The Matthew Shepard Act passed!

[nenya_kanadka]

From the Matthew Shepard Foundation homepage:

The legislation is formally entitled, the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (S. 1105). It was offered as a bipartisan amendment by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) to the Department of Defense authorization bill currently before the U.S. Senate. The virtually identical House version of the bill passed overwhelmingly on May 3rd, 2007 with a bipartisan vote of 237 to 180 as an appropriate and measured response to the unrelenting and under-addressed problem of hates crimes against individuals based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability.

Current federal hate crimes law permits the federal prosecution of a hate crime only if the hate crime was motivated by bias based on race, color, religion, or national origin and the assailant intends to prevent the victim from exercising a "federally protected right" such as the right to vote or attend school. If this legislation is signed by the president, the law will be expanded to protect the GLBT community as well as remove the restrictions on what type of acts can be considered applicable under hate crime law.

Woohoo!

--although I wonder if the President will try to get out of signing it?

Comments

[spiletta42.livejournal.com]

I should add that I'm not against the legislation, I'm just not understanding how it helps. But if it does help, at all, in any way, then great.

[nenya_kanadka]

One thing it helps with is getting justice after the fact--if you have a federal law, it's easier to insist that this case where the frat boys beat up a gay kid gets looked into, when maybe the local police didn't think it was all that important, because, heh heh, it was a gay kid after all, wasn't it? Kind of like the use of making federal civil rights laws about racial discrimination, instead of leaving it to states & cities. The big thing about this particular law is that it's federal.

Some people have said they think hate crimes laws criminalize thought--you get a harsher penalty if you beat the guy up because he was black or gay than if you beat him up just because you wanted his money. But really, you're considering the exact same thing in a hate-crimes case as you are in any other case: intent. You get a harsher penalty if you intentionally beat the guy to death, having planned it ahead of time, than if you were robbing his house and lashed out at him with something heavy when he caught you. It's about saying that as a society we think it's very bad to kill or beat someone, and it's even worse if you did it because they were just different from you.

That's my take anyway. (And I'm all, yay, people are commenting on my post, too, lol.)

[evilstorm.livejournal.com]

Some people have said they think hate crimes laws criminalize thought

Why that is such a bad thing, I don't know. It's not as if you get hit by it if you just don't like blacks or gays or whatever, it only catches you if you would act on that dislike. And to have crimestop wrt hurting people because they are different is not such a very bad thing at all...I think.

There is Also the Stupidity Factor

[the-resa.livejournal.com]

I've had the displeasure of knowing a few fellows who hated something enough for violence and, trust me, this kind of person tends to be extra-odinarily stupid. They're the ones that need the extra instructions attached to the hair dryer so they don't try to use it in the shower.

So -- they need things spelled out. "This is good, this is bad." They need to see in print that beating up that fellow because of his color or sexual preference is illegal and will send you to jail.

Trust me on this. The two in question had fairly decent IQs -- but zero common sense or ability to understand cause and effect. And their meanness made them extremely stupid. The fact that either lived to adulthood still surprises me.

So yeah, you need to spell it out for these people.

[windcedar.livejournal.com]

You can never tell what'll set off a long comment thread, can you? :)

[amazon-syren.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is... Well, as Nenya said, it's about intent.

To take a far less extreme example than beating someone to death with a golf club:

Spray painting graffiti all over a wall is, technically, a crime. But it's, like, 'mischief'. It's not a *big* crime. Spray painting your tag on a random wall is no big deal.

Spray painting, say, 'fags suck' on a random wall is dumb.

Spray painting 'fags suck' specifically on the wall of the house of your neighbourhood lesbians, however, is about more than just 'airing your grievances' to the world at large. That kind of thing is done, specifically, to threaten/intimidate a particular person (or group there-of).

If you have hate-crime legislation in place, the lesbians and their lawyer can point out that the 'fags suck' slogan was clearly meant to intimidate the people living in the house, and have that statement backed up by law.
Whereas, if there is no such legislation, then the representation of the spray-painters can (theoretically) get them off with something like:
"It was just a little graffiti. You're over-reacting. If they'd actually meant to intimidate these women and their 'lifestyle', wouldn't they have, like, ganged up on them in a parking lot or something?"
The intent of the crime could be easily overlooked (on purpose or not) by the judge simply because there's nothing on the law books that says they have to pay more attention to it than that.

Y'know? :-)

So that's how it helps. I think. ;-)