God as the highest authority would give it a greater legitimacy in the eyes of the religious.
All references to God in the Declaration are neutral with respect to the preferred understanding of God. There is no explicit statement that the Catholic, or Unitarian, or Muslim, or any other understanding of God is the one discussed in the Declaration.
To get this neutral religious understanding into their document the Founders chose to frame a Deist understanding of God. This choice was reflected in the lack of a specific Theistic understanding of God, and their choice of Deists for the authoring of the Declaration. The Founders acknowledged the legitimacy of Deism by choosing a Deist as the initial author and choosing a Deist as one of the two editors acknowledges the legitimacy of Deism. This choice also strongly suggests that the Founders intended to frame a Deist understanding of God.
“the Laws of Nature” refers to natural law. A good discussion by James A. Donald on natural law can be found at - Amorian Deism Natural Religion, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness
As one of the Founders, John Adams, correctly observed: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
This statement is pretty much true of the entire Western world. The West’s systems of government and law primarily owe their existence to a Judeo-Christian heritage. Now with Christianity in decline in the West and false religions on the rise such as Secular Humanism, we are witnessing the decline of Western civilisation. Once all moral restraint has been thrown off, even the best systems of government will fail, which is why Western governments are becoming more totalitarian in an attempt to maintain civil order. And this brings us back to the topic of ‘hate crimes legislation’.
If ever there was an negative example of government attempting to legislate morality, this sort of legislation is it given that it attempts to control what people say and think. It’s ironic considering it is usually Christians who are accused of “legislating morality” but it’s the atheists who have developed it into an art form.
As one of the Founders, John Adams, correctly observed: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Answer: As one of the Founders, Thomas Jefferson, correctly observed: “If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? …Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814. No one needs religion to have good morals and ethics.
This statement is pretty much true of the entire Western world. The West’s systems of government and law primarily owe their existence to a Judeo-Christian heritage.
Answer: The West’s systems of government and law primarily owe their existence to ancient Greek and Roman democracies that existed ling before Christianity did and to philosophical enlightenment, which is constantly ridiculed, belittled in the Bible and by Bible thumpers. There are no examples of any democratic societies in the Bible or during the time Christianity ruled the Western world known as the Dark Ages.
Now with Christianity in decline in the West and false religions on the rise such as Secular Humanism, we are witnessing the decline of Western civilisation.
Answer: Secular humanism is neither a religion nor is it false; it’s a philosophy. I’d like you to name one attribute of secular humanism that is the least bit religious. Your claim that “we are witnessing the decline of Western civilization” is a matter of opinion. I disagree and right now so do the majority of your fellow Americans.
Once all moral restraint has been thrown off, even the best systems of government will fail, which is why Western governments are becoming more totalitarian in an attempt to maintain civil order. And this brings us back to the topic of ‘hate crimes legislation’.
Answer: There is no evidence that all moral restraint will ever be thrown off. Quite the contrary. Human morals and ethics are progressing and becoming more sophisticated, they’re not regressing. I’d like you to point to one Western government that is having some kind of problem maintaining civil order.
If ever there was an negative example of government attempting to legislate morality, this sort of legislation is it given that it attempts to control what people say and think. It’s ironic considering it is usually Christians who are accused of “legislating morality” but it’s the atheists who have developed it into an art form.
Answer: What atheists exactly? What atheists are in Congress legislating anything let alone morality? Fundamentalist Christians are always claiming that the vast majority of the people in this country are Christians like 75 to 85 percent of the population. They also make claims that atheists are running the government, the public schools, the media and everything else. The fundamentalists act like Christians are some kind of persecuted minority whose rights are being trampled on. Obviously the small number of atheists and humanists in the United States don’t have the political or monetary clout to do any of the things fundamentalists accuse them of doing.
Ewan the reason Christianity is in decline is because people like you make desperate, absurd and false claims to defend it. You posted a link to a creationist website that attempts to make the case that the reason the Church persecuted Galileo was essentially that other scientists had convinced the churchmen that the earth was flat and didn’t move rather than the text of the Bible. So the Church supposedly arrested and threatened Galileo not because he had debunked the Bible’s flat immovable earth claims but because he refuted some scientists that the churchmen believed over the Bible. Who do you expect to believe that may I ask? You know it isn’t true, none of it. That you would even post such obvious falsehoods says a lot about Christian ethics and morality.
Ewan,
Ewan
I told you to take the high road and stop insisting that our founders were Christians. You’re only shooting yourself in the foot and missing a great opportunity to promote your religion. Our founders did not allow women the right to vote but they did allow women to have abortions with absolutely no restrictions placed on them. Many people are unaware that the fundamentalist wacko who prosecuted John Scopes, William Jennings Bryan, was one of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. Had our founders been conscientious Christians like Bryan they likely would have given women the right to vote in our founding document the Constitution, and they may also have put some sensible restrictions on abortions. But they did neither.
Our founders made no laws against slavery and denied African Americans full citizenship. People like Bryan and other fundamentalist Christians were known as champions of the little guy. Had our founders been concerned with the poor and less advantaged people in our society as many fundamentalist Christians have been through history they likely would have outlawed the institution of slavery and granted African Americans full citizenship. But they did neither.
Had our founders been real Christians I highly doubt there would have even been a bloody revolution to win our freedom. I’m pretty sure our founders, had they been true Christians, would have negotiated a purchase similar to the Louisiana Purchase we made from France, rather than just refuse to pay what were certainly not unfair taxes and instead just start shooting the British soldiers sent to protect them and keep the peace.
Our founders weren’t Christians and anyone can look at what they wrote in our founding documents and what they said publicly and privately and see that they weren’t. When you make claims to the contrary people can easily see that you are lying. You have a rare opportunity to actually tell the truth about something and make some points. If I were you I’d use it.
Bernie, thanks for putting us all straight on the subject of the Founders and Christianity and the many other subjects you cover. I have to bow to your superior intellect and wisdom. No doubt Dr. Brown once he comes to his senses will do likewise.
But seriously, are you claiming that the Founders’ intention in the Constitution of the USA was to “allow women to have abortions with absolutely no restrictions placed on them” ? This has to be one of the craziest things I’ve heard in a while.
Ewan,
Forget whether one of us has superior intellect or wisdom or might come to their senses. That’s irrelevant. I’m winning this debate because I have the facts on my side and you do not. That’s what’s really going on here.
Abortions were not only being done in the United States at the time the Constitution was written abortion services were openly advertised. Our founders had to be aware of this and could have easily placed some restrictions on abortions. Clearly they did not. And your explanation for this would be what exactly?
Bernie, if by “winning this debate” you are judging by the ability to make absurd assertions then you certainly are winning.
You cannot be serious in claiming the founders of the US Constitution deliberately intended to “allow women to have abortions with absolutely no restrictions placed on them”. Why then did the US Supreme court need to invent certain “penumbral rights” not explicitly found in the Constitution in order to over ride State laws prohibiting abortion?
Our founding fathers had just thrown off an opressive central government. They formed a minimal government formed from loosely aligned states. The founding fathers were very careful to try and limit the power of the central government, thus the 10th amendment. Writing something into the Constitution to allow or prevent abortion would have gone against this principle. Many of the founding fathers also wrestled with the issue of slavery. The many states were firmly determined to keep slaves. Trying to write anti-slavery into the Constitution would have prevented its acceptance.
America was settled by Christians fleeing pursecution in Europe. All but two of the first 108 universities in America were Christian. In 1777 Congress voted to spend $300,000 to purchase Bibles for distribution in the 13 colonies. Congress recommended and approved the Holy Bible for use in schools. Many argue the freedom of religion was not intended so much as freedom to a Hindu as freedom to choose your own denomination. The founding fathers did not want a Church of England in America.