Hate Crimes and the Gays and Their Crazy Agendas: a.k.a. Dawn's Treatise On Hate Crimes Legislation

I receive political e-mails from my uncle on a semi-regular basis now. My response upon reading one is “What? Really? That doesn’t make sense. ” I have to re-read several times before I get it, because my life is a sheltered and naïve metropolitan bubble of urban bliss that forgets about 90% of America’s Midwestern rural population who refer to the current Presidential administration as “Hussein’s terrorist-loving illegal Totalitarian regime, God’s allowance of the Biblical prophecy of end-times.” I know, right? Here I am calling him “Obama,” silly me. I think Obama’s doing pretty good considering the circumstances; I mean, what do I know?

My uncle, who lives in rural Kansas, believes that the government considers him a “Potential Domestic Terrorist,” along with those who support the Constitution, are pro-life, and are opposed to government control. My uncle doesn’t work. Literally all he does is sit in his recliner, watching monster truck rallies and WWF wrestling matches on the tv. He also occasionally checks his e-mail. I’m pretty sure he only leaves the house once a week to run errands, such as going to the grocery store to purchase Doritos and hot dogs. Therefore, I have my doubts regarding his domestic terrorist status. Government, this is a message to you: If you are monitoring my uncle, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME.

The most recent e-mail was about hate crimes. My uncle wrote, “You can't possibly say anything good about this bill. I don't see how you/anyone could/can.” The bill he’s referring to is the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. New hate crime legislation was initiated following the infamous and horrendous hate-motivated torture-murder of a college student in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. Congress has been debating the inclusion of hate crimes based on sexual orientation, gender, and people with disabilities.

My uncle forwarded e-mails about the hate crimes bill from two organizations, the American Family Association (AFA) and Concerned Women for America (CWA). These organizations are tremendously, vehemently opposed to the hate crimes bill, because of its inclusion of homosexuality, more so than for any other reason. That’s my opinion.

THE AFA

The first organization, AFA (www.afa.net), is a Christian group that stands for traditional family values. They don’t hate homosexuals, but are motivated “to expose the misrepresentation of the radical homosexual agenda and stop its spread though our culture.” AFA has a whole page devoted specifically to the homosexual agenda, which I find exciting, because this whole “agenda” thing continues to elude me. http://www.afa.net/homosexual_agenda/

The e-mail from the AFA about the hate crimes bill was titled: “Senate Poised to Give Special Protection Status to Pedophiles: Your Calls Are Needed Today!”

It made only one point,
1. “The U.S. Senate is set to give legally protected status to pedophiles and 30 other sexual orientations. The Senate refused to define what is meant by sexual orientation in S. 909, the ‘Hate Crimes’ bill. This means that the 30 different sexual orientations will be federally protected classes.”

THE CWA

The second organization, CWA (http://www.cwfa.org), is a Christian group whose mission is to bring Biblical principles to all levels of public policy. CWA believes that gay people aren’t born that way, but rather exhibit a behavior that can and should be resisted. Also, homosexuals are inherently dirty, unhealthy, and disease-ridden. I don’t exaggerate. http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp?id=959&department=CWA&categoryid=family

One CWA article says, “Despite the clear medical evidence that homosexual behavior is at its very essence unhealthy, many advocates and activists insist that we cannot counsel these people to change their behavior, because it is an innate genetic trait. These advocates make reference to several medical studies that claim to have established a biological link to homosexuality. However, fair evaluation of these studies proves that they are anything but conclusive.” It therefore follows that CWA also feels that people can be counseled out of being gay.

The CWA, being more elaborate than the AFA, had three points to say about the hate crimes bill,
1. “’Hate Crimes’ is an overreach and overbroad . . . Over 30 kinds of sexual behaviors could be covered, including pedophilia and bestiality.”
2. “’Hate crimes’ laws lead to religious discrimination. These laws have been used in Europe, Canada – and even American – to intimidate and punish people who honor natural sexuality and value marriage as the union of a man and a woman. If a person speaks out against various sexual behaviors, they may be accused of ‘hate speech’ and promoting ‘hate crimes.’”
3. “’Hate crimes’ creates special classes of victims based solely upon their ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘gender identity.’ Victims who engage in homosexual, transgender, fetish, or other sexual behaviors would get preferential treatment over victims who are grandmothers, veterans or children. In other countries, it has lead to punishing people for their Biblical views on sexuality.” http://www.cwfa.org/factsheets/thoughtcrimes-factcard.pdf

MY RESPONSES

POINT 1: PEDOPHILES

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning website, PolitiFact.com, a site managed by journalists from the St. Petersburg Times, is dedicated to fact-checking statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists, and interest groups, and rating them on a “Truth-O-Meter.” The truth-o-meter rates true, mostly true, half-true, barely true, false, pants-on-fire, and full-flop.

The claim that the hate crimes bill will protect pedophiles received a PolitiFact rating of “Pants-On-Fire,” meaning that it’s essentially ridiculous. It elaborates. For one thing, pedophilia and sexual orientation aren’t the same thing. “Sexual orientation relates to the gender to which a person is romantically attracted while pedophilia relates to age, adults who are sexually fixated on children.”

Furthermore, the FBI's Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines currently defines “sexual orientation bias” as "a preformed negative opinion or attitude toward a group of persons based on their sexual attraction toward, and responsiveness to, members of their own sex or members of the opposite sex, e.g., gays, lesbians, heterosexuals." This is how our own federal government already defines it. It doesn’t include pedophiles.

Additionally, 31 states have had hate crime laws on the books for decades that include sexual orientation, and there hasn’t been a single case ever of a pedophile being involved. Why would the federal government expect it to happen, if it has never happened before on the state level?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/may/14/steve-king/rep-steve-king-claims-federal-hate-crime-law-would/

POINT 2: RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION

To say that it’s religious discrimination to punish someone for committing a CRIME against another human being, someone who violently ASSAULTS an innocent, law-abiding person, is crazy. Sorry. You don’t have to commit a crime to value marriage as the union of a man and a woman. There’s no correlation. People who commit crimes should be punished, because they committed crimes, which leads me my next point.

POINT 3: SPECIAL TREATMENT

This is the surprise ending where I wind up agreeing with my uncle on this one point. A valid argument can be made against the idea of hate crime legislation in general. Hate crime legislation can be considered to be redundant, because legal prohibitions for traditional crime already exist. It’s essentially recriminalizing actions that are already criminalized.

All crimes against all humans are bad, because all individuals are EQUAL under the law. A crime is a crime, whether or not it’s driven by hate or a senselessly random act of violence. Legally speaking, we look at the crime and determine judgment based upon the crime itself. To single out certain groups for special treatment is, perhaps, undemocratic. However, I can understand both sides of the problem. This isn’t a simple, black-and-white issue.

I realize that hate crime legislation was originally based on the belief that hate crimes cause greater individual and social harm, because they attack a person’s core identity and cause severe dehumanization resulting in emotional and psychological problems, and then society suffers from the disempowerment of the group of people. I understand that, but some crimes against people are just BAD, no matter what. Violent assault, dehumanization, and victimization all have damaging effects on everyone who experiences them.

Ultimately my response to, “You can't possibly say anything good about this bill. I don't see how you/anyone could/can,” is that I can appreciate that this bill and hate crime legislation in general have good intentions. If hate crime legislation is going to exist, then certainly, sexual orientation should be a part of it. There’s no reason to ever discriminate against or commit a crime against someone based on their sexual orientation.