Because y'all just voted for HATE.
Today the Senate passed hate crimes legislation that will expand the ability of the federal, state, and local governments to investigate and prosecute hate crimes.
It would expand those defended to include hate crimes based on disability, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity in addition to current law that applies to crimes of race or religion.
Every Democrat, both Independents, and 9 Republicans voted for it.
Trent Lott, Thad Cochran, and Larry "I am not gay" Craig voted against it along with 37 of their Republican colleagues.
I blogged about this on my civil liberties site a few months ago. It's tricky because what the bill effectively does is establish federal jurisdiction over all bias-motivated crimes, which is a very big deal in terms of changing law enforcement jurisdiction. The expansion of existing hate crimes statutes to include sexual orientation and gender identity, while badly needed, is ultimately not the primary function of the bill.
ReplyDeleteWhat I would like to see is two separate bills: One piece of legislation right now that expands existing federal hate crime statutes to include sexual orientation and gender identity, and a second piece of legislation intended to address the failure of local law enforcement to prosecute bias-motivated crimes. The former piece of legislation is a no-brainer; the latter needs to be rigorously debated, examined closely, and written carefully, because the potential effects of the bill, if it is not written well, are legion.
For example, local law enforcement--facing no penalties for not investigating bias-motivated crimes--could simply pass the case along to the feds every time they like. Take the Jena Six, a great example of a situation where there is racial disparity in prosecution. The logical thing for local law enforcement to do, if the new federal hate crimes bill were to become law, is prosecute the cases against the Jena Six locally while sending cases in which the victims are black to the federal government. Imagine this happening in thousands of cities all over the country and you see the potential effect of a badly-written federal hate crimes bill: A separate but equal standard of prosecution for minority groups.
My preference would be to establish, instead, a radical expansion to Title VII holding local law enforcement agencies to extremely stringent standards in cases of bias-motivated crimes, with stiff penalties attached for noncompliance. That way if Sheriff Bubba doesn't want to investigate the beating of a local black or gay resident, he can't just pass the investigation along to the feds--he is forced to investigate it himself, dotting every I and crossing every T, or Sheriff Bubba's life becomes very unpleasant very fast.
What I'm driving at here is that framing the debate in terms of "Do you want to prevent hate crimes or not?" is great politics but bad policy. If leaders in Congress want to get serious about hate crimes, and I think they should, then they need to deal with the sexual orientation and gender identity expansion first and then start talking about how they're going to deal with the broader issue of federal involvement in the investigation of bias-motivated crimes.
I think you've picked the right profession.
ReplyDeleteI'm up writing a paper on the evolution of race in scripted media.
It'll have an audience of two unlike the work of a certain author. :)