House votes to expand hate crime protections
WASHINGTON – Brushing aside a veto threat from President Bush, the House on Thursday approved legislation that would extend federal hate-crime protection to gays and increase penalties against attackers.
The legislation was first given life in 1998, after James Byrd Jr., an African American, was dragged to death outside of Jasper, Texas, and Matthew Shepard, a gay man, was beaten and left to die, tied to a fence in Wyoming. Although the proposal has passed the House or Senate several times since 2000, it has never cleared the entire Congress.
But with Democrats in charge, advocates see the best chance yet of strengthening a federal hate-crime law that has existed since 1968 and focuses on race, color, religion and national origin. The bill passed with relative ease, 237-180, with 25 Republicans joining 212 Democrats. Fourteen Democrats opposed the bill.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who co-authored the bill’s first version with Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., in 2000, pledged quick Senate action.
But the president may stand in the way. On Wednesday, the House’s staunchest conservatives wrote to Bush, saying the legislation federalizes crime enforcement and “segregates people into different groups – based on sex, gender identity, minority status, and other often nebulous terms – then seeks to either reward or punish these different groups using different standards.”
During testimony Thursday, Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., said: “If someone commits a crime, they should be punished for that crime. Period.
“Today, the Democratic majority has chosen to end equality under the law.”
Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, warned that the true intent of the bill was “to muzzle people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about homosexuality.”
“It does not impinge on public speech or writing in any way,” countered Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., pointing out that the bill reaffirms First Amendment and free speech rights.
The White House responded Thursday with a formal statement recommending that the president veto the bill.
The FBI received reports of 7,163 hate crimes in 2005, the most recent data available. Racial motivation accounted for about 55 percent; religious for 17 percent; sexual orientation, 14 percent; and ethnicity/national origin, about 13 percent. Less than 1 percent were blamed on bias against an individual’s disability.
Under the existing hate crime law, federal authorities can investigate and prosecute violence motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion or national origin. The new legislation expands the definition to cover offenses committed against individuals based on their sexual orientation, gender, disability or gender identity (that is, transgender individuals).
Violations are punishable by up to 10 years in prison and, in the case of the death of the victim, life in prison.