by Brian Mahany
Burn a cross in the yard of a black neighbor and you have committed a hate crime. Deface a local mosque or temple and you commit a hate crime but beat someone up solely because they are gay - as of today, that’s not a hate crime under federal law. That should soon change, however.
The U.S. House has overwhelming approved legislation adding crimes motivated by sexual orientation to the list of federally prohibited hate crimes. Activists have tried to enact such a law for the last 11 years. Each time they were thwarted by President Bush, conservative Republicans or the inability to agree on language.
In 2002 while a law enforcement officer in Maine, I witnessed hate crime first hand. While driving across the Kennebec River in Augusta, I observed 3 young men hurl bottles at a feeble old homeless woman crossing the bridge with a shopping cart. I arrested those boys. In their mind, she was “guilty” of being old and unemployed. The court thought otherwise, enhancing their sentences because the crime was motivated by hatred. Their behavior was pure evil.
Enhancing sentences if the crime is a so called hate crime makes perfect sense to most. Unless the victim is gay, bi-sexual or transgendered.
As a society, we have no problems enhancing penalties for people who abuse the elderly. We have little tolerance for skin heads and KKK type behaviors and thankfully most of us do not have the religious bias that leads to mass violence and even genocide in other parts of the world. But getting the votes to protect gays has taken over a decade.
The move to include sexual orientation as a protected class picked up steam in 1998. That is when Matthew Wayne Shepard was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming because he was gay. His death, and the subsequent prosecution of his attackers, gripped the nation for several weeks. Unfortunately, legislative efforts to protect gays from assault failed. Until now.
The Senate is expected to easily pass the measure next week and President Obama has promised to sign the bill.
Earlier this evening I logged on to the website of a major newspaper to see their coverage of the House vote. Roughly 1/3 of reader’s posts were from virulent anti-gays. Another 1/3 simply misunderstand the legislation and mistakenly believe it will prohibit the ability to preach or speak out against homosexuality.
Prohibiting the beatings, assaults and murder of people because of their race, religion or sexual orientation is a far cry from regulating free speech or one’s opinion. Rep. Tom Price, a conservative Republican from Georgia, called the legislation a “disgrace” and said it amounted to creating “thought crimes.”
Personally, many would call such narrow minded thinking an absolute disgrace. This blog post isn’t about being gay or straight. It is not about the pro’s and con’s of gay marriage. It’s about protecting people from physical harm simply because they may happen to be different from you or me. Discrimination based on sexual orientation has long been against the law in Wisconsin. Committing a crime against someone simply because he or she is gay is soon to be against the law across the country.
Of note is how the bill is drafted. Congress wrote the law in a neutral fashion. The legislation protects against bias based on sexual orientation, not because one is gay. Under the law, a group of gays who beat a person because he or she was straight would also be guilty of a hate crime. It’s hard to argue that as drafted the law favors gays as several commentators have suggested. It simply favors people who wish their personal choice and privacy to be respected.
Mahany & Ertl defends people who are the victims of sexual harassment and unlawful discrimination of any type. From our offices in Milwaukee, our lawyers represent people throughout Wisconsin and the Midwest. Initial consultations are without charge.
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