Hate Law Case Study - Colorado

By Harmony Grant
6-2-9

About 80 people protested the hate crimes bill May 18 outside the US Supreme Court. Two days later, our President met with the mother of Matthew Shepard to again promise his support for this legislation. We need more than 80 brave people. Everyone in America should rise against this freedom-crushing legislation. But the fact is-most Americans already live under hate laws. We have a landmine in our backyard just waiting to be finally triggered by hyper-liberal judges and lawyers once they have their federal law.

States' experience with hate crime laws is highly relevant to anyone who isn't sure if this legislation is as ominous as we describe.

In 1988, Colorado became the first state to pass a hate law. Sexual orientation, including transgender status, was added in 2005. (This is what hate law advocates are trying to do on the federal level right now.) Hate laws creator, the Anti-Defamation League, hailed the state: "For too long, Colorado law has not viewed crimes against gays and lesbians and people with disabilities as hate crimes. Colorado citizens in those communities now can take comfort in knowing that such crimes will receive the special treatment by law enforcement that they deserve."

Special treatment? That smoke you smell is the 14th Amendment-"equal protection under the law"-burning in the lawmakers' trashcan. Michigan's American Family Association gets it right: "The notion that some victims are worthy of greater protection than others, especially if it's based on their choice of sexual behavior, is simply outrageous." (Michigan lawmakers are currently considering a bill to expand their definition of a hate crime-just like the bill being considered at the federal level right now.)

Last month, a man in Colorado found guilty of beating and killing an 18-year-old transgendered woman was sentenced to life without parole. Did hate crime laws come to the rescue? Hardly. This sentence was meted out apart from the hate crime charges! Homosexual activists sought to use the crime as an opportunity to advocate for the federal hate law. But he already got life without parole because he beat and killed somebody and, yes, that's already illegal. (In the same way, Matthew Shepard's murderers were punished without the aid of hate crime laws, which Wyoming did not and still does not have.)

A local attorney and progressive blogger commented, "Every sexual assault felony in Colorado already carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. First degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole. We also (hopefully not much longer) have the death penalty. What more do people want? Life plus cancer? I'm sure they do, but I hope they don't get their way."

The director of Colorado's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center-the organization hoping to exploit the murder as propaganda-"said that not having a federal hate-crimes law sends the message that violence based on sexual orientation is OK." Um, yeah, violence is okay. Where does our legal system say that?

One protestor of hate crime laws suggested that if we want to stiffen penalties to deter crimes, then let's stiffen the penalties for all crimes! Of course, that wouldn't do the job of sending a message from the government about protecting homosexuals, Jews, etc. To whom? To criminals? No, they aren't listening. The value of this message within the enhanced penalties of hate laws is to intimidate anyone with a traditional view of sexuality (or a politically incorrect view of race or religion) who might want to make their beliefs heard. The federal hate bill, S. 909, says that if the public speech "induces" anyone to commit a hate crime, they will end up a federal hate criminal alongside the active offender. Yes, hate laws are pretty intimidating to those who might quote Biblical "hate speech" against sodomy.

If hate crime laws are completely unnecessary, why are they promoted? It's because hate laws send a symbolic statement; they enshrine lawmakers' and lobbies' biases into the law; and they can be used to silence speech that lawmakers and lobbies dislike. Conservative Selwyn Duke, in The New American, wrote about how hate laws are not about justice but instead about this enforcement of contemporary beliefs.

So let's make no mistake about the message here: because some people matter more than others, hating some racial and ethnic groups is worse than hating othersEighty years ago, it was a lot worse for a black man to "lust" after a white woman than for a white man to lust after a black woman, and today we view this as the most backward, invidious sort of prejudice. But is it any better to create a standard under which it's worse for a white man to hurt a black man based on "hate" than the reverse? Is the practice somehow sanitized because we've substituted one deadly sin, hate, for another, lust, and transposed the privileged and persecuted groups?

This is true. Hate crime laws have nothing to do with thwarting violence or ending crime. They have everything to do with freedom of speech, thought and religion-and the rising threat of hate law bureaucracy locking away those liberties. To paraphrase a famous quote: Justice needs hate laws like an eagle needs a cage.

http://www.rense.com/general86/hatee.htm