Hate Crimes Bill

05/09/07

Bush has threatened to veto the Hate Crimes Bill or The Matthew Shepard Act. If passed, it would include sexual orientation and gender to the categories protected by federal hate crimes law. Also being considered is a measure that would ban job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The Administration argues the State’s and local’s laws are enough to protect those individuals.

Is it really enough?

When Matthew Shepard was brutally killed in 1998, the two convicted murders were not charged with a hate crime because Wyoming did not have such law (and failed to pass it after). Although both of them were sent to their life-long prison term (and that was just because that inhumane murder had attracted the outcry from people around the world), to commit crime on the basis of sexual orientation is not prosecutable as hate crimes. Therefore, to federalize this law, every gay, lesbians and transgender will be protected by laws no matter where they are. In addition, the punishment for those who commit the hate crimes will be harsher than other crimes.

The United States federal prosecution is possible for hate crimes committed on the basis of a person’s race, color, religion or nation origin but not sexual-orientation and gender. Human being of any race and origin should be protected but not of sexual-orientation.

This is what the New York State legislature found when it enacted the Hate Crimes Act of 2000.

"Hate crimes do more than threaten the safety and welfare of all citizens. They inflict on victims incalculable physical and emotional damage and tear at the very fabric of free society. Crimes motivated by invidious hatred toward particular groups not only harm individual victims but send a powerful message of intolerance and discrimination to all members of the group to which the victim belongs. Hate crimes can and do intimidate and disrupt entire communities and vitiate the civility that is essential to healthy democratic processes . In a democratic society, citizens cannot be required to approve of the beliefs and practices of others, but must never commit criminal acts on account of them.”

Bush’s coming third veto will define his core characteristic of his presidency. First veto was used against the stem cell research (science). He fired the second one to stop the Democratic Congress from inserting the timeline for troop withdrawal from Iraq (peace). The third one will be used to kill the equal rights of all people. And let me guess, he will use the forth one to help his friends in the big pharmaceutical business to fend off the poor elderly from ordering cheaper drugs from other countries.

Tae

 

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