The Democrat-controlled Congress has scheduled a vote on a “hate crimes” bill today, the same day as the National Prayer Day, which has angered some Christian groups. What does one have to do with the other? It would help to understand that the “hate crime” bill is actually a sort “special rights” bill for homosexuals and other politically correct groups, making crimes against them worse than the same crimes against others.
Many Christian groups object to the hate crime bill because they see it as another step toward criminalizing religious speech that is “intolerant” of gays and because it will further force homosexuality into the mainstream of society.
Conservative Christian activists worry that the measure would give individuals who engage in homosexual behavior (“sexual orientation&88221) or cross dressers (“gender identity”) preferential treatment over other citizens by elevating them to a specially protected class.
“This so-called hate crimes bill begins to lay the legal foundation and framework to investigate, prosecute and persecute pastors, business owners and anyone else whose actions are based upon - and reflect - the truths found in the Bible,” Sheldon said.
Other conservative Christians are using the occasion to remind everyone that homosexual victims of crimes already receive special treatment compared to those who are victims of “hate” crimes, as so-defined, by homosexuals.
Justice should be blind,” CWA President Wendy Wright said in a news release. She said the assailants of Matthew Shepard - a homosexual youth who was killed in 1998 - should receive the same sentence as the killer of Mary Stachowicz, “a grandmother who was brutally murdered by a homosexual man [in Chicago in 2002].”
Stachowicz was murdered by her co-worker Nicholas Gutierrez, a 19-year-old homosexual, who went off the deep end when she told him to stop having sex with other men. For her temerity, he punched and kicked and stabbed her until he got tired and then suffocated her with a garbage bag. Stachowicz had a conversation with her killer as she came home from Mass and for that she was murdered. Gutierrez was not prosecuted for a hate crime even though he killed Stachowicz for her beliefs.
There are two problems with “hate” crimes prosecution. First, you’re prosecuting someone based on what you think he thought. And why should that be worse if he thought one thing and not another? Is not the victim still dead? Of course, we opened the door on this years ago with other “special circumstances” laws.
The other problem is that, as we see, the laws are rarely applied evenhandedly. The intent is to create a legal basis on which we can say that certain politically correct groups deserve special rights. If you want to see where this is going, look at Canada’s Human Rights Tribunals, which strip Christians of their rights and grant them to protected classes.
Technorati Tags: politics | hate crime | Congress | homosexuality | National Day of Prayer | religious freedom |
The reports of “hate” crimes (when is a crime not hateful?) are often hyped up. One of the first big media covered crimes was a murder in New York involving 3 young criminals and a gay victim. The press reported it as 3 kids who killed a man because he was gay. The problem is that one of the attackers was one Eric Brown. Eric Brown was a friend of my close friend. Eric Brown was a bisexual. He was present at the attack because he was the bait in a robbery setup. So a robbery that turned into murder became one of the big causes for the hate crimes push. There is so much dishonesty on this stuff.
Why isn’t it enough to prosecute criminals?
All that the Democrats—apparently unanimously—are proving is that for all their perennial prattle about defending the U.S. Constitution, they are perfectly willing to gut it to gain points with one of its major constituency groups.
It’s a tragedy that our ‘Human Rights Tribunals’ are now seemingly the stick of the pro-homosexual political leviathan in Canada. We have severe racism, ethnic violence and growing crime, and yet my government sets aside millions each year to fund petty inquisitions which target dissident businesses, associations (like the KoC) and upstart Bishops. And it gets even worse – our government is now building a $100 million plus ‘human rights museum’ which celebrates contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage. It’s not exactly a great time to be a Canadian.
I urge you Americans to fight any Hate Crimes or special consideration law that ever gets drafter, even if it is designed to protect Christians. Such laws are always abused.