The latest legislative cowflop in the form of the hate crime bill including gays is being readied to head to the Executive Branch with a serious flaw that the right has been pointing to for weeks, if not months.
The folks on the left have been deriding those on the right for claiming that the bill would criminalize sermons and other speech within the sanctity of a religious ceremony and that the only reason Republicans were objecting to the bill was because they hated gays.
Apparently no one on the left reads anything this Congress puts out, because they were so very wrong to support the bill.
House Republicans took care of their problem: That religious beliefs of the immorality of homosexuality spoken from the pulpit could not be prosecuted as a hate crime.
The Senate, not so much. And because of this fact the ACLU is lobbying to put a stop to this thing getting signed.
Oh, and the guy who stopped the right piece of legislation from being adopted in the Senate: Your AG and mine, Eric Holder
Although the Justice Department has argued that it usually avoids attempting to introduce evidence proving nothing more than that a person holds racist or other bigoted views, it has lobbied hard this year against having the Senate include the House-passed speech and association protections in the Senate bill. The Justice Department is specifically seeking to use evidence of a person’s speech or association even if the evidence does not specifically relate to the offense.
The problem today is that there is an increasing focus on “combating hate,†fighting “hate groups,†and identifying alleged perpetrators by their membership in such groups–even in the absence of any link between membership in the group and the violent act. Those arguments are very different from the arguments made in support of the criminal civil rights statute when it passed as an important part of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1968.
If the left weren’t such control freaks we wouldn’t have “hate crimes legislation” in the first place. But they are and we do.
Too bad they don’t learn from their mistakes.