What's to debate? Evanglical nutcase's right to beat up and kill gays?
Boehner: Protecting People Against Hate Crimes ‘Takes Us Down A Path That Is Very Scary’
Think ProgressToday, the House is voting on the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a bipartisan bill that would enable federal officials to work with state and local officials to investigate and prosecute hate crimes.
Radical right-wing groups have lobbied aggressively against this bill. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson called it “insidious legislation” that would “silence and punish Christians for their moral beliefs.” (Listen to Dobson HERE.) The Concerned Women for America said the bill is meant to “grant official government recognition to both sexual and cross-dressing behaviors, and to silence opposition to those behaviors.”
Today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) reiterated this far-right talking point. He claimed that under the hate crimes bill, you would be charged with a crime if you were “thinking something bad” before you committed a crime against someone. “I just think it takes us down a path that is very scary.” Watch it at link~
The right-wing is wrong. This legislation goes after criminal action, like physical assaults, not name-calling or verbal abuse. The bill clearly states that “evidence of expression or associations of the defendant may not be introduced as substantive evidence at trial, unless the evidence specifically relates to that offense.”
The hate crimes legislation is by endorsed by 31 state attorneys general and leading law enforcement agencies. Under current law, federal officials are able to investigate and prosecute “attacks based on race, color, national origin and religion and because the victim was attempting to exercise a federally protected right,” but unable to intervene “in cases where women, gay, transgender or disabled Americans are victims of bias-motivated crimes for who they are.”
Transcript:
BOEHNER: It’s yours, yes.
REPORTER: Hate crimes legislation?
BOEHNER: Hate crimes? Yes.
REPORTER: How do you feel about it? What’s going to happen?
BOEHNER: I’ve got to tell you, I really don’t understand it. We’re going to put into place a federal law that says, not only will we punish you for the crime that you actually commit — the physical crime that you commit — but we’re also going to charge you with a crime that if we think that you were thinking bad things about this person before you committed a crime.
I just — I just really don’t understand it. I’ve been opposed to this for a long time and I remain opposed to it.
I mean, it’s a crime on what people were thinking when they were committing an act of violence. How do you walk into court and make a case for a crime because someone was thinking something bad. I just think it takes us down a path that is very scary.
The House today saw otherwise..
House passes bill to add attacks on gays to hate crime law; White House threatens veto
WASHINGTONLinky— Just hours after the White House issued a veto threat Thursday, the House voted to add gender and sexual orientation to the categories covered by federal hate crimes law.
The House legislation, passed 237-180, also makes it easier for federal law enforcement to take part in or assist local prosecutions involving bias-motivated attacks. Similar legislation is also moving through the Senate, setting the stage for another veto showdown with President Bush.
"This is an important vote of conscience, of a statement of what America is, a society that understands that we accept differences," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
Yeah.... bad implications to this bill (even though it's core premise is in the right place).... my father (an evangelical pastor) recieved a memo saying he could no longer denounce sexuality from the pulpit.
This was to be expected during my lifetime..... it's no surprise at this point.
A memo from who? Did it take a memo to persuade your father not to denounce gays in public?
does he make a habit of condemning sexuality from the pulpit?
Could the person that sent the memo be gay?
And it's for this reason that the more legitimate arguments in favor of hate crime legislation are rarely heard.What's to debate? Evanglical nutcase's right to beat up and kill gays?
Only if he happens to be reading directly from Romans Chapter 1... or when he happens to list the types of sins which have become the debauchery of our generation.... as in noting that the propensity for these deviant behaviors has increased strikingly over the past few years....
He would never call anyone out on it... that's never the purpose. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Are you familiar with that little gem? Nevertheless, it is what it is... and the Bible declares sexuality to be an abomination before GOD.
Last edited by Phenomanul; 05-03-2007 at 06:00 PM.
The same memo that allows you to disrespect him on a public forum? I guess you don't wish to relinquish that right?
It goes both ways... except I don't recall a case where my father attacked anybody for their lifestyle. Everyone will be held accountable for our actions to a higher authority (ahemmm GOD)... and this will happen regardless of whether we believe said authority exists.
"a memo from who" was a valid question, that you didn't answer.
You brought it up.
The fact that you and he discussed the memo means there was some discomfort in having received it.
Religious, sexual deviants are plenty. Just wondering how the chart of acceptability works in your house.
Don't know how I disrespected him, unless he is you.
From the Baptist Association Director.... it was a memo to all pastors in the area. It wasn't a memo to single him out - it was with reference to this particular bill.
I didn't suspect he'd been singled out, but you never know the true character of those that lurk among the robed.
Did he get the other memo? The one about putting covers on all the TPS reports.
The problem is that it is possible to prosecute speech as a "verbal assault." If a sexual decided he felt intimidated by a Christian preacher denouncing sexuality, said preacher could be in legal jeopardy under federal law.
Is this something you agree with?
I happen to agree with Dr. James Dobson on this one... it takes us down a 'scary path'.
Pardon the jump to conclusion... you didn't exactly phrase your comment too clearly... and I didn't exactly give all the details from the onset.
It's alright to jump. Religion is a leap. So is atheism.
See as much as I disagree with say....boutons_'s core beliefs... he is en led to believe whatever he wishes, no one should deny him that right. If however the implications of this bill went as far as creating a vast 'gray area' of criminal assertions and allegations..... Well... that too would mean that I would be able to accuse boutons_ or even someone like Bill Maher of hate speech towards Christians. That would be absurd.
This law would bring about the "Salem witch hunt" all over again....
I doubt that. Hate crime laws generally require some sort of actus reus that is already defined to be criminal (assault, for instance). Assailing someone's sexuality is not a crime. Any district attorney who would actually prosecute a "verbal assault" as a crime is out of his or her mind.
The point of hate crime legislation is to say, I think, that we've made a societal judgment to commit a crime against another simply because of some characteristic displayed by that person -- color, religion, sexual orientation. Frankly, I think that hate crime laws are more political footballs than they are effective prosecution tools. A person who chooses his victim based on some characteristic like that can be prosecuted for having intentionally committed the crime (as opposed to having evidenced some lesser culpable mental state (knowingly, recklessly, negligently)). In some ways, the better societal judgment might just be to increase the penalties on all who are convicted of committing intentional crimes.
Still, I think that a lot of disgust with law stems from a lack of understanding of what the law really is and Chicken Little characterizations of the law by those who are charged with describing it to the public. First Amendment religion clause law is a prime example of that phenomenon to me. The notion that someone should be prohibited from reading the Bible in a public school or from saying a private prayer is anathema to Supreme Court authority on the issue. Yet lawyers for school districts and poorly informed administrators enforce those sorts of uncons utional limitations with some regularity.
There may be other reasons that Phenomanual's father was told not to denounce sexuality, but to suggest that such speech is somehow forbidden by a hate crime law would seem to misunderstand what the law is meant to do.
I know that this is what the true intent of the law is... And like I mentioned in the first post the core principle is dead on.
It still takes us down an uncertain path... with an analogous Salem witch hunt or McCarthy trials as the extreme outcome.
The reason you assault, kill, rape or rob someone is completely irrelevent. The action is the crime, not the thought that goes through the criminals head before and during the crime. That is by definition policing people's thoughts. The thought police are here and they are only going to want more power. I can't believe people can't see the incredibly steep and slippery slope that hate crime laws have put us on.
Discrimination is bad. Racism is bad. Committing crimes against people for those reasons is bad. This is not the way to stop it though. The price we pay in letting the thought police in the door outweighs the benefits. The guy from the article is right: you're making a thought an illegal act. Unless these laws are done away with then we will live in a future where it will be illegal to say, "I don't like my son's teacher because he's gay" or "I can't stand Mormons". Not wrong, not socially unacceptable, but crimes that are punished. Don't think it can't happen.
But we already do that. A person's culpability for a crime is already directly tied to what he or she was thinking (or not thinking) before the crime was committed. It is, at least, to the extent the prosecutor can prove that culpable mental state.
In homicide cases, there are varying degrees of crime based entirely on the actor's culpable mental state. In most jurisdictions, if the actor can be shown to have killed someone intentionally, he's charged with murder. If he can only to be show to have acted recklessly, he's charged with manslaughter. And if it can only be established that he acted without ordinary care -- that is, that he acted negligently -- he's charged with criminally negligent homicide. The crime in each situation is precisely the same: killing someone. The difference in punishment for having committed that crime, however, depends on what the actor thought before committing the crime.
Hate crime laws, to me, are a variation on that theme. What they generally offer, I think, is an opportunity to enhance punishments based on the substance of the individual's thought. It's not as if the criminal's thoughts are only considered in hate crime situations -- it's that the criminal's thoughts become particularly repugnant to society when those thoughts become the sole basis for criminal action against the target. Like I said in my earlier post, I think there may be a better societal judgment in concluding that any intentional crime -- and a hate crime, by definition, would be an intentional crime -- should be punished more severely. I can also see the public policy arguments, though, for recognizing hate crimes.
Well said.
And yet the fear that wacky judges will push this past its meaning will always be there.
But wacky judges can't do that in isolation. That's why the system has so many checks in it.Well said.
And yet the fear that wacky judges will push this past its meaning will always be there.
A criminal prosecuted for a hate crime has the right to a jury trial, which generally takes the judge out of the picture in terms of deciding whether the defendant is culpable or not. If the judge somehow interjects himself into that issue, there are, in most states (and certainly in the federal system) one level of guaranteed review and another level of discretionary review on appeal. Sustaining a verdict like that takes the acquiesence of a majority of judges on a panel of 3 (in most instances) at the intermediate level and, if discretionary review is granted, significantly more at the highest level. That sort of appellate process ensures that the law won't just be the determination of one "wacky judge," but the conclusion of several judges. It severely curtails the likelihood of odd decisions that tend to become outliers on the legal landscape.
And the wackier the decisions of the lower courts, the more likely it is that discretionary review will be granted at the highest levels.
I disagree.
What you described is intent not mental state.
You can intentionally kill someone for a variety of reasons (race, money, revenge, jealousy, just to watch 'em die, etc...) and it's all the same crime, murder. Whereas acting recklessly or without regard are behaviors, not mental states.
Welcome to "1984" or "Minority Report," whichever you prefer.
No, under your premise, their thoughts are only considered in hate crime.
And I still think "hate crimes" are a a stupid idea.
i'm not trying to draw you into anything, but if you list a roll call of sins and "note" a propensity for certain sexual behaviors you may as well quit beating around the bush and condemn them. even though sexuals are people, like anyone else, capable of being good despite a perceived abomination before god.
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